Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room. The gentle whirring and clunking of huge magnets brimming with electricity can be heard faintly in the background. He smiles gently to himself, takes another swig of coffee and presses a grubby-looking red button.

In the next room a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner. If it wasn’t for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman’s face you could be forgiven for thinking that this was just a normal health check. But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is possible to predict the future.

And the results released exclusively to Newsmonster suggest that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them ‘see’ the future before it actually happens. Such amazing results may help explain the predictive powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such ESP, déjà vu and clairvoyance. On a more mundane level, it may account for ‘gut feelings’ and instinct. It also creates a host of philosophical paradoxes and may leave little scope for our much cherished free will.

“We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens,” says Professor Dick Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. “We’d now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.”

Admittedly, Dick Bierman’s claims seem preposterous. We all know that you cannot see the future, don’t we? Preposterous or not, Professor Bierman’s results do not violate any of the laws of physics and they mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.

Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize winning physicist from Cambridge University, says: “So far the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.

“In fact, it’s not clear in physics why you can’t see the future. In physics you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect.”

Almost before the wreckage of the World Trade Centre began to cool, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the disaster. It soon transpired that many of the survivors had escaped because they’d changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease had unnerved them. It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that ‘something’ was not right. Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks people started altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct. The actress Nicole Kidman was one of these. She had planned to fly with her children from Los Angeles to New York on September 10th 2001, but changed her mind because she had a premonition that it “would not go well” there.

Then there was the woman who suffered crippling stomach pain whilst queuing for one of the ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center. She made her way to the toilet only to recover spontaneously. She missed her flight but survived the day.

Amidst the collective outpouring of grief and horror it was easy to overlook these stories or write them off as mere coincidences. Easy perhaps, but also wrong. Such stories point to a far more interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look. For if it was possible to predict the future you would expect major disasters like the attack on the Twin Towers to be the acid test. If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on an airliner destined to crash then that would hint at a subconscious ability to divine the future. Well, strange as it seems, that’s just what you see.

The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on September 11th were unusually empty. In fact, the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away – but all four?

And it wasn’t just on September 11th that people subconsciously seemed to avoid disaster. The scientist Ed Cox found that trains ‘destined’ to crash carried far fewer people than they did normally. And Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, found exactly the same bizarre effect.

If it was possible to divine the future you might expect those at the sharp end, such as pilots, to have the most finely tuned instincts of all. And again, that’s just what you see.

When the Air France Concorde crashed spectacularly in 2000 it wasn’t long before the colleagues of those killed in the crash spoke about a looming sense of foreboding that had gripped the crew and flight engineers before the accident. Speaking anonymously to the French newspaper Le Parisien one spoke of a "morbid expectation of an accident."

“I had this sense that we were going to bump into the scenery," he said. “The atmosphere on the Concorde team for the last few months – if one has to have the guts to admit it - has been one of morbid expectation of an accident. It was as if I was waiting for something to happen”.

All of these stories suggest that we are capable of picking up premonitions of events that are yet to be. Although these premonitions are not in glorious Technicolor they are often emotionally powerful enough for us to act upon them. They are generally not as strong as the type of ‘precognition’ featured in the film Minority Report. In technical parlance it is known as ‘presentiment’ because emotional feelings are being received from the future not hard facts or information.

The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate such paranormal phenomena as remote viewing, premonitions and the ability of mediums to predict the future.
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Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of ‘lucky’ soldiers to forecast the future. These are the ones who survived the cut and thrust of battle against seemingly impossible odds. Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings – and occasionally actual glimpses of the future - could flow backwards in time to guide soldiers in the present. It helped them make life-saving decisions, often on the basis of a hunch.

He devised an elegant experiment to test these ideas. He hooked up volunteers to a modified lie detector, which measured the conduction of an electrical current across the surface of the skin. This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing an extremely violent picture or video. It’s the electrical equivalent of a wince. Radin then showed extremely erotic, violent or soothing images to volunteers in a random sequence determined by computer.

Radin soon discovered something amazing – people began reacting to the pictures before they actually saw them. It was unmistakeable. They began to ‘wince’ in exactly the expected way a few seconds before they actually saw the image. And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would allow. In one series of experiments at Nevada University the odds against it happening by chance were around 125,000 to one. And in science, that’s as good as proven.

So impressive were Radin’s results that Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize winning chemist, took an interest. He was hooked up to Radin’s machine and shown the emotionally charged images.

“It’s spooky,” he says “I could see about three seconds into the future. You shouldn’t be able to do that.”

Other researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to Cornell in the US, rushed to duplicate Radin’s experiment and improve on it. And they got similar results. It was soon discovered that gamblers began reacting subconsciously shortly before they won or lost. The same effect was seen in those who are terrified of animals moments before they were shown the creatures. The odds against all of these trials being wrong is literally millions to one against.

Professor Dick Bierman decided to take this work even further. He is a psychologist who has become convinced that time as we understand it is an illusion. He could see no reason why people could not see into the future just as easily as they dip into their memories of the past. He’s in good company. Einstein described the distinction between the past, present and future as “a stubbornly persistent illusion”.

To prove Einstein’s point, Bierman looked inside the brains of volunteers using a hospital fMRI brain scanner whilst he repeated Dr Radin’s experiments. These scanners show which parts of the brain are active when we do certain tasks or experience specific emotions. Although fiendishly complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving over 20 volunteers. And the results show quite clearly that seemingly ordinary people are capable of sensing the future on a fairly consistent basis.

Bierman emphasises that people are receiving feelings from the future rather than specific ‘visions’. It’s clear, though, if ordinary people can receive feelings from the future then perhaps the especially gifted may receive visions of things yet to be. It’s also clear that many paranormal phenomena such as ESP and clairvoyance could have their roots in presentiment. After all, if you can see a few seconds into the future, why not a few days or even years? And surely if you could look through time, why not across great distances?

It’s a concept that ties the mind in knots – unless you’re a physicist.

“I believe that we can ‘sense’ the future,” says the Nobel Prize winning physicist Brian Josephson. “We just haven’t yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen. People have had so called ‘paranormal’ or ‘transcendental’ experiences along these lines. Bierman’s work is another piece of the jigsaw

“The fact that we don’t understand something does not mean that it doesn’t happen.”

If we are all regularly sensing the future – or occasionally receiving glimpses of it as some mediums claim to do – then doesn’t that mean we can change the future and render the ‘prediction’ obsolete? Or perhaps we were meant to receive the premonition and act upon it? Such paradoxes could go on for ever.

The emerging view, Bierman explains, is that “the future has implications for the past”.

“This phenomena allows you to make a decision on the basis of what will happen in the future. Does that restrain our free will? That’s up to the philosophers. I’m far too shallow a person to worry about that.”

The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you can’t rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case but there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to their premonitions or feelings of presentiment.

One of the saddest involves the Aberfan disaster. This, you may remember, occurred in 1966 when a coal spoil tip collapsed and swept through a Welsh school killing 144 people, including 116 children. The children had just finished singing All Things Bright and Beautiful when they were killed by the avalanche. It turned out that 24 people had received verifiable premonitions of the tragedy.

One involved a little girl who was killed. She told her mother shortly before she was taken to school: “I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.”

So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams? Some experts believe that we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a surprising degree. Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, who has worked for the US military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal research, believes that we’re constantly sampling the future and using the knowledge to help us make better decisions.

“I think we’re doing it all the time,” says Professor Utts. “We’ve looked at the data and it does seem to happen.”

So perhaps the Queen in Through the Looking Glass was right: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

Source: NewsMonster.co.uk