by Eric Wargo
Throughout history, there has been one diplomat who can shuttle across the divide between the objective science of causes and the subjective study of meanings and barter a truce between the disputants. That diplomat is reason —in the old-school sense, the kind of thing that prepostmodern philosophers still debated but that seems somehow quaint in our day. Since even the most reasoned skeptics like Martin Gardner admit there is no way to even approach the problem solely with numbers and statistics, all sides in the debate must supplement their arguments with appeals to this arbiter. How reasonable is the “it’s just coincidence” argument in any particular case, or the bulk of the cases, versus some other explanation more in line with the existence of something like precognition? This book will present many examples that will appear more or less persuasive, depending on your point of view. There are no smoking guns, but for very interesting reasons having to do with the nature of time and information, there cannot be smoking guns. This is why I find the topic so fascinating: Precognition operates in the shadow realm of uncertainty. Some things that look very much like precognition may indeed be just coincidence, and there is no way to know for sure. By the same token, I will show that many examples of likely bona fide precognition have been hiding in plain sight, for instance in psychoanalysts’ clinical writings, yet have been overlooked because they have been given alternative, less causally offensive—but also less parsimonious and I think less believable—theoretical framings.
To provide reasonable (if not strictly scientific) proof of precognition’s reality, one could do no better than cite a modern case recently brought to light by Rice University historian of religions Jeffrey J. Kripal. He has done more than perhaps any other scholar in our time to legitimize psychic phenomena and the paranormal (he prefers the less pejorative term “super natural” 56 ) not only as valid topics for academic inquiry but also as things that are just plain real—even if we do not yet have an adequate understanding of how they work. His recent case is a Houston woman named Elizabeth Krohn, who began experiencing frequent and distressing dreams after surviving a lightning strike in the parking lot of her synagogue in 1988. 57 Often these dreams corresponded to imminent plane crashes or other disasters reported in the news, and she learned to authenticate them by recording them in emails to herself, providing a time and date stamp and a kind of electronic paper trail. For example, on January 15, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Israel time—this occurred during a trip to Jerusalem—Krohn awoke from an afternoon nap and emailed herself the following dream:
MID-SIZE COMMERCIAL PASSENGER JET (80-150 PEOPLE) CRASHES IN NYC. MAYBE IN RIVER. NOT CONTINENTAL AIRLINES. NOT AMERICAN AIRLINES.
IT IS AN AMERICAN CARRIER LIKE SOUTHWEST OR US AIRWAYS. 58
Her husband, who had been napping by her side, remembered that she told him that the passengers seemed to be standing on the wing of the plane , even though this detail seemed absurd to both of them at the time. Six and a half hours later, at 8:57 Eastern time in the United States, US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after it struck a flock of Canada geese and lost engine power. Thanks to the expert piloting of its captain, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, all 155 passengers survived. Memorable photos that appeared in the news around the world showed the plane floating in the water with its lucky passengers spread out along both wings, awaiting rescue by nearby boats.
On February 2, 2015, at 5:52:15 AM, Central time, Krohn emailed herself the following:
PASSENGER PLANE WITH PROPELLERS. PLANE IS WHITE. FOREIGN AIRLINE—MAYBE ASIAN. CRASHES IN A BIG METROPOLITAN CITY RIGHT AFTER TAKEOFF. RIGHT WING OF PLANE IS POINTED STRAIGHT UP RIGHT BEFORE CRASHING. MOST ON BOARD KILLED, BUT SOME SURVIVORS.
Sent from my iPad 59
A day and a half later, on February 4, TransAsia Airways Flight 235 crashed in the Keelung River near Taipei, Taiwan, right after takeoff; 43 were killed but there were 15 survivors. Crucially, a driver’s dashboard video camera captured the crash and shows the right wing of the plane, propeller prominently visible, pointed straight up as it crossed over the highway ahead of the car, exactly matching Krohn’s description of her dream. Like the pictures of the survivors of the Hudson River emergency landing, the dashboard camera video of Flight 235 was widely shown in the media and went viral on the internet.
