Michael Prescott's Blog

Zulu time

Vitor, in comments, asked me to transcribe Lyall Watson's account of a Philippine case that Watson personally witnessed.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

The case is presented on pages 152 -160 of Watson's 1987 book Beyond Supernature, under the heading of "Possession." Here it is:

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Long before either Spanish or American colonisation, the islands of the [Philippine] archipelago were a patchwork of well over a hundred distinct linguistic, cultural and racial groups -- many of which still survive.

Cagayan Valley in north-eastern Luzon is home to one such community -- an Igorot or mountain people who are marked by Christianity and post-war developments, but nevertheless leave all the most important decisions of their lives to solemn rituals that involve animal sacrifice and lead to consultation with the spirits. Communion is accomplished by aniteras or female shamans who are now rare, but carry on like gently beating hearts in dying tribal life. It was to meet one such woman that I made the long journey from Bayombong up into the forests of the Cordillera. I spent several bewitching weeks living in the old lady's compound, watching the daily work of weaving and basket making, taking part in the evening rituals of healing and spirit worship. It was an altogether magical time, but one I remember best for my involvement in what I can only think of as a kind of exorcism.

A child was brought to the aniteras suffering from a complaint like none I have ever seen. He was said to be ten years old, and from the right side he looked about that age; but from the left, he had the appearance of an aged and diseased dwarf. From the front, you could see a line running down the centre of his body ...

[T]he effect was truly horrible. The hair on the right side of his head was dark and glossy, while that on the left was dank and lifeless. One eye was clear and bright, the other squint and rheumy. Half his teeth were widely spaced and drawn out into fangs by the retreat of bloody gums, and the skin on that side of his face and down his left arm was covered in running sores. He walked slowly and with obvious pain, hunched with every other step over a left leg shortened several inches by a clawed foot. And when he spoke, which he did rarely, it was out of the twisted left side of his mouth in a snarl and in a language which nobody there understood. Nobody except me. I was astounded to hear, in amongst the deep-throated growl, a few phrases in clear and ringing Zulu -- the one African language that I was able to speak when I was his age. The words were odd ones and inappropriate to that situation, but they left me feeling very vulnerable, as though I had just had my pocket picked.

The aniteras decided that the child was possessed by busao, an evil spirit -- which, in the circumstances, seemed like the only reasonable diagnosis. And for three days she worked her wiles on the child, plying him with herbal potions, saturating him with ceremony and invocation. All to no avail. On the fourth night, however, she was otherwise occupied and the boy/dwarf was sitting on the ground next to a fire encircled by a group of elders, frightening me from time to time with occasional obscene twitches. The people and I were talking in reluctant Tagalog, which is no more their language than it is mine, just passing the time. Nobody was concentrating on the figure at the fire, he was not subject of conversation and he was looking away from me into the flames. Then slowly, one by one, our cases focused on him, the talk stopped, the air became almost heavy with condensed attention; and suddenly, as if by prearrangement, the old lady was there with us, standing tall on the edge of the circle. She hurled something into the fire, which flared up in a green blaze and she shouted very loud, very angry, a long quick string of words hurled directly at the afflicted boy.

There was a moment of silence, complete silence, then a terrible scream as the child threw himself down on the ground and began to thrash around violently. Again she shouted, and once more he screamed -- a searing combination of pain and anger. It was a duel in sound, a pitched battle that raged and grew into a frenzy, and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun as the child hurled himself face down to the earth and lay still with one arm and shoulder in the glowing coals. For a long, awful moment nobody moved, and then the old woman stepped forward, gently lifted the body up and carried it away to her hut. And it was as though she took with it a great weight from our shoulders -- a burden that we were not conscious of carrying, but that had been with us ever since the weird child had arrived.

The next morning, the boy was up early with the rest of the women, helping carry water. He looked straight at me for the first time and his eyes, both eyes, were clear. By that evening he was talking normally, in his own tongue, and walking with only the suggestion of a limp. And by the end of the week, his skin and teeth and hair, his whole appearance, were those of any other healthy, unmarked, active and attractive Filipino child.

I make no apologies for telling this story in such detail and without corroboration. I am not offering it in evidence, but as a starting point for a line of argument. Three things about it are of interest to me. The first is the laterality of the affliction -- which, however it was caused, suggests at least a biological vector, involving just half of the brain. The second is the nature of the cure -- which was both rapid and dramatic, suggesting the sort of catharsis that has mental rather than physical origins. And the third is the use of an unfamiliar language -- in the presence of perhaps the only person out of fifty million in the Philippines who could have understood.

I am not claiming that the child was possessed. I discovered later that his problems had begun three years before when his mother was run over by a truck -- killed and hideously disfigured as he was walking down the road with her -- holding her right hand. There are, however, strong resemblances between this incident and several other accounts in the literature of what has been identified as demonic possession -- most notably the case of fourteen-year-old Karen Kingston, who was cured of a similar affliction in North Carolina in 1974 by a group including three clergymen, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a general practitioner.

