The saying of sooth does not come cheap.

In one corner a former German fighter pilot who was killed in World War I was discussing the large number of World War II fatalities who are being reincarnated these days, hoping for a quieter life this time around.

A few feet away, a former professional football player and his wife, dressed all in white, described UFOs they’ve seen.

Uhhhhhh . . . yeah.

Yeah, sure.

It was New Age business as usual at the monthly Psychic Faire on a Sunday afternoon at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Sherman Oaks.

The fair has been going on for “at least 9 or 10 years,” said Lorayne Hulin of Canoga Park, wife of the organizer, Edward Hulin. Usually, about 100 people show up to have their vibes lubed or their auras tightened or their past lives pressed and starched. Admission is $2, but those whose astrological sign is up get in free. On this particular Sunday, it was Libras.

The hotel meeting room had a small lecture area at one end, and the remainder was filled with about a dozen practitioners of otherworldliness plying their trades--Tarot card readers, palm-wrinkle maestros, crystal-mongers and sundry general-purpose wizards, diviners and soothsayers.

The saying of sooth does not come cheap. Most readings cost $13.

($13? . . . 13?! . . . Isn’t that supposed to be . . . naaahh. Must be a coincidence.)

Gary Johnson of Tujunga charged $10 to take “auraistic” photographs with a camera clustered with equipment worthy of a NASA Mars probe. The camera picks up heat patterns, infrared light and just about every emanation short of cheap after-shave, producing pictures of people surrounded by halos and auroras, star bursts of crimson, blue and dark gold.

For another $10 he would interpret the pictures, which to the uninitiated all look alike, showing the subjects as they might appear to someone who had swallowed a large amount of various drugs to prevent the police from finding the stash.

Technology was also put to the service of the spiritual plane by Chip Hunter, who has a Tustin store that deals in metaphysical books and supplies and provided fair-goers with instant readings on an Apple II computer. Horoscopes went for $3 and compatibility readings for $2. For $10 the computer could do a numerology reading “that would cost $50 to have a numerologist do in greater detail,” Hunter said.

Hunter and her husband, Art, a center for the Rams in the 1960s, were dressed in white, including their shoes. This had no particular occult significance, they said. They just like white.

They have seen UFOs “several times,” Art Hunter said. “We were in Puerto Vallarta once and saw a whole formation of 13 of them. Like colored lights. They just stopped in the air, like no airplane I’ve ever seen could do. Then they shot off so fast they disappeared in seconds.

“We hadn’t had anything to drink or anything like that.”

Psychic experiences crop up on the football field, he said. Some players “just always know what to do, where to cut, they never get hurt,” as if they were in tune with an unseen force.

“But nobody talked about these experiences until Shirley MacLaine started doing it. Now a lot of people are interested,” said Hunter, a financial consultant for a stock brokerage and head of the NFL alumni group.

The same is true in law enforcement, said Jack Taube of Northridge, a retired juvenile probation officer. He said he found that while relaxing on quiet Sunday afternoons, he could sense that one of his 80 or so young charges was about to commit some mischief, and he could then talk them out of whatever mayhem they had in mind.

A psychic parole officer, surely a godsend to the criminal justice system, must have seemed a nightmare to his charges.

He said, “They call it street smarts, but it’s psychic abilities that tell some cops, ‘Don’t go around that corner,’ or that tell some soldiers, ‘Get out of this foxhole,’ and 2 minutes later a shell hits it.”

Taube’s speech was filled with military references and anecdotes. In a previous life, he explained, he was a fighter pilot in the Imperial German Air Service and was shot down while fighting for Kaiser and country in 1918.

In this life he applied to West Point and also tried to become a pilot again but kept getting rejected, he said, until he finally realized this was the universe’s way of telling him “Oh no you don’t, not again.”

His research has convinced him that many babies being born today have the souls of World War II casualties, both soldiers and concentration camp victims, he told the audience at his lecture on reincarnation.

A young housewife can remember basic training at Ft. Dix and can still disassemble an M-1, he insisted. Why did the soldier come back as a woman? “Because he wanted to be sure he couldn’t be drafted again.”

Many of them bear physical marks or ailments traceable to the traumas that killed them, he said. Children with asthma, for instance, may have been gassed in their last incarnation.

The lecture was filled with handy tips for tracing yourself through history. Go to Rome, for example. Can you find your way around without a map? OK, that nails one cycle.

Taube’s lecture was listed in the program as dealing with the pyramids of ancient Egypt. It didn’t. That was a joke by the guy who wrote the program, who used to be an ancient Egyptian priest, Taube explained.

Just a little New Age humor there.