The Spectral Voyager Episode 2: The Premonitions Bureau (sample)
Are you ready to be premonition pilled? In the second episode of the Spectral Voyager, we take you on a journey through several devastating disasters - Aberfan, 9/11, the Titanic, plane crashes - and the people that seemed to dream of them before they happened. In fact, there were so many cases of these dreams and visions that a national bureau was created in the U.K. to catalog them, with a tragic ending. We also interview science writer, author, and precog expert Dr. Eric Wargo about the possible scientific explanations of the phenomena. So join Jake and Brad to find out if we can dream the future… or if it’s all just coincidence and hindsight bias.
To listen to the full episode, and gain access to our other mini-series such as Manclan and Trickle Down, you can subscribe for just five bucks a month at: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
The Spectral Voyager theme composed by Nick Sena.
Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky.
Editing by Corey Klotz.
QAA’s website: http://qanonanonymous.com
Sources: Time Loops by Eric Wargo (@thenightshirt on twitter), The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight, Changed in a Flash by Jeffrey Kripal.
All horrific disasters with an unexplainable connection.
People seem to have foretold them before they happened, through dreams and creative acts.
This should be impossible.
It defies logic and credulity.
But if you think long enough...
You've probably had a premonition of some kind too.
From the mundane, sensing someone is about to call before they do, to the profound, of knowing the exact moment when a loved one has been injured or died.
So for the next hour, just imagine, what if memories can work in reverse, and we can dream the future?
Or it's, you know, all just a coincidence, statistical insignificance, and hindsight bias.
Behind the cracking wallpaper of our reality, there exists another world that science has yet to explain.
In here dwell monsters and madness, and potentially, the answers to our most important questions.
In this world, gravity intensifies, time slows down, and your heart rate quickens.
I'm Jake Rakitansky.
And I'm Brad Abrahams.
and you're listening to the Spectral Voyager.
I have become Brad.
People often ask me, how did I become this way?
No matter how far I journeyed back into the soft, mucilaginous recesses of my mind, I could never pinpoint where my initiation began.
But when doing research for this episode, something came to me like a long forgotten dream, just remembered.
And now, I have a theory.
At an impressionable young age, a series of commercials were on the air, and each time they played, my then-uncorrupted mind would light up with wonder.
Chicago.
A man is about to get on a routine flight.
Suddenly, he pauses.
He doesn't know why, but he's got to walk away.
An hour later, the plane goes down in flames.
It's dismissed as chance.
Britain.
A woman has a sudden image of a black mountain that's moving, with children trapped underneath it.
Two hours later, a Welsh schoolhouse is buried in an avalanche of coal slag.
It's dismissed as coincidence.
Stonehenge.
A visitor fashions a wire antenna in the shape of an ancient Egyptian symbol.
He points it at the stones, and a surge of power rushes into his arm, knocking him unconscious.
Was it all in his mind, or was it much more than that?
Now, Timelife Books announces an important new library, Mysteries of the Unknown, a series that explores the most controversial phenomena of our time and tells you everything that can be known.
Wow.
So I pleaded with my parents to order just a few of the books from the 33 volumes of the series, and they had titles like Mystic Places, Alien Encounters.
Mysterious Lands and Peoples.
Secrets of the Alchemists.
Utopian Visions.
I mean, this is cool, though.
The art is awesome on the- I mean, this is far better than what I did, which was not tell my parents at all and secretly subscribe to a CD mailing list in the back of the magazine so that I could get the Offspring CD, which had some bad language in it.
This seems far more healthy.
Yeah.
There was one volume and subject that most enraptured me, though.
Psychic powers.
It was my first exposure to the field of parapsychology and the phenomena of ESP, precognition, telepathy, and remote viewing.
This has turned into a lifelong hobby reading about these subjects, as well as having a few confounding experiences of my own.
So although I usually find myself playing the hardline skeptic when it comes to Wu, I soften a little to entertain the subject of psychic phenomena, especially when Nietzsche, Nabokov, Vonnegut, and Kipling have all had their own paradigm-shifting psychic experiences.
Or perhaps I should be taking a page from Freud, who said, My acceptance of telepathy is my own affair, like my Jewishness and my passion for smoking.
But what about you, Jake?
Where's precognition on your scale of Wu?
Oh, whether I believe in clairvoyance?
Yeah.
100%.
All right then.
100%.
I think my thing is that I allow space for the idea that there's some scientific thing to it that we just kind of haven't figured out yet.
