The Cop who is a Mentalist.

This is quite an interesting news that I picked up from Express news covered by Brian Chasnoff. It is about a 51 year old policeman with special abilities. He is known as Candin though his real name is Wayne Cannon. As I was reading, I thought that it would be nice if every precinct in the world has cops with such special abilities then....there would not be anymore missing persons,things or missing animals...

Here goes...

He's a police officer — a missing persons detective, serving and protecting the Alamo City for 12 years. Soon he'll start investigating crime scenes.
He has other interests which includes deep space, Armageddon and mentalism. He performs the latter — a form of mind reading, a more rarified sort of magic — when he's not helping solve mysteries in the streets.

“We have to remind people that he's not the Antichrist,” says Steve Schmidt, owner of Enchanted Springs Ranch in Boerne. “He's not the dark side.”

Sometimes they watch the mentalist perform. He'll bend a spoon before your eyes. Pick a word from a 300-plus-page novel & he will tell you what word you chose. “It's sleight of mind,” the mentalist explains, cryptically. “You have to persuade somebody to go a certain direction.” He will guess your mother's name if you tell him your birthday.


Candin spikes his shows with off-kilter humor, conflating ESP with ESPN, for example, and he's peculiar in conversation too, sputtering digressions about dinosaurs and meteorites.

He collects meteorites in an aquarium in his laundry room. He's spent thousands of dollars on them, misshapen chunks of debris from outer space. One, he says, contains amino acids not found on Earth.
“There's your extraterrestrials,” he says. “That's my passion.”
He points out stones that fell in Russia and China, New Orleans and Africa.
“This thing came down like a bus in Peru,” he says. “It's fascinating to me because this is from somewhere else. It's like, how close can you get to God? With a meteorite.”


The book of Revelation intrigues Candin. He reads the Bible literally. He steers clear of witchcraft. He won't touch Ouija boards. “Contacting the dead is an abomination,” he says. “It's in Deuteronomy. You shouldn't do it.”

But mentalism is different. Candin says it's an art form that encompasses suggestion and psychology. Skeptics say it's trickery, that the novel the mentalist hands you is a fake. Candin says he uses techniques, but he's no skeptic. His performances can startle even him.

“God is supernatural,” he says. “He's paranormal, and I think he shows us things.” Other times, Candin takes more of the credit. “I mess with people's minds,” he says.


Candin used to be in the Air Force. He's afraid of breaking rules. He's skittish about connecting mentalism to police work.

Candin says,“I get hunches, but I think every police officer has that ability.”
And: “I think it makes me a better detective because you're acting as a prophet. No, I don't want to say that.” And: “If it does subconsciously help me with police work, so be it.” And: “I know you're saying this guy's a psychotic policeman.”
He's not. People who know him love him. They say he's unusual, yes, but also funny and kindhearted. And he became a cop for the right reasons.

“He has very high ambitions,” says an officer who's known Candin for more than two decades and requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to a reporter. “He always aspired to be a good person.”

One of the thing Candin most loves to do is to catch people off-guard when they are in the midst of admiring his meteorites. And that's when Candin will tell you to look at a coin he acquired in an exotic land. Next, a fireball will explode in your face. Candin will smile, and you'll smell the butane as you wait for your heart to stop pounding.