[He cites the 1977 book The Devil and Karen Kingston, by Robert Pelton, and describes the exorcism, which cured the girl of major psychiatric problems. Then he continues:]

But to me the crucial aspect of both cases, is that events were clearly culturally determined. They followed the scenario appropriate to the circumstances, drawing on beliefs and expectations relevant to those involved. The cures remain mysterious, amenable one day perhaps to the liberal tenets of the fledgling science of psychosomatic medicine, but the process was essentially traditional and social. Which is why I believe it succeeded. I suggest that the clergyman who acted as Karen's exorcist, also played the devil's role -- just as I somehow contributed a few words of Zulu to the Philippine performance. Neither of us was conscious of doing so, but I am convinced that at some saman level [sama is Watson's term for the interconnectedness of minds] we were involved. We added social weight to an individual dilemma and helped move it to communal resolution....

Let me return, however, for the next step in the argument, to those Zulu phrases. Parapsychology has a name for the ability to use a language of which a person has no ordinary knowledge. It is called xenoglossy or "foreign tongue" and comes in two forms. "Recitative" xenoglossy is the utterance of fragments of a strange language, as one might parrot Latin phrases without having any idea of their syntax for actual meaning. And [there is] "responsive" xenoglossy, which is something far more intelligent, involving an ability to converse in the unknown language....

The Filipino child was not speaking Zulu, he was practicing recitative xenoglossy. There are many similar examples in the literature on spiritism -- of mediums reciting the Lord's prayer in Greek or throwing in the odd word that turns out on later analysis to be Egyptian or even Hawaiian. Some of these borrowings can be traced to a phenomenon known as cryptomnesia or "hidden memory", in which we dredge up information from unconscious areas without being aware of doing so...

[But] I cannot imagine any set of circumstances which could have brought a ten-year-old boy in the Cagayan Valley into contact with Zulu at any stage of his life. Nor am I disposed to assume that he was possessed by the discarnate spirit of a Zulu witch doctor. It seems altogether more reasonable to assume that somehow, the mechanism is still far from clear, he was able to recite phrases that were familiar to me, borrowing them from my mind...

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Watson goes on to give examples of "the sudden acquisition of linguistic, musical and artistic skills" by apparently paranormal means, such as the well-known case of Sharada, reported by Ian Stevenson (and described here by Scott Rogo), and the case of Rosemary Brown, who wrote classical music compositions by apparently channeling deceased composers. His overall point is that "the actual limits of the senses... can be surprisingly elastic."

Personally, I have no particular problem with the idea that the Igorot boy (and probably Karen Kingston, too) was actually possessed -- not necessarily by a "demon," but perhaps by a low-level, earthbound spirit. Indeed, the possessing entity in the Kingston case reportedly gave its name as "Williams," which sounds decidedly human. I also find it likely that a possessing entity could possess the kind of freewheeling ESP that could indeed grab random thoughts from the minds of bystanders, including snatches of Zulu.

In any event, the Philippine case is not particularly strong as a case of xenoglossy, since only a few random words were spoken, and it is possible that Watson simply misheard some scattered gibberish. What is strong about the Philippine case, if we are willing to take Watson's word for what happened, is the remarkable effectiveness of the shaman's cure, which healed the boy both mentally and physically almost overnight.

As Watson himself notes, there is no corroboration of his story and therefore, strictly speaking, it cannot be counted as evidence. But I find him to be an intelligent, sensitive, and honest observer, so I'm prepared to take him at his word.

Nature and supernature

A while ago I picked up a copy of Lyall Watson's 1987 book Beyond Supernature: A New Natural History of the Supernatural. It sat on my shelf for a long time before I got around to it. Now I'm finding it fascinating.

Watson, who died in 2008, has been described as  "a South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and author." He combined his interest in exotic cultures and native traditions with an open-minded, hands-on approach to investigating the paranormal. His book is a serious overview of parapsychology, enlivened by accounts of his personal encounters with anomalous events, including a destructive poltergeist in Indonesia.

He took the view that while laboratory research is all well and good, it may be too sterile to capture the more exciting incidences of psi that occur spontaneously in everyday life. Card-guessing games and their equivalents generate little emotional response, yet intense emotions often go hand in hand with the most dramatic psi manifestations (crisis apparitions, for instance). Indeed, many indigenous cultures practice frenetic rituals precisely to bring about a state of emotional excitement more conducive to psi. Meanwhile, Westerners who study the subject in the anodyne, antiseptic confines of a laboratory wonder why their results are not more "robust."

Though unconvinced of life after death (he attributed poltergeist activity to unconscious psychokinesis), Watson was personally persuaded of the reality of many psi phenomena, having witnessed a large number of them.

In the concluding chapter he sums up his point of view with the casual eloquence that made his earlier book Supernature a major bestseller:

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Something strange is going on.

