The tale, a true one to be sure, begins with a man named Matthew Palmer. Mr. Palmer is now a filmmaker, but the source of one of his earliest films is far from typical. You see, his mother was a 28 year old singe woman, with no interest in having children and almost no respect for the truth of psychic power. So when a psychic told her that she was to have a son and that his father would die when he was 13, she paid it no mind. Things looked especially bleak for this prophecy after she came down with a case of pneumonia that nearly caused her death. However, she soon-after had a son, whose father was an avid smoker. She would warn him with the prophecy (although she wasn’t fully convinced just yet) that he should quit smoking. He didn’t heed the warnings, and the prophecy was fulfilled when Matthew was 13. His father died of cardiac arrest, quite unexpectedly.
Matthew Palmer went on to create films and decided to take a collection of home videos and phone call transcripts between he and his mother to write the film What the Psychic Saw. The short film reflects on his late father’s life, tragic death, and the aftermath of the impact on his mother’s life. As to the psychic’s prediction, the film really does not answer the question of how the psychic could predict such a thing, which leads the audience to believe that Matthew wasn’t seeking to prove a lack of supernatural phenomenon with his film. Rather, the psychic’s prediction was simply an accepted part of the entire tragic and ironic story.