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The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category.

Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly).

As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawed from the start, the idea was to ask readers to write in with any premonitions they received for the future, and to see if there were any solid predictions, or any convergence where multiple individuals predicted the same disaster.

Barker apparently had the idea that, if successful, this would make it possible to offer such a service for the public good, though this did open up the slightly mind-bending worry for him that if premonitions made it possible to prevent a disaster, how could the premonitions exist in the first place?

Although what's in the book is very reasonable and genuinely fascinating, the frustrating thing is a lack of analysis by Knight. He is a good storyteller, but all too often just tells us what happened without saying if it made any sense. The best example of why this matters is the Bureau's first big 'success', a premonition of a plane crash made in March 1967. The 'seer', a man called Alan Hencher, who had already claimed (after the event) to have predicted Aberfan, described a very detailed dream. A Caravelle jet airliner would crash shortly after takeoff after passing over mountains. About 124 people would be killed.

Knight comments on the similarities of this prediction with the Nicosia plane crash of 20 April 1967, which killed 126 people. This was assumed by Barker to demonstrate the reality of the premonition. But apart from the casualty numbers, there was hardly any correspondence between the prediction and reality. (For that matter, given the size of planes at the time, this was the kind of number you would make up to represent a big tragedy.) Hencher got the aircraft type wrong, and was wrong in saying it was a jet - the plane was a propellor-driven Britannia. The crash wasn't soon after takeoff - the plane had been flying for hours. But the really big problem is that the crash didn't happen until 30 days after the prediction. Lots of people have dreams about plane crashes, and planes were less reliable then. There were at least 14 fatal airliner crashes with significant numbers of deaths in 1967. If they waited long enough, inevitably this prediction would have 'come true' given the level of leeway applied - the whole thing was highly dubious. Yet Knight does not explore this.

Some of the other predictions mentioned are more impressive - though if you are constantly receiving guesses about the future,  statistically some will eventually be close enough to be considered a success. Knight focusses particularly on two big hitters, Hencher and a Miss Middleton, but again fails to explore crucial information, for example: how many predictions they got wrong.

The book is at its best when it is following its main thread of Barker's life. He seems to have hated his job at a crumbling mental asylum, particularly when the authorities were less than enthusiastic about his real passions - the paranormal and an obsession with death that led to his writing a successful book Scared to Death about people who apparently died from purely mental causes. Less effective are parts where Knight breaks up the story with short, often very loosely connected, asides, for example on Ancient Greek philosophers’ ideas about fate, or an obscure French philosopher’s thoughts on death - these feel like padding.

Whether or not you believe paranormal phenomena exist, they are fascinating (the psychology of thinking they're real, and the work of fakers is just as interesting as the concept itself) - I enjoyed researching and writing about these subjects and scientific attempts to study them in a more general way in my book Extra Sensory. With its large, moody, black and white illustrations and excellently written text, Knight tells Barker and Fairley's story extremely well.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
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