Zak Martin was just seven years
old when he became aware of his psychic
abilities - or, as he puts it,
"realized that other people couldn’t do
some of the things I was able to do".
Things like seeing into the future, knowing what other people were about to say or do and much
more. Visitors to his home were often amazed when
he was able to tell them things about themselves
that he had no way of knowing - including past and future
events.
"It
was just a game to me at the time," he now
recalls, "But people were really frightened
by my powers - a fact that did not occur to me
until years later."
His paranormal abilities also caused problems at
school:
"Although I was terrible at math, I was
often able to solve difficult mathematical
problems the instant they were set on the
blackboard. The correct solutions would simply
pop into my head and I would call them out,"
he remembers, "But my teachers were more
than a little suspicious when I couldn’t
explain how I had arrived at my answers."
Since those days, Zak Martin has gone on to be
hailed as one of the world’s foremost
psychics and a leading New Age figure.
Zak Martin first came to the attention of the
public while he was a student at University College, Dublin, when he took part in a widely reported game of chess-by-telepathy with another student. This led to a series of press interviews and articles dealing with his interest in psychic research and his own remarkable abilities in this area. He began to give public talks and demonstrations of ESP, and he became involved in the search for a young woman called Elizabeth Plunkett, who had disappeared
in suspicious circumstances while on holiday at
the Irish seaside resort of Brittas Bay. After a
nationwide search had failed to discover the girl's
whereabouts, Martin was called in to help. He told the police that he believed the girl was dead, and went on to provide them with details of her murder and a description of the two men who had carried out the killing. He also told them that he believed the men had abducted a second girl, whom he was also able to describe. Finally, he was able to pinpoint the whereabouts of the killers - near the centre of the city of Galway - where, within a few hours, they were located and arrested. The body of a second victim, Mary Duffy, was later found in a lake. The girls' killers - Geoffrey Evans and John Shaw, both from Lancashire in England, where they were wanted in connection with a series of rapes - were subsequently convicted of both murders (they admitted to police when caught that they had already targeted a third victim) and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Since that case, Zak Martin’s unique talent for
psychic detection has been in demand by police
forces around the world, and he is credited with
solving a number of baffling murder and missing
persons cases. He has been consulted by Scotland
yard on several occasions, most notably in the
"Notting Hill Rapist" case, when he
helped track down a violent rapist who had
terrorized women in the Notting Hill area of
London over a five year period. His part in the
successful hunt for the Notting Hill rapist made
front page headlines in the British press.
Using psychometry, the technique of picking up
psychic impressions by touching or holding
personal objects of jewellery, clothing and so on
- in the Notting Hill rapist investigation the police allowed him to handle a
knife that had been used by the rapist in one of
the attacks - Martin was able to provide
information including a description of the wanted
man. Zak’s abilities were put to the test by
Scotland Yard detectives during the first
psychometry session. He was provided with four
items to psychometrize: three identical strips of
cloth which, according to the police, had been
used by the rapist to tie up one of his victims,
and a knife he had used to threaten a number of
women. On handling the first two strips of
material Zak Martin gave a series of impressions
which included a physical and a psychological
description of the rapist. When the third strip
of cloth was handed to him, however, he appeared
to draw a complete blank; and after handling the
item for several minutes trying to pick up
psychic impressions from it, he finally
announced: "I’m afraid I can’t
pick up anything at all from this one… It is
clean of impressions. It doesn’t seem to
make sense, but I don’t feel that this item
is connected with the others - are you quite sure
it’s his?"
A senior police officer then said, "No, you
are correct. That one isn’t his."
The officer apologised, and admitted that they
had included a "decoy" item of evidence
with the others in order to test the
psychic’s abilities. (The full transcript from the tape-recording of this meeting was
published in Psychic News)
Over the years Zak Martin has assisted police forces all over the world in solving crimes and locating wanted and missing people. In one instance he used ESP to trace a London businessman who had
disappeared from his home four years earlier, in
circumstances which led his family and friends to
believe he may have committed suicide. Using a
combination of pendulum dowsing and psychometry,
Martin was able to track the missing man to a
village in Italy, where he had bigamously married
a local woman and built a new life for himself.
In another case, Zak Martin was able to locate a
missing schoolboy using a dowsing pendulum over a
map of Europe. Working from his London office,
and with only a photograph of the missing youth
as a psychic link, Martin pinpointed a town in
the South of France. The French police were
contacted, and within a few hours the boy, who
had run away from home, was found and taken into
custody. On yet another occasion, Zak Martin was able to
provide Japanese police with important clues in a
multiple-rape and murder case.
Following these early cases, which made headlines in the British and Irish papers, Zak Martin adopted a "no comment and no publicity" policy as a precondition for his assistance in cases of this kind.
