The Warning Voice

The sinking of the Titanic, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and the Aberfan disaster - all have been the subject of remarkable successes on the part of those with the extraordinary gift of precognition.

At 5 o'clock one morning in 1979, a knock at her apartment door woke Helen Tillotson from a very deep sleep. Suddenly, she heard her mother calling out: 'Helen, are you there? Let me in!' Helen hurried to the door to find out what was wrong. Her mother, Mrs Marjorie Tillotson, who lived in a Philadelphia apartment block just across the street, demanded to know why Helen had been knocking on her door a few minutes earlier.

Helen, 26, assured her mother that she had gone to bed at 11 o'clock the previous night and had not woken at all until she heard her mother knocking at the door. 'But I saw you. I spoke to you,' said Mrs Tillotson. She said Helen had told her to follow her home immediately without asking questions.

Suddenly, there was a loud noise from outside. Both women rushed to the window: across the street, a gas leak in Mrs Tillotson's block had caused an explosion, and her apartment was gutted. 'If she had been asleep there at the time,' said a fire chief, 'I doubt whether she would have got out alive.'

Had Helen been sleep-walking? Or did her mother have a psychic vision? Whatever the explanation, either mother or daughter had apparently sensed the danger of an explosion, and saved Mrs Tillotson's life. Such incidents are known as premonitions; and although they are rare, enough cases have been documented to suggest that mysteriously, some people do seem able to catch a glimpse of the future.

Premonition of death

Early in 1979, Spanish hotel executive Jaime Castell had a dream in which a voice told him he would never see his unborn child, due in three months. Convinced that he would die, Castell took out a 50,000 (pounds) insurance policy - payable only on his death, with no benefits if he lived. Weeks later, as he drove from work at a steady 50 mph (80 km/h), another car travelling in the opposite direction at over 100 mph (160 km/h) went out of control, hit a safety barrier, somersaulted and landed on top of Castell's car. Both drivers were killed instantly.

After paying the 50,000 (Pounds) to Castell's widow, a spokesman for the insurance company said that a death occurring so soon after such a specific policy had been taken out would normally have to be investigated thoroughly. 'But this incredible accident rules out any suspicion. A fraction of a second either way and he would have escaped.'

Sometimes a number of people will even have forebodings of the same event. Many of them have no direct connection with the tragedy they foresee; but some, like Eryl Mai Jones, become its victims. On 20 October 1966, this nine-year-old Welsh girl told her mother she had dreamt that, when she had gone to school, it was not there. 'Something black had come down all over it,' she said. Next day she went to school in Aberfan - and half a million tons of coal waste slithered down onto the mining village, killing Eryl and 139 others, most of them children.

After the disaster, many people claimed to have had premonitions about it. They were investigated by a London psychiatrist, Dr John Barker, who narrowed them down to 60 he felt were genuine. So impressed was he by this evidence for premonitions of the tragedy that he helped set up the British Premonitions Bureau, to record and monitor such occurrences. It was hoped the Bureau could be used to give early warning of similar disasters and enable lives to be saved.

When Dr Barker analysed the Aberfan premonitions, he noticed that there had been a gradual build-up during the week before the Welsh tip buried the school, reaching a peak on the night before the tragedy. Two Californian premonitions bureaux - one at Monterey, south of San Francisco, the other at Berkeley - have since sifted through predictions from members of the public in the hope of detecting a similar pattern.

Sceptics often point out that information about premonitions is published only after the event, and that the vast majority of such predictions are discarded when they are found to be wrong. This may be true in many cases, but there are exceptions.

Prophet arrested

A Scottish newspaper, the Dundee Courier & Advertiser, carried a story on 6 December 1978, headlined 'Prophet didn't have a ticket.' It told of the appearance of Edward Pearson, 43, at Perth Sheriff Court, charged with travelling on the train from Inverness to Perth on 4 December without paying the proper fare.

Pearson - described as 'an unemployed Welsh prophet' - was said to have been on his way to see the Minister of the Environment to warn him about an earthquake that would hit Glasgow in the near future. The Courier's readers doubtless found it very amusing. But they were not so amused by the earthquake that shook them in their beds three weeks later, causing damage to buildings in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland. Earthquakes in Britain are rare; and prophets who predict them are even rarer. But the most remarkable prophecy ever made must surely be the story of the Titanic, the great ocean liner which sank on her maiden voyage in 1912 with terrible loss of life. In 1898, a novel by a struggling writer, Morgan Robertson, had predicted the disaster with uncanny accuracy.

Robertson's story told of a 70,000-tonne vessel, the safest ocean liner in the world, which hit an iceberg in the Atlantic on her maiden voyage. She sank and most of her 2,500 passengers were lost because, incredibly, the liner had only 24 lifeboats - less than half the number needed to save all the passengers and crew on board.

Fiction becomes fact

On 14 April 1912, the real-life tragedy occurred as the 66,000-tonne Titanic was making her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. She, too, hit an iceberg; she, too, sank. And, like the liner in the novel, she did not have enough lifeboats on board - only 20, in fact - and there was terrible loss of life. Of the 2,224 people on board the luxury liner, 1,513 perished in the icy waters. Robertson even came remarkably close to getting the vessel's name right - he had called it the Titan.

