March 15, 2022
After the 1966 coal mine collapse in Aberfan, Wales, in which 144 people, 116 children among them, perished, English psychiatrist John Barker learned that several individuals had in some way predicted the tragedy--even some of the schoolchildren who would die in it. In these eerie foretellings, Barker, long interested in "the problem of precognition," found inspiration for the Premonitions Bureau, which, working with London's esteemed Evening Standard newspaper, solicited readers' future-predicting "visions" in order to log them, see if any came to pass, and perhaps prevent future tragedies. Beginning as a story in the New Yorker, where Knight is on staff, The Premonitions Bureau offers spine-tingling confluences and spooky occurrences in abundance. Barker grew to rely on two "percipients" in particular, even as they grew increasingly unsettled by his encouragement and the news coverage of their abilities, a music teacher and a postal worker, who envisioned transportation disasters, assassination, and danger to Barker himself. Deeply researched and rich with historical illustrations, Knight's inquiry into past visions of the future ultimately meditates on how we make sense of reality itself.
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April 4, 2022
A British psychiatrist’s inquiries into “the problem of precognition” are recounted in New Yorker contributor Knight’s mesmerizing debut. In October 1966, one week after the collapse of an enormous coal waste pile killed 116 schoolchildren in Aberfan, Wales, John Barker, a psychiatrist with “a keen interest in unusual mental conditions,” and Evening Standard science reporter Peter Fairley issued a call for people to report their premonitions of the disaster. The responses they received—including a letter from Kathleen Middleton, a London dance teacher who awoke the morning of the accident “choking and gasping and with the sense of the walls caving in”—led Barker to speculate that precognition “might be as common as left-handedness.” To test the theory, he and Fairley established a “premonitions bureau” to “log premonitions as they occurred and see how many were borne out in reality.” Within 15 months, they received more than 700 premonitions, 3% of which proved to be correct. One of the most accurate correspondents was Middleton, who also envisaged a train derailment, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, and Barker’s untimely death from a burst vessel in his brain. Amid the vivid profiles of Barker, Middleton, and others, Knight interweaves intriguing episodes of precognition from history and literature. The result is a captivating study of the uncanny. Photos.
Starred review from April 15, 2022
Fascinating exploration of the eldritch matter of foreknowledge. In 1902, a British soldier in the Boer War dreamed of a volcano exploding on an unnamed island, recognizably a French colony, and killing 4,000 people. A few weeks later, he read a newspaper account of the explosion of Mont Pel�e on Martinique, which killed 40,000. "I was out by a nought," he remarked of the discrepancy in the death count. More precise, writes London-based New Yorker staff writer Knight, was the foretelling on the part of a middle-aged Briton who warned of an impending air crash that would kill 124 people--the exact casualty count when a French passenger jet crashed a few days later. (The toll would rise when two wounded survivors succumbed later.) "Premonitions are impossible," writes the author, "and they come true all the time." Though Arthur Koestler attempted to wrestle the matter to the ground in his 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence, there wasn't much effort to quantify it until a British science editor named Peter Fairley established a "premonitions bureau" at the London Evening Standard in the mid-1960s, inviting readers to submit predictions that the paper would then track. The correlations weren't definitive, most "impossible to verify," but there were enough to lend credence to the idea that there are people who seem to have special connections to future events. Though, as Knight observes, the laws of thermodynamics don't support it, things can "prefigure in our minds." Few of those things are happy. For instance, the author profiles an eccentric British psychiatrist who came into contact with Fairley after investigating a terrible Welsh disaster in which 116 children died, one of them a little girl who had told her mother of a dream in which her school was covered with "something black"--the flood of coal slurry that overcame the victims. A reasonable, readable excursion into realms of unreason--and good evidence to pay attention to dreams and hunches.
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