Portents & Premonitions

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Anonymous

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To all:

History is filled with tales of great events or calamities being attended by preceding, supernatural type, warnings.

It is said that. before Lincoln's death, strange weeping was heard. Lincoln, himself, supposedly foresaw his own death.

The sinking of the Titanic was, presumably, presaged by a book about a giant liner, The Titan, sinking after hitting an iceberg.

In one case, a woman, drowsing on the beach, is said to have written that President Kennedy was going to be shot.

George Washington, it is said, even foresaw the Civil War, in a vision.

Historic signs of great tragedies have included strange voices, blood weeping from the walls, and wild animals in the streets. Dreams seem a very common form of portent, at least these days.

Yet it is not certain that premonitions or portents for many significant events have been recorded. Were there, for example, portents preceding the Chicago Fire, or the San Francisco Earthquake of 1908? Was anyone warned, ahead of time, for example, of the attack on Pearl Harbor? Were the events of September 11, 2001 preceded by any kind of sinister supernatural events?

It might be interesting to note to what degree various important events were presaged by events beyond the normal.

It might also be worth considering establishing a kind of premonition or portent clearinghouse, whereby possible supernatural warnings can be assembled, ahead of time, and the threats, possibly even addressed in time!



Julian Penrod
 
julianpenrod said:
George Washington, it is said, even foresaw the Civil War, in a vision.
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Not to be a spoilsport, but I'd imagine that anyone helping to found a nation is going to have nightmares about civil war, etc, the moreso since the war grew out of sectional tensions present at the founding of the nation.

Was anyone warned, ahead of time, for example, of the attack on Pearl Harbor?
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IIRC, Frank Edwards claimed in one of his books that there was a chalk message 'Remember Pearl Harbor' written on a sidewalk outside a school somewhere near Indianapolis Dec 7, 1940. Edwards, while enormously entertaining, was never scrupulous about researching his facts, though.
 
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i remember a (very UL-ish) news story aboput a boy somewhere in america saying to his teacher <WW III is beginning, and america will lose>, something like that, on 10 september 2001...
 
TBN Christian Extremists Forsee The End. Is It Rapture Ruptu

If you really want to have a constant, dysentry-like, stream of portentious omenousity pouring forth upon you, I can direct you toward the foaming outpourings of:Hal Lindsey: Oracle. Extreme Rapture Rupture.

Or, slightly less, extreme rightwing, but more bonkers, there's: Jack van Impe Ministries. Extremely Rapturous Rupturing, "Oh dear me, Yes!"

Both these, and many more drop of a hat portent and Rapturous doom merchants can be seen on: Trinity Broadcasting Network

They all claim to be foretelling Armageddon and some of them claim to have the ear of the present US President, who they adore. They're quite enthusiastic about the End of The World and claim that the Rest of It is the cause of all God and the USA's problems, especially, the World of Islam, the European Union, China and the United Nations.

Warning: Enter these sites at your own risk. Remember to check the contents of your pockets and to count that you still have all your fingers, before leaving.
 
ginoide said:
i remember a (very UL-ish) news story aboput a boy somewhere in america saying to his teacher <WW III is beginning, and america will lose>, something like that, on 10 september 2001...
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That was in FT. The boy got detained by the FBI afterwards, I think, and was a muslim so that REALLY got them interested... no idea what happened, these stories rarely seem to have followups :(
 
taras said:
That was in FT. The boy got detained by the FBI afterwards, I think, and was a muslim so that REALLY got them interested... no idea what happened, these stories rarely seem to have followups :(
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Which just goes to show, kids should never repeat things in school, that they've overheard their parent saying in the privacy of their own homes!

Something a lot of kids learnt in Germany and Europe, a few decades back. ;)
 
Apparently, there were portents of the SF earthquake, which were made in 1906.
 
taras said:
That was in FT. The boy got detained by the FBI afterwards, I think, and was a muslim so that REALLY got them interested... no idea what happened, these stories rarely seem to have followups :(
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Probably released when they realized they weren't goign to get anything out fo him. Many of these stories alck follow-ups becasue they aren't interesting.

