The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  But a proportion of the Lebanese population had become convinced that Hayek was not only predicting the troubles, but causing them. Several Beirut business threatened to sue him for ruining their trade.

  In December 2005 Hayek announced via media release that he would make no further prophecies for the time being: After all the clamour surrounding my predictions for this year I have decided to stop. I don’t want to be the reason people are afraid to go to the grocer or send their children to school.’

  Dream Screams Warned

  of Heart Attack

  The most convincing evidence of precognition can be found in print, on film, or in dated and stamped letters and reports. An example of the latter type of documentation involved the British actor Roy Kinnear. A Hertford woman wrote to ASSAP - Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena - to describe a vivid nightmare in which she had seen him fall to his death from a boat.

  The woman’s letter, comprising several closely written pages, was unnervingly circumstantial. The dream-glimpsed accident had occurred on a warm day during a film-shoot in a sunny location. The crew, who had been laughing at some joke, suddenly screamed, horrified as the actor stumbled and plunged headfirst into the water.

  An ASSAP investigator, Ken Phillips, was sufficiently impressed by the letter to send a photocopy to Roy Kinnear at London Weekend Television, suggesting he try to avoid the described situation. Following standard procedure Phillips then date-stamped and lodged the original letter in ASSAP’s files. He received no reply from Roy Kinnear.

  The letter’s contents became public months later, when most of the dream’s details came true. Kinnear died while filming Return of the Musketeers in Spain. The one ‘mistake’ in the nightmare was that no boat was involved. The actor, in reality, suffered a heart attack while riding a horse over a drawbridge.

  The Man Who Painted the Future

  In 1976, after retiring from his art-lecturing job at a Scottish university, David Mandell took up painting as a 50-hour-a-week hobby. The activity proved a boon to him psychologically. It enabled him to give artistic expression to the nightmares which had for unknown reasons begun to plague his sleep.

  Before long Mandell was startled to find that some of his dream canvases had foretold future events, small and large, ranging from train accidents to massacres. He wanted to share this information with people who might be able to explain what was happening - but he realised that he’d probably be dismissed as a delusional old pensioner.

  Determined to prove that he was regularly painting visions of disasters yet-unfolded, Mandell persuaded the local bank manager to have him photographed beneath the branch’s calendar clock (showing date and time) whenever he had a new picture to display. The results were dramatic enough to have him invited onto TV programs in England and USA.

  Mandell’s most famous artwork - painted, annotated and photographed precisely five years before events overtook it - shows the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. The painting depicts a silhouetted airliner approaching the towers which collapse into each other, gushing black billowing smoke. In the air floats the head of the Statue of Liberty. [David Mandell was not alone in producing a graphic ‘prediction’ of this kind. The Inner City Hustlers’ rock album Time to Explode was released in July 2001. After 11 September 2001 it was hastily removed from stores. Its bore a prophetic picture of the Twin Towers ablaze.]

  Another work, which Mandell completed four months before the terrible event, shows Scotland’s Dunblane primary school massacre of 13 March 1996, in which 16 children and a teacher were murdered.

  He also painted an image of a Concorde crashing while flying a Tricolor flag [a sinister preview of the Concorde disaster at Paris airport]…and a picture of Tokyo commuters dying in the sarin gas attack. In an accompanying note he identified the city as ‘Tokio’.

  In March 2003 Britain’s Channel 5 subjected David Mandell to stringent scientific testing - checking the photographic negatives, which showed no evidence of tampering, and putting the artist through a polygraph test, which he passed. A sceptical panel admitted that it had found no evidence that the artist was a hoaxer or fantasist.

  David Mandell had never sought money - only an acknowledgement that his gifts were genuine. He announced that he was delighted by the investigation’s result.

  The Child Who Foreglimpsed

  JFK’s Murder

  As a 10-year-old schoolboy Cuban-born Tony Cordero experienced a distressing vision in which he saw President John F. Kennedy fatally shot.

