NONFICTION - Feb. 10, 1991

THE BLUE SENSE: Psychic Detectives and Crime by Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi (The Mysterious Press: $19.95; 320 pp.). Cops are so overburdened by the sheer amount of crime in our cities that many people look to uncommon methodology, specifically ESP and psychics. Lyons and Truzzi look first at evidence debunking psychic frauds, and then at the success stories. Among the former is a Beverly Hills psychic (whose clients, at $135 an hour, included Sylvester Stallone, Bob Dylan, Tony Bennett and Phyllis Diller) who predicted John Hinckley’s shooting of Ronald Reagan on a videotape prudently made the day after the shooting. Among the latter are the men and women who are called in when all else has failed, and accurately suggest where bodies, and sometimes suspects, are located. The authors cannot be sure, even after their research, that such psychic powers exist. Neither can they prove they don’t. So they settle for a reminder of what Thomas Edison once said: “We do not know one millionth of one percent about anything,” a number which hasn’t changed appreciably in the intervening years.