Boy stolen by FBI- Big News
Boy released to custody of parents, all parties involved happy- Page 6
 
Not quite on the scale of the things being talked about, but I'm sure lots of folk on this board can help me with this. I have heard (but have so few details I won't even google it) about a child in a Welsh village in the 60's (?) having a precognizant dream about dying in mining-related accident that wiped out most of his/her town shortly thereafter. Anybody? UL?
 
Yes, Lopaka, I've heard that one before. The incident in questiojn was the Aberfan disaster, where an mine spoil heap 'avalanched' onto a school, killing and injuring many children.

Carole
 
Try googling on Aberfan - a mine spoil tip collapsed after heavy rain, I think, and buried the village school.

IIRC, there were several accounts of poeple who'd had premonitions about it.
 
Two local tragedies share premonitions


By PETE BOSAK, THE TRIBUNE-DEMOCRAT
January 18, 2004



Dawn Golby had a chilling premonition.

Somehow, she knew her son was dead.

“Something was wrong,” she recalled. “I just didn’t know what.”
Golby returned home from work on Jan. 8 and logged onto her computer. She learned a military helicopter had crashed on a medical mission in Iraq.

“And I knew,” the 49-year-old Richland Township woman said.
Her premonition proved true: A telephone call to her daughter-in-law in Colorado verified that her son, Spc. Christopher A. Golby, 26, was among nine GIs killed when their helicopter was downed near Fallujah.

And in November 2002, state Trooper Joseph Sepp was shot and killed in the line of duty in Ebensburg – a death he seemed to have foreseen and prepared his wife and children for life without him.

Precognition, an apparent moment when someone accurately foresees the future or knows of a far-off event they could not possibly know of, has been studied extensively by scientists to no avail, said James Matlock, managing director for Rhine Research Center in Durham, N.C.

The center is an institute for the scientific study of parapsychological phenomena.

“It’s possible it is some sort of coincidence,” Matlock said. “There is no good explanation for how it happens.”

Sepp was shot and killed by a drunken gunman who led police on a miles-long pursuit, crashed his Jeep in Ebensburg and leapt out, guns blazing.

The fallen trooper seemed to have known it would happen, his wife, Jenny, said later.

“He always brought it up,” Mrs. Sepp said during an interview a few days after her husband’s death. “He would say, ‘If I get shot on the job, you have to do this, you have to do that.’ I would tell him to shut up.”

So Sepp took his fears and prepared his wife, without her knowing it, for his untimely death.

Within the year before he died, Sepp compiled a list of bank accounts, phone numbers and other important information his wife would need if the worst ever happened. Knowing how his wife did not want to even consider the possibility, he instead gave that list to his mother.

But can people sometime accurately predict future tragedy? Or is it merely a coincidence?

The reasons are psychological, not supernatural, said Mary Berge, a licensed clinical psychologist with Alternative Community Resource Program, 131 Market St. in Johnstown.

“There is no actual physical evidence ... where there has been any statistical proof the human mind can see the future,” Berge said.
The phenomenon is more to fulfill a psychological need than a supernatural vision, she said.

“It’s an emotional, psychological need to rationalize what has happened,” Berge said. “It’s looking back and trying to give yourself some sense of control over a tragic event.”
There really is no explanation, Matlock said.

“No,” he said in a telephone interview. “There certainly is a lot of anecdotal material like that. It is interesting that a lot of these premonitions are associated with warfare or violence.

“There seems to be some human faculty that allows us to know things we shouldn’t know, especially with people we are especially close to. They’re not that unusual.

“They’re just not talked about very much,” Matlock said of premonitions.

But in many cases, people who have had premonitions of tragedy later were thankful for the vision, he said. It prepared them better to hear the news.

“From our point of view, precognition is part of human nature,” Matlock said.

