On precognition

 Warnings of air raids

Teddy Pugh of Birmingham wrote that “During the war, when the German bombing raids were going on, we had a black mongrel dog who used to go to our back door and bark to go out, and you could bet that around ten minutes later the sirens would sound for an air raid. We got so used to the dog doing it that I would run up and down both sides of the street and knock on all the doors to warn of an impending raid. She was never wrong once.”

I have received thirty-five other accounts of dogs that gave warnings of air raids before the sirens sounded the official alarm. Some of them let their owners know by whining, some barked, some hid, and others led the way to the air-raid shelter or cellar where the family took refuge. British dogs gave warnings of German air raids during the Second World War, and German dogs gave warnings of British air raids.

Some dogs were said to alert their owners just a few minutes before the sirens went off, but most reacted ten to thirty minutes beforehand. In three cases the dogs gave their warnings more than an hour in advance.

One little dog called Dee sometimes stayed curled up in her basket when the siren went off, and invariably no planes came over. Sometimes when there was no warning siren, she would become very agitated and urge everyone to take cover, and sure enough a raid would take place. 25 As a bonus, some families were able to get back to bed before the all clear sounded: “The dog would suddenly get up, leave the shelter, and settle into its basket with a contented sigh. Five minutes later the all clear would sound.” 26

During the Second World War, cats also anticipated bombing attacks,  usually by showing obvious signs of agitation or by hiding. Some were said to give warning more than an hour in advance. Birds too seemed to know when bombers were on their way: seagulls flew off, cock pheasants gave warning calls, and ducks and geese raised the alarm. Here is how a German parrot did it, according to Dagmar Kessel:

During the wartime year of 1943 I stayed with acquaintances in Leipzig. They had an old parrot. Suddenly, about 9:00 P.M., it was extremely upset in its cage, lifted its left wing and called, “Da oben! Da oben!” (“Up there!”) It even looked up and nobody could get it quiet. I was surprised and asked my hosts what all this meant. “He always does this before an air alert,” the lady said, “usually two hours in advance.” That same night the Tommies really came. They destroyed the Crystal Palace.

Warnings given by German pigeons were a source of trouble to an unfortunate Austrian sculptor, Heinz Peteri, who was arrested during the war for his “undiplomatic” words and deported to Bochum, in the Ruhr, to defuse unexploded bombs. He lived in a small room in the tower of the police administration building. From his window he used to watch the pigeons that lived on the roofs, and he noticed that “the birds often flew away suddenly, all of them, and half an hour later (at the most) the bombers came. Afterward the birds came back. This was repeated many times.” He used this knowledge to warn his comrades and superiors of impending raids, and his predictions repeatedly proved to be accurate. When the Gestapo heard about it, he was arrested once again under suspicion of being a spy “in contact with the enemy.” 27During the Kosovo Conflict in 1999, when NATO was bombing Serbia, the animals in Belgrade Zoo provided an early warning about half an hour before the bombs fell. “It’s one of the strangest and most disturbing concerts you can hear anywhere,” said Vuk Bojovic, the director of the zoo. “It builds up in intensity as the planes approach … and when the bombs start falling it’s like a choir of the insane. Peacocks screaming, wolves howling, dogs barking, chimpanzees rattling their cages.” 28How did all these animals know when air raids were imminent? The most obvious possibility is that they heard the enemy planes when they  were still too far away for humans to hear. But a few moments’ reflection shows that this is not a very plausible suggestion, for at least four reasons. First, as we have seen, the hearing of dogs and other domestic animals is not much more sensitive than our own, although dogs can hear higher-pitched sounds than we can. The bombers used in the Second World War flew at about 250 miles per hour when loaded; hence an animal that responded half an hour before an air raid would have to have heard them when they were about 125 miles away. Some animals were said to respond even earlier, when the bombers would have been more than 200 miles away. Even animals that responded only a few minutes before the sirens went off would have to have heard the planes when they were more than 30 miles away, assuming that the siren gave about five minutes’ warning. It is very unlikely that they could have heard the enemy aircraft at such distances.

Second, hearing distant sounds depends on the wind direction, and there is no evidence that the regular warnings given by animals occurred only when the enemy aircraft were upwind. Rather, the evidence suggests that animal warnings were remarkably reliable and not dependent on the wind direction. Moreover, since the prevailing winds in Britain are southwesterly and the German bombers approached from the east, in most raids they would not have been upwind, and hence the sounds would have been blown away from, rather than toward, the animals that sensed their approach.

Third, there were many other aircraft in the skies, including the country’s own bombers heading toward enemy territory. Apparently the animals did not warn of the approach of friendly bombers. Therefore the hearing theory would require the animals to distinguish between the sounds of different kinds of bombers at great distances, irrespective of the wind direction. There is no evidence that this is possible.

