by Eric Wargo
It seems incredible … that in Psalm 46 of the Bible the forty-sixth word is “shake” and the forty-sixth word from the end is “spear,” and that Shakespeare was 46 when the King James translation was completed. Taken in isolation, such coincidences seem paranormal. But we must realize that in a book as vast as the Bible the probability is high that some astounding word coincidences would occur. It is like finding a long run of consecutive digits in the endless decimal expansion of pi. 18
In addition to being unable to calculate the odds of oddities, we are also swayed in a million different directions by our biases. There are lots of them. The psychologists’ bias bestiary grows more massive by the year; at the time of this writing, Wikipedia’s “List of Cognitive Biases” page listed over 180. 19 Thus every claim of the paranormal is met with an eye-roll and a named bias to explain why your perception of the situation has been distorted by expectation or wishful thinking (confirmation bias ) or failure to take some factor into account in your reasoning. One of the most interesting and perilous, and one I shall be returning to again and again throughout this book, is hindsight bias—the distortion of our memory by later events, making past events seem predictable when they really weren’t. It has a close cousin, selection bias , or what is known in science as the “file drawer effect”—the tendency to discard data that don’t conform to our desires or expectations. These are related because hindsight is itself a kind of selection, a narrowing of the frame in which we view the past.
An event like the Titanic ’s sinking gives us new frames of reference, and after it happens, individual and cultural memory will suddenly discern specific chains of ordinary causation leading up to it that would otherwise have remained invisible or drowned out by noise—causal arrows emerging from the clouds of chaos. In this process of selection, hindsight will inevitably turn up some apparent anomalies, like sharks and dolphins caught in a tuna fisherman’s nets. According to the law of large numbers, in a universe of thousands of novels and stories, one or a few of them are bound to match the sinking of an ocean liner closely enough to seem “prophetic”—particularly when we extend our allowable timeframe out by years and decades, as we must in the case of Robertson’s Futility or especially W. T. Stead’s From the Old World to the New .
Gardner also shows that when you put the prophecies in context, at least some of the impossibility of the coincidence between Robertson’s novel and the Titanic disaster dwindles. The size, passenger complement, speed, etc. of the ship, for instance, were predictable. Any writer who knew anything about ocean liners would have extrapolated realistically from the existing ships of the White Star Line and other shipping firms of the day and arrived at a “biggest-ever ocean liner” more or less matching the Titanic’s stats. As we saw with journalist Stead, the fear of fatally hitting icebergs in the North Atlantic was a very real one at the time and for decades beforehand, having claimed countless smaller ships, and thus it was natural fodder for writers of sea yarns. Several novels and stories from the years prior to the Titanic ’s sinking used such collisions as plot devices. 20 Those collisions commonly happened in the spring, so it was natural for Robertson to sink his Titan in April. And any writer wanting to inject the dramatic elements of hubris and corporate negligence into such a story might naturally give his ocean liner too few lifeboats. Here again, Robertson was not the only one to use this plot device. For Gardner, the fact that Robertson was not alone in writing a story with this premise weakened, rather than strengthened, the case for prophecy.