©Tribune Democrat 2004
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http://www.tribune-democrat.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10828189&BRD=2332&PAG=461&dept_id=484742&rfi=6
 
I'm off to Hungary on Tuesday until April and have taken out extra insurance and will be writing a will. Not because I think I'm going to die but just in case, you know.....;)
 
escargot said:
I'm off to Hungary on Tuesday until April and have taken out extra insurance and will be writing a will. Not because I think I'm going to die but just in case, you know.....;)
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Well we are all going to miss you a lot around here. April eh? That is a looooooong trip.

My intuition tells me you are going to be just fine! :likee:
 
Have an excellent time Escargot!

Reading through the thread made me think though. It would be nice to think that people would have premonitions before every major disaster but what about all the premonitions people have that don't come true?

I once had a dream that the Pope was assasinated (he wasn't-obviously) and regularly dream about things like tornados, storms, war etc. If the Pope HAD been assasinated I would have thought my dream was a premonition and been spooked. As he WASN'T that just made it a dream. Perhaps people just get lucky sometimes? After all, your bearded gentlemen with "The End of the World is Nigh" sandwich boards are going to end up right one day...
 
Awww, thanks, Inky & Min!

I'll still be able to access the 'net, it just won't be all night.
At the moment I have the 'socks' (Xmas present laptop) on my bed and can surf at will. Won't be doing that there! :eek:
 
I think Min has hit the nail on the head with that one- if you said something every time you felt you had encountered some kind of portent you would look like a nutter. It's like the kind of co-incidence where you think of a friend and then they phone you- the only ones that get remembered are ones where the phone call happened.
 
julianpenrod said:
Were there, for example, portents preceding the Chicago Fire, or the San Francisco Earthquake of 1908?
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Could it be the portents caused the event:

Did a Comet Trigger The Great Chicago Fire?

By Irene Mona Klotz, Discovery News


March 5, 2004 — Perhaps it was not Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern that sparked the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed the downtown area and claimed 300 lives.

New research lends credence to an alternative explanation: The fire, along with less-publicized and even more deadly blazes the same night in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan, was the result of a comet fragment crashing into Earth's atmosphere.

The comet theory has been around — and most often discarded — since at least 1883, but Robert Wood, a retired McDonnell Douglas physicist, said never before has the orbital parameters of the rogue comet been taken into consideration.

The likely suspect, in Wood's eyes, is a fragment from Biela's Comet, which had been circling the sun every six years and nine months before a close encounter with Jupiter caused it to break into two large fragments in 1845. During its next passage, astronomers noted a 1.5-million mile, 15-day gap between the two pieces.

Wood said his analysis of the fragments' positions during subsequent orbits shows that Jupiter's gravity again affected their speed and trajectory, sending the smaller fragment on a path toward Earth that ended in October 1871. He presented his findings at a conference last week titled "Planetary Defense: Protecting Earth from Asteroids," held in Garden Grove, Calif.

Wood cited eyewitness reports of spontaneous ignitions, lack of smoke and "fire balloons" falling from the sky to bolster his theory. If the fire had been caused by comet debris, which is believed to have consisted of small pieces of frozen methane, acetylene or other highly combustible chemicals, it also would explain the cause of the fires blazing north of Chicago, which wiped out 2,000 people and burned 4 million acres of farm and prairie lands.

The deceased included many who showed no signs of being burned, Wood said. "This would be consistent with either the absence of oxygen or the presence of carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide above lethal levels," — a rare — but not unprecedented — situation in large forest fires.

In all, over a 24-hour period, an area of land the size of Connecticut was burned. Wood speculates the main body of the comet crashed into Lake Michigan, with peripheral fragments causing the fires in Chicago, Wisconsin and Michigan.

NASA is among a handful of agencies and organizations working on cataloging potentially threatening near-Earth asteroids and comets. What would be done about any threatening asteroids, however, remains the domain of science fiction.

