From the Daily Mail piece:
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In fact, what I discovered was even more astonishing: that a machine at Princeton University in New Jersey had forecast some major disaster nearly three hours before the first plane struck the World Trade Centre.
THIS sounds absurd. So let me explain how the machine works. It is called a Random Event Generator, and it uses sophisticated technology to generate two numbers - one and nought - in a completely unpredictable sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.
The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' - can then be printed out as a graph, showing the chance fluctuations whenever one value turns up more frequently than the other.
In 1977, a Princeton scientist named Robert Jahn conducted experiments to see whether this 'coin-flipper' could be influenced by human mental effort.
He brought in strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on the machine. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
The results were amazing. Again and again, total strangers proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, showing that one value was turning up much more frequently than the other.
Jahn's friend and colleague Roger Nelson then had an even more bizarre idea.
When he heard that a group of yoga enthusiasts were organising a global 'meditation for peace', he decided to link together Random Event Generators all over the world to see whether this burst of meditation, involving thousands of people, would influence their readings.
That, admittedly, sounds preposterous. At least Jahn's subjects had been consciously trying to influence the machines; what Nelson was asking was whether meditators could have the same effect without any conscious effort at all.
Preposterous or not, the results were more startling than ever. Not only were the generators influenced by the global burst of meditation, but the effect was seven times greater than had ever been achieved with volunteers.
From then on, Roger Nelson was unstoppable. He connected up 40 Random Event Generators all over the world, linked them to his laboratory computer in Princeton, and kept the recorder going day and night.
Most of the time, the graph-pen made a wavy horizontal line across the paper, with a few minor variations, like a calm sea with the occasional small wave.
But during the funeral of Princess Diana in September 1997 - which of course was televised all over the world - the graph shot up like a mountain.
And, as if to show that this was no fluke, it rose again (albeit rather less strongly) just a week later during the funeral of Mother Teresa.
Nelson admits his own astonishment about this. But it looks as if great outbursts of emotion can influence these electronic coin-flippers without anybody intending to.
It soon became apparent that the graph responded to happy events as well as upsetting ones. Just before midnight on New Year's Eve, 1998, the graph peaked at the very moment that lots of happy revellers were singing Auld Lang Syne. The connection was impossible to ignore because it peaked again, always just before midnight, at different time zones around the world. And to prove this was not some freak effect, the same thing happened on New Year's Eves in 1999, 2000 and again at the end of last year.
YOU can probably already guess what happened as the World Trade Centre disaster unfolded on the morning of September 11. The graph peaked like the Eiffel Tower between 9am and 10am, New York time, just as the first horrific images were being relayed across the globe.
But what seems even more astonishing is that the graph had started its rise soon after 6am. That was about three hours before the first hijacked jet hit the World Trade Centre. Why should this be so? Unless we put all the results down to the most extraordinary coincidence, I believe there is only one explanation.
As I am about to show, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people experienced premonitions of disaster in the run-up to the attack. I believe it was this surge of fear and distress that began to show itself on the graph three hours before the attack began.
Such feelings will have affected Roger Nelson's machines just as surely as grief for Diana or joy on New Year's Eve. And, in doing so, they sent out a terrible warning of the impending catastrophe.
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Roger Nelson believes that his equipment is somehow recording a new form of consciousness that is being developed by the human race: global consciousness.
This is an idea that was originally put forward more than half a century ago, by the French biologist and Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin. He suggested that the earth was developing a new spiritual dimension that he called the 'noosphere' (noos is Greek for mind).
Roger Nelson explains his own version of the concept by pointing out how human beings often have the feeling that their minds are united with those of others.
For example, when an audience is carried away by a great performance of a symphony, it is as if their minds are united together.
Sceptics will point to those words 'as if', and argue that the unity is just an illusion - that, in reality, the audience all remain separate individuals.
But this has been disproved by a scientific experiment in Las Vegas.
In 1991, an audience of 5,000 people was asked by a scientist called Loren Carpenter to play a giant game of electronic pingpong. All of them were given individual controls linked to a giant screen; then the audience was divided into two halves, with one half playing against the other.
Within a few minutes, the two halves - each of 2,500 people - were playing exactly like two individuals. The whole audience was then connected to a flight simulator, and went on to guide a plane through a difficult landing, just as if they had become a single person.
The conclusion is plain: human minds can indeed unite together, just like two raindrops coalescing.
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Hapgood then found himself tantalised by an even more dramatic possibility.
If people could be regressed to the past, could they also be sent forward to the future?
He decided to find out - and the results were remarkable.
Under hypnosis, a student named Jay was told to go forward to the following Wednesday. He described the events of the day - luncheon menu, class assignments, tests - in some detail.
Asked where he was now, he said he was at the local airport, and that he had met a pilot from Montpelier, Vermont, who had been able to clear up the details of a rather puzzling plane crash that had occurred a year earlier.
Emerging from his trance, Jay had no memory of the predictions he had made.
The following Wednesday evening, Hapgood asked him about his day.
Sure enough, Jay said that he had been to the local airport, where he had had a chance meeting with a flier from Montpelier, who told him all about the puzzling plane crash. The remaining details of his day - food, assignments, etc - corresponded closely to what he had said the previous Sunday.
Another student named Henry was 'progressed' to the following Thursday. He explained that he was going to the nearby town of Brattleboro to get drunk, and was going to borrow a friend's car.
Progressed a few hours further, he described how he was drinking in a cafe with two women, who were making improper advances to him, and criticising their husbands.
Even under hypnosis, Henry declined to repeat their remarks, obviously finding them too embarrassing. He described how he finally arrived home at 2am, and woke up the household when the dog barked.
ONCE again, he had no memory of these predictions when he emerged from the trance. The following Friday, Hapgood saw Henry in the Student Union building and said: 'I know where you were last night.' 'I bet you don't,' said Henry.
'You went to Brattleboro,' shot back Hapgood.
Henry looked surprised. He was even more surprised when Hapgood told him whose car he had borrowed, and how he had gone to a cafe and met two women.
'You don't know what they said?' Henry asked in alarm, and Hapgood laughed and said: 'No, you refused to tell us.'
Henry also confirmed that he had arrived home at 2am and that the dog had woken up the household.
What Hapgood seems to have proved is that our unconscious minds know all about the future, and that under hypnosis we can uncover this knowledge.
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The case had first been recorded by the parapsychologist Louisa Rhine, and concerned a woman who dreamed that she was on a camping holiday, and took her baby with her when she went down to the river to wash some clothes.
In her dream, the woman forgot the soap, and left the baby while she went to fetch it. When she returned, the baby lay drowned with his head in the water.
Months later, on a camping holiday, the woman went to wash some clothes in a river when she suddenly recognised the place as the scene of her dream.
Again, she had her baby with her, and again she realised she had forgotten the soap.
Forewarned by her dream, when she went back for the soap she tucked the baby safely under her arm. In doing so, she changed the future that she herself had predicted - and saved her baby's life.
Precognitive dreams like this seem to be one of the most frequent methods that our unconscious minds adopt to give us glimpses of what is to come.
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