By The Premonition Agency was a curious institution that operated for only two years in Britain. While it was active, it produced what some considered accurate predictions and others called “coincidences.” Which was the truth?
Clairvoyance has been present in different cultures and eras since ancient times. It seems that humans have always believed in the possibility of seeing the future and in the existence of people who have this gift. Psychiatrist John Barker wanted to examine this phenomenon more closely; that is how he created the British Premonition Agency.
Barker was a prestigious psychiatrist, which makes this story all the more interesting. He was not a tarot reader, an astrologer or a fortune teller who took the initiative to create this agency, but a man of science, who graduated as a doctor from Cambridge in 1948. He specialized in so-called ” aversive therapy ” and a famous article of his, published in The Lancet , was decisive in improving the conditions of psychiatric inmates in Great Britain.
For much of his career he worked with David Enoch, another renowned psychiatrist, on what they called “psychiatric orchids” or rare cases in the field. These included Othello syndrome , Couvade syndrome and a very special one: “scared to death.” It was this last thing that ultimately led Barker to found the British Premonition Agency.
“No matter how rational you are, DO NOT underestimate instinct, premonition or feeling, remember they came before any logic . “
-Luis Gabriel Carrillo Navas-
A catastrophe in Aberfan
Aberfan was a small British village that hardly anyone knew about until October 21, 1966. On the morning of that fateful day, a pile of coal on the side of the mountain collapsed. This caused 50,000 tons of mud to fall on several houses and a school where children attended classes every day. In total, 144 people died, including 116 children.
The whole country had its eyes on the small village. However, what caught John Barker’s attention was a child who was unharmed in the tragedy , but died shortly afterwards, without explanation, apparently “from fear” . Thus, the psychiatrist arrived in the village and almost from the beginning he heard strange stories.
She learned that an 8-year-old boy named Paul Davis had drawn a picture of a landslide on the side of the mountain and titled it “The End.” Another girl, Eryl Mai Jones, had told her mother a week earlier that she was not afraid of dying. And the night before the tragedy, she told her mother about a dream : “I dreamed I was going to school and there was no school. Something black had fallen everywhere!”
The British Premonition Agency
Barker was certainly interested in strange phenomena. In fact, he was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research, which studied paranormal events. The events at Aberfan led him to become interested in clairvoyance . It occurred to him that it might be a good idea to collect testimonies of premonitions of a tragedy .
To do this, he asked Peter Fairley, the science correspondent for the London Evening Standard , to place an advertisement asking for stories about the matter. He received 76 replies in all. Several of them included details that the press did not publish. Among these were messages from Kathleen Lorna Middleton and Alan Hencher, two of the people who would become the pillars of his studies.
This was the beginning of the British agency, an institution that would study the prediction of catastrophes. Barker believed that clairvoyance was perhaps more common than previously thought and that many people were capable of predicting disasters; a kind of “human sensors”.
A strange ending
During the following months, some truly remarkable predictions were made, especially by Middleton and Hencher . After a while, 18 premonitions seemed to come true, and 12 of them came from these two people. Among the most notable cases were those of a plane crash and a train tragedy.
Middleton’s prediction of Robert Kennedy’s death was particularly striking, as he began warning almost a month before it happened. However, the agency was faced with a contradiction: if a catastrophe was predicted and announced, it would be difficult for it to happen, as efforts would be redoubled to prevent it from happening.
Two years after opening the British Premonition Agency, John Barker received a disturbing message from Alan Hencher: he had to be careful, his life was in danger. The astonishing thing is that Middleton, unaware of this, also called him to warn him of something similar. On August 18, 1968, Barker suffered a stroke and died. For days he had been more stressed than usual by the warnings of the psychics. Did he die “of fear”? We will hardly know.