We live in a world whose realities are defined by science, which tells us how things work. And yet there are some things which don't seem to work that way at all. Our science tells us that these things are impossible and don't exist, yet they stubbornly refuse to go away. There are relatively few of them and they are often elusive and hard to control, but they are there for anyone to see. They exist. And by their very existence, no matter how tenuous this might be, they present a problem.

Some students of the unusual feel that the fact of this existence turns science on its head. Some scientists seem to agree. They find the whole possibility so alarming that, rather than have science submit to such indignity, they choose to turn themselves upside down instead. The gesture is heroic, but the posture is ridiculous.

Consider just one example. A dowser, who claims to be able to find underground water and buried minerals with the aid of a pendulum, is tested in Wales. He walks across a valley floor and hammers in a line of stakes to show where he believes a stream to be, giving an estimate of its depth and flow. He is being filmed by a television team for a programme on the paranormal. The interviewer objects that such claims are hard to check and asks for a diagnosis that can be verified. The dowser holds his pendulum over the man to assess his state of health and makes the surprising claim that the interviewer seems to be healthy enough, except for a piece of metal in his thigh. Everyone is very impressed. The diagnosis is unusual, but it just happens to be true. The interviewer once had an operation that required the reinforcement of his femur with a metal brace. It's not something that he talks about, and the scientist assessing this demonstration concedes that it would have been difficult for the dowser to have discovered the fact about the embedded metal beforehand, without having a very efficient spy network. He notes that there was no defect in the interviewer's limb movement caused by the metal insertion.

So what happens? Is there a serious discussion about the possibility of dowsing having any scientific validity? Does he begin to wonder about organic metal-detection? No. Faced with the paradox, this distinguished physicist stands on his head. "I regard this," he says, "as a coincidence." And closes the subject.

It is, of course, a scientist's duty to consider all the angles. Given the extraordinary nature of the dowser's claim, he has every right -- as long as all other things are equal -- to favour explanations consonant with the orthodox scientific view of how things work. All things, however, are not equal here. Coincidence remains one possible explanation of what happened, but its probability is very low. And there is a point where "normal" explanations become more implausible and more far-fetched than a frank acceptance of the facts.

The fact is that unusual things do sometimes happen. I have seen them happening often enough now to be certain of that. And, as a scientist myself, I admit that they present us with a problem. But it is not insoluble and it does not require any desperate mental gymnastics. I see it, in truth, as more of a paradox than a problem. An apparent contradiction produced by poor definition rather than faulty procedure.

Science decides what is possible by reference to its definition of reality. Anything which fits the definition is acceptable. Anything which doesn't fit is impossible and must be rejected. And the problem is that the facts of dowsing or poltergeist phenomena stand in direct contradiction to the current definition. So the issue is reduced to a choice between rival facts. The normal versus the paranormal. And, of course, the normal wins -- even if it does have to stand on its head to do so.

Such contortions ought to make us suspicious of the premises that made them necessary. There has to be a flaw somewhere in the argument. And there is. What is being ignored is the point that our definition of reality is a theory, not fact. We don't know exactly how things work. All we have is a reasonably good hypothesis. And it never was a matter of choosing between rival sets of facts. The debate concerns a set of discordant facts and their relationship to a theory of how things happen. All that is at stake is the validity of a working hypothesis. And all that is necessary to reconcile the new facts with the old theory, is an admission that the theory might be incomplete. There is no need for anyone to stand on their heads. There is no assault on the laws of nature or the principles of science, and no need for protectors of the faith or charges of heresy.

What we need is a slightly broader definition of reality. One which includes the possibility of certain things happening when humans are involved. A definition that is not so exclusive; one less inclined to dismiss certain things as impossible, and better able to deal with what actually happens in terms of probability rather than outright and unreasonable denial.

I don't have such a definition to offer. I think it is probably still too soon to frame one that will work. What we need are more facts on which to base our discussion. And that is what I have been trying to provide. [Beyond Supernature, pp. 264-266]

Seeing the past

More than three years ago, after blogging about Stephan A. Schwartz's book The Secret Vaults of Time, I bought his follow-up work The Alexandria Project, which deals with the use of psychics to guide archaeological digs in Alexandria. Reading the book should have come easily to me, since I am interested not only in psychic phenomena but also in ancient Alexandria -- in some ways the most intellectually exciting city of the ancient world. Yet for some reason I did not get to the book until recently. It was worth the wait.

Originally published in 1983 and reissued in 2001, The Alexandria Project recounts two archaeological expeditions in 1979 that made use of information supplied by various psychics, including two psychics -- Hella Hammid and George McMullen -- who accompanied the author on his first trip. The author's intention was to show that psychic talents can supplement information provided by more conventional by more conventional sources, making archeology more efficient. Both before and after 1979, Schwartz conducted other such experiments, often with notable success.

