Salinas psychic Brian Henson predicts the future and sees dead people, too.

831 -- Tales From the Area CodeStaring at me with piercing light blue eyes across a Cherry Bean Coffeeshop table, local psychic Brian Henson leans forward and asks, "Why are they showing me radio towers around you?"

I really have no idea, but I''d been wary about having a reading done in the first place (a psychic once predicted a series of family tragedies for my grandmother and they all came devastatingly true). Well, I remember, there actually is a tower that stands like a skeleton on Point Sur, a half mile from my house.

"There are two males and a female energy that comes through that area," Henson continues.

Damn. I squirm in my seat and watch my chai while it cools to room temperature. Then my skepticism returns. This guy could have gleaned that information from my voice mail when he left a message.

Henson continues with a few vague but plausible pronouncements and then hits a home run. He asks, "What is going on with your cat''s kidneys because he doesn''t drink enough water?"

Wow! Abner, my cat, is suffering from urinary problems and I am not quite certain if he''s fully recovered.

"What or who is Moby?" I am still reeling from the cat question and can''t deal with this new query. I don''t know. A book I read in college? A musician with no hair? I don''t know. Henson assures me it''s important, so I write it down.

"I get you more settled, more secure with money," he says with the certainty of a scientist explaining the theory of evolution to a bright child.

I can live with that.

Then Henson tells me that my dead grandfather is joining the conversation.

"Feisty energy though, dude," Henson tells me.

After correctly divining that my father lost money in the stock market (joining thousands of others), Henson predicts I will meet a love interest with red hair this June. She will be petite and she will have a job in the banking business.

This is a prediction I receive with great anticipation.

"What I am tapping into is your blueprint, your life theme, what you have that is charted out," says Henson.

I just nod my head, not sure what to believe.

After my impromptu reading, I find the extraordinary details of Henson''s life possible. Brian Henson says his world was literally shaken when he discovered his gift during puberty.

"When I was 12, I was in my bed and the bed started shaking violently," he says. "I thought it was an earthquake, so that didn''t freak me out."

Henson says he asked friends and loved ones about the temblor, but found out no one else around him felt any seismic activity.

In the early 1990s, Henson took his tax return monies and bought a reading from Sylvia Browne, a nationally known psychic from Campbell who has appeared on the Montel Williams Show, Leeza and Unsolved Mysteries. Apparently, Browne realized right away that Henson had the gift of psychic power. "She kept making a lot of inclusive remarks like ''people like us'' type things," says Henson, recalling her reading.

During the same period, Henson reveals that he started seeing dead people while working in the drapery department of Northridge Mall''s J.C. Penney''s store. He says that the departed sometimes look like a wavy figure, flickering like a mirage on a hot highway.

Intellectual Heavyweights

In 1994, Henson decided to go into business for himself and started to make a living off his psychic abilities. He placed an eye-catching classified on the back of the Weekly ("I See Dead People"), a one-line blurb in the Salinas Californian and made a couple of local television commercials to put out the word.

Now, mostly due to word-of-mouth publicity, Henson conducts from 21 to 25 readings a week with clients in 28 states and England. He also has taken over the hosting chores for local radio station KIEZ 540 AM''s In the Company of Angels program, where he gives readings for call-in listeners.

Henson''s readings range from eerie (contacting dead relatives) to the mundane (helping a couple from England find their lost TV remote).

"It''s a blessing, because I can protect people," Henson says about his professional duties, adding that his work can become very draining if emotions are running high.

Humans have believed in the possibility of psychic powers since the dawn of western civilization when the Greeks visited the famed Temple of Apollo at Delphi for personal and political advice. Psychic credibility was boosted in the 1500s when the famous French prophet Nostradamus predicted events of his era and incidents that would not occur until centuries later, little things like the arrival of aerial warfare and the rise and fall of Adolph Hitler.

At the start of the previous century, intellectual heavyweights like Albert Einstein and Carl Jung proposed theories that suggested time might not be linear. Jung''s theory of synchronicity saw time as an interconnected web of events as opposed to a series of points on a continuum. People who believed in the possibility of psychic powers felt validated when these two pillars of the gray matter establishment said that the past, present and future may be jumbled together.

Henson believes that everyone has latent psychic ability but his is stronger because he focuses on it. His mentor Sylvia Browne sums it all up with a good analogy. "Anyone can learn to play the piano," she writes on her Web site, "but not everyone is a concert pianist."

Near the end of our conference, I decide to steer Henson into more comfortable territory (away from me) and ask what he predicts will happen in the near future.

"Nobody ever mentions this, but New York is going to be hit by an earthquake in about two and a half years," he offers nonchalantly.

I ask him about George W. Bush''s presidency.

"I keep hearing from others that he is not going to live out his term--but he does," says Henson, who goes on to forecast that Vice President Dick Cheney will have another heart attack.

Will it be a mortal heart attack?

"No, thank god, because without him, it''s like George Bush without training wheels," he says with a grin.

The ROTA Crystal and Psychic Fair takes place Saturday and Sunday (starting at 10am both days) at the Monterey Peninsula College Center, 980 Fremont in Monterey. Admission is $7 and a 20-minute reading cost $20. For more info, call 648-1003.