"Paranormal Planet"

     If you keep your eyes and mind open, you will find that the paranormal, the miraculous, the simply inexplicable not only happen, but are not even uncommon. If you haven't had an experience which defies the paradigm of modern science, which appears to violate the laws of nature that we know, then you know somebody who has. Four years ago I published a book entitled, Apparitions: tulpas, ghosts, fairies, and even stranger things, which goes further than simple ghost stories, but explores a parallel world of non-material beings which is only occasionally perceptible to us. Now I have produced a companion volume entitled simply, Paranormal Planet in which I seek to document and explore more than a dozen aspects of the paranormal which do not involve apparitions

Why You Should Follow Your Dream

       I'm getting addicted to the game show, Deal or No Deal (Australia) on Channel 10, and have only just watched Episode 34, which aired on Wednesday 13 March 2024. For those unfamiliar with the game, there are 22 boxes, each of which denotes a prize ranging from 50c to $100,000. First of all, you will be asked to pick a box, which you hope will denote the $100,000. It remains unopened until the end of the show. If you make no deals, you get the prize. You then get to pick one box after another, and you see various prizes disappear from the screen. At intervals, the banker will offer you a "deal" ie an amount of money less than the maximum. Most people eventually accept a deal, because the choice is between money in the hand, and the possibility of winning a lot or winning very little. For example, last week there were only two boxes left on the screen. One denoted 50c and the other $100,000. The contestant accepted a deal of $50,001. He would have been a fool not to.

        Well, on Episode 34 a woman called Kim Boucher picked box 17, because she said she had dreamed about that number. Eventually, when there were still four boxes in play, she accepted a deal of $11,890. Guess what! No 17 denoted $100,000. She should have followed her dream.

        Update 9 April 2024. It happened again. The contestant chose box 14 because his adult daughter had dreamed of it, although she could not remember how the dream ended. Remember, people put their names down as contestants, and it is only on the night that one of them is chosen. She must have dreamed of the game when her father told her he had entered the draw. Anyhow, on the night it came down to the wire, with only two prizes left in play: $75 and $100,000. He accepted the deal of $47,277 as a compromise; he would have been a fool not to. Just the same, it turned out box 14 denoted $100,000. His daughter's dream was correct.

        Update 5 July 2024. It happened yet again. The contestant also chose box 17, this time because her husband had dreamed it. And although she accepted a deal for $33,333, it turned out box 17 really did denote $100,000.

         Update 16 September 2024. This time the contestant's mother announced that she had had a premonition that the contest would come down to a final choice between $50 and $100,000 and that is exactly how it turned out. This show is becoming a real time natural experiment in clairvoyance.

The Dream That Led to Murder

      There are so many anecdotes of accurate premonitions of danger, either waking or dreaming, that we must accept this form of ESP as one of our evolved survival strategies. A strong premonition of this sort commonly induces the percipient to alter his behaviour in order to avoid the danger. But what if there are serious consequences of such an action? What if cancelling your plane flight at the last moment means losing both the fare and the cost of your holiday? What if your boss insists you make the journey? Worse still, how do you know that attempting to avoid the danger won't make it come true?

"Don't Go to Jersey!"

       On Maundy Thursday, 1899, the ferry, S.S. Stella departed Southampton with 190 passengers and crew, bound for the Channel Islands. They never arrived. Just after 4 p.m., in a heavy fog, it hit the Casquets Rocks. Within ten minutes, it went down, taking at least 77 persons with it. But one man was not present, for he had been forewarned by The Voice in the night.

Another Voice in the Dark

     A woman told how, just as she was about to cross the street, she got a strong premonition, a "bad feeling", and turned away - just before an out-of-control vehicle careered past. If she had attempted to cross, she would have been killed. This is an example of the most common ESP anecdote: a psychic warning of danger out of the blue. But is it possible for the premonition to be externalised as a voice? In my post of July 2014 I recounted the experience of a 19-year-old boy who was saved by a voice in the dark. He eventually went on to become a clergyman. Well, I have now been reminded of a similar experience by a man a few years older, and he, interestingly enough, also went on to become a clergyman.

Diagnosis by ESP?

     "Fawlty Towers in Tibet" could have been the alternative name for Alec Le Sueur's 1998 book, Running a Hotel on the Roof of the World. For five years commencing 1988, he had been the sales manager of the Holiday Inn in Lhasa where, to the backwardness of one of the remotest areas of the world was added the incompetence of Communism, and that made a formidable combination. They even used Fawlty Towers videos for training purposes. Even without the author's dry sense of humour, the inevitable clash of cultures would tickle your funny bone. You will discover how the sheets were washed in the river by hand and dried on the grass, while the most advanced laundry unit in western China lay idle because no-one knew how to use it. Thirty vacuum cleaners imported from Hong Kong had their motors burnt out within a month because the maids never emptied the bags, having assumed that the dirt magically disappeared up the electric power cord. Printing was done on an "only slightly more modern version of the Caxton printing press" (but missing the letter "s") because no-one knew how to use the super-duper press provided as a gift from the Australian Government. The hotel typewriter lacked an "a", while their brand new offset printer had never been used because the special oil could be obtained only from an unknown supplier in Hong Kong.
     I could go on and on with such craziness, but this blog was not established as a rival to Good Reads. Its aim is to rescue items of anomalies in danger of being overlooked and lost. Therefore, I shall cut to the chase, and talk about Dr Ga Ma.

