Clairvoyant Callers

By Amanda Bower

First Miss Cleo was charged with fraud. Now telephone telepathics in Vietnam are under fire. There are more than 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers missing from the war, and Hanoi is warning that clairvoyants are duping distraught relatives of MIA soldiers with claims of a 70% success rate in tracking down loved ones' remains--with the help of cell phones. After an initial consultation, a seer draws a map with the location of the missing body. The family heads to the site and makes cell-phone contact to narrow the search, receiving instructions like "See that banana tree? A little to its left." One psychic agency claims it's getting up to 100 inquiries a day for its service, in exchange for "donations" of $40. Unlike the millions spent by Washington to help find missing U.S. servicemen, Hanoi gives no official aid in tracking Vietnam's MIAs, other than to warn families that they are being led to freshly buried bones.

--Reported by Kay Johnson/Hanoi

With reporting by Kay Johnson/Hanoi