Professional psychic Nancy du Tertre yearns for the day when serious research investigates the links between psychology as we know it and parapsychology -- that realm of thinking, feeling and knowing that is partly of this world and partly not.

Having assisted detectives in their searches for murder victims, du Tertre is also an avowed skeptic -- in her own field.

"I often lecture on the topic of psychic intuition to university psychology students," she told me in a recent interview. "At one recent lecture, I took questions afterwards. I nearly got into a fistfight with a professor who happened to be attending and who took great umbrage at the fact that I would have the audacity to call myself a skeptic when it was obvious, in his opinion, that I was a believer in psychic phenomena.

"I tried to explain to him that skepticism means that I retain a healthy inquiring mind when it comes to every psychic experience. It does not mean that I discount and discredit every experience which cannot be explained within a context that is already familiar to me. It also means that I will allow myself to be convinced of a psychic event once I feel I have sufficient evidence and have ruled out other options.

"I am not married to disbelief like most so-called skeptics," says du Tertre, whose new book Psychic Intuition also details her work as an energy healer, medical intuitive, medium -- and New York lawyer.

She talks about psychic sleuthing on her weekly radio show, "Hot Leads, Cold Cases."

"These skeptics are actually more akin to religious zealots. They just don't realize it because they are blind to their own prejudice. They believe that the scientific method is the only way to prove that something is real, and when the scientific method fails to yield repeatable and consistent results ... they will go to any length to make sure that an alternate hypothesis can never be raised.

"Are there things and people in the spiritual realm about which I remain highly skeptical? Yes, absolutely. There are many psychic wannabees. There are also many psychics and paranormal investigators who are very happy to pretend to be way more powerful than they are.

"The problem is that most people are too eager to give away their personal power to someone who they believe is more powerful," du Tertre laments. "And people are more than happy to take their power. That is one of the reasons I see it as my mission to spread the word that we are all psychic. It is a basic, human, physiological sensory ability."

Yet science has never found the means by which to calculate it, quantify it, control it, or analyze it -- at least, not yet.