Coincidence or Precognition?

Call it hunch, intuition, coincidence, foreboding, premonition, or anything else, precognition is one of the best documented, most common, and at the same time, most puzzling of mysteries.  What is particularly frustrating to investigators is that the great majority of precognitive experiences occur to perfectly normal people who had little or no interest in the supernormal or the supernatural. 

An increasing number of psychologists, psychiatrists and other qualified students of the human mind no longer are satisfied to accept coincidence as an explanation.  Nor, on the other hand, do they regard it as evidence of the supernatural.  They consider precognition to be supernormal, a phenomenon which has not as yet been fully accepted by general scientific opinion, but which they believe must have a logical explanation. 

The long and carefully detailed investigation they have been making of this phenomenon – or mystery if you prefer – began with the founding of the British Society of Physical Research in 1882.  A few years later a somewhat similar organization, the American Society for Physical Research, originated in the United States. 

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Under the leadership of Dr. George H. Hyslop, M.D.; Ph.D., former professor of logic and ethics at Columbia University, the ASPR attracted thousands of members throughout the country.  All of them have been solid citizens, psychologists, physicians, educators, ministers, industrialists and others who have shared a common interest in furthering the genuine investigation of psychic phenomena. 

There are a number of other such organizations equally respected.  One is the Menninger Foundation which is carrying out various phases of study at its headquarters in Topeka Kansas. 

Extrasensory perception, of which precognition is a facet, gained added status by research at college and universities.  Probably the first institution to become seriously interested was the Department of Psychology at Duke University where Professor William McDougall encouraged the work of the biologist-psychologists, Dr. Joseph Rhine and his wife Louisa, well known ESP authorities. 

This is the background of modern scientific research in precognition which investigators now divide into two parts.  The first is a strong premonition – it may not necessarily come as a dream—that something sinister, even tragic, may happen to an individual if he should do a certain thing or go to a specified place, perhaps at a predetermined time.  The second is this apprehensive feeling about someone else – a relative, a friend, a business associate.