READER'S DIGEST RECOMMENDED READ: Suspicious Minds

The mysterious gift of premonitions is explored in this stranger-than-fiction true story

THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU might sound like an organisation straight out of a science-fiction movie. In fact, it was a serious scientific endeavour set up in the 1960s by two intellectually respected men. One was Peter Fairley, the science editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, who later presented ITV’s moonlanding coverage. The other was John Barker (1924-1968), a reforming psychiatrist at the badly outdated Shelton mental hospital in Shropshire.

But along with his day job, Barker had a deep interest in the psychic abilities of the human mind. After the 1966 Aberfan disaster, when a coal tip infamously collapsed on the town’s primary school, he persuaded Fairley to appeal in the Standard for anybody who’d had a premonition of the catastrophe. Seventy-five people replied and, after a spot of sifting, the Premonitions Bureau was born: partly to see if some people really could foresee terrible events, but partly too with a view to preventing them.

Its two biggest stars—often to their own discomfort—were Miss Middleton, a London piano teacher, and Alan Hencher, who worked for the Post Office. Between them, they seemed to predict the Torrey Canyon oil spillage, the death of a Russian cosmonaut, Robert Kennedy’s assassination (see sidebar) and a fatal train crash in London. By 1968, the two were also predicting Barker’s own death…

Sam Knight tells the whole astonishing story with impressive calmness, acknowledging the possibility both of coincidence and of something rather more mysterious. He also uses it as springboard to explore wider questions of how the mind works.