"What's important about these findings," Wood said, "is that they show you people can actually get killed from something from out of space."
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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040301/comet.html
 
I had a dream that a military training flight crashed in my neighbor hood and two days later one crashed in a neighborhood in the next town. Noone was injured as the plane crashed almost perfectly between two houses. Its not unusual I would have that dream because some days they are flying so low my whole house shakes. I don't live to far from the Naval Air station.
 
I guess this response might be shot down in flames by some people, but I'm coming to believe that my girlfriend could have some kind of precognitive ability. She arrived at mine last night with a horrible feeling that something bad had either happened or was about to happen, and was concerned for her friends. Turns out they were all fine, but this morning word reaches us from Madrid of a rather horrific event.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3500452.stm

She has had other sensations of doom before but I've never pinpointed specific events that she might have foretold - until now. Now obviously she wasn't able to foretell what was going to happen, and I could be just be putting two and two together, but I thought I'd share it anyway.
 
Terrible. It could indeed be the Moors, they have always had a bee in their bonnet about Spain, but my moneys on eta.

Anyway, to turn this thread around slightly, we dont believe in portents, strange things in the sky and three headed frogs (sic) dont bother us in the slightest. But what if we lived in olden times when they `did` matter?
 
Anonymous said:
... IIRC, Frank Edwards claimed in one of his books that there was a chalk message 'Remember Pearl Harbor' written on a sidewalk outside a school somewhere near Indianapolis Dec 7, 1940. Edwards, while enormously entertaining, was never scrupulous about researching his facts, though.
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Edwards didn't invent this story. It appeared in the November 1957 issue of FATE magazine.

The town was Owensville, Indiana. The chalk message allegedly appeared in 1939 rather than 1940.

According to this webpage:

http://anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1939-remember-pearl-harbor

... the earliest known publication of this story was June 30, 1957, in a Bridgeport Connecticut newspaper, and this earliest version didn't claim the chalk message was discovered on December 7.
 
Anonymous said:
... George Washington, it is said, even foresaw the Civil War, in a vision. ...
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Anonymous said:
I seem to recall that this prophecy was concerned with an invasion from europe, with a major land war across america or so... I'll try and find a link somewhere.
Edit: A transcription of the text: http://teamfu.freeshell.org/grant/xfactor/washington.shtml
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The premonition of internal strife and war among Americans is one of the components of the apocryphal Washington's Vision tale, which didn't surface until 1859 (on the eve of the Civil War). See:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/george-washingtons-vision/
 
Jerry_B said:
Apparently, there were portents of the SF earthquake, which were made in 1906.
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The most commonly cited story about predicting the 1906 earthquake concerns Ellen G. White (one of the founders of Seventh Day Adventism). Even though Ms. White mentioned earthquakes up to 3 years prior to the quake disaster she didn't publish any of her possible premonitions until after the event (in one case years later), and she would write an apparent denial concerning one of her statements appearing to predict the event. See:

https://www.nonegw.org/sanfran.shtml
 
CALGACUS03 said:
The article (which is well written and quite interesting (at least if you have and interest in the railways)) is here.

The comment reads:
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Re the Harrow & Wealdstone train disaster mentioned in above post, this from the Sunday People for 5 February 1978

Not all premonitions occur during sleep.
Sixty-five-year-old Miss Betty Gayler, of Vaughan Road, Harrow, Middx, had one while crossing a railway bridge.

In 1952, she was returning home from a day out with two friends. It was midnight and they were crossing the bridge at Harrow and Wealdstone station.
Miss Gayler writes: "There were very few people about at that time of night and the station seemed very ghostly.
"As we crossed... suddenly felt a terrible panic and grabbed hold of my two friends and ran.
"When they asked me what was wrong. I replied, I smell death."
Two days later, on October 8, 1952, one of the worst rail disasters in history happened at that bridge. More than 100 people died when two trains crashed in fog and a third ploughed into the wreckage.
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