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.

© Lara Goldman, 2009