The Psychics of Ape Canyon

     Every good bigfooter knows the story of Ape Canyon, close to Mount St Helens, Washington: how it acquired its name in 1924 when a group of prospectors were harassed in their cabin by a party of giant apes. Well, in 1967 ie 43 years after the event, one of the prospectors, Fred Beck decided to set the record straight, and his story was written down by his son, Ronald A. Beck. I don't know where it was originally published, but you can read it all on the excellent Bigfoot Encounters website.

    Parts 1 and 2 deal with the events themselves, and you should read them. It is Part 3 that is of interest here. Although, in my opinion, he does not establish his case that bigfoot is not a flesh and blood animal, he does recount in detail his own psychical experiences in the Canyon. He then branches off into speculations about the nature of reality which need not concern us.

     Normally, I would be reluctant to copy large sections of another's website, but I fear that, in this case, the remarkable story will be lost in the voluminous amount of information present on the Bigfoot Encounters site. (I really would suggest you read it, if you are interested in the subject.) Also, fair's fair. I haven't complained that the site includes a copy of a paper of mine from 1989, even though it represents an opinion I know longer hold. With this in mind, let us see what Mr Beck had to say.

A Voice Out of Nowhere

     If the 1894 survey of hallucinations is anything to go on, one in ten of you has encountered by sight, sound, touch, or smell something which, on reflection, you realised was not physically present. In other words, a ghost. Since life is not yet over, no doubt even more will have the experience before they expire. In most cases, it will be something they saw. But how many of you have heard a voice from out of nowhere? And if you did, how did you react? I have heard more than one such incident. Here is a good example.

Telepathy, Anyone?

     What's the difference between mind reading and thought transference? Essentially, the same as between listening and speaking. Mind reading means eavesdropping on somebody else's thoughts: the power all police detectives and suspicious spouses wish they had, while thought transference is the deliberative sending of a message by means of thought. Where the analogy breaks down, of course, is that listening and speaking use two separate organs, whereas mind reading and thought transference both use the brain, so it is possible that the two are connected.
     That's assuming, of course, that they actually exist. Proving their existence in the laboratory would be, to say the least, rather difficult. In the film, What Women Want Mel Gibson convinced his female doctor that he could read women's minds by asking her to think of a number, and then telling her what it was. However, while that experiment might have convinced her, there was no objective evidence which a third party could grasp. After all, we can't read her mind to determine whether he was correct. With this in mind, what I am about to tell you are anecdotes, rather than scientific experiments. But I think they are good anecdotes.

The Psychics and the Saucers

     One of the benefits of preparing last month's post was that it forced me to reread Jim Schnabel's excellent book on the U.S. psychic spies, or remote viewers. Schnabel is an excellent investigative reporter in the field of science, and he detailed his sources of information page by page, so I don't think we need doubt the broad details of his story. This is important, because one of the things the remote viewers discovered was that there was Somebody Else interested in the same things as them.

Why Psychics Don't Win Lotteries

     Readers of this blog will be aware that I consider there to be adequate evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP), or clairvoyance. So this raises the question - the $64,000 question - which skeptics always introduce: how come these "psychics" never seem to win the lottery? Is there some special dispensation to the rest of us that they are unable to use it for their own advantage? Well, apart from the possibility that some of them might just be doing so, the short answer is: the skeptics are mostly right. 90% - perhaps 99% - of professional psychics are either outright charlatans or self-deluded. But what about the small residue of genuine cases? To answer that, just look at the claims. The most plausible psychic anecdotes - the ones most likely to be true - fall into two categories. The first involves sudden flashes of insight, usually involving danger or disaster. The second involves vague impressions induced by the presence of a person or an object - sufficient to predict being decorated by the King some time in the indefinite future, but not good enough to determine whether you will gain the latest promotion, let alone next week's winning lottery numbers. To put it bluntly, nobody's psychic powers are that strong. If you don't believe me, just ask the U.S. intelligence services

They Saw It Coming

     I've boarded more long distance flights, both international and domestic, than I can count, and suffered nothing worse than a missed connection. I never worry about them. I never have premonitions - about aircraft, or anything else. That is why I occasionally ponder this proposition: suppose the night before a fully prepaid flight, with a fully prepaid package holiday waiting at the other end, I had a vivid dream of a crash, what would I do?
     I happen to know that premonitions of disaster are one of the most commonly reported psychic phenomena. And I have already explained why the glib explanations of coincidence or the manifestation of prior anxiety fail to hold water. It is probably part of our in-built survival mechanism.

