San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors should know better than to monkey around with self-appointed seers

The myth that San Francisco is more sophisticated than Los Angeles seems to have lost some more luster with that story in the paper the other day about the missing monkeys.

According to Associated Press, a member of the Board of Supervisors has called on psychics to help them find two patas monkeys that escaped the city zoo’s new $7-million primate center more than a month ago.

It seems that Supervisor Louise Renne got the idea on a visit to Cork, Ireland, where she was told that Cork used psychics to find a missing monkey two years ago.

Cork City Councilman Frank Nash was quoted as saying: “The monkey was worth a few thousand pounds and we tried tracking him for five or six days, using all the professionals we had. They couldn’t find a trace of him.”

Of course Ireland is a country where they believe in leprechauns, so I’m not surprised that they believe in psychics.

“If it worked in Cork,” said Supervisor Renne, “why not here?”

It seems to me that San Francisco has enough problems without trusting its affairs to a supervisor who believes in psychics.

Psychics, as you must know, are those self-appointed seers who make their living by predicting the future for or about celebrities, and by selling their predictions to the kind of newspapers one sees at supermarket checkout stands.

You know the kind of stuff they deal in: Elizabeth Taylor to have twins by voodoo doctor; Prince Rainier to marry Las Vegas dwarf; Boy George pregnant.

They are not right once in 100 times, but their predictions make sensational reading, along with the news in such papers: one reads that a woman in Germany has been accidentally inseminated by an ape’s semen, and has borne a half-ape infant, and one says, “‘Isn’t that astonishing!” without sensing that it is not only astonishing but improbable.

When seers err, no one ever mentions it; their predictions are forgotten. But when, occasionally, by pure chance, or through simple logic, they hit one on the nose, they never let you forget it.

Seers are very good at throwing in such sure things as “Reagan to run for second term,” and then crowing about it when, inevitably, he does.

I don’t believe it has ever been proved that psychics helped any police department to find a criminal, but it is widely believed that they can, and that certain police departments rely on them.

Psychics always come forth in cases like the Black Dahlia or the Hillside Strangler, but none that I know of has ever identified a suspect or his whereabouts. All they do is make police work harder.

It is true that the police of Atlanta invited psychic Dorothy Allison to identify the murderer of several black children a few years ago. Allison had boasted on the “Phil Donahue Show” that she could do it, as she allegedly had in other cases of murder and missing children.

According to James Randi, in The Skeptical Inquirer quarterly, Allison arrived from Nutley, N.J., with her usual police escort, “showboated” around town and posed for every camera in sight. TV viewers around the world were told that she had identified the murderer (or murderers).

“Soon after,” Randi reports, “because of dedicated police work, a suspect was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced. And Dorothy Allison fell strangely silent.

“Following up,” he goes on, “I discovered that Atlanta officials were not at all eager to talk about Allison, and it was some time before I learned the truth about what had actually happened.

“When a Sgt. Gundlach was asked about Dorothy Allison, he snorted that ‘that wacko broad’ had given them some 42 possible names for the murderer(s) but not the correct one. ‘She rode around in a big limousine, ate real well for three days, then went home,’ said Gundlach.”

The story in San Francisco is funnier. It doesn’t have the tragic element of murdered children: just a couple of monkeys--a mother and offspring--evidently out swinging in that good-time city while psychics-at-large are communing with Supervisor Renne’s office.

One psychic who gave his name only as Max called three times, and on the last call told Renne’s assistant, Allen Johnson, that the two monkeys were in a neighborhood bar, eating ravioli, and didn’t want to go home.

Another psychic, Harold Hooper, called to report that his 4-year-old son feared he might have run over the baby monkey with his bicycle.

“He was concerned that his son might get into trouble,” said Johnson. “I told him of course not. It’s not like it’s a hit-and-run accident.”

You’d think a psychic would have known that running over a baby monkey with a bicycle wouldn’t be a hit-run accident.

Meanwhile, zoo officials say they don’t need any paranormal help in finding the monkeys, which have been reported frolicking in high trees in a neighborhood near the zoo.

“We don’t need a psychic,” said spokeswoman Ellen Newman. “We’ve called in a primatologist and an expert trapper. We have 40 volunteers helping in the search. Our problem is not finding the monkeys. Our problem is catching the monkeys.”

Renne’s office also received a call from an ordinary citizen, not a psychic, in a high dudgeon over the supervisor’s ingenuous appeal.

“He said, ‘Are you people idiots or what?’ ” said Johnson. “I said, ‘No, we’re not. This is the Board of Supervisors.’ ”

Of course that may be a non sequitur.

While they’ve got those psychics on the line, maybe they can identify our San Gabriel Valley assassin.