Born Jeane Pinckert in Wisconsin in 1918, Jeane Dixon is perhaps the best known seer America has produced. Her column predicting hundreds of events for each forthcoming year is syndicated world wide, and as a prophet she stands unchallenged.
 
Like many others who have been endowed with special gifts at a young age, Jeane discovered hers at the age of nine. She met a down and out actress by the name of Marie Dressler and was given a crystal ball to play with. She saw in it stars and money and told her parents who advised Marie Dressler to go on with her stage career. This she did and became one of the great names in the cinema.

Jeane moved to California and one day while in a hairdressing saloon met Carol Lombard the beautiful wife of film star Clark Gable. Jeane had a premonition and begged the actress not to fly by plane for the next six weeks. Carole Lombard didn’t take her seriously and tossed a coin to see if she should fly or not, she did, and was killed when the plane crashed.
 
This awesome ability to predict misfortune manifested itself time and time again, and two of her predictions have earned her world-wide fame.

Eleven years before the assassination of John F Kennedy, Jeane had a psychic vision in which she saw an outline of the White House, a tall, blue-eyed young man with a stock of brown hair standing in front of it, and above, the numerals 1-9-6-0. A voice told her that a Democrat would be inaugurated as President in 1960 and that he would be assassinated. Again and again she would peer into her crystal ball and see a huge black cloud over the White House, she tried to warn President Kennedy of pending danger when he set out on that fateful day to Dallas, but in vain. On November 22, 1963, JFK was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Later she forecast the death of Robert Kennedy who was gunned down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and also warned his younger brother Edward not to fly on a certain day, again the warning was ignored, Edward Kennedy breaking his back in a plane crash.
 
Deeply interested in politics, Jeane Dixon has made some startlingly accurate predictions in this field, among them the partition of India which came to pass on the exact day she forecast, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, the explosion of racial violence in South Africa and the death of Dag Hammarskjold, secretary-general of the United Nations.
 
Comment:

Mrs Dixon takes the “shotgun” approach to making predictions, that is, she makes hundreds at a time thus enhancing the probability that some will come to pass. Even then her success rate of the more specific is a lamentable five per cent. Given that she has access through friends to Information not readily available to the general public her success rate is not even good guesswork. In keeping with other psychics, post-validation plays a large part in her “record of success” and only hits are remembered the many failures forgotten.


Further reading:
 
Edwards, Harry. 1993. “Predictions” (Parts I & 2) the Skeptic. 13(2) and 13(3)
 
Hines, Terrence. 1988. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal.
Prometheus Books, Buffalo. New York.
 
Laycock, D. (Ed.) Skeptical. Canberra Skeptics. Canberra