Proof of precognitions? Ruickbie excerpt #22

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Before Dr. John Barker, Society of Psychical Research members Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, H. F. Saltmarsh, and Dame Edith Lyttelton, as well as winner of the Nobel Prize Charles Richet, the Director of the Institut Métapsychique International Eugene Osty, and the writer J.B. Priestley had all collected reports of premonitions and attempted to make some sense out of them. Sidgwick, working with the fewest cases, remained the most sceptical, but, working with rather more cases, Myers concluded that “our conception of time loses its accustomed meaning.”

Lyttelton received many accounts of apparent precognition after a BBC radio broadcast in 1934, whilst she was President of the SPR, publishing the best cases in 1937. Although trying to reserve judgement, she conceded “that some predictions are cases of definite precognition I personally have no doubt at all,” and that from this “the world of the senses is then illusory.” Struck by the veracity of evidence and credibility of the witnesses, Saltmarsh concluded that “we are bound to admit that the future does exist in some sense now – at the present moment,” and “we must revise our ordinary ideas about the nature of time.”

   Charles Richet     

Already in 1931, Richet put it nicely when he said: It would be inexcusably rash to affirm, as I have boldly done, that there are premonitions, if abundant and formal proof had not been advanced. This abundant and formal proof has, I think, been given.

Eugene Osty worked for twelve years with a group of psychics and was able to question them closely about their abilities, including the way time was represented to them. M. de Fleuriere saw time symbolically projected “on a semicircular screen,” with the past on the left, the present in the middle and the future on the right. Mme Morel seemed to stand in the stream of time, seeing the past behind her, the present at her side and the future ahead. “Time, as well as Space,” he concluded, “is penetrable by the faculty of super-normal cognition, just as if Time were but an illusory creation of the human mind.”

Saltmarsh also saw that the questions about time arising out of the study of precognition necessarily led to a re-examination of the possibility of life after death, although he did not go further than that. Additionally, he also concluded that the future is both predetermined and what he calls “plastic.”

Experiments continued after the closure of the original Premonitions Bureau. The remote viewing pioneer Ingo Swann (1933–2013) ran the American Prophecy Project from November 1989 to December 1990. The Estate of Ingo Swann relaunched this as the Prophecy Project in 2018. The website UKPsychics.com also ran an online “Premonitions Registry” from 1999 to 2005. 

Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove also ran a premonitions registry as a restricted access group on Yahoo from 2001, following the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks. There have been several attempts to recreate Barker’s original experiment, including a growing business in commercial precognition aimed at predicting market trends.

After a year working on what she called “a classified project for the United States government” (i.e., Project Star Gate), the President of the American Statistical Association, and professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis, Jessica Utts, reported:

The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically and would be widely accepted if it pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at data!

After studying 35 new cases, Ian Stevenson concluded that “true precognition may occur.” A 1989 meta-analysis of 309 “future-telling” studies by 62 different investigators involving a total of 50,000 subjects between 1935 and 1987 concluded that there was a “highly significant precognition effect.” Stevenson recognized that this “may require some of the more recondite explanations that upset our habitual notions of causation and time.” We can upset that even more when we consider precognition by disembodied consciousness.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.