Future Schlock, but We Love It : Predictions: Year after year tabloid and TV psychics tell of coming events that stretch the imagination and fail to come true. But something about them keeps us intrigued.

Here are some news events you probably missed this year:

* A seventh-grade genius amazed science-fair judges by constructing a working time machine from parts of a microwave oven.

* Socks, the White House cat, was kidnapped and held for ransom by a homeless man who also tried to swipe Al Gore’s poodle.

* Tonya Harding failed in her quest to open the country’s first all-nude ice rink.

* Garth Brooks was ridiculed for claiming to have been abducted by a UFO--until doctors found a homing device implanted in his neck.

* A meteor the size of a Buick crashed into a used car lot in Las Vegas, opening a massive underground reservoir that ended the city’s water crisis.

* Hugh Hefner quit Playboy and became a sunflower farmer.

* Four out of five Americans shaved their heads.

If those stories sound unfamiliar, it’s because they’re among the scores of 1995 events that were predicted by America’s leading psychics but somehow never quite materialized.

“The accuracy rate is just abysmal,” says Gene Emery, a Providence Journal-Bulletin science writer who has been tracking such forecasts since the late 1970s.

Each year, he collects supermarket tabloids--the National Enquirer, the Star, the Weekly World News, the Globe, the National Examiner--and logs their predictions into his computer.

To qualify, the prognostications must describe verifiable public events and avoid language that allows “wiggle room” (such as Mystic Meg’s revelation that Liz Taylor would stumble across an elixir that could cure AIDS).

Emery also accepts mailed-in predictions and keeps tabs on some TV psychics.

Near the end of the year, he publishes the hit-miss scorecard in the Skeptical Inquirer, a journal that subjects supernatural claims to scientific scrutiny.

*

The results are predictable.

“About the only one that ever came close . . . was [a 1992 forecast] for [an autumn] hurricane in Florida,” he says.

Of course, that’s a little like predicting earthquakes in California, but Emery insists he tries to give crystal-ball gazers the benefit of the doubt.

Others are considerably more generous. The Pentagon, for example, shelled out $20 million over two decades for psychic help with military intelligence.

Emery, too, was “a big believer in this stuff in high school and college”--until he began examining the reams of scientific research refuting claims of psychic ability.

He also began noticing the embarrassing track record of paranormal predictions in the media. This year, for instance, professional fortunetellers “gave no warning of the Oklahoma City bombing, haven’t been able to find the Unabomber and apparently had no inkling of Christopher ‘Superman’ Reeve’s tragic accident,” he notes.

They were also wrong about Arnold Schwarzenegger running for prime minister of Austria, scientists finding a virus that transforms ordinary rocks into food, Peter Jennings doing the news aboard a space shuttle, the Clintons marketing Hillbilly Burgers, Iranian terrorists blowing up the Statue of Liberty, and Bill Cosby serving as ambassador to South Africa (a recurring theme: in previous years, Phil Donahue and Frank Sinatra were drafted for diplomacy).

The list goes on.

*

“The question in my mind is why [the tabloids] keep going to the [same] psychics year after year when they’re so bad,” he says. “My suspicion is it’s because they’re interesting and entertaining.”

Definitely.

Among Emery’s all-time favorites: a prediction that Dolly Parton’s left breast would explode on national television.

He also marvels over this prognostication for next year: Olympic athletes will be required to undergo species tests after officials discover that a woman who won the gold medal in the shotput is actually a female gorilla.

Other supermarket tabloid forecasts for 1996, as compiled by Emery, include: Judge Lance Ito becoming chief justice of the Supreme Court, Hawaii sinking into the sea, and the federal government converting the Grand Canyon into a nuclear waste dump.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.