Are psychic detectives all a big bunch of fakes, fugazis and frauds?  Many in the skeptical community certainly think so…..and will often go out of their way to point out discrepancies in many of the “boasts” made by celebrity psychics popularized on TV and elsewhere. 

Here is a REALLY critical look at some popular psychics by the Sketical Inquirer, a well known repository of folks who believe ALL paranormal perusings are the hobgoblins of super small minds..:-)  While I’m not a big fan of the folks behind a lot of this pyschic bashing, some of their targets I DO believe are fakes, and are not good for the betterment of genuine psychic study.

Check out the full article after the jump below….but if you are a harcore believer in some of the “targets” of their investigation, be warned – you will NOT be happy with what you read!

Allison DuBois

Allison DuBois is the “real-life” Phoenix-area clairvoyant / spiritualist whose alleged assistance to law enforcement is the basis for NBC’s drama series Medium (featuring Patricia Arquette as DuBois). Executive producer Glen Gordon Caron (creator of Moonlighting) says of DuBois: “I was amazed by her tale. She has this radio in her head that she has no control over. Wherever she looked, she saw dead people.

It was a tremendous albatross in terms of having a family life. And I thought, ‘I’ve never heard that story before, certainly not from the point of view of a soccer mom’” (Hiltbrand 2005).But Caron has been snookered. The Medium Web site boasts that “DuBois has consulted on a variety of murders or missing persons cases while working with various law enforcement agencies including the Glendale Arizona Police Department, the Texas Rangers, and a County Attorney’s office in the Homicide Bureau.”

 In fact, however, both the Glendale police and the Texas Rangers deny DuBois worked with them. Glendale police spokesperson Michael Pena told SI managing editor Benjamin Radford that the detective who investigates missing persons cases “does not recall using DuBois at all in [one specific] case, or in any other cases.” And Texas Rangers spokesperson Tom Vinger stated flatly to Radford, “The Texas Rangers have not worked with Allison DuBois or any other psychics” (Radford 2005, 7).

The Case of the ‘Psychic Detectives’; Investigative Files (Skeptical Inquirer August 2005)