The coincidence of names, too, Gardner found less than compelling. He called attention to an obscure science-fiction novel called A 20th Century Cinderella or $20,000 Reward , written just a couple years after Robertson’s Futility by an otherwise unknown writer named William Young Winthrop and set in the year 1920; the novel makes reference to an ocean liner called the Titanic , built (like the real Titanic ) by the White Star Line. It was published in 1902. “It seems to me entirely possible,” Gardner wrote, “that the White Star company, as early as 1898, when Robertson wrote his novel, had announced plans to construct the world’s largest ocean liner and to call it the Titanic .” 21 Gardner could provide no evidence for this notion, although he cited an 1892 news item from The New York Times about the White Star Line’s plan to build a huge ocean liner—similar in stature to the eventual Titanic —called the Gigantic (which was never actually built). “It seems clear now what happened,” Gardner wrote:
Knowing of plans for the Gigantic , Robertson modeled his ship on this proposed mammoth liner. After the use of such names as Oceanic, Teutonic, Majestic , and Gigantic , what appropriate name is left for such a giant liner except Titanic ? Not wishing to identify his doomed Titan with the White Star line, Robertson dripped the “ic” from the name. The White Star’s later choice of Titanic for its 1910 ship was almost inevitable. The company was surely aware of Robertson’s Titan , but perhaps did not mind adopting a similar name because it was firmly persuaded that its Titanic was absolutely unsinkable. 22
This scenario makes a fine “just so” story to explain why Robertson might have named his fictional ocean liner Titan , but it is not actually based on any evidence, only an assemblage of individually plausible might-have-beens. Some degree of supposition is unavoidable when trying to make sense of the past—we never have all the data we’d like, so the available facts are always supplemented with “frog DNA” in our reconstructions of events (to use a metaphor from the movie Jurassic Park , where cloning dinosaurs from fragmentary genetic material was made possible using DNA of living animals). I too will be resorting to a little supposition in this book. But while sometimes fraudulent mediums, fortune tellers, and psychics have been exposed by detection of cheating, most “debunking” of alleged psychic or paranormal experiences reported by ordinary people only amounts to supplying some alternative explanation, one that typically invokes the fallibility of human perception, memory, and reasoning. It is up to the reader to assess whose story is really more reasonable or believable, the psychic claimant’s or the debunker’s.
Questions of precognition and other “paranormal” occurrences are certainly a quagmire—Gardner is absolutely right in this. If you don’t like quagmires, don’t read farther, because with the whole topic of precognition you are stepping in a very big one. But the skeptics are as easily made to look foolish flailing in this quagmire as the true believers are.
We will return to Morgan Robertson and Futility later in this book. There are more potentially precognitive dimensions to the novel than Gardner admitted and that even proponents of its “prophecy” have realized.
Touching the Slab
On the other hand, coincidences that may look outrageously uncanny at first glance do frequently have a way of evaporating on closer examination. Readers of my blog, The Nightshirt , shared with me a number of coincidences around the events of 9/11—an event with an even bigger halo of alleged paranormal events and premonitions than the Titanic disaster. One that stood out to me initially for its strangeness concerned the Millenium Hilton, a 55-story slab of dark glass built in 1992 immediately adjacent to the World Trade Center. It appears to have been consciously modeled by the architect Eli Attia on the enigmatic slab in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey . In the film, the slab first appears among starving man-apes on a savannah, subtly—psychically—giving them the idea of killing and enabling their evolutionary uplift. Millions of years later, on the way to the Moon, Haywood Floyd stops at the iconic double-ringed space station in orbit, which features a Hilton hotel, and then proceeds to the Moon, where he is shown a slab that has just been excavated in Tycho Crater. After the World Trade Center towers fell to the violent attack, photographs of the site, with the stark black slab-like Hilton Hotel now exposed in the background by the vast pit being cleared of rubble in the foreground, looked a lot like the second slab in the movie, rising from the lunar dust where it had been excavated, surrounded by floodlights.
This coincidence
seemed “synchronistic” to some—as though some archetypal pattern having to do with violence and cosmic transitions imprinted itself on historical events. But zooming in on this case, the strangeness and even the coincidence quotient dwindles. The real year 2001 fast approaching naturally would have invited thoughts of Kubrick’s film to supply some design idea for the first hotel to be named for the millennium. 23 And while the slab in the film is associated with violence (among other things), there is hardly anything unique about that—indeed, the violence committed by the hijackers on 9/11 was not really the kind of violence shown at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey , killing with some brand-new technology as part of our species’ cultural evolution or uplift. Moreover, violence of all kinds, literal and metaphorical, occurs on the streets of Manhattan, and in the offices above, all the time.