  The FBI placed the youngster’s statement on file, but took no action. The president was assassinated several days later.

  The federal agency’s records of the interview, released under the Freedom of Information statute, reveal that the boy had accurately described many major details of the killing.

  In adult life Cordero’s precognitive abilities made him a celebrity. Journalists Bernard Gittelson and Laura Torbet told his life story in the book Intangible Evidence (Simon and Schuster).

  Cordero recalls that he was at school when the knowledge of the president’s fate ‘washed over’ him:

  All the Cuban kids had gathered around a little TV set to watch President Kennedy at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The picture was in black-and-white - but I could see blood coming out of the president’s head, and it was in colour. I was really shook up. I started hyperventilating.

  Tony was taken to a children’s hospital, where he was so insistent the president was in danger that a young doctor rang the FBI. ‘Three agents came to talk to me, but they just took notes. Two days later President Kennedy died, in the way I’d seen it.’

  To his parents’ relief, Tony Cordero’s warning attracted no publicity at the time. But the situation had changed by 28 October 1971 when, as an already nationally known 18-year-old, he appeared on the radio program Speak Out, Washington - predicting that a scandal would force President Nixon to resign.

  The Watergate Hotel break-in did not occur until 17 June 1972. When the scandal broke, the tape of Cordero’s interview was replayed across America.

  Moon-Visions Mystery

  In June 2004 the space probe Cassini took the first-ever close-ups of Mimas, one of Saturn’s 31 moons.

  The Saturnian moon Mimas, photographed by NASA space probe Cassini.

  Bemused NASA scientists noted that the tiny satellite, with its distinctive circular crater, was almost identical to the Death Star, which had awed Star Wars audiences years earlier.

  The crater on Mimas is of colossal size and has a central mountain taller than Mount Everest. The uncannily similar crater-like feature on the spherical Death Star was used in the Star Wars scenarios to launch gigantic superweapons.

  Death Star’s Hollywood designers could not possibly have copied from nature. While they were building the model, no earthly telescope would have shown Mimas as more than a pinprick of light.

  The Death Star (right) was created by Star Wars set designers, years before NASA photographed the stunningly similar moon Mimas.

  Producer George Lucas’s designers were not the first creative people to steal a glimpse of a Saturnian moon. In his novel 2001 (published 1968) Arthur C. Clarke included a chapter titled The Eye of Japetus. In it his hero, astronaut Bowman, discovers a strange landmark, resembling a gigantic eye staring up at him from the little moon’s surface. At its centre is a black pupil-like dot, which proves to be one of 2001’s monoliths. In 1979 Voyager I transmitted the first images of Japetus to earth. Clarke’s friend, astronomer Carl Sagan, then working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, sent him a print of one of the photos with a note, ‘Thinking of you’. The picture showed a large, white eye-shaped oval on the surface of Japetus. At the ‘eye’s’ centre was a small black dot.

  The Novelist Whose Dreams Came True

  In 1975 Gerard de Villiers, a moderately popular author of political thrillers, published a novel with the unwieldy title Irresistible Ascent of Mahommed Rizza. The book,
a thinly disguised speculation on the possible fate of Mahommad Reza, then Shah of Iran, received little publicity.

  A controversial novel precisely foretold the time and nature of the Shah of Iran’s death.

  But its fortunes changed in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown - and newspapers pointed out that the novel had quite precisely foretold the time and manner of the leader’s political demise.

  Questioned by journalists, de Villiers seemed confused. He could not understand how he had been able to foresee the Shah’s downfall in such detail. The novel, he lamely supposed, was a pattern of coincidences.

  But the following year - 1980 - he did it again. In his novel Terror at San Salvador he described the city’s archbishop being killed by a bullet to the head while celebrating mass. Two months after the book appeared, San Salvador’s Archbishop Romero was felled by a single shot. This time, however, the media reacted harshly - blaming the novelist for inspiring a copycat murder.