The most dramatic part of the book recounts marine archaeological probes conducted in Alexandria's harbor, in which divers -- following instructions from the psychics -- found many sunken ruins, including what were evidently the Timonium (a building erected by Mark Antony) and the palace of Cleopatra. An ancient seawall and what may be the ruins of the legendary lighthouse of Pharos were also discovered.

Schwartz himself admits that the existence of ancient ruins on the harbor floor came as a surprise to nobody. It was well understood that Alexandria's shoreline had receded over the centuries, and that structures which had stood along the coast in ancient times were now underwater, having collapsed on account of beach erosion and frequent earthquakes. His point, though, is that finding these structures in the large harbor would ordinarily require far more time and effort than his team expended. He writes:

There was no question that any group of divers, swimming careful search patterns, would have found what we found. The Eastern Harbor is unlike Marea [another Alexandrian site], in that there are general locations of certain ancient structures in [the works of the Roman writer] Strabo and other sources; and the water is shallow ... Here, the issue would not primarily focus on only the psychic -- unless a specific object predicted was found, and that would require another probe -- but rather, on the role psychic data could play in making archeology more efficient and less costly. Other diving teams could have found what we found, but not as quickly or as easily. It would have been extremely difficult to make several of these finds with just the sonar to guide us, and careful search patterns would have taken weeks. But with historical sources, and the psychics, we were able to make a reasonable first approximation of what could be seen on the harbor floor in just a few days. [pp. 231-232]

Unfortunately the poor visibility of the polluted harbor waters impeded the divers' work, and many interesting sites had to be left unexplored. Subsequent marine archaeological work carried out by a French-Egyptian team in the 1990s has, according to Schwartz, confirmed "both the generalities and specifics" of the psychics' predictions. Schwartz comments only briefly on these developments in an epilogue to the new edition, referring to reader to his Web site for details. Though the site contains much material of interest, I could not find a discussion of the more recent work in the harbor. At Jeff Rense's site, however, I found an article by Beverly C. Jaegers, which recounts Schwartz's work and then reports: 

Almost as an anticlimax, the Oceanex, bearing Franck Goddio, world-famed submarine explorer, his diving and filming teams along with a sophisticated array of nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometers and computers (along with a much improved sonar array) arrived in that same harbour in 1996, and began a thorough survey.

Apparently totally unaware of the earlier pinpointing of sites by remote views and divers, Goddio was nevertheless able to rediscover the Timonium ruins, the limestone-paved area, sphinxes, statues and sites they felt were the palaces and Isis temple. This confirmed the accuracy of the Mobius probe.

Some archaeological work was also undertaken by Schwartz's team on dry land, with generally positive results. In one case, an attempt was made to open the wall of a crypt, after both of the on-site psychics reported sensing a subterranean complex. Interestingly, both psychics advised against digging at the particular spot chosen (out of necessity) by Schwartz, saying that behind the wall the excavators would find not only an impenetrable mass of debris but also a second wall. A veteran Egyptian archaeologist scoffed at the idea of a second wall, but such a wall was in fact discovered. As predicted, the dig proved unfeasible, stopped by the debris, the second wall, and bureaucratic complications.

The two psychics also spent hours in the blistering triple-digit heat of the Egyptian desert, pinpointing a spot where digging would reveal an ancient structure. One psychic, George McMullen, embedded stakes in the ground that indicated the contours of the building's walls, which were, of course, underground and invisible to normal senses. Excavation did reveal a building at that spot, with walls that matched McMullen's layout. Moreover, prior to excavation, Hella Hammid visualized a short, broken column in the center of the building, an unusual and unexpected feature. The column turned out to be there. McMullen sensed that the column had been used in conjunction with a "fire pit" -- a claim that seemed inexplicable until a local Bedouin explained that such columns were indeed used as primitive "hot plates" for cooking.

One evening McMullen participated in an informal experiment in which he was given six potsherds and asked to arrange them in chronological order. This he did. The Polish archaeologist supervising the test said that it had taken a team of experts several years to properly arrange the shards along a timeline. McMullen accomplished it in a matter of minutes. (Of course it could be argued that the Polish architect, who knew the correct sequence, unconsciously signaled McMullen during the test. But this kind of explanation would not cover McMullen's many successes when working in the field.)

The psychics' work included notable "hits," some "misses," and a great many predictions that could be neither substantiated nor disproved. An example of the latter is George McMullen's explanation of why Alexander the Great continued fighting long after his principal enemy, the Persians, had been defeated.

I'll tell you one reason why Alexander was out all the time fighting in other countries. It was like today's sports. As long as you keep the people's interest up, they are going to come and pay the freight. But in this case it wasn't a team or a sport, but an army and -- it was fighting. So who's going to pay for this? And the soldiers have to keep winning once they get started. He wasn't really out to conquer the world. It got so that one thing led to another. When he started his campaign he wanted to do what he knew how to best, and that was to fight.

This sounds plausible to me -- more plausible than the romanticized view of Alexander as a visionary -- but of course there is no way to know if it's true, as Schwartz himself points out.

