Peter Hurkos

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Peter Hurkos (21 May 1911 – 1 June 1988), born Pieter van der Hurk, was a Dutchman who claimed that he manifested extra-sensory perception following a head injury that resulted from a fall off a ladder when he was age 30. With the help of businessman Henry Belk and parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, Hurkos became a popular entertainer known for performing psychic feats before live and television audiences (in a manner similar to Uri Geller).

Hurkos once described his psychic impressions thusly:

"I see pictures in my mind like a television screen. When I touch something, I can then tell what I see."

Even so, author and stage magician James Randi contends that Hurkos refused to allow his skill to be tested by scientists except for one session with Dr. Charles Tart of the University of California at Davis. Dr. Tart's tests were negative.

In his early career as a psychic entertainer, Hurkos purported that he employed his psychic powers to discern details of audience members' private lives that he could not otherwise have known. The Skeptical Inquirer published a transcription of such a reading in their Fall 1978 issue:

Hurkos: I see an operation.

Subject: [no response]

Hurkos: Long time ago.

Subject: No. We have been lucky.

Hurkos: [somewhat angrily] Think! When you were a little girl. I see worried parents, and doctor, and scurrying about.

Subject: [no response]

Hurkos: [confidently] Long time ago.

Subject: [yielding] I cannot remember for certain. Maybe you are right. I'm not sure.

James Randi analyzed this and other transcripts of Hurkos performances, and professed to have identified a number of standard cold reading techniques. For example, Hurkos may begin with something seemingly personal, but actually quite common: a surgery. Hurkos does not specify that the subject underwent surgery; it could be any recent surgery of personal relevance to the subject. If this approach fails, Randi maintains, Hurkos would qualify the statement with the phrase long time ago. At this point, any operation to any family member or friend in the subjects's own life would have been a 'hit', and yet would have looked psychic because an operation is thought of as a private matter. Randi adds that the tone in Hurkos' voice is also significant: Hurkos presents himself as confident and knowning, and characterizes the subject as obstinate.

Other common techniques included guessing numbers of people in families (easy enough if you pick a typical number, and allow yourself to add frequent visitors or exclude family members who have moved away from home as needed to match the target, as Hurkos did), including nonsense words in his presentation that could be interpreted by the subject to have any one of many meanings, and guessing on the importance of common names, which could be permutated as needed until he got a hit. (He most commonly used the name "Ann," which would give him a hit with anybody who had a relative or friend or teacher or boss or co-worker named Ann or Anna, or Anastasia, etc., at any point in his or her life.)

1 Refuted claims
2 Popularization
3 Sources
4 External links

[edit] Refuted claims

Hurkos and his supporters maintained that he was a great psychic detective; by 1969, he cited the successful solution of 27 murder cases in 17 countries. However, in some cases the detectives assigned to these cases countered that that Hurkos contributed no information unobtainable from newspapers and, in some cases, that he took no part in the investigations whatsoever. In response to Hurkos' claim that he located the stolen "Stone of Scone", Home Secretary Chuter Edge declared:

The gentleman in question whose activities have been publicized (though not by the police) was among a number of persons authorized to come to Westminster Abbey to examine the scene of the crime. He was not invited by the police, his expenses have not been refunded by the Government, and he did not obtain any result whatsoever.

Hurkos also claimed to have identified the Boston Strangler, and he did in fact travel to Boston and spend time with the police there. However, he was not of help to them; several days after he concluded his consultation, he was arrested (and eventually convicted) for impersonating a police officer. Hurkos allegedly posed as a police officer in order to gather information that he could later claim to be psychic revelations.

In the case of John Norman Collins, he sometimes claimed the killer was blond, other times brown-haired, so that he could claim victory either way. He made other claims about the killer that were simply wrong. He claimed to have identified Charles Manson to police, but this was not true; Manson was identified by his supporter Susan Atkins to a cellmate while she was in jail for a different crime. In fact, Hurkos had been to the Tate residence to do a "reading", but his guesses were well off the mark.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Popularization

Despite refutations, Hurkos remains famous, perhaps because of his successful television specials. Among these, Japan/ six hours for TV-TOKYO and NET-TV "The Greatest Psychic in The World . . . Peter Hurkos" (-a two-parter, filmed at Dr. Puharich's lab in Dobson, NC where Hurkos was specifically tested for this special, and also on location in Japan), The Netherlands/nine hours for TROST-TV "Peter Hurkos"( - four-part special highlighting Hurkos' finding the kidnapped Dutch millionaire, Maup Cransa), Canada/two and a half hour special for CBC "Psych-Out with Peter Hurkos" (-which created a circuit overflow when Hurkos began speaking with the home audiences by telephone).

Numerous periodicals reported Hurkos' exploits throughout his lifetime: Time, Newsweek, Omni, Life, True, Reader's Digest, Playboy, The National Enquirer, Ladies Home Journal, et al. Hurkos himself published three books: Psychic (Bobbs-Merrill), The Psychic World of Peter Hurkos, (Doubleday), and Peter Hurkos: I Have Many Lives (Doubleday). Various authors have described and examined various details of Hurkos' life and alleged ESP in more than seventy-five published books.

He also appeared in several motion pictures as himself, including The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena (Sunn International), Mysterious Monsters (David Wolper), and Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (Paramount). George Voskovec portrayed Hurkos in The Boston Strangler, the 1968 film adaptation of Gerold Frank's 1966 book of the same name. His life was also the basis for the Stephen King novel The Dead Zone.

Hurkos' hobbies included gardening and oil painting. At one time, one of his paintings was on display in New York's Museum of Modern Art. The personal art collection of Ronald Reagan reportedly includes multiple Hurkos paintings, as does the General Omar N. Bradley Museum in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

At the time of his death, Peter Hurkos resided in Studio City, Los Angeles, California. Ironically, he failed to predict accurately the date of his own death; although he prophesied that he would die on 17 November, 1961, he did not die until 1 June, 1988.

[edit] Sources

Ramsland, Katherine. "Chapter 6: Enter the Psychic." John Norman Collins: The Co-Ed Killer.
Randi, James. An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. St. Martin's Press, 1995.
Randi, James. Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and other Delusions. Prometheus Books, 1982: pp. 270–272.
Bugliosi, Vincent with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: the True Story of the Manson Murders. Bantam Books, 1975.