Columnist Susan Snyder: Forecast: Partly gullible

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 | 8:44 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesday, Sundays and Fridays. Reach her at snyder @ lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

What would we do without Elko?

The townspeople who brought us national attention by planting a giant shovel in the courthouse lawn and collecting a truckload of spades to illegally open a mile-long, washed-out, dead-end mountain road has now gained attention as the town with a fake psychic.

As opposed to the other kind.

Elko law enforcement officials say Cindy McKinney swindled believers out of more than $30,000, according to an Associated Press report.

The names of Her Counterfeit Clairvoyantness' victims are concealed in court records because, as one Elko police detective put it, the people "feel a stigma is attached to being a victim of such crimes and many times will not report the crime to authorities."

Maybe the authorities just aren't that high on the victims' lists. After all, the woman who had to explain to her husband how $6,000 disappeared from the checking account had a lot of thinking to do -- fast.

Honesty is not the best policy when the truth is, "Honey, I gave the money to a psychic who was going to perform some mystical rites over it before I put it under your side of the bed."

Better to tell him you bought a couple of new pairs of shoes -- in Tuscany.

Now, before you get angry and call to tell me that some psychics are real (See? I know some of you will do so before you've even picked up the phone), let me say it is not my intention to decided what is real or fake about the unknown.

I simply enjoy the fact that people lose money on something more ridiculous than the Megabucks machine that sucks mine up every couple of months.

But there definitely is something wrong with people forking over large sums of cash as a deposit on crystals that reportedly absorb all the negative energy around them (put those crystals in the Clark County Courthouse and the whole County Commission would disappear).

It is a crime, but only because of the fact people would buy into such a thing. Didn't they stop to wonder why the Fake Foreteller of Fortunes would need a deposit on her crystals. Wouldn't she, after all, already know which people were going to steal them?

Sillies.

It is almost un-American to arrest this Pilfering Predictress of Prophesy for taking money people were willing to give her for something we can never truly say is there or not.

It would be like arresting all the tire salesmen who lure you into the store promising a whole set of tires at $25 apiece (mounted and balanced). No one truly knows whether such tires actually exist because they have always "just run out" when we arrive.

I called a couple of local psychics over the weekend to ask them how one spots a pretend prognosticator. No one was available. Didn't they know I was going to call? (Lighten up. It's just a joke.)

But the G.M. Physics home page, run by astrologer Pete Green and Celtic visionary Gracia Travis, says there are ways to trap an imposter.

If a psychic claims, "My clients return again and again," ask why. A good reading should last years. And ask those who claim to be"internationally famous" to speak languages other than English.

Police found Elko's Fibbing Forecaster in Phoenix. She must be fraud because they nabbed her.

She should have known they were coming.