Like our thoughts are sort of able to, you know, that there's a certain radio frequency essentially that human thought travels on and that other human beings are sort of able to pick it up.
Yeah.
So I'm sort of in that kind of camp.
I'm not a big future predictor.
You know, at least in my studies, a lot of people who have called themselves prophets are wrong, especially on Twitter.
So, you know, I'm a little bit sort of more hesitant to go any further than the occasional, you know, wire cross or cell phone intuition.
So, Professor Jeffrey Kripal, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Rice University, and who also appeared in my documentary, Love and Saucers, has talked about the four responses, or stages, we may go through when confronted by impossible phenomena, or a mystical experience.
As a skeptical lot, I think these may be helpful for us for the next hour.
The Hoax First, some of us will label such stories as made-up, fictitious, or simply fraudulent.
The Honest Misperception Second, Some of us will accept the honesty of the experiencer's personal narrative, but think that such a story is a complex construction of some kind of cognitive dysfunction, neurological blip, or delusion.
The distraction.
Third, when the stratagems of the hoax and the honest misperception fail us, some of us will let the story stand, but we will not allow ourselves to think about them too much, much less to follow their implications down the proverbial rabbit hole.
That's definitely me.
I constantly have to stop myself from going.
And actually, I've worked on this in therapy to keep my brain from going, what does this mean?
What does this tell me about the world?
What does this tell me about myself?
And I think that applies to a lot of people in the creative field, people who have vivid imaginations.
You know, your imagination can allow you to do all of these incredible things and work in particular fields, but it can also be a curse in some ways.
The guiding sign.
Fourth, and finally, when the strategies of the hoax, the honest misperception, and the distraction fail, some will accept particular narratives as more or less accurate and we will experience something between existential marvel and intellectual fascination.
We will hear them as encouragement to think and imagine anew.
With that, let us take you deeper into the ether on a journey through some of the most memorable disasters that may have been foretold, the people who dreamt them, and the Bureau that wanted to stop them from happening.
A quick mention of my sources, the Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight, Time Loops by Eric Wargo, and the Selected Writings of Jeffrey Kripal.
Listeners, are you ready to be Premonition Pilled?
And I just know there's gonna, there's a handful of people out there who are going, "No."
The Great Death.
1966 was an eventful year.
Both Batman and Star Trek aired for the first time.
LSD was made illegal, the Department of Transportation was created, the miniskirt invented, and NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 launched.
But over the Atlantic, on October 21st, the UK was about to experience its defining moment of the year.
It was 9am, and the day was about to begin for students, aged 7 to 11, and teachers at Pantclist Junior High School.
The school was in the center of Aberfan, a village in the south of Wales.
Nearly all of the town's 5,000 inhabitants were employed by its coal industry, which loomed large both in the town's psyche and its geography.
A literal mountain of coal waste jutted skyward on the hills above the village.
There were seven mounds of this waste, some over 100 feet high.
Coal tip number seven, which had been piled 111 feet high over the previous eight years, was starting to exhibit worrying behavior.
It began to sink and then rise up again.
The mine workers did not like what they were seeing.
A pile of coal isn't supposed to do that.
Suddenly, a jet of thick black liquid shot out from the top, collapsing the mountain's tip and sending a monstrous inky black tidal wave down the hill towards the unsuspecting village.
No one could be warned as the only working telephone line up there had been previously stolen.
The wave was moving up to 20 miles an hour and was 30 feet high.
The sound was said to be of a low-flying jet engine.
By 9.10, the attendance at the junior school was taken, and the children were all settled in to spell, draw, read, and play.
The secondary school next door got started a bit later, with the tweens and teens starting to file in.
Morning announcements over the PA.
By 9.15, both schools were crushed by the 30-foot wave of debris.
The school's roofs just barely poked up from underneath it.
Of the 144 people that died in Aberfan that day, 116 of them were children.
The majority were between 7 and 10 years old.
A boy who was late to class that day saw three of his friends crushed while sitting on a wall beside the school.
A dead girl was found holding an apple.
A boy holding a four-pence coin.
Most of the bodies were badly disfigured.
The dead were laid out by the church, while parents lined up to identify their children.
Most of those waiting were fathers who had likely piled up the same coal that had just buried their children alive.
You have been listening to a sample from The Spectral Voyager, a new miniseries from the folks at QAA, where we explore true tales from the edge of reality.
To listen to the full episode and gain access to our other miniseries, such as Man Clan and Trickle Down, you can subscribe for just five bucks a month at patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous.