She Saw Dead People

     So called "sensitives", who can detect ghosts, are not much use in psychical research. The reason is not that it is unlikely (if you are prepared to believe in ghosts), but simply that it is normally impossible to confirm their evidence. After all, if everybody in the room sees a particular apparition, there is a rebuttable assumption that it has an objective existence. However, if only one person claims to have seen it, it may indicate that he is "psychic", but it may also mean that he is (a) lying, (b) self-deluded, or (c) crazy. The situation becomes even more nebulous when it concerns, not seeing the ghost, but merely "sensing" it.
     Just the same, there do appear to have been good cases where an apparition was seen by one person, but not another. (Here, for example.) I have recorded a couple in my posts of May 2012 and February 2012. In the latter case, you may recall, a visitor saw the apparition while the owner saw nothing, but the alleged psychics were more or less ineffective. If ghosts are psychic manifestations, then it may well be that one person, because of his or her frame of mind at the time, may be more attuned to it than others (particularly when they are children), and perhaps some people are permanently in that condition.

Sometimes You Need a Good Witchdoctor

     Readers of my vintage might remember a program called On Safari, by a husband-and-wife film team, Armand and Michaela Denis. In the mid-1950s they decided to settle in Kenya, residing in a Nairobi hotel while their house was being built at Langata, 11 miles out of town. That was how the trouble started. Michaela had been so engrossed in watching the Sikh carpenters and Kikuyu workmen, that she casually left a certain heavy biscuit tin in the dressing room. Only when they had returned to the hotel did she realise she had forgotten it. Feebly, she agreed to her husband's suggestion to wait until the morning to go back.
     Their friend, Tom Stobart in fact returned by half past nine the next day, and phoned to announce that the box had gone. "What was in it?" he asked.
     "Thousands of pounds worth of jewellery, that's all," she replied. She always carried it around with her.

When the Devil Talks in Tongues

I will answer for myself, and say at once that in 28 years as a minister, I have performed one Major Exorcism of a person and three of places, although I have been asked time beyond count to "do an exorcism" as though it were a matter of conjuring or catching mice.

     That was a statement by a British exorcist whom the ex-scientist, Terry White refers to only as the Reverend Mr A., and he probably speaks for most clergy in the mainstream churches who are involved in exorcism. However, he did admit that, in the first year of his ministry, he had an experience which shattered his cynicism about the supernatural, and something he probably would not have believed had it been reported by somebody else.

The Ghost and Betty Hill

    The late Betty Hill will always be remembered for her part, along with her husband, Barney, in the first publicised alien abduction case in 1961. It has overshadowed her lifetime of social work, but without it, no-one would have recorded her other unusual experiences, which really deserve to be remembered.

Two Unusual Fortune Tellers

     As a lark, my brother, then in his late teens, visited a fortune teller. After hearing the usual run-of-the-mill predictions such an exercise entails, he asked how he was going to die. The fortune teller replied that she would prefer not to deal with such a subject, but Warren insisted. So she told him he would die at the age of 25 (or 22, I forget which) in the armed forces of a foreign country, and would leave behind a widow and two children. Warren laughed as he told that story, but what happened? He lived to be 52 years old, he had only one child, and he never got near any armed forces. So much for the lousy prediction!
    Seriously, you would have to be pretty stupid to listen to a fortune teller. Even if you accept the possibility of clairvoyance, the question still remains: how do you know this fortune teller is any good? Does she (it is most often a she) have a certificate from the Psychics Academy, guaranteeing that she had an 80% success rate for periods up to twelve months, when face to face with the subject, or handling one of his possessions? The field is wide open; anybody can call herself or himself a psychic. The best that can be said of most of them is that they are adept at cold reading, and when the client wants to believe, their performance can be impressive.
    Just the same, one occasionally comes across something unusual.

Premonitions or Coincidence?

     Premonitions are another one of those phenomena which are very common, but which official science declares cannot exist, and therefore do not exist. A couple of years ago some folk related their premonitions on a brief TV documentary. For the sake of fairness, they also interviewed a sceptic, who explained them by a combination of chance and selective memory. To put it simply, our brains are wired to notice the exceptional events. We remember an unusual coincidence, and forget all the times our hunches or premonitions turned out false.
    On the face of it, this is all very reasonable. A soldier, a bundle of nerves before a battle, declares: "I've got a bad feeling. I don't think I'm going to make it through the day." If he is killed, all his comrades remember it. If he survives, it's forgotten. In the more mundane world, you take out an umbrella when you suspect it is going to rain, but you remember particularly the time you lugged the useless thing around when the sky cleared, and you joke about how an umbrella scares the rain away. Also, since the number of random events is virtually infinite, we are all, at some stage or another, going to be presented with what looks like a remarkable coincidence.
    However, on closer examination, the theory doesn't always hold.