Schwartz's book is written in a straightforward style and a sensible tone; he does not come across as a credulous "believer," but instead as a serious researcher interested in testable predictions and concrete results. He strikes me as honest and reliable, though I wish he had spent less time detailing his endless run-ins with the Egyptian bureaucracy; a little of this material goes a long way.

In his epilogue to the new addition he laments the knee-jerk, know-nothing skepticism that greeted the announcement of his team's results. One archaeologist, who had never worked in Egypt, publicly dismissed the whole project as "phony visions cribbed ... from a tourist guide." But no tourist guide could have specified the alignment of an ancient building's walls under the Egyptian desert, or the locations of the underwater ruins in the harbor. Indeed, Mieczyslaw Rodziewicz, the Polish archaeologist who assisted Schwartz, and who was considered the world's foremost authority on Alexandrian archeology, said that "the discoveries [in the harbor] are of the highest importance, because they extend our plan of the ancient city." The seawall and other underwater ruins found by Schwartz's team lie considerably farther from shore than the experts had expected.

In the last chapter of the original edition, Schwartz speculates on what it all means:

I know there may be critics who will attack this work and, in some details, they will be right. We could have done it better. In later experiments we have already done so. But all science could be better, and hopefully each experiment is more sophisticated than the one that preceded it. The character innuendo, which is the most prevalent form of criticism, is really no criticism at all. And the statements that the psychic basically cannot exist, based on what we understand of the universe, and that therefore there must be some other explanation, really have reached the point where they say more about the critics than the research they are criticizing.

Criticism should always play an important role in parapsychology, as it does in the rest of science, but it is time to go beyond the dispute over whether or not the psychic exists. Those who wish to argue this are welcome to do so; but we also need to start asking new questions.

Suppose we entertain a new perspective, one which does not tie consciousness to the parameters of time and space. Suppose consciousness, of which what we call the psychic is a part, exists independent of the brain. Is this nonsense? There is, as yet, no absolute answer to the question. But there is mounting evidence in disciplines as widely separated as quantum physics and neurophysiology that suggest consciousness is not only more than the brain, it is perhaps the core around which the universe has grown....

I find myself most in agreement with the late Dr. Wilder Penfield, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, and one of the leading neurophysiologists of this century. As the father of brain-mapping -- a technique in which portions of the brain receive direct electrical stimulation to determine their function -- he looked back on a career of mapping thousands of living brains and concluded -- albeit with reluctance -- that "it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain...."

Penfield saw the brain as a computer and felt that if the brain was harmed, the body or reasoning abilities of a person would be impaired. He stressed that hurting the brain does not necessarily mean hurting the mind. The mind-self might not be able to communicate or control its vehicle -- the body -- but that was not evidence that it had been injured. When one consider[s] that numerous cases have been reported of people with little or no brain tissue, who are nonetheless functional and successful -- or individuals in other cases who have died and been resuscitated, bringing back accurate observations about places and events distant from their temporary corpse -- the question of the mind/body relationship is even less clear.

Regardless of this confusion and the lack of a universally accepted theoretical model, applied research should be pursued, and it may help in the development of the needed theories. And new theories about these anomalous phenomena will lead to new instruments with which to test the theories. No one can say yet exactly what shape either instrument or theory will alternately take, but there are suggestions -- and we should be prepared to accept matter, energy, and life itself as different points on the same spectrum. This will alter science as much as Einstein's equations, and life as much as the industrial revolution. When both sides of the mind -- the intuitive and the analytical -- finally function together in concert, we may find something behind both of them that we now only dimly perceive. [pp. 265-267]

Giving psychics the business

Here's a semi-interesting video report from ABC News about the increasing popularity of psychics in this time of economic turmoil. What interested me was not the stories of individuals who seek out psychics for advice, but rather the fact that some large corporations are apparently following suit. The remarks by "intuitive" Laura Day, who makes big money advising corporate types, struck me as cogent and intelligent.

Both the reporter and the show's host (Diane Sawyer) are pretty snarky and dismissive, but you've got to expect that. Besides, there are a lot of fake psychics out there, so a certain amount of snark is justified.

Someone to watch over me

An interesting new survey reports, among other things, that 55% of the American public believes in guardian angels.

Of course, guardian angels are entirely consistent with the spiritualist doctrines transmitted by mediums for well over a century. The only difference - which is mainly semantic - is that spiritualists usually think of their guardians as the spirits of departed loved ones rather than nonhuman entities.

Why is this belief so widespread? I suspect it's because of personal experience. After-death communications have convinced many people that someone is watching over them. They have felt an invisible presence, experienced a premonition or warning, or communed with a loved one in a dream. 

Meanwhile, the same survey shows that atheism remains the viewpoint of only 4% of Americans. Surprisingly, atheists are not much more prevalent in other Western countries. "Europe does have more atheists than the U.S., the survey said, but no country has more than 7 percent except France, which is at 14 percent of the populace."

