Pondo is not a psychic. He is not a detective. He is a patternist — a self-described “indexer of omens.” For two decades, he has scoured local news archives, police scanners, and obituaries, looking for the small, anomalous detail that precedes catastrophe.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Probably nothing.” index of sinister
Of course, skeptics call Pondo a hoarder of coincidence. “Apophenia with a filing system,” says Dr. Mira Laskey, a cognitive psychologist at Johns Hopkins. “The human brain is wired to see patterns. A red shoelace doesn’t cause a raid any more than a black cat causes a broken mirror.” Pondo is not a psychic