On the morning of October 21, 1966, a dark, gleaming wave of coal waste erupted from a hill above the Welsh village of Aberfan and poured down. Later, people compared the roar of a collapsing mine to a low-flying jet, thunder, or train. Initially, sheep, hedges, cattle, a farm with three people inside were strangled. The wave then reached Pantglas High School and Pantglas County High School, burying the first one, which was full of children matching the register. One hundred and forty-four people were killed on the Aberfan rink, 116 of them children, mostly between the ages of seven and 10.
Subsequently, a blockade was imposed to control access to the disaster, but more or less everyone in uniform or in a company car could find their way. On the morning of October 22, a green Ford Zephyr made its way to the village. At the wheel was John Barker, a 42-year-old psychiatrist at Shelton Hospital near Shrewsbury who was interested in unusual mental conditions. Barker was tall and broad, wearing a suit and tie. At the time, he was working on a book on whether it was possible to be scared to death. In early news reports from Aberfan Barker, he heard that a boy had run away from school unharmed, but later died of shock. The psychiatrist had come to investigate, but realized he had arrived too early. When Barker reached the village, the victims were still being excavated. “I soon realized that it would be quite inappropriate to make any inquiries about this child,” he wrote afterwards. The devastation reminded Barker of the blitz when he was a teenager growing up in south London, but the loss of life in Aberfan was worse because he was so concentrated and the dead so young. “Parents who had lost their children stood in the street, stunned and hopeless, and many still crying. There was hardly anyone I met who didn’t lose someone. “
Voyeurs and outsiders who came to Aberfan for no good reason were easy to identify. They shouted at police officers who were standing around drinking tea. Someone threw a box of tobacco at a photographer and broke the flash of his camera. During the day there was a constant downpour that wetted hundreds of rescuers, blurred the streets, which were already inches deep in mud, and raised fears that the peak could suddenly fall again, causing another disaster. The village was terribly tense.
Rescuers are searching for survivors after a coal waste tank collapsed on Aberphan in October 1966: bereaved families later spoke of dreams and omens before the incident. Photo: PA
But Barker did not return to his car and did not leave. He had long been interested in topics that seemed ominous or inexplicable to others. In every outward sense, he was an orthodox psychiatrist. He studied at the University of Cambridge and at St George’s Medical School in London. But he was also annoyed by the boundaries of his field. Barker was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 to study the paranormal, and for several years had been interested in the problem of notice and people who seemed to know what would happen to them before doing so. . .
Speaking to witnesses, he was struck by “several strange and pathetic incidents” related to the disaster. A school bus carrying children from Mertir Vale was amused by fog and reached the site after the summit fell. Their delay saved their lives. One boy had fallen asleep, apparently for the first time in his life, and was sent to school in a hurry by his mother, in tears; he was crushed. Meaningless, ill-considered decisions in the moments before the waste fell – a cup of tea before starting work, looking in the wrong direction, leaning against a wall – spared lives and put an end to others.
Barker was interested in the nature of these decisions and what prompted them. Did people have rational fears or inexplicable knowledge? The dark, unnatural tips over Aberfan have long played on the minds of the locals. The families of the mourners also spoke of dreams and omens. Weeks after the incident, the mother of an eight-year-old boy named Paul Davis, who died at Pantglas School, found a drawing of massive figures digging up the hillside under the words “The End” he had made the night before. the slide.
In the days after his visit to Aberfan, Barker came up with the idea for an unusual study. Given the special nature of the disaster and its full penetration into the national consciousness, he decided to gather as many premonitions as possible about the event and to study the people who had them. Barker wrote to Peter Fairley, the scientific editor of the London-based Evening Standard, and asked him to publish the idea. On October 28, Fairley carried Barker’s call to his World of Science column. “Did anyone have a real premonition before the top of the coal fell on Aberfan?” That’s what a senior British psychiatrist would like to know, “Fairley wrote. The article describes the types of vision that Barker is interested in: “bright sleep”, “bright waking impression”, “telepathy during a disaster (affecting someone for miles)” and “clairvoyance”.
For a year, Standard newspaper readers were able to send dreams and forebodings to compare with real events.
Barker received 76 responses to his complaint to Aberfan. Two nights before the disaster, a 63-year-old man named J. Arthur Taylor of Stecksted, a village on the edge of the swamps of Lancashire, dreams of being in Pontyprides, South Wales. He had not been in town for many years and was trying to buy a book. He faced a large button machine. “I have never seen a computer now. This may have been one; I just don’t know, “Taylor wrote. “Then suddenly, as I was standing next to this big machine, I looked up and saw an ABERFAN painted as hanging in white letters on a black background. This seemed to last a few minutes. Then I turned and looked the other way and saw rows of houses through the window and everything seemed deserted and empty. ” Taylor did not recognize the word, although he passed the village countless times until he heard it on the radio on the day of the disaster.
In Plymouth, the night before the coal landslide, Constance Milder had a vision of a spiritualist meeting. Milder, 47, told six witnesses that she saw an old school building, a Welsh miner and an “avalanche of coal” rushing down the mountain. “At the bottom of this mountain of throwing coals was a little boy with long fringes who looked absolutely terrified to death. After that, for a long time I “saw” how rescue operations were carried out. I had the impression that the little boy had been abandoned and saved. He looked so sad. ” Milder recognized the boy later in the evening news.
A Kent man was convinced days before the Aberfan incident that there would be a national disaster on Friday. “It occurred to me as much as it might have occurred to you that you forgot that tomorrow is your wife’s birthday,” wrote RJ Wallington of Rochester. When he arrived at work on October 21, he told his secretary, “Today is the day.”
Barker wrote back to the recipients, as he called them, asking for details and witnesses. Of the 60 plausible premonitions, there was evidence that 22 were described before the top of the mine began to move. The material convinced Barker that foresight was not uncommon among the general population – he suggested it could be as common as the left hand.
In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker turned to Charles Wintour, editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called the Foreboding Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper will be invited to send their dreams and premonitions, which will be compared and then compared with real events around the world. Wintour agreed to the experiment. Fairley developed an 11-point rating system for predictions: five points for unusualness, five points for accuracy and one point for time.
In 1902, a young soldier had a vision of a volcano about to explode … and later heard of an eruption that killed 40,000 people. Illustration: Dinah So’Ote / Guardian
The Premonition Bureau was not the first attempt to capture the visions of the British public. In the late 1920s, JW Dunne, an aircraft designer, wrote a popular book called The Time Experiment, which combined a narrative of his own precognitive dreams with a discussion of the theory of relativity and quantum physics. In 1902, Dunn was a young soldier in the Boer War when he dreamed of a volcano that would erupt on a French colonial island that would kill 4,000 people. A few weeks later, he obtained the Daily Telegraph, which reported the loss of 40,000 lives after the eruption of Mont Pele on the Caribbean island of Martinique, and read about his dream in print. I’m lost for nothing, Dunn thinks.
Premonitions, banal and great, haunted him for years. Dunn’s response was sentimental. “I guess no one can get much pleasure from assuming he’s a freak,” he wrote. By the end of World War I, Dunn was comforted by advances in quantum mechanics, which suggested that the old order of time was collapsing. “It was already in the smelter,” he wrote. Modern science had put him there – and he wondered what to do next.
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Dunn’s own theory of how time works, which he called serialism, was difficult to follow, but Experiment with Time was influential because it encouraged thousands of readers to keep diaries of dreams and see if their premonitions materialized. Dunn stressed that we need to pay attention to …
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