Finally, during the last year of the Second World War, the Germans were firing supersonic V2 rockets at London. These missiles were launched from Holland and headed upward at about 45 degrees. Their engines cut out after a minute or so, and they followed a ballistic trajectory, reaching speeds of more than 2,000 miles per hour as they plunged downward, arriving unseen and unheard. They took only five minutes to reach their targets in England, some 200 miles away, carrying a ton  of high explosives. 29 They were particularly terrifying because their explosion was preceded by no warning and they could strike anywhere in southeast England at any time of day or night.

Dr. Roy Willis, who was seventeen at the time, was living in Essex, just east of London. “I noticed that our dog [a German Shepherd–Norwegian Elkhound cross] was seemingly able to sense the imminent arrival of a V2 rocket. The dog, called Smoke, would go to the window and stare out, hackles raised, as if in anger and fear. After about two minutes, during which time he remained in the same aggressive posture at the window, I would hear the ominous crump of an exploded rocket.” At least one other dog owner had a very similar experience, his animal reacting shortly before the explosions. Assuming that these accounts are reliable, and I have no reason to doubt that they are, the dogs could not have heard these missiles coming, however acute their hearing, precisely because they were both silent and supersonic.

If animals were not anticipating air raids by hearing the approaching bombers or rockets, how did they know the attacks were coming?

No explanation is possible in terms of electrical charges in the earth and the atmosphere, such as those that may serve as warning signs before earthquakes. As far as I can see, only two possibilities remain: telepathy and precognition.

Telepathy. The animals picked up influences telepathically from people or animals along the flight path of the bombers. A wave of alertness and alarm spread through the human and animal populations as the bombers flew by, and this alarm spread telepathically. The trouble is that this telepathic alerting might have taken place in all directions and hence caused false alarms in places to which the planes were not flying.

Alternatively the animals might have picked up the hostile intentions of the German bomber crews as they moved toward their targets with their attention focused on the places they were planning to attack.

These possibilities are obviously highly speculative, and although telepathy may account for some of the available facts, it cannot account for all of them. In particular, no telepathy theory could explain how dogs could anticipate the arrival of the supersonic V2 missiles: no one was aware of their flight path, and they were unmanned. Even  the Germans who launched them did not know exactly where they would land.

Precognition. Perhaps the animals somehow intuited what was going to happen in the near future, or at least had an apprehension that something was going to happen, without knowing what. This theory would account for the dogs that anticipated the V2 attacks, as well as many other premonitions. One trouble here is that this is a very vague theory. Another is that it raises terrible logical problems and mind-twisting paradoxes, since it implies that something in the future can have an effect backward in time. There is a further logical problem with precognition. It is not possible to know if a precognition is valid until the foreseen event has actually happened. Only in retrospect can precognition be identified as such.

I would prefer to avoid this theory, if possible. I find telepathy easier to accept than precognition. And the two V2 cases are the only evidence so far that seem to necessitate a theory of this kind. However, we must now turn to the many other examples that make the idea of precognition or presentiment almost unavoidable.

Other kinds of premonitions

In addition to all these examples of warnings that animals gave before air raids, earthquakes, avalanches, and tsunamis, I have received dozens of accounts of apprehensive behavior prior to accidents, catastrophes, and danger.

Some dogs refused to walk along paths when shortly afterward branches or trees fell where the person and the dog would have been. Other dogs, horses, and cats delayed or prevented their owners from setting off on foot or by car when road accidents happened soon afterward, in which they might well have been injured or killed. When one dog adamantly refused to enter a pedestrian underpass, the person with it had no option but to turn back: “We had barely turned around when there was a great bang and the concrete ceiling came down!” Another dog prevented its owner from getting onto a boat that exploded shortly afterward. Another dog pulled its owner away from the roadside just  before a van hurtled around the corner and crashed into the place they would have been.

In some of these cases, it is possible, though implausible, that the animals heard something unusual that caused their alarm. In others that is impossible, because the animal’s apprehension began long before it could possibly have heard anything that might have given any clue. For example, a woman who was driving with her cat on the back seat of the car, where it normally slept, found that the animal became more and more disturbed. She tried to calm it, but it eventually jumped into the front seat, then went so far as to touch her arm and to slightly bite the hand that held the steering wheel. “So I finally stopped,” Adele Holzer reported. “Right at that moment a big tree fell onto the road a few meters in front of the car. Had I continued as before, it would have fallen on the car.”

Some of the dangers to which animals alert people are silent, so hearing could have played no part in arousing their apprehension. An Austrian couple were traveling along a steep mountain road with rocks on one side and an abyss on the other when their Poodle, Susi, suddenly started to howl. Friedel Ehlenbeck wrote that “She even put her paws on my husband’s shoulders to stop him. My attempts to keep her quiet failed. Her behavior became mad. Startled, my husband slowed down, and when we turned around the next bend we were shocked: the road was gone. Only a few meters in front of us there was a precipice. A landslide had taken the road with it. Susi had saved our lives.”

