Sylvia “I Talk To Dead People” Browne has accidentally revealed the secret to her “psychic” abilities and showed she’s a hypocrite in the process. Seems she was on George Noory’s Coast to Coast radio show back on January 3rd when all the drama with the West Virginia miners was taking place. Sylvia was tripped up by the initial false report that the miners had been found alive and had to do some serious backpedaling after the truth came out. There’s a partial transcript in an article at, of all place, Fox News. Emphasis mine:
Browne, who had just announced that John McCain would run against John Kerry in the next presidential campaign, was relieved to hear from Noory that all but one of the miners was alive.
Noory: “Had you been on the program today, would [you] have felt if — because they heard no sound — that this was a very gloomy moment — and that they might have all died?”
Browne: “No. I knew they were going to be found. I hate people that say something after the fact. It’s just like I knew when the pope was dead. Thank God I was on Montel’s show. I said, according to the time, it was 9-something and whatever Rome time was. And I said he was gone, and he was.”
But the situation was fluid, something Browne — ahem! — obviously didn’t sense despite her claims of being able to speak to the dead, among other things. She couldn’t have imagined that within a short time, the entire story of the miners would change completely — and make her look very foolish indeed.
Noory soon announced that there were new reports that all but one of the miners was dead.
Browne — who was still in the studio taking questions from listeners — had to say something. Now she was just riffing: “I don’t think there’s anybody alive, maybe one. How crazy for them to report that they were alive when they weren’t!” Then she added: “I just don’t think they are alive.” She cleared her throat, and there was a deafening pause.
Noory went to a commercial.
Oops.
So will this mean the end of Sylvia’s career as a $700 a session psychic? Ha ha! Don’t be stupid like so many of her fans are. It’s not like being wrong has ever stopped her before. She’ll just do what she did during the radio show and just pretend she never bragged about knowing they’d be found alive and her fans will just pretend right along with her. Just like the folks who are defending James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces that I talked about the other day. She might lose a few fans, but there’s plenty of folks out there that need to believe she’s the real thing and who feel she’s changed their entire lives. Her message, after all, is a positive (if expensive) one. She’ll just keep right on making shit up as she goes along and her fans will keep spending way too much money swallowing it whole.
Link found via The Two Percent Company and Skeptico.
Posted on 02/10/2007 at 11:47 AM 
Posted on 03/20/2007 at 01:18 AM 
Like folks listening to “Coast to Coast” are going to notice a little inconsistency like that? Or care? I mean, crikey, anyone listening to that show is either certifiably insane or already chuckling in disbelief.
Two nights ago, driving home from the airport, I had a choice between sports talk, a couple of smug conservative assholes, a liberal lunatic whose spittle was actually flying out of my stereo speakers, and “Coast to Coast,” where I got to hear the usual cryptozoological UFO conspiracy bits.
I listened to “Coast to Coast,” of course, because it was at least entertaining (and a chuckle is always better than an aneurysm).