I will state my own position plainly (lest it is unclear): In both of Krohn’s stunning dreams (and several others cited in the book she and Kripal co-wrote, Changed in a Flash ), claims of “mere coincidence” or the kind of “law of large numbers” calculations a skeptic like Wiseman might supply simply fail most any test of reasonableness. These dreams, like those painted by Mandell, were not reported by random members of the public as once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. They were part of a pattern in the life of an individual who had begun to notice dreams corresponding to imminent news events and did her best to record and authenticate them, at least to allay her own doubts that something extraordinary and inexplicable was occurring in her life. Moreover, that pattern happens to perfectly support a coherent and counterintuitive theory about precognitive dreams and other prophetic phenomena that an aeronautical engineer named J. W. Dunne adumbrated in a remarkable 1927 book called An Experiment with Time , which we will examine in the next chapter.
The theory, briefly, is that precognition is not a matter of seeing or knowing objective events in some generalized future time but is the accessing of knowledge a person will acquire in his or her own future, often directly related to some rewarding or troubling learning experience ahead. Although Krohn’s dreams will typically be described as “premonitions of plane crashes,” she was, as Kripal points out, clearly dreaming about her future experience of seeing news stories about those crashes, not the events as such. It is a crucial distinction. In fact, the idea that dreams focus intimately, or one might even say “myopically,” on our own future experiences and the thoughts and feelings they provoke—not on events per se—is one thing that helps move the topic of precognition out of the murky realm of the “occult” or “supernatural” and into the realm of physical plausibility. It very much suggests an embodied, brain-based origin for these phenomena; they seem to be linked to memory and to meaning-making processes that have been studied in psychology and related fields for well over a century.
Cognitive biases and human clumsiness with statistics do often make people see illusory faces in the clouds of causality—that much is undeniable. But it also must be underscored that no one has ever actually shown that biases explain purported precognitive dreams. Nor can such arguments disprove the existence of “prophetic” artworks such as Robertson’s Futility or Richards’ Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian . In every case, skeptics can only cite the possibilities of bias and memory distortion as more or less plausible alternative explanations, easing the minds of those troubled by the idea of information flowing from the future to the past. In the end, reason must be the arbiter of any particular case. Did Morgan Robertson actually receive some kind of paranormal foreknowledge of the Titanic disaster and weave it into his novel Futility in 1898? Were Mr. Middleton’s dreams of the Titanic sinking just coincidences, or false memories confabulated after the disaster? There is no way of knowing for sure. No one case can offer definitive proof, for reasons that will be addressed at length. But one of my hopes in the next few chapters is to show that that idea—that information from the future “refluxes” to influence us in the present—is actually a very reasonable one, having increasing scientific support and plausibility.
2
“If I Were You, I’d Stay on the Ground for a Couple of Days” — Victor Goddard, J. W. Dunne, and the Block Universe
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
T he evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk, France, by a flotilla of private boats at the end of May 1940 was a heroic underdog moment that emboldened the Brits for a long and bloody struggle agai
nst Germany. In a now-famous speech to the House of Commons afterward, Winston Churchill famously promised that Britain would fight to the end, “on the beaches … with growing confidence in the air [and] in the streets,” and “never surrender.” It would not have happened without the personal intervention of a BEF air staff officer and pilot named Victor Goddard.
As the officer in charge of the air forces defending the Allied soldiers trapped on the French coast by Hitler’s tanks, Goddard saw personally what a dire situation the men were in—a situation that the British government did not fully appreciate. So at great personal risk, in the early morning hours of May 27, he and a few companions commandeered a bullet-riddled plane with no working radio from an abandoned farm outside of Dunkirk and flew across the Channel so that Goddard could personally plead with the heads of the armed forces in London. There, he forced his way into a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff and begged, on behalf of his commander, BEF General Lord Gort, that the Navy order all available boats—fishing boats, yachts, “everything that can cross the Channel … even rowing boats!” 1 —to aid in the evacuation. The rest is history … and a stirring 2017 film by Christopher Nolan.