  In a future-probing novel, writer Gerald de Villiers circumstantially predicted the murder of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat.

  Gerard de Villiers, now a bestselling writer, defended himself by saying his plots were partly based on disturbing dreams or intuitive flashes. ‘But my novels are also built around known facts - and information I receive from political sources,’ he said. ‘I don’t in any way consider myself to be a psychic author.’ His editor, Ganari Ali of Pion Publishing, Paris, disagreed. ‘This author’s track record for accurately writing about the future defies all odds and explanations,’ he said.

  In 1981 de Villiers published another novel, The Egyptian Plot, which described the imaginary assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat. The ‘fictional’ narrative came true within months.

  Possibly the most astonishing of de Villiers’s books was Red Grenada, published in 1982. It forecast in detail the communist-inspired execution of Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, followed by the subsequent US marine invasion.

  A Prescient Parade of Popes

  In 1139 an Irish Catholic bishop, known today as St Malachy, reportedly fell into a trance while visiting Rome - and experienced a strange vision of monumental proportions. When he woke (according to his contemporary biographer Bernard of Clairvaux) Malachy wrote down everything he could remember from the dream. It was a list of popes, each of whom he identified by a prophetic description. His roll-call stretched into an unimaginably distant future.

  Malachy gave his manuscript to Pope Innocent II, who incuriously deposited it in the Vatican archives, where it lay forgotten for several centuries. Then, in 1590, it was rediscovered and the full list published.

  Doubters argued at the time that the descriptions up to 1590 might have been doctored and ‘improved’ before going to print. And possibly they had. But because Malachy’s list has been on the public record ever since publication, people interested in precognition can study the post-1590 entries with greater interest.

  Malachy describes Leo XI, for example, as Undosus vir - ‘The man who will pass like a wave’. Leo did just that: surviving for only 27 days in 1605.

  Similarly intriguing is the motto ‘Lily and rose’, which Malachy attaches to Pope Urban (1623-1644). It was Urban who gave permission for the marriage of England’s Charles I to Henrietta of France. The lily dominated Henrietta’s coat-of-arms. Charles’s symbol was the rose.

  The pope whom Malachy dubs ‘guardian of the hills’ is Alexander VII, enthroned in 1655. Alexander’s coat-of-arms depicts a star glittering above six hills.

  He describes Clement XII as Columna excelsa - ‘The lofty column’. History records that Clement, a frustrated architect, ordered - and interfered with - the building of many churches. When he built the chapel at Mantua he used two immense columns salvaged from the ruins of the Pantheon.

  Malachy’s descriptions of popes become, if anything, more direct as he enters the 20th and 21st centuries.

  His motto for Pius X, whose reign ended in 1914 is Ignis ardens - ‘Burning fire’, conceivably a reference to the devastation of World War I which erupted that year.

  Benedict XV (1914-1922) is linked to the words Religio depopulata - ‘Death of the religious’. This has been interpreted to refer not only to the unprecedented millions of Christians killed during the Great War, but to the Russian Revolution in which countless churchgoers were murdered and their places of worship destroyed.

  John XXIII (1958-1963) is accorded the motto Pastor et nauta - ‘Shepherd and sailor’. Before his election he was patriarch of the maritime city of Venice.

  Paul VI (1963-1978) is described in the prophecies as Flos florum - ‘Flower of flowers’. His personal arms bore three fleurs-de-lis.

  John Paul I is identified as De medietate Lunae - ‘The average age of the moon’. Albino Luciani became pope on 26 August 1978, the day after the moon reached its last quarter - and reigned for 33 days, approximately five days longer than a lunar cycle. Scholars have noted that he was born in the diocese of Belluno, a placename with echoes of Bella luna - ‘Beautiful moon’. This short-lived Pope’s name is also interesting: Albino, related to albus (white) - and Luciani, derived from Lucius, reducing to lucis (light)…arguably suggesting the moon’s ‘White light’.

