Peter Hurkos


Peter Hurkos was a Dutchman who allegedly manifested extrasensory perception after recovering from a head injury and coma caused by a fall from a ladder when aged 30. He came to the United States in 1956 for psychic experiments, later becoming a professional psychic who sought clues in the Manson Family murders and the Boston Strangler case. 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.

Testing and analysis

Hurkos stated in a 1960 episode of the television series , after giving a lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to a scientific panel, that he would participate in any scientific experiment under any circumstances. However, author and stage magician James Randi contends that Hurkos refused to allow his skill to be tested by scientists except for one session with the parapsychologist Charles Tart of the University of California, Davis. Dr. Tart's tests were negative. Randi commented "If Tart can't find such powers, they certainly aren't there!".
The parapsychologist Andrija Puharich was impressed by the stories about Hurkos and invited him to the USA in 1956 to investigate his alleged psychic abilities. Hurkos was studied at Puharich's Glen Cove, Maine, medical research laboratory under what Dr. Puharich considered to be controlled conditions. The results convinced Puharich that Hurkos had genuine psychic abilities. However the experiments were not repeated by other scientists and Puharich was described as a "credulous investigator". Raymond Buckland has written "with the exception of Dr. Andrija Puharich, not a single recognized psychic investigator has been impressed with Hurkos's performances."
During 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. However, the psychologist Ronald Schwartz wrote in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that Hurkos used cold reading methods and published a transcription of such a reading in their autumn 1978 issue.
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 might begin with something seemingly personal but actually quite common: a surgery. Hurkos would not specify that the subject underwent surgery—it could be any recent surgery of personal relevance to the subject. If this method failed, 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 seemed psychic because an operation is thought of as a private matter. Randi adds that the tone in Hurkos's voice was also significant: Hurkos presented himself as confident and knowing and characterized the subject as obstinate.
Other common techniques included guessing numbers of people in families, 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.

Refuted claims

Hurkos and his supporters maintained that he was a great psychic detective. In 1964, Attorney General Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts said Hurkos had come uncannily close to describing the person suspected in the Boston Strangler case. 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 Hurkos contributed no information unobtainable from newspapers and, in some cases, that he had no part in the investigations whatsoever. In response to Hurkos's claim that he located the stolen "Stone of Scone," Home Secretary Chuter Ede declared:

The gentleman in question whose activities have been publicized 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 made notable claims contrary to popular belief such as the claim that Adolf Hitler was alive and living in Argentina.
In 1964, Hurkos was put on trial on the charge of impersonating a federal agent, found guilty, and fined $1,000. Hurkos posed as the police officer in order to gather information that he could later claim to be psychic revelations.
In the case of murderer John Norman Collins, he sometimes claimed the killer was blond and at other times brown-haired so that he could claim victory either way. He claimed to have identified Charles Manson to police; Manson was also identified by his devotee 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, including descriptions of how the "killings erupted during a black magic ritual known as 'goona goona,'" were inaccurate.
The magician Milbourne Christopher in his book Mediums, Mystics and the Occult documented the errors Hurkos had made.
Authors Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi Ph.D., also a founder of the International Remote Viewing Association, wrote the Hurkos cases were "pure bunk" in their 1991 book The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime.

Popularization

Despite refutations, Hurkos remained famous. He has had several successful television specials, including:
A story about Hurkos' alleged psychic powers entitled "The Man With The X-Ray Mind" appears in Frank Edwards' 1959 book Stranger Than Science
Numerous periodicals reported Hurkos's 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 and Peter Hurkos: I Have Many Lives. The Psychic World of Peter Hurkos,, was written by Norma Lee Browning. Various authors have described and examined various details of Hurkos's life and alleged ESP in more than 75 published books.
He also appeared in several motion pictures as himself, including The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, The Mysterious Monsters, and Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. George Voskovec portrayed Hurkos in The Boston Strangler, the 1968 movie adaptation of Gerold Frank's 1966 book of the same name. His life may also have been the basis for the 1979 Stephen King novel The Dead Zone.
At the time of his death, Peter Hurkos resided in Studio City, Los Angeles. 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, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in West Hollywood, California. He was survived by his wife, Stephany Courtney, their daughter, and six children from a previous marriage, including a daughter from his second marriage and a daughter from his third marriage, Gloria, who resides in San Diego, California.