But oddly enough, it is not this exploit but some fascinating and time-bending brushes with the paranormal that Goddard is best known for.
In 1935, for example, on a day jaunt to play golf in Gullane, Scotland, Goddard flew his Hawker Hart over a long-abandoned WWI airstrip in a little village called Drem, near his destination. During his visit, he drove to the site by car to speak with the owner about landing his plane there in the future, but found it unusable, having been turned over to pasture. The hangars were totally run-down, unsuited to house a plane. The next day—he estimated 16 hours later—on his return flight, Goddard flew through a thunderstorm and emerged from the clouds over the very same old airfield and saw—or thought he saw—something astonishing and impossible. What had been a derelict set of empty buildings and a strip overgrown with weeds was now a busy air base bustling with RAF flight crews … but they were wearing blue overalls, not the usual brown. The crews were tending four yellow planes; one was a monoplane distinctly unlike anything flown by the RAF at that point. And most oddly, those busy crews didn’t pay him any heed, even though he zoomed over them at the perilously low altitude of about 30 feet.
Seconds later he was plunged back into rain and lost sight of the airfield.
Four years later, the preparations for war with Germany had made Goddard’s brief vision a reality. The airfield at Drem, Scotland was again in use, and Goddard knew that one of the new training planes being flown there was a monoplane just like the one he had “seen” four years earlier. Also, the RAF had by this time changed the uniform for its flight crews: They now wore blue. 2 Goddard’s experience has been described as a kind of “time slip”—a rare but not unheard-of animal in the bestiary of paranormal experiences. 3
Goddard only wrote about this experience decades later, after his retirement. During their careers, military men and pilots generally don’t like to sully their reputations or have doubts cast on their sanity by reporting things like “coming unstuck in time” (to use Kurt Vonnegut’s famous phrase). 4 But this wasn’t even the strangest thing Goddard witnessed. He was to find himself at the center of another, even weirder, time-slipping—or really, time looping —experience shortly after the war’s end.
A year after his exploit with the BEF, Goddard was sent to the Pacific to supervise Great Britain’s air efforts there against the Japanese. As Commander of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, he led his pilots to victory, alongside other Allied forces, at the Battle of Guadalcanal and in the Solomon Islands campaigns. Then at the end of the War, he was posted to India, where he administered Admiral Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command as the British Air Forces took back Burma and Malaya from the Japanese.
In January 1946, Goddard’s duties mopping up the messes made by the Japanese in the South Pacific were finished, and he was ready to head home to England and then begin the next and final phase of his illustrious military career, representing the RAF in Washington, DC. Instead of flying home the direct route, through Asia, he wanted to fly via Tokyo and the Pacific, so that he could personally say “thank you and farewell” to the Americans he had fought alongside, and especially to pay his respects to General MacArthur, one of the few other Allied military commanders to have seen the entire Pacific campaign through from start to finish. For his journey, Mountbatten in Singapore let Goddard take one of their most comfortable, well-equipped transport planes, a Dakota—the British name for the American C-47, the military version of the DC-3, many of which were lend-leased to Britain during the War. The plane was named Sister Ann . 5
Goddard’s trip to Tokyo in Sister Ann took him through Hong Kong and Shanghai, and it was during the latter stopover, at a cocktail party in his honor, that, amid the chatter of many Americans and Brits he did not know, Goddard overheard news of his own death.
“I’m very glad this party is really on tonight!” he heard an Englishman behind him say. “Of course, old boy, but why shouldn’t it be?” said another man. “Well, wasn’t it laid on to welcome Air Marshal Goddard? We haven’t met him. We never shall. He’s dead!”
Goddard couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was the man crazy? Was he hearing things?
The voice behind him went on, with an authoritative tone that Goddard found increasingly unsettling: “Died last night in a crash—hell of a crash. Yes, he was killed—no doubt about that. Not a hope. Bad show!”