In most cases I have heard of, the behavior of the animals helped protect their people from danger. But not everyone heeded the warnings the animals tried to give. This report came from Elizabeth Powell of Powys, Wales:

One morning my dog, Toby, tried to stop me going out of the front door. He barged against me, leaned on the door, jumped up at me, and pushed me. He is normally a quiet, loving dog and knows my routine; I would have been back within four hours. I had to lock him in the kitchen and left him howling, something he has never done before or since. I set off at 7:30 A.M. and by 9:40 A.M. I was involved in a horrific traffic accident resulting in a fractured neck and right arm, and many other injuries. When I was in hospital an image of Toby kept  appearing to me through the drugs, and I could feel his anguish. I sent a mental “Okay, I’ll be back soon” and the images disappeared.… My husband said Toby was very agitated for twenty-four hours and then suddenly became quiet. I am slowly recovering. In the future I’ll listen to Toby.

Sometimes the animal’s reactions are not specific warnings about which the person can do anything, but seem to be presentiments of something alarming about to happen. In 1992, Natalie Polinario was living in North London near Staples Corner, where IRA terrorists detonated a large bomb on April 11. Her white German Shepherd, Foxy, was outside in the garden. “I was lying on the bed watching TV. About one minute or two minutes before the bomb went off she came in running and literally crying, in a really weird mood. She got on the bed and just lay there next to me, really stiff as if something had really scared her, but there was nothing out there. And then I heard this almighty bang, which was the bomb at Staples Corner. The minute it went off she was fine again. She has never done anything like it since then, or before.”

One night Kerry Greenwood of Footscray, Australia, was suddenly awakened by her cats at 3:05 A.M. “They were terrified, clawing to get under any cover, and shivering and crying. We got up to look around for an invading predator or gas leak, but the house was quiet, so we went back to bed to hug the cats and try to get back to sleep. The cats would not settle but kept burrowing and scratching. They had never done this before or since. At 3:35 A.M. a bomb went off in the Serbian travel agency at the end of the street and blew a huge crater in the road, sending a shock wave that belted through the house, shook all the windows, and scared the hell out of all of us. We got up to look at the fire trucks coming and were so shaken that we sat for the rest of the night in the kitchen.… The cats, however, went calmly to sleep as though nothing had happened. I admit I found this comforting; clearly the bomber had done his stuff.”

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some of these warnings must indeed have been precognitive. What other explanation could there be? And if premonitions of disasters, accidents, and air raids can be precognitive, then so might some premonitions of storms and earthquakes, avalanches, and tsunamis, even though others might be explicable in terms  of a sensitivity to electrical changes or other physical causes. Some of the forewarnings of epileptic fits, comas, and sudden deaths discussed in the previous chapter might also include an element of precognition.

Human precognition

All around the world we find people who believe in the ability of some human beings to foresee the future. Shamans, seers, prophets, oracles, or soothsayers are found in most, if not all, traditional societies, and even in modern industrial societies, fortune-tellers and clairvoyants still flourish. No doubt some of them are fraudulent. But there are far too many convincing examples of human premonition to dismiss this entire area of experience out of hand.

Many people who are not professional fortune-tellers have had premonitions that have turned out to be true, and there are many stories of people whose lives have been saved by dreams, presentiments, or forebodings that led them not to take planes that later crashed and to avoid places that would have exposed them to grave but otherwise unexpected dangers. Sometimes they do not or cannot act on these premonitions, either because they are not specific enough or because they do not take them seriously. But sometimes they do.

These different reactions were illustrated in a dramatic way prior to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. A week before he was shot in the Ford Theater in Washington, he told his wife and his friend Ward H. Lamon of a dream in which he heard sounds of mourning in the White House. Anxious to discover the cause, he went from room to room until in the East Room, with “sickening surprise” he saw a catafalque on which rested a corpse in funeral vestments, guarded by soldiers and surrounded by a throng of mournful people. As the face of the corpse was covered, he asked who it was. “The president,” he was told, who had been killed by an assassin. 30

Less well known is the fact that General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, were supposed to accompany President Lincoln to the theater and sit in his box. That morning Mrs. Grant felt a great sense of urgency that she, her husband, and their child should leave Washington and return to their home in New Jersey. The general could not leave because he had  appointments throughout the day, but as Mrs. Grant’s sense of urgency increased, she kept sending him messages begging him to leave. So great was her insistence that he finally agreed to go with her, even though they were scheduled to accompany the president to the theater. When they reached Philadelphia, they heard about the assassination, and later they learned that they were on the assassin’s list of intended victims. 31Of course, not all premonitions are as dramatic as this, nor do they necessarily involve danger. And many pass unnoticed, especially when they occur in dreams. Precognitive dreams are surprisingly common. A classic book on this subject, An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne, contains simple instructions for investigating one’s own dreams. 32

From: Dogs that know when their owners are coming home : and other unexplained powers of animals / Rupert Sheldrake