The article notes:

The survey, which has a margin of error of four percentage points, also revealed that theological liberals are more apt to believe in the paranormal and the occult - haunted houses, UFOs, communicating with the dead and astrology - than do conservatives. Women (35 percent), blacks (41 percent), those younger than 30 (40 percent), Democrats (40 percent) and singles who are cohabitating (49 percent) were more likely to believe, the survey said.

Danger ahead?

A reader pointed me to a Web site that is collecting premonitions of disaster. As the site puts it:

[I]n the last two days I have received four independent, explicit indications from far removed friends suggesting that something very substantial and disruptive is going to happen to the U.S. within the next 60 days or so. If these warnings manifest themselves in an event of the significance of something like 9/11 then people all over the world should begin to experience dreams and other intuitions suggesting that something extraordinary is about to happen.

So I’m asking you to participate in an experiment with us. If you, or someone you know, experiences any kind of significant suggestion (dream, intuition, etc.) that something big and disruptive is about to happen in the coming weeks, send us a note and tell us about it. We’ll compile them all and see if we can find any patterns or pointers toward an actual future event.

At the link there is a form that can be used for filing a report.

Obviously, "something very substantial and disruptive" is very vague and covers a lot of ground; and there are always disasters of one type or another. Just within the last few weeks we've had two major hurricanes and a financial panic. But if a lot of specific predictions are compiled, and then proved true in the right time frame, it would be interesting, at the very least.

Of course, I'd prefer it if nothing calamitous happened at all.

Dream weaver

Going through some files, I came across a news clipping from the Tuesday, October 12, 2004 edition of USA Today (page 3A).  Here's the story in its entirety:

Teen found alive 8 days after wreck

Volunteer says dreams led her to scene of crash

The Associated Press

SEATTLE -- After eight days, Laura Hatch's family had almost given the 17-year-old up for dead, and sheriff's deputies had all but written her off as a runaway. Then she was found, badly hurt and severely dehydrated but alive and conscious, in the backseat of a crumpled car, 200 feet down a ravine.

A volunteer searcher who said she had had several vivid dreams of a wooded area found the wrecked car in the trees Sunday.

Hatch, who remained hospitalized Monday in serious condition, was last seen at a party on Oct. 2. When she did not show up by the next day, her family filed a missing-person report.

The initial search was slowed because there had been underage drinking at the party, and the young people who attended would not say where it had been held, sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart said.

On Oct. 6, detectives learned where the party had been held. They searched along Hatch's likely route home, Urquhart said.

But their hope dimmed as the days passed.

"We had already given her up and let her be dead in our hearts," her mother, Jean Hatch, told KOMO-TV.

Urquhart said an investigation into the accident was underway.

Hatch's parents organized a volunteer search on Saturday. That night, Sha Nohr, a church member and mother of a friend of Hatch's, said she had dreams of a wooded area and heard the message, "Keep going, keep going." On Sunday morning, Nohr and her daughter drove to the area where the crash occurred, praying along the way.

"I just thought, 'Let her speak out to us,'" Nohr told The Seattle Times.

Nohr said something drew her to stop and clamber over a concrete barrier and more than 100 feet down a steep, densely vegetated embankment where she barely managed to see the wrecked Toyota Camry in some trees. She call to her daughter, who flagged down a passing motorist.

"I told (Hatch) that people were looking for her and they loved her," Nohr recalled, "and she said, 'I think I might be late for curfew.'"

Hatch was being treated for dehydration, a blood clot on the brain and broken facial bones, a hospital spokeswoman said.

When I did a little online research, I found another report on the incident, this one on a religious Web site that stresses the power of pray. An excerpt:

Nohr said her teenage daughter, distraught over her missing friend, showed Nohr a photo of Hatch on Saturday and asked what they could do to find her. Nohr said she told her daughter all they could do was pray. That night, Nohr, who belongs to an online prayer group, said she had several vivid dreams of a wooded area. In the dreams, she said, she heard the message "Keep going. Keep going." Yesterday morning, Nohr said, she woke up and felt an urgency to look for Hatch. She asked her daughter to go along. They drove to the Union Hill area and pulled over. Nohr said she got out, but "it just didn't feel right." So the two drove farther and stopped again in about the 20200 block of Northeast Union Hill Road. All the while, Nohr said, she prayed. "I just thought, 'Let her speak out to us.' " At one spot, Nohr said she felt something draw her down a steep embankment. Her daughter waited up on the road while Nohr scrambled over a concrete barrier and inched her way more than 100 feet down through thick vegetation. At the bottom, Nohr said, she saw nothing at first. She was about to leave, thinking she was wrong, when through the trees, she said, she saw what looked like a car.It was Laura Hatch's, crumpled so badly that it looked like "modern art," said Randy Phillips, the family's pastor.

Other perspectives:

A skeptical forum dismisses the story as luck, coincidence, and randomness at work.

