As stated in the book Blue Sense by Arthur Lyons " Even if they had no ideas of their own to offer their clients, their insights legitimized random behavior by enabling men to make a choice between different courses of action when on rational.

             grounds there was nothing to choose between them" (15). Through most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word of the local cunning man was often all it took for a person to be arrested on crimes such as theft or even murder in some cases. .

             One of the first well known psychic detectives was Jacques Aymar, who gained public notoriety throughout France by assisting in the solving of many famous cases. On July 5, 1692 in the small city of Lyons, France a wine merchant and his family was brutally.

             murdered and robbed, by an unknown assailant. The local police were completely without a clue, until Aymar came to police and said that he was capable of having visions of occurrences with the aid of a piece of clothing from a person involved in the event. After.

             holding a piece of clothing of one of the victims, Aymar was able to see three men had committed the crime and were now living in a nearby town. The police took Aymar to the neighboring city and had him examine a line up of the cities known criminals. Aymar was.

             able to pick the three men out of the twenty that were presented to him. At first the three men denied having any involvement in the murder, but after a police interrogation one of .

             the three men gave in and confessed also incriminated the other two as well (Wilson 22). Aymar went on to help police solve many other crimes until his death in 1694.

             During the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century the use of psychics by the police in America was not as frequent as in the past centuries. The reason.

             for this is because psychics had gotten a bad reputation as being scam artists, even though there were many legitimate psychics during this time period.