British Premonitions Bureau

And then you can feel guilty about not letting somebody know, even though it's, it's not obvious who you'd, who you would tell, and there's als- a danger in it too, because then they can think you caused it.

This is, uh, I don't know if you know about the Premonitions Bureau.

I'm sure you do.

Um, you know, where they, they tried to catalog, you know, specifically with psychiatric patients who often were wrong, but if they are right one time, right, that's enormously significant.

Yeah.

I mean, we had a very famous thing here, I don't know if you've heard of it, called the Premonitions Bureau.

Sounds familiar.

I think we talked about it on a previous episode.

... disaster whose, uh, anniversary is in the next couple of days.

60 bloody years, crikey.

And so he decided that they, alongside with the London Evening Standard, they were gonna open a Premonitions Bureau and invite members of the general public to write in, and they would gauge them.

And over the course of the two years that the bureau was running, this has got a twist in the tale, there were two or three regular contributors who seemed to be right more than they were wrong, in general.

He was a psychiatrist who specialized in treating fear, panic, and psychosis.

He also founded an organization called the British Premonitions Bureau.

Like the name suggests, the Premonitions Bureau researched and documented people's premonitions.

Well, after the Aberfan disaster, Dr. Barker caught wind that some people had actually predicted the tragedy.

Barker was a highly respected doctor among his peers at this time, and he was also a member of Britain's Society for Psychical Research, and this is an organization that was created to understand things that are often labeled as psychic or paranormal.

So feeling very inspired by the vague evidence of premonitions before massive disasters, John Barker formed the British Premonitions Bureau in 1966.

Its goal was to collect as many reports as possible and also see if any premonitions could predict any more future events.

But there's going to be a paradox here because with this information, they planned on preventing future disasters from occurring, and they even set up an alert system.

He was a psychiatrist who specialized in treating fear, panic, and psychosis.

He also founded an organization called the British Premonitions Bureau.

Like the name suggests, the Premonitions Bureau researched and documented people's premonitions.

Well, after the Aberfan disaster, Dr. Barker caught wind that some people had actually predicted the tragedy.