Curiously, another work of fiction about a similar tragedy had appeared in a London newspaper some years earlier. The editor was a distinguished journalist, W.T. Stead, who added a prophetic note to the end of the story: 'This is exactly what might take place, and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats.' By a particularly ironic twist of fate, Stead was one of the passengers on the Titanic who died for that very reason.

Such cases are rare, however, and for every prediction that is fulfilled there are perhaps a thousand that are not. In 1979, the Mind Science Foundation of San Antonio, Texas, USA, came up with a novel experiment to test how accurately people could predict an event. The American Skylab space station had begun to fall out of orbit and, although it was known for certain that it would eventually fall to Earth, scientists did not know when this would occur, nor where it would land. The foundation therefore invited people known to have psychic powers - and anyone else who wanted to participate - to predict the date of Skylab's fall and the spot on Earth where its remains would land. It called the exercise 'Project Chicken Little', and over 200 people responded to the appeal. Their predictions were analysed and published before Skylab fell. Virtually all were wrong: very few even came close to the date of Skylab's return (11 June), and even fewer guessed that it would land in Australia.

While such experiments to prove that the future can be predicted have not been very successful, some individuals nevertheless seem to excel at prophecy. Nostradamus, for example, the 16th-century seer, made many prophecies that have apparently come true. Not everyone agrees with their interpretation, however. Take this one for example:

'Near the harbour and in two cities will be two scourges, the like of which have never been seen. Hunger, plague within, people thrown out by the sword will cry for help from the great immortal God.'

But what does it predict? Nostradamus' followers say it is a prediction of the atom bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. But no one could have used his prophecy to foretell these events. In other words, it is hindsight that gives credibility to writing such as this.

Assassinations foretold

Jeane Dixon, a modern seer, successfully predicted the assassinations of President John F Kennedy, his brother, Robert Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Intriguingly, her premonition of the future President's murder came 11 years before the event and before he had even been elected.

A devout woman, she had gone to St Matthew's Cathedral in Washington one morning in 1952 to pray, and was standing before a statue of the Virgin Mary when she had a vision of the White House. The numerals 1 - 9 - 6 - 0 appeared above it against a dark cloud. A young, blue-eyed man stood at the door. A voice then told her that a Democrat, who would be inaugurated as President in 1960, would be assassinated while in office.

She predicted Kennedy's brother's death in 1968 - in an even more startling way - while addressing a convention at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. She invited questions from the floor and someone asked if Robert Kennedy would ever be president. Suddenly, Jeane Dixon saw a black curtain fall between her and the audience, and she told the questioner: 'No, he will not. He will never be President of the United States, because of a tragedy right here in this hotel.' A week later, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in that very hotel.

Sceptics, of course, will argue that it is impossible to look into the future, many of them feeling that, until the existence of precognition is proved in the laboratory, it cannot be taken seriously. But, although it may not be easy to look ahead at will, there remain on record some extraordinary stories of premonitions that are difficult to explain according to the laws of conventional science - unless there is something wrong with our concept of space and time.

A first-class example of this is the experience of Mark Twain. Before he became a famous writer - and while he was still known by the name of Samuel Clemens - he worked as an apprentice pilot on a steamboat, the Pennsylvania, which plied the Mississippi river. His younger brother, Henry, worked as a clerk on the same boat. Samuel went to visit his sister in St Louis; and, while he was there, had a vivid dream, featuring a metal coffin resting on two chairs. In it was his brother and, resting on his chest, a bouquet of white flowers with a crimson one in the middle.

A few days later, back on the boat, Samuel had an argument with the chief pilot of the Pennsylvania and was transferred to another boat, the Lacey. His brother, however, stayed aboard the Pennsylvania, which was travelling up the river two days ahead of the Lacey. When Samuel reached Greenville, Mississippi, he was told that the Pennsylvania had blown up just outside Memphis with the loss of 150 lives. His brother Henry, however, was still alive, though badly scalded, and Samuel spent six days and nights with him until he died. Exhausted, he fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke, he found his brother's body had been removed from the room, so he went to find it.

It was just as he had seen it in the dream. Henry was in a metal coffin, which rested on two chairs. But one detail was missing - the flowers. Then, as Samuel watched, an elderly woman entered the room carrying a bouquet of white flowers with a single red rose in the centre. She placed them on Henry's body and left. Mark Twain's glimpse of the future had been fulfilled in practically every detail.

Children and adolescents often have astonishing psychokinetic powers. June Knowles, left, could cause a plastic mobile to move inside a bell jar by thought alone; and a young Californian psychic, David Shepherd, right, specialized at one time in bending metal.

The illustration, above, symbolically depicts the intriguing telepathic link that researchers have found in the dreams of certain subjects with a close relationship.

To test his wife's telepathic powers, American writer Upton Sinclair sent her the sketch of a bird's nest, shown top. It was sealed in an envelope. Prior to opening it, she concentrated on the 'target' and produced the sketch above.

Members of the Society for Research into Rapport and Telekinesis can be seen, above, levitating a table. The group became so good at inducing such phenomena that they were soon regular occurrences at their meetings.