Though their past gaffes haven’t faded away, those fearless pro forecasters, heading into a new decade, have no hestitation in putting a . . . : Finger on Fate

When did it start--the national end-of-the-year preoccupation with predicting what the future will bring?

Although we are not yet a nation of fortunetellers, one can hardly read a magazine or newspaper, listen to radio or watch television without being treated to someone’s idea of what the coming year--or decade--has in store.

And with 1989 marking not only the passing of a year but the demise of the penultimate decade in the century as well, the astrologers, economists, demographers, professional trend-mappers, political pundits, consultants, weather forecasters and other tipsters seem to have gone into overdrive.

But it’s tough telling the future. There’s always the chance the crystal ball will cloud, the draft pick heaped with adulation will prove to have hands of clay, or that years of hard-earned expertise will simply prove no match for events galloping off pattern, out of control.

Just ask these soothsayers (as we did) what their best, and worst, moments have been in their jobs of telling the rest of us what’s going to happen.

It’s All in the Vibes

When producers of “Ghostbusters” wanted to add a little legitimacy to publicity for their movie, who did they call? Nonie Fagatt.

And when there are poltergeists in Hancock Park, illness to ease by faith, and marriages to predict by Tarot, it typically is Nonie Fagatt, the cheery cabalist of Beverly Hills, behind the hands, the cards and the psychic evictions.

She teaches classes in psychic development. She counsels television programs on spiritualism and has hosted tours to medieval haunts of Europe. Given the right cards, she could probably build a happier psyche for the Phantom of the Opera.

“We call ourselves teachers in the light,” Fagatt, 62, explained. “We try and get everyone in the world to put forward a more positive vibration that will make the world a little better.

“Transcendental meditation. Channeling. Anyone who works with positive vibrations is going to help the world because they put off that little vibration into the atmosphere.”

Which is why the governments of Eastern Europe are crumbling along with the Berlin Wall. Not that Fagatt predicted those occurrences.

“But I felt a betterment in the world,” she said. “And that’s what the people have done in Poland and East Germany. They put it (positivism) in their minds. They said: ‘It is going to happen.’ They made it happen.”

Eighty percent of her time at the Tarot cards, Fagatt said, she can feel, visualize and foretell what is happening with her clients.

“But that means there’s 20% out there where you’re just not on their wavelength,” she added. Intellectual resistance to psychic acceptance can block communication. Affection between reader and client will also contaminate a session.

She believes that is what tripped her 10 years ago when a close friend came to Fagatt for a Tarot reading. Her friend was to leave for a European vacation that day.

“She was recently divorced and I saw a marriage for her and we discussed that,” Fagatt said. “She was young and beautiful and very excited about going to Europe . . . and I didn’t see one (negative) omen.”

Twenty-four hours later, Fagatt said, her friend was badly injured in an automobile accident in Paris. She was taken to the hospital in a coma.

Fagatt said she flew to France to “see what I could do . . . but nothing helped. She was out of body and I could see her standing in the hospital room trying to decide whether she should stay or leave.

“We talked. She would look at me and just say: ‘I’m dead.’ I pleaded with her to stay but she wouldn’t come back for me.”

A year after the accident, Fagatt said, her friend died.

“That was the biggest bummer of all,” she said. “Had I seen it, I would somehow have persuaded her not to go. I would have locked her in her house. I would have watched her. But I didn’t see one glimmer.”

How could the ultimate negative escape an expert clairaudient and schooled psychic?

Said Fagatt: “We’re all human.”