Free The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein Page B

Simon Newcomb, eminent American scientist at the turn of the century, declared that it was impossible for any machine to fly long distances through the air. And an editorial in an eastern newspaper sized up the telephone like this:
    A man about 46 years of age has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people, by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires. He calls the instrument a telephone, which is obviously intended to imitate the word “telegraph” and win the confidence of those who know of the success of the latter instrument. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value. 8
    I should have remembered these things, but my hard core of conditioning had somehow never been penetrated by these considerations. Nor had I ever taken seriously any of the spontaneous instances of peering into the future. Such accounts—many by eminent and conservative observers—are abundant. Here is one sample from
Some Cases of Prediction
, a collection of a number of cases, together with verification reports, by Dame Edith Lyttelton, former president of the British Society for Psychical Research:
    … A few weeks before the 1931 Schneider Trophy air race… I went to the cinema with my husband and a woman friend one evening; the news reel contained photographs of the British Schneider Trophy team…. We were first shown the team standing in a group and were then shown each member separately. I may say at this point that all the members were complete strangers to me. …I had no interest in the race whatever…. The team that year consisted of RAF men with the addition of one single Naval flying man, he stood out in the group by reason of his different uniform…. Then we were shown each man singly. As the photograph of this young man was thrown on the screen, I received a sudden terrific sensationof shock, the shock of violent physical impact. I started so violently in my seat that my friend sitting next to me whispered, “What’s the matter?” I answered in great distress, “He’s going to be killed, he’s going to crash.” That was all But either two, or three weeks later the newspapers came out with headlines “Schneider Trophy Fatality,” the only Naval member of the team had crashed into the sea and had been killed instantly while on a practice flight. Those are the facts. My friend… can confirm them.
    For many people such examples are unnecessary; most readers can supply their own experiences. Frequently these premonitions are concerned with forthcoming disasters, collisions, or deaths. As for me, I had always dismissed such reports as “coincidences.”
    For the parapsychologists, however, the matter was one neither for peremptory dismissal nor acceptance. It was for the laboratory. Again the famous ESP cards were employed, but this time the subjects were asked in advance to predict what the order of the entire deck of cards would be after they were shuffled a specified number of times; the shuffling would take place after a certain length of time. Later there were even more stringent conditions, including machine shuffling of the cards. The outcome: There is definite evidence for precognition, and it stands up against all alternative explanations.
    “This man Rhine keeps fooling around with cards all the time,” commented my father, who had been reading the
Readers Digest
condensation of Rhine’s book, “and I’ll bet he doesn’t even gamble!”
    “Don’t get the wrong idea,” I answered. “This man isn’t trying to break the bank at Monte Carlo. His card tests prove that the mind has a very real power that science has tended to overlook all these years. And don’t be fooled by the fact that it now registers to only a slight degree. In Ben Franklin’s time the big news about electricity was