This was too much—Goddard turned to see who it was spouting this nonsense. It was a naval commander, who simultaneously turned and met his gaze, and started as though seeing a ghost: “My God! I’m terribly sorry! I mean I’m terribly glad—that is—how extraordinary and how appalling! I do apologize!”
“I may be a bit moribund, commander” Goddard said wryly, “but I’m not quite dead yet.”
The Navy man was Gerald Gladstone, captain of a Royal Navy cruiser, HMS Black Prince , currently docked in Shanghai harbor. 6 When Goddard pressed him for why he was under the impression there had been a crash, Gladstone admitted he had seen it in a dream the night before—or else that very afternoon, he couldn’t quite remember. Yet it had been extremely vivid and clear: Goddard had gone down in a transport plane, probably a Dakota, on a rocky beach in either China or Japan, after being caught in a snowstorm. “You’d been over the mountains in cloud. Up a long time,” Gladstone said. “I watched it all happen. … If I were you, I’d stay on the ground for a couple of days.”
One thing an aviator does not want to hear is a premonition like that. And Goddard was not inclined to just brush it off as nothing, given his own aviation-related visions that had come true. Also, Goddard had, years before, read a most fascinating book by a pioneer aeronautical engineer-turned-philosopher named John William Dunne, about the reality of precognitive dreams. Gladstone, they quickly ascertained, had just been reading the same book, An Experiment with Time , which accounted for his own confidence in discussing his dream as something that might have really come true. It didn’t mean much to Goddard that Gladstone had “seen” him flying a Dakota, since that was a very common type of transport plane, but his description of the crash occurring on a beach in China or Japan was unsettling, considering he was going to be making a flight from Shanghai to Tokyo the following morning—the next leg of his journey to meet General MacArthur. So Goddard pressed the man for details of his dream: “Did your dream show you what sort of people I was traveling with?”
“Yes,” Gladstone said slowly, “an ordinary service crew.”
“Anybody else?” Goddard was curious whether Gladstone’s dream showed that he had been carrying—although only as far as Shanghai—a civilian, Hon. Seymour Barry, who was in Asia as a journalist for The Daily Telegraph .
“Yes,” Gladstone said definitely. “Three civilians. Two men and a woman. All English.”
Goddard was relieved. “I’m carrying no one but
a service crew. I did have one civilian aboard, but he’s not going on.”
The two men chatted a bit about Dunne’s book—Goddard, who understood it better, found himself needing to clarify the author’s argument for his new acquaintance. Gladstone, for his part, must have felt a good deal of embarrassment, first at having pronounced so confidently on the party honoree’s death, and then at being corrected about the finer points of Dunne’s book and the topic of precognitive dreams—which his recent dream now didn’t seem to be an example of, after all. After their conversation, they moved apart, and Goddard never met Gladstone again.
If that were the whole story, of course, we would not know of it now. But as it happened, this deeply awkward, brief conversation between an Air Force hero and a somewhat befuddled Navy captain was just the beginning of a harrowing 24 hours in Goddard’s life. He was no stranger to daring exploits in war, but he later described this episode in a lengthy 1951 Saturday Evening Post account as his favorite true adventure story.
Things began to get unsettling for the air marshal just minutes after he drifted off to join another conversation at the party. Mr. Barry, the journalist who had flown in Sister Ann as far as Shanghai, approached him and asked if he could, despite his previous intention to remain in China a few days, join Goddard as far as Tokyo instead. Without betraying his trepidation, Goddard agreed.
It only got worse later that evening, when Goddard joined the British Consul General George Alwyne Ogden and some other guests for dinner at Ogden’s home. Midway through the meal, the Chinese butler handed Ogden a telegram: It was from the Foreign Office in London, saying it was imperative for the Consul General to visit the British high commissioner in Tokyo the next day. Ogden said to Goddard, “I am sorry to impose on you, but I wonder if you can possibly take me with you tomorrow?” There were now two civilians who wanted to fly with him. Goddard could of course say nothing about his worries, so again he agreed to this change in plans.