  John Paul II: De labore Solis - ‘Travails of the sun’. During World War II Karol Wojtyla worked in a quarry, from which optimistic analysts have derived ‘labouring in sunlight’. A more persuasive interpretation might be that labore solis is a metaphor for solar eclipse. The future pope was born on 18 May 1920 during a partial solar eclipse - and was buried during a rare ‘hybrid’ eclipse over South America on 8 April 2005.

  Benedict XVI: Gloria olivae - ‘Glory of the olive’. Cardinals participating in the papal conclave speculated that the next pontiff might come from the Order of St Benedict, whose symbols include the olive branch. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, elected in April 2005, is not a Benedictine, but chose Benedict as his regnal name: a case, perhaps, of a prophecy fulfilled by its own subject.

  This is the last of Malachy’s prophecies that scholars overwhelmingly agree to be genuine. His predictions have been in print for more than eight centuries. As they have unfolded, pope by pope, into the 20th and 21st centuries sceptics have had increasing difficulty in dismissing them. At the very least, Malachy, lying in a trance-dream in the old Rome of 1139 AD, seems to have glimpsed vast landscapes of future time, in a manner which defies explanation.

  The Film that Foresaw 9/11

  In 1984 -17 years before suicide bombers flew hijacked jets into New York’s Twin Towers - journalist Bob (Watergate) Woodward completed a screen-play, Under Siege.

  His 240-minute television movie, starring Peter Strauss and Hal Holbrook, was screened by the NBC network in February 1986.

  Following the dark date of 11 September 2001, DVD and tape sales of the film spiked sharply. Journalists, and the public, realised that the movie had foretold, in multiple detail, many of the murderous events of 9/11.

  When the film was first screened in 1986, numerous critics and international friendship groups slammed it as being discriminatory. The plot, disparaged at the time as ‘unlikely’ and ‘far-fetched’, features an onslaught on ‘the heart of America’ by terrorists, thought by the FBI to be Arab fundamentalists. Fanatical suicide squads attack a mall and crowded restaurants. Using truckloads of explosives (as were later central to the World Trade Center bombing of 1993) they also destroy a Washington DC military base in scenes reminiscent of the 9/11 assault.

  Suicidal hijackers explode passenger jets in mid-air - and security analysts speak presciently of danger to the World Trade Center. Many Americans call for an immediate war on Iran, believed to be the culprit behind the holocaust. In a pre-echo of the controversy surrounding the invasion of Iraq, moderates call for Iran’s guilt to be proved first.

  Under Siege was not the only teleplay to pre-mirror the terror assault on America. The first episode of a series, The Lone Gunman, was televised on 4 March 2001, only six months
before the 9/11 massacre. The hero, created by writers Chris Carter and Vince Gilligan, is tipped off about an impending terrorist action: the bombing of a domestic airliner. He and colleagues board the plane expecting to find a bomb - only to learn that the plane IS the bomb. The hijackers take him prisoner - and as he listens to their sneering hints, he realises what they are planning to do: ‘…World Trade Center. They’re going to crash it into the World Trade Center.’

  A Presidential Premonition?

  J.W. Dunne, author of An Experiment with Time, postulated that world-shaking events can sometimes resonate ‘backward from the future’ into our dreams. Perhaps he should have added: ‘and drawings’.

  In 2006 Basic Books USA released a volume Presidential Doodles: a collection of random squigglings perpetrated by presidents from Abraham Lincoln onward. The section devoted to John F. Kennedy (assassinated 1963) contains a curious entry. In a circle JFK writes the numbers 9/11. Beneath, underlined, he scrawls Conspiracy.

  Strange Case of the Psychic

  Stock-tipper

  In August 2001 - one month before the Twin Towers tragedy - Arch Crawford, a successful Wall Street stock adviser - delivered a strange recommendation to his popular newsletter’s subscribers. He advised them to go 100 per cent short - and sell every share they owned, along with just as many they didn’t, with the intention of buying them back later at drastically lower prices.