Roberto Westbrook / Alligator Staff
Noreen Renier will teach the UF leisure course “ESP: An Awareness” during the Spring semester. She hopes to show students how to increase their own psychic awareness in the six-week class. Renier has worked on more than 400 unsolved cases and has lectured at the FBI Academy.

ESP Made Easy

By Rebecca Boyajian
Contributing Writer

Noreen Renier is no ordinary instructor. Instead of explaining math problems or grading term papers, Renier is planning to teach UF students how to become psychics.

The Gainesville-based psychic detective and leisure course instructor believes everyone has psychic abilities. Through hands-on experiments and tuning in to a normally unused portion of the brain, Renier hopes to show students how to increase their own psychic awareness.

In her Spring leisure course, “ESP: An Awareness,” she plans for students to learn how to see auras and what they mean, and how they can affect others’ energy fields with their own. They also may learn about meditation, telepathy and psychometry — picking up information from inanimate objects such as rings or watches.

“In six weeks, one class a week, they can touch an object and read it,” Renier said.

Renier has used psychometry in her 23-year career in detective work. She has lectured at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., and worked on more than 400 unsolved cases.

Renier’s most famous local case occurred in Williston, and the area’s scenic beauty actually spawned Renier’s move from Orlando.

Two years after the April 1994 disappearance of Norman Lewis, a 76-year-old Williston resident, police suggested the Lewis family contact Renier. Figuring the police had no more leads to follow, the family paid the psychic’s $650 fee.

Renier said she psychically saw cliffs, water, railroad tracks, a truck bridge and the numbers 45 and 21. She claims her clues helped point police and Navy divers to a water-filled lime rock pit adjacent to state Route 45 and 2.1 miles from Lewis’ home. The pit held Lewis’ submerged truck and body.

But Renier’s psychic premonitions began many years before the discovery of Lewis’ body. In the late 1970s, Renier worked in advertising and public relations at an Orlando hotel. A co-worker pleaded with Renier to rent a room to a friend for a psychics’ convention. Renier initially refused but later agreed to meet the co-worker’s psychic friend and rent the room.

“I didn’t believe in any of it,” Renier said. “I thought it was all phony, all frauds.”

After meeting the psychic and having a personal reading, the once-skeptical Renier became intrigued. She started reading books about dreams, psychics and psychic detectives and began meditating with friends regularly.

“I started because I was so skeptic,” Renier said. “Then you can’t stop. The word obsessed would have been good then.”

Renier said she became so fascinated with her newly learned skills that she constantly wanted to practice. She would invite community members to the hotel for free lunches so she could practice her psychic abilities on the willing and unwilling attendees. She was fired within three months.

“Some psychic I was,” Renier said. “I didn’t even see it coming.”

Although newly jobless, Renier continued to practice. She became so involved in psychic phenomena that she switched careers and created her own job as a hotel lobby’s resident psychic. Adorned with large hoop earrings and a flowing green and purple gypsy-like outfit, Renier charged hotel guests a $5 fee for her readings and continued to practice.

Renier said she became so talented at her craft that she even amazed herself. To understand more about her talents, she contacted a Duke University researcher and underwent psychological evaluations and brain pattern monitoring.

“I was using a different part of my mind,” Renier said. “I wasn’t special. I wasn’t crazy. Everyone has this part of the mind.”
Soon after her evaluations, Renier began teaching and lecturing at the University of Virginia. During a lecture, a student asked Renier if she would perform a “public service.” Renier said she agreed without thinking, beginning her career as a psychic detective.

The student’s sister was a victim of a serial rapist who had victimized several women in the town and was yet to be caught. Renier visited the victim’s home and, using psychometry, envisioned an object going round and round and the rapist covering his face with a stocking, a scar on his body, wearing a uniform, and living on a hill close to a movie theater. Renier said she told officers that they would catch their man before Christmas.

Although Renier’s predictions did not lead police to the man, he was apprehended three days before Christmas. The clues Renier gave matched exactly with details about the rapist. The object going round and round, something that had baffled Renier, was the cement truck he drove.

After working on other criminal cases, Renier was invited to lecture at the FBI Academy. During a speaking engagement, she says, she predicted President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 attempted assassination.

“I remembered seeing something go into his chest, and I told them he would be injured,” Renier said.

After her predictions came true, Renier said CIA agents probed her for any other psychic visions that predicted danger for the president. Renier saw foreign uniforms and shooting and assumed her vision was about Reagan. She said her premonition was correct but related to a different country’s leader — Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was shot months later.

Renier said her extensive psychic career and knowledge about the phenomena will aid her in teaching the Spring leisure course. Renier said in her course, students will come to understand much more than their unknown psychic abilities.

“It will teach them about themselves,” Renier said.

Gainesville-area resident Phil Klein said while he already is experimenting with palm reading, he would like to register for the course and learn more.
“It will be good for people to be able to translate,” Klein said. “It is something all of us have, but we just need to be open and allow phenomena to happen.”