Pictures of the Millenium Hilton (the developer intentionally misspelled it with one n to make it more distinctive) looming above the ruins of the World Trade Center are still fun to look at side-by-side with stills from 2001 , but the more you pick this “synchronicity” apart, the more it mainly boils down to the coincidence of the year 2001 and a suggestive photo-op. Selecting a framing of a scene or an event to make it meaningful is precisely what photography—and cinema—is all about, after all. From an almost infinite number of angles, pictures of the Hilton after 9/11 do not seem meaningfully coincidental in the slightest. Photographers may even have been unconsciously or consciously guided by iconic images like those in 2001 when photographing the building with the rubble in the foreground. In short, what at first seems strangely coincidental quickly loses much of its uncanny grandeur, the “size of the impossible” when examined with a critical eye.
But the fact that in the infinite universe there will be myriad coincidences that only seem impossible, or meaningful, from a certain point of view is no kind of argument that our commonsense understanding of causality is complete, or that there aren’t real “synchronicities.” Who are skeptics to say that people might not sometimes be right when they detect the operation in their own lives, or in history, of some principle that has not yet been given mainstream psychology’s stamp of legitimacy, such as premonitions of future events? We know our understanding of physical reality is not complete—physicists are clear on that—and we will see in Part Two that new advances at the intersection of physics and biology are radically revising our understanding of living systems too. Among other things, they raise the possibility that the brain may have properties that could even be time-defying. Given the certainty that science is not finished and that new revolutions await us, is it reasonable to insist that there are no undiscovered realms of human capacity awaiting to be catalogued and investigated?
Consider another coincidence related to 9/11: a bronze 1999 sculpture by Jamaican-American artist Michael Richards, called Tar Baby vs St. Sebastian. It is one of a series of sculptures Richards created in the late 1990s in which he depicted himself as one of the Tuskegee Airmen—the African American aviators who distinguished themselves during and after World War II yet were still subject to segregation and racism. In Tar Baby , Richards depicts himself in bronze, standing rigidly erect (one might say tower-like) in an aviator’s suit and helmet, being pierced by numerous planes—similar to how the early Christian martyr St. Sebastian is depicted in countless Renaissance paintings, as a pincushion of arrows. The eerie detail here is that Richards died on 9/11 in his studio, which was on the 92nd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, where he had spent the night.
Much has been made of this one seemingly prophetic sculpture. Does it add to the case for prophecy, or subtract from it, that aviation-related destruction and martyrdom were themes that had come to obsess the artist during the five years leading up to his death? His sculptures include many objects being impaled by planes, planes hitting bullseyes, and planes crashing to the ground. 24 Two of his final pieces, according to friends who had visited his studio in the days before the disaster, were also of himself being impaled by planes, surrounded by fire and meteors. 25 Another was of himself as a Tuskegee airman riding a meteor. 26
The arguments of skeptics can be anticipated: Tar Baby vs St. Sebastian is one of billions of artworks created by Americans in the years leading up to 9/11, and one of perhaps thousands created in those years just by people who were killed in or who survived the disaster. Among them, we know of only one work in which a person (the artist) is “martyred” specifically by planes impaling his body. Thus (the argument would run), our focus on this one apparent correspondence to the terror attacks ignores the vast denominator, all the other artworks that never even entered into our calculations because they don’t seem relevant. Our desire to make sense of the traumatic event on 9/11 causes us to find meaning in this one uncanny and heartbreaking case and see Richards’ sculpture as somehow prophetic in hindsight.
But such arguments contain biases of their own, and in a way are just as arbitrary. No two people respond exactly alike to the same stimulus, and in fact many people around the world did produce artworks or write stories that seem uncannily prophetic in light of the events of 9/11. Issue #596 of The Adventures of Superman , released on September 12, 2001 (but obviously drawn and written sometime in the weeks preceding the disaster), shows the twin “LexCorp” towers smoldering after being attacked in a superhero conflict. The issue was promptly recalled by the publisher, DC Comics, making it now something of a collector’s item. 27 In June, 2001, Oakland, California, hip hop artists The Coup created a cover for their upcoming CD Party Music showing the towers exploding; after 9/11, the CD release was delayed until the band could create a new cover. 28 On March 4, 2001, the pilot episode of a spinoff of the X-Files called The Lone Gunmen centered on a government plot to hijack a jetliner by remote control and fly it into the World Trade Center. This seemingly too-prescient-to-be-coincidence episode supplied fodder for conspiracy theorists claiming that the government had foreknowledge of or planned the attacks. 29 A quick Google search turns up many more artworks and pieces of cultural ephemera that seem to have anticipated 9/11 in one way or another.