A PDF file on the aftermath of the story showcases Laura's remarkable recovery.

Incidentally, the hospital where Laura was treated, Harborview Medical Center, was the site of the famous "tennis shoe" NDE reported by Kimberly Sharp.

More about the fairies

After putting up my last post, on Arthur Conan Doyle's championship of the Cottingley fairies, I happened to come across a copy of Daniel Stashower's outstanding biography of Doyle, Teller of Tales, which I read a couple of years ago. Though plainly skeptical, Stashower does his best to present the Doyle's fascination with the paranormal in a sympathetic and positive light - but the Cottingley case proves too much for him.

The book as a whole is well worth reading, and Stashower's insights into the Cottingley episode provide a useful bookend to our earlier discussion. (All of the following quotes are from Chapter 25 of Teller of Tales, titled "Away with the Fairies.")

Stashower notes that a debate with a prominent skeptic in March of 1920 "had reinforced [Doyle's] reputation for plain speaking and common sense." But, he goes on, "[t]hat reputation evaporated in December, when the first of Conan Doyle's pronouncements on fairies appeared in The Strand [magazine]. Overnight, Conan Doyle became the spiritualist movement's greatest liability. 'Poor Sherlock Holmes,' ran one headline, 'Hopelessly Crazy?'"

Doyle, of course, was not crazy. He was however badly deluded, and Stashower presents several possible motives for his need to believe in the dubious photos. For one thing, Doyle

refused to entertain any possibility of deception on the part of the two young girls, as the very idea offended his notions of chivalry. This attitude was typical of him, as his son Adrian once learned to his sorrow. Asked by his brother Denis if he found a certain woman attractive, Adrian replied, "No, she's ugly." The statement drew a slap across the face from his father, who informed him that "no woman is ugly." One hesitates to offer criticism of such a gallant sentiment, but it could be argued, in the age of the suffragette movement, that Conan Doyle's views were naïve, if agreeably courtly. Where woman were concerned, he was blind to the possibility of deception, or indeed any base motive.

But, as Stashower notes, "Conan Doyle's actions in the Cottingley affair point to more than a gentleman's instincts.... There are two possible explanations. First, Conan Doyle had become deeply interested in the practice of spirit photography ..."

His commitment to photographs purporting to show deceased loved ones may have made him even more anxious to defend the Cottingley photos. Certainly he took the issue of spirit photography quite personally; he had quarreled vociferously with the psychic researcher Harry Price, after Price's investigation discredited spirit photographer William Hope.

"Price respected Conan Doyle's great integrity," Stashower observes,

but thought him something of a fool in psychic matters. "Setting aside for the moment his extraordinary and most lovable personal qualities," Price wrote, "the chief qualification that he possessed for the role of the investigator was his crusading zeal. Among all the notable persons attracted to spiritualism, he was perhaps the most uncritical. His extreme credulity, indeed, was the despair of his colleagues, all of whom, however, held him in the highest respect for his complete honesty. Poor, dear, lovable, credulous Doyle! He was a giant in stature with the heart of the child."

Stashower continues:

A second, far more personal motivation may also have guided Conan Doyle's actions. His own childhood had been especially rich in fairy lore. Conan Doyle's Celtic heritage was rife with tales of fairy midwives, leprechauns, brownies, and other sprites....

Conan Doyle's own family took a keen interest in fairies. His uncle Richard had been famous as an illustrator of children's books, many of which featured playful renderings of fairies. Conan Doyle's unhappy father [Charles Doyle] also drew fairies...

Charles Doyle's sketchbook offers additional evidence of his fascination with such creatures. Its pages are filled with fairies, goblins, and elves who crouch under toadstools, play upon pipes, and whisper into the ears of innocent children... On another page, Charles Doyle has scrawled: "I have known such a creature."

We are left to conclude that Charles Doyle, a man widely held to be insane, may well have believed in fairies. In some small measure, then, it is possible that his famous son regarded the Cottingley crusade as an act of redemption. If the existence of fairies could be proven, Charles Doyle could be seen as something of a visionary, rather than a broken-down drunkard.

The elder sister involved in the prank, Elsie, eventually admitted to the fraud -- but only when she was 81 years old. At that time she suggested yet another possible motive on Doyle's part.

According to Elsie, the two girls agreed to keep silent because they were "feeling sad" for Conan Doyle. "He had lost his son recently in the war," Elsie wrote..., "and I think the poor man was trying to comfort himself in these things, so I said to Frances, we are a lot younger than Conan Doyle and Mr. Gardner, so we will wait till they die of old age and then we will tell."

Edward Gardner [a Theosophist who first brought the fairies to Doyle's attention] lived to be one hundred years old, leaving the girls to maintain their silence well into their declining years.

