Suspicious Minds
The mysterious gift of premonitions is explored in this stranger-than-fiction true story
The Premonitions Bureau might sound like an organisation straight out of a science-fiction movie. In fact, it was a serious scientific endeavour set up in the 1960s by two intellectually respected men. One was Peter Fairley, the science editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, who later presented ITV’S moonlanding coverage. The other was John Barker (1924-1968), a reforming psychiatrist at the badly outdated Shelton mental hospital in Shropshire.
But along with his day job, Barker had a deep interest in the psychic abilities of the human mind. After the 1966 Aberfan disaster, when a coal tip infamously collapsed on the town’s primary school, he persuaded Fairley to appeal in the Standard for anybody who’d had a premonition of the catastrophe. Seventy-five people replied and, after a spot of sifting, the Premonitions Bureau was born: partly to see if some people really could foresee terrible events, but partly too with a view to preventing them.
Its two biggest stars—often to their own discomfort—were Miss Middleton, a London piano teacher, and Alan Hencher, who worked for the Post Office. Between them, they seemed to predict the Torrey Canyon oil spillage, the death of a Russian cosmonaut, Robert Kennedy’s assassination (see sidebar) and a fatal train crash in London. By 1968, the two were also predicting Barker’s own death…
Sam Knight tells the whole astonishing story with impressive calmness, acknowledging the possibility both of coincidence and of something rather more mysterious. He also uses it as
springboard to explore wider questions of how the mind works.
This edited extract begins— coincidentally or not—the day after Barker had been warned by his sceptical superiors at Shelton to disassociate himself from the Premonitions Bureau or risk losing his job:
‘‘ The bureau got its first major hit in the spring of 1967. At 6 am on 21 March, the phone rang in Barker’s dining room. He came downstairs and answered. It was Alan Hencher.
‘I was hoping not to have to ring you,’ Hencher said. ‘But now I feel I must.’
Hencher was coming off a night shift and was calling to predict a plane crash. Barker made notes on a piece of Shelton hospital letterhead. Hencher was upset. He had a vision of a Caravelle, a Frenchbuilt passenger jet, experiencing problems soon after take-off. ‘It is coming over mountains. It is going to radio it is in trouble. Then it will cut out—nothing.’ Hencher said there would be 123 or 124 people on board and that only one person would survive, ‘in a very poor condition’. Hencher couldn’t tell where the crash was going to happen but he had had the feeling for the last two or three days. It was as if someone on the aircraft was trying to communicate with him. They were trying to make peace. ‘While I am talking to you, I have a vision of Christ,’ Hencher told Barker.
Barker passed the prediction on to the Evening Standard. In the subsequent weeks, he made no effort to curb his extracurricular research or to stop drawing attention to himself. On 11 April, he and Fairley appeared on Late Night Line-up, a chat show on BBC2, to publicise the bureau. Nine days later, a turboprop Britannia passenger aircraft carrying 130 people attempted to land in Nicosia, Cyprus, during a thunderstorm. The plane was on its way from Bangkok to Basel, carrying mostly Swiss and German holidaymakers. It was on its way to its penultimate stop, in Cairo, when the pilots were advised the airport was closed because of heavy rain. The flight plan suggested
Beirut as the back-up option but the captain decided to make an unscheduled landing in Cyprus, despite the bad weather.
By the time the plane reached the island, the captain and his
The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story by Sam Knight is published by Faber at £14.99
co-pilot were almost three hours over their time limits at the controls. At 11.10pm, the aircraft was cleared to land at Nicosia, but came in a little high. Muller requested permission to make a circuit of the airport and try again. The control tower glimpsed the plane, its landing lights flashing through the low cloud, before it wheeled to the south and clipped a wing on the side of a hill, rolled over, broke into pieces and caught fire.
‘124 DIE IN AIRLINER’, the Evening Standard reported on its front page the following morning. (The final death toll was 126; two people who survived the initial impact were taken to a nearby UN field hospital, where they died.) Fairley and Barker noticed the similarities with Hencher’s prediction immediately. The Evening Standard published an account of Hencher’s premonition alongside the news coverage. ‘The Incredible Story of the Man Who Dreamed Disaster’, the headline read.