Dreaming of a White Christmas

Another snippet from my PhD, this time about David Mandell (DM), a man who believed he could dream the future.

DM claimed to have frequent precognitive dreams and as an artist took to painting them down, to provide a record of his experiences. One of his most impressive claims is to have dreamt about the twin towers attack before it happened. There is evidence that he drew a picture of the twin towers (apparently collapsing) on September 11th, 1996. But is it paranormal or just normal?

Well DM had produced hundreds of drawings, although not all were specific and many were very general in nature (like ship sinking's etc). One in particular inspired some good normal explanations. Look at the picture (top of the page) drawn by DM on the 20th March, 1997. It is claimed to be a picture of Concorde crashing. The picture depicts a triangular looking aeroplane, with flames or a jet coming out from underneath the plane’s tail. At the bottom right-hand corner is a figure of a man, sat in a small triangular plane and flying a French flag.

On the 25th of July, 2000 Concorde crashed, with the loss of 113 lives, just after take-off from a French airport. At the time of the crash, Concorde was deemed one of the safest planes on record, having not had a single fatal accident since it first flew in 1969. At first glance, the Concorde example also seems compelling evidence for some kind of precognitive ability on the part of DM.

But how unlikely was Concorde's crash? Even though it had not reported a single fatal accident over its long flying history, it did report some accidents. Was it just a matter of time before Concorde would crash (if it had not been on the 25th of July would it have happened sooner or later)? Dreaming of a white christmas isn't psychic. It just requires that you wait long enough.

Secondly, an alternative event was found that seemed an even better match for the picture.

On June 3, 1973, Russia's supersonic rival to Concorde, the TU-144 (pictured), crashed at the same airport as the pilot of the Concorde which crashed, was hoping he might reach: Le Bourget. The plane was dubbed Concordski by the British and French press and it crashed killing 13. At the time of the crash, there were rumours of a botched espionage attempt by the French, mistakes by the crew, and mechanical failures.

The French eventually acknowledged that they had sent up a Mirage III jet to photograph the TU-144 in flight, without telling the Russians. The French also allegedly shortened the TU-144's demonstration flight at the last minute, and extended one by the Concorde. The crew aboard the TU-144 were forced to improvise a landing and apparently tried to do so on the wrong runway. As they went around to make another attempt, they were on a collision course with the French jet. The pilot took evasive action, which supposedly caused stalls in some or all of the engines and caused the plane to crash.

So we have one picture and two events which match it. Do we conclude the picture is a precognition of Concorde crashing or a memory of Concordski crashing? Seems to me that if you write down enough dreams and wait long enough, your dreams will seem precognitive too!