And most people do not create art at all but respond to inspiration in different ways. For one thing, everybody engages in the nightly internal sculpture called dreaming. Dreams seemingly corresponding to some future event or upheaval in the dreamer’s life are probably the most common paranormal experiences (reported by 17-38 percent of people in surveys 30 ). And as might be expected, many people reported dreams and other premonitions of the 9/11 events. The Rhine Center in Durham, North Carolina, which collects disaster premonitions, received more calls about dreams and other premonitions of 9/11 than any other disaster. 31 Again, a quick Google search turns up pages and pages of stories, including stories of people who perished in the attacks and whose loved ones recalled their doomed visions in dreams in the days and weeks before. 32
Skeptics are particularly dismissive of claims of premonitory dreams, noting that in the vast majority of such cases, the dream has been recalled and recorded after the event it supposedly predicted. They can point to the well-established fact that memory is a malleable thing, easily selecting among its vast and ever-shifting contents to create apparent coincidences in hindsight. Dream memories are vague and fleeting in the best of circumstances, so alleged prophetic dreams are particularly suspect. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, a pioneer of false-memory research, writes: “One person may swear that the details of a tragic accident were forecast in his dream. Later, after an accident does occur, he checks his dream diary, he may discover that the emotion of the dream was unpleasant but the details only had a vague resemblance to the accident.” 33 He may, true enough; but in fact, the opposite is very often true. 34
There is, for instance, the case of a retired art professor named David Mandell in the London suburb of Sudbury Hill. A 2003 British TV documentary profiled Mandell and his astonishing record of seemingly precognitive dreams, which he depicts the next morning in drawings or watercolors a
nd then photographs under the calendar clock at his local bank to provide a time stamp and forestall accusations of fakery or faulty memory. On September 11, 1996—five years to the day before the attacks in Manhattan—he reported awakening from a terrifying dream and sketched his vision of two tall towers crashing down in a disaster that he said felt to him like an earthquake. Six months later, he had the dream again, and painted it in watercolor—the towers in his painting are flanked by a shorter building with a pyramidal top. Nine months after that dream, he sketched a third dream in which two twin-engine planes crashed into a pair of buildings, from opposite directions. Mandell recalled feeling terrible shock, “shuddering and shaking,” on the day of the terror attacks in Manhattan when he saw the pictures on television, and how stunningly they matched his dreams. Revisiting his watercolor, it exactly matched the New York skyline with the burning towers flanked by the pyramid-topped American Express Building. Because of his method of date-stamping them with photographs at his bank, he was able to verify the coincidental date of the first dream as well. 35
As common as they are, in our culture presentiments and premonitions are seldom shared publicly, because of those eye-rolling skeptics (and every family and workplace has one)—but they are the kinds of things people do sometimes share with partners or close friends. Private divulgences of such things in letters or journals are commonly uncovered by biographers, although as isolated occurrences they will carry little evidential weight. Recently, historian Jonathan W. White, researching a history of sleep, sleep deprivation, and dreams during the Civil War, stumbled on a rich trove: hundreds or thousands of premonitory dreams in letters between soldiers and their spouses, girlfriends, and mothers. While not having intended to write a book on psychic phenomena, White cites in his book Midnight in America numerous accurate (often sadly accurate) precognitive dreams by ordinary Americans during that incredibly uncertain and stressful period of American history. 36 Such dreams, White argues, provided ordinary Americans with meaning in the face of overwhelming loss and fear, often confirming their belief in God or providence.
