Can psychics help the police find missing persons? Few questions in the field are surrounded by as many anecdotes – from Hans Bender's deployments with the clairvoyant Gerard Croiset to countless television stories. The most thorough scientific answer was worked out by the Dutch parapsychologist Sybo A. Schouten – and it is sobering. Important from the outset: what was evaluated were, at their core, voluntary, unvetted tip-givers – people who came forward to police or families on their own initiative – not tested mediums. His major research report, for decades accessible only in scattered and abridged form, has been available in full since 2025, published in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik. Precisely because the result is inconvenient, it deserves a careful reading.
A study with an odyssey
Schouten investigated the subject in a project funded by the IGPP (completed in 2003): questionnaire surveys of police departments in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA, a review of the experimental research, in-depth analyses of two Dutch missing-persons cases, and a comparison of 418 missing-persons cases with and without psychic involvement, supplemented by interviews with relatives and psychics. The report first appeared only in German, spread over several journal issues (2002–2004), and later in a heavily abridged English version; the complete English text was first printed in 2025 by the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik – 84 pages, freely available in full text. Incidentally, this is proof of what we praised about that journal: the field publishes even its most inconvenient findings itself.
What the numbers say
First the surprise: psychics in police work are no fringe phenomenon. About one third of the police departments surveyed in all three countries had experience with them. But the usefulness reported by the departments themselves ranged between 0 and 21 percent. In the 418 missing-persons cases, psychics were involved in about 15 percent – typically when families feared the worst. The balance over four years: three cases solved following psychic advice; overall, about 10 percent of psychics contributed something useful and roughly 3 percent offered correct solutions – and even correct information often did not lead to locating the person. Experimental tests in which psychics were to solve crimes by handling crime-related objects showed no positive outcomes (Schouten fairly notes the highly artificial conditions); in comparison studies under more realistic conditions psychics scored lowest – with overall small differences between groups.
The vault case: why anecdotes seduce
How treacherous the terrain is, is shown by a case from a 1958 police dissertation that Schouten retells: money had vanished from a locked, undamaged company vault. A psychic called in found, in the director's office, a hidden spare key whose existence nobody in the company knew of – a genuine, verifiable hit. He then, by psychometry, named an employee as the culprit. Five months later a professional burglar confessed to the crime: the suspect was innocent. The lesson: a verified hit tempts one to believe the unverified statements as well – in an investigative context this can cast suspicion on the innocent. Exactly this anatomy of error in anecdotal success stories was systematically catalogued in 1991 by Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi – the coiner of the term pseudoskepticism, here on the critical side.
The two missing-girl cases – and the relatives
In two Dutch cases of missing girls Schouten analysed all the "tips from supernatural sources" received. His verdict: for the investigations, entirely useless. Important here is whose tips these were: unsolicited contributions from the general public – not vetted or even selected sensitives. Many contributors did not consider themselves psychics at all but felt emotionally compelled by their impressions, which had seemingly proved correct in earlier cases. As a group, the predictions of this self-selected sample were no more accurate than criminal profiling – presumably, Schouten suggests, because perpetrators often fit common stereotypes anyway. The "entirely useless", then, is a verdict on the unfiltered mailbox of an investigating authority – not on tested mediums.
And now the finding that lifts the study above a mere reckoning: the majority of relatives judged the psychics' involvement positively in retrospect – although more than half of them could not identify any concrete investigative contribution themselves. What they valued was the psychological support and the feeling of truly having tried everything. Schouten quotes the old phrase of the psychic as the "poor man's therapist". The occasional genuine successes he explains soberly: local and social knowledge rather than the paranormal – systematically trained officers, his pointed conclusion runs, could probably outperform psychics.
What the study shows – and what it does not
An honest reading includes both limits. First: Schouten tests psychics in an investigative context – not the existence of extraordinary perception as such. He himself records that quantitative research with sensitives has occasionally produced significant, if very modest, results. Second, the study says nothing about mediumship in controlled settings: a missing-persons case is methodologically the worst conceivable proving ground (no base rate, no blinding, an emotionally extreme situation) – controlled investigations such as those of Julie Beischel or the EREAMS study work under entirely different conditions and answer a different question. Whoever turns Schouten into "the paranormal does not exist" overstretches him just as the Croiset anecdotes overstretched the opposite.