Whatever unconscious motives may have driven him, Doyle paid a considerable price for his credulousness. Stashower reports that Doyle's book The Coming of the Fairies, first published in 1922 (and "surely one of the most remarkable volumes ever written," he notes dryly), received mostly negative reviews studded with terms like "easily duped" and "sad spectacle." But the ridicule extended far beyond the newspaper pages.

A popular wisecrack suggested that at the crisis of the play Peter Pan, when Peter exhorts the audience to revive the dying Tinkerbell, the loudest shouts of "I do believe in fairies!" would be Conan Doyle's.

All but a few of his spiritualist allies deserted him. Conan Doyle had hoped that the episode would invite belief in spiritualism. But if anything it seemed to have the opposite result....

In time, the flood of scorn would subside, but Conan Doyle never lost hope that his faith in the two girls would one day be borne out.... In an addendum to his autobiography, written shortly before his death, he expressed a hope that the incident would "be recognized some day as opening a new vista of knowledge for the human race."

Needless to say, that new vista has yet to open, and the fairy episode has done more than any other to annihilate whatever reputation Conan Doyle might have had as a sober-minded investigator into the unknown.

More than 80 years after the publication of The Coming of the Fairies, Doyle's self-inflicted damage to his reputation has yet to be repaired.

The conning of the fairies

Since I've written two recent posts on Arthur Conan Doyle, I thought I should take up the most notorious incident in his career as a paranormal investigator - the case of the Cottingley Fairies. The story is pretty well known and needs no retelling here; those who are interested can read the essentials in Doyle's own book on the subject, The Coming of the Fairies. The complete text is available online, along with all the photos that featured in the controversy. A much shorter version of the story, with some photos, is found at Wikipedia; unlike some Wiki articles on the paranormal, this one seems to be accurate, at least at the present time.

Probably the most famous criticism of the Cottingley case was presented by James Randi. In his well-known book Flim-Flam!, Randi devotes all of Chapter 2 to an in-depth analysis of the controversy, which includes original research making use of the then-new technique of computer scanning.

I must admit that when I read Doyle's book, I was hoping to find his presentation of the facts more convincing - and hence less damaging to his reputation - than I'd been led to expect. Not that I harbored any doubts about the photos; they are obvious fakes, and their artificiality is immediately apparent to any modern viewer, though people in Doyle's era were considerably less sophisticated in regard to trick photography. What strikes us as clear fakery apparently looked pretty convincing to some people - even presumed photographic "experts" - of that day.

So yes, the photos are undoubtedly fakes; nothing can alter that fact. But if Doyle had presented his case with appropriate qualifying remarks, he might have escaped much of the opprobrium he later suffered. Sadly, he did not. Though he sounds a few notes of caution, the overall attitude of his book is that of a true believer, doggedly certain that these five photos are the beginning of a new era for humanity, a time when the mystical creatures previously seen only by clairvoyants would become visible to us all. No wonder he described the Cottingley photos as "epoch-making."

In his book, elaborate and highly doubtful claims are made on behalf of the photos. It is claimed that the fairies are clearly in motion in the stills, when actually there is little if any blur on the figures - understandably, since they were cutouts. It is claimed that only a photographic genius with the full resources of a studio at his disposal could have attempted such fakes; in reality, the shots were easily done by placing the cutouts in front of a human subject. It is claimed that innocent little girls never lie; well, not all girls are so innocent. 

Though I'm not normally a fan of Randi, I must admit that in Flim-Flam! he makes mincemeat of the fairies - and, with his typically unsparing sarcasm, of Doyle as well. According to Randi, Doyle was "convinced of many irrationalities ... a man who needed such evidence desperately to bolster his own delusions... [and who] spent some L250,000 in pursuit of this nonsense [i.e., spiritualism]."

Doyle himself begins his book with the earnest hope that his arguments for the validity of the photos, even if rejected by the reader, will not prejudice anyone against the idea of life after death, which is to him a separate issue. In this he was surely naive. His exposure as disappointingly gullible in one area of paranormal investigation inevitably colored all subsequent perception of his efforts in other areas. If he could be taken in by two girls playing a childish prank, how can we trust his judgment regarding séances conducted by professional mediums?

Although the photos have been thoroughly debunked, interest in the fairies continues. This Web page, part of a site devoted to the Cottingley area, offers some useful information and links. The Museum of Hoaxes covers the topic and includes all five photos.  Joe Cooper, who wrote a book on the subject, presents the essentials of the case here. The Cottingley Network goes all-out with a multi-page presentation. An essay rather sympathetic to Doyle was put out by the Arthur Conan Doyle Society; it makes the point that the original prints were not as clear as the more modern ones (see the comparison at the very bottom of the page).

I have not found anyone who still believes the fairies were real.

Windbridge

Julie Beischel, who formerly worked with Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona, has opened a new research institute dedicated to exploring the survival of consciousness after death, alternative healing, intuition, and other subjects of interest to readers of this blog.

It's called the Windbridge Institute, and it boasts an impressive array of scientific advisors.

I certainly wish this new venture all the best. You can become a member here.