And third: a base rate does not refute outliers. Schouten's ~10 percent is a statement about the average tip-giver in a missing-persons case – not about the best sensitives under other conditions. Our overview Mediums in Police Work collects the remarkable individual cases that do exist: Martin Zoller, for instance, located by remote viewing a plane crashed in Bolivia that the official search teams had failed to find for days; Birgit Fischer stands in the tradition of remote perception that the CIA had researched with taxpayers' money for two decades in the Stargate programme – where the hits were considered robust enough to keep funding it, and where, with Pat Price, even a former police officer served the CIA as a remote viewer; and as our overview of intelligence agencies' psi programmes worldwide shows, the CIA was by no means alone in this. Schouten's statistics and these cases do not contradict each other: together they show that the average is of little use and the top end is the truly interesting research question.
On a close reading, one can hold some deficiencies against the study itself – several of which Schouten fairly names himself. First, self-selection throughout: in the police surveys and the 418 cases, too, no vetted mediums were at work. The initiative came from relatives in 79 percent of cases; the police themselves called someone in for only 4 of 67 documented contributions, and in the Bavarian Milke survey the roughly one hundred "psychics" had all come forward on their own – the greater the media echo, the more contacts. Second, question artefacts: the usefulness range of 0 to 21 percent hangs strongly on the wording – the US studies asked whether the information was more helpful than other information, the Dutch ones whether it contributed at all; the vault case with the genuine key hit would have counted as a "no" under the US wording, as Schouten notes himself, following Truzzi. Third, Schouten expressly considers Milke's Bavarian zero-percent balance statistically implausible and explains it by the data path via department heads and Milke's well-known skepticism. Fourth, police usually lack any experience in dealing with mediums: there is neither training nor protocol for taking down mediumistic impressions cleanly, keeping them free of expectations and evaluating them – not by chance does Schouten's report close with recommendations on how police and the public should handle such tips; clumsy handling devalues even usable information. And fifth, the choice of countries: Switzerland is missing – of all places the country where the targeted, repeated cooperation of individual police officers with proven mediums is documented, as our overview of mediumship in Switzerland shows – for instance with Pascal Voggenhuber, whom investigators repeatedly called in on murder and missing-persons cases. Whoever wants to know what mediumistic work can do for investigations would have to measure precisely where it is used deliberately, with practice and with a track record – not in the average of all unsolicited contributions. That study has yet to be done.
Puzzling, finally, is the publication history itself: that the field's journal reprints a methodologically so limited report from the 1990s in full in the year 2025 says less about the report than about the state of production of German-language anomalistics – evidently, in two decades nothing newer and better appeared on this topic. Yet already in the report's completion year, 2003, van Lommel's Lancet study had demonstrated what prospective, methodologically clean design looks like in a neighbouring field. The yardstick had long existed – it simply was not applied here.
Context
This site collects not only the strong findings but also the sobering ones – from the Maharishi effect to this one. Schouten's study is a model case of that honesty, twice over: a parapsychologist examines a popular claim of his own field and finds little; and the field – the IGPP as funder, the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik as publisher – makes the finding fully accessible instead of letting it disappear. For relatives of missing persons a differentiated message remains: turning to a psychic is humanly understandable and often psychologically helpful – but little is to be expected, in investigative terms, from the unfiltered stream of self-declared tip-givers. It is different with proven mediums: there, documented successes exist, from Zoller's location of the plane to Voggenhuber's police cases. Both may be said at once. Our own directory, too, lists mediums who have worked with investigating authorities for years – such as Kym Durham, whose family has supported the resolution of more than 240 murder and missing-person cases, the psychic investigator Marisa Ryan, whom police have consulted regularly since a verified tip, Dave Campbell, who searches for missing persons in the "Find Me" network together with police and search-and-rescue dog teams, and the forensic profiler Carrie Cox. That authorities continue such cooperation over years would be hard to explain without usable results. And the research task that follows from all this is just as clear: not to measure the average of all unsolicited contributions yet again – but to look precisely where it works: at the practised teams of investigators and proven mediums such as exist in Switzerland. That is exactly what distinguishes research from folklore – in both directions.
Sources: Sybo A. Schouten: "The Use of Psychics in Police Investigations of Missing Persons", Zeitschrift für Anomalistik / Journal of Anomalistics 25 (2025), no. 2, pp. 306–389, DOI 10.23793/zfa.2025.306, full text (PDF) (IGPP project 85.02.10, 2003; German partial publication in the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 2002–2004; abridged in Advances in Parapsychological Research 10, 2021); Arthur Lyons & Marcello Truzzi, The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime (Mysterious Press, 1991); supplemented by our articles on Hans Bender (Croiset), the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik and controlled mediumship research (Beischel, EREAMS).
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.