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Postcards from Your Future Self — Scientific Evidence for Precognition

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance … there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”

“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.

“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said ...

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

K urt Vonnegut frequently hinted in his fiction that he believed in some kind of psychic connection between people. It is a premise in his novel Cat’s Cradle , for instance, that we are linked to each other through networks of meaningful coincidences. When a writer on ESP phenomena named Alan Vaughan probed Vonnegut about whether these motifs sprang from anything in his own experience, the novelist volunteered an amazing, sad story of “telepathy or whatever” that occurred in 1958 and that happened to center on one of the most decisive turning points in his and his family’s life.

Vonnegut described how in the mid-morning of September 15 that year, he suddenly left his study and walked across his Massachusetts house to the kitchen, where for no reason—just a funny feeling—he placed a long-distance call to the office of his brother-in-law, James Carmalt Adams, in New Jersey. “I had never telephoned him before, had no reason to call then.” Adams wasn’t at the office, and he would never arrive. At 10:30, the first two engines and three passenger cars of a commuter train went off an open drawbridge over Newark Bay, drowning Adams and 47 other passengers.

There was a news flash over the radio about the railroad accident, without any details. I knew my brother-in-law had been on the train, though he had never taken the train before. I was on a plane within an hour, and had taken charge of his home and four children before the sun went down. My sister was a terminal cancer patient in a hospital at the time. She died the next day. My wife and I have since adopted and raised their children. ¹

Kurt was not the only Vonnegut to sense this looming upheaval in their lives—“my wife got the signals too.” He told Vaughan that starting about two weeks before the tragedy, Jane Vonnegut “kept coming up with the odd notion: ‘The refugees are coming, the refugees are coming.’” ² And indeed, adding four newly orphaned boys to their own three children must have felt to the Vonneguts like running a refugee camp. Years later, in her own memoir about the aftermath of the tragedy, Jane remembered how even “allowing for some fantastic Einsteinian time warp, that was close enough to simultaneous for me to think that something really weird had been going on here. I had not yet heard of Jung’s word synchronicity .” ³ (Put a mental asterisk by that last word. One of several ready go-tos in our culture’s grab-bag of explanations for anomalous happenings is Carl Jung’s “acausal connecting principle”; we’ll be examining that concept with a critical eye later in this book.)

Vonnegut’s out-of-nowhere urge to call his brother-in-law—and perhaps even his 1972 correspondence with Vaughan about the event—was undoubtedly in the back of his mind when he penned his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions . In that book, the death of a 108-year-old woman sparks an odd, fleeting thought in the head of a man nine miles away, whose family she had cleaned laundry for when he was a little boy:

Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.

Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dwayne: “Oh my, oh my.” ⁴

For half a century, the study of psychic experience was dominated by the concept of telepathy, the term first coined by psychologist Frederic W. H. Myers in 1882. Again, it meant a kind of communication between minds that could even, at least in a limited way, transcend time, and that manifested most often in times of crisis or trauma. The Victorian era was a time of growing cultural backlash against the reductive mechanism of Enlightenment science, which the sociologist Max Weber accused of having “disenchanted” the world and stripped human life of higher meaning and hope (Nietzsche’s “death of God,” etc.). ⁵ Among other things, the Newtonian, mechanistic, billiard-ball universe hadn’t made room for any kind of knowing that could not be explained by some measurable energy carrying information across space (e.g., as light or sound waves). Information was physical, just as mind was physical, and if it could not be explained by physical principles, it was supernatural—and thus belief in it, no matter how widespread, amounted to superstition. Myers, like many thinkers of the time, challenged this Enlightenment view, but his theory of telepathy was still very much rooted in ideas and metaphors drawn from the science and technology of his day, especially then-new advances in telecommunications (the telegraph) and physics (radiation). His work—and his brilliant, “sciencey” neologism—was a strategic effort to rescue a vast domain of common human experience, “the psychical” (or what we would now call the paranormal), from the Enlightenment’s dustbin of rejected, delegitimized human experiences. ⁶

Besides collecting accounts of spontaneous cases of psychical phenomena and studying spiritualist mediums at work, SPR researchers also conducted telepathy experiments, for instance having participants make guesses about drawings or objects being viewed and “sent” by a partner nearby or at another location. But while such experiments often yielded interesting results, the subjective way results were assessed made them fall short of the standards being established in the relatively young field of scientific psychology.

In the early 1930s, two botanists at Duke University, Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife Louisa E. Rhine, began studying psychical phenomena with a new degree of experimental rigor, initially under the guidance of psychologist William McDougall. The Rhines’ aim was to turn the study of psychical functioning, whatever it was, however it worked, into a real, quantitative science. As part of their overhaul-slash-facelift of psychical research, the Rhines renamed the field parapsychology ; and to dispel the musty taint of Victorian drawing room séances, they gave a shiny new scientific name to their object of study: extrasensory perception , or ESP. The Rhines’ initial research results were promising enough that in 1935 the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory was founded under J. B. Rhine’s leadership.

To facilitate quantification and replication, Rhine used Zener cards in his experiments—decks of 25 cards, each showing one of five different symbols: a circle, a square, a star, a plus sign, or a group of three wavy lines. A typical protocol would involve one of a pair of student participants, the “sender,” looking one by one at cards that had been drawn from shuffled decks, while another participant behind a screen or in another room would attempt to state which of the symbols had been drawn. (These are known as “forced choice” tasks—in contrast to the “free response” tasks involving drawings or verbal descriptions.) It was quickly discovered that some of the best test subjects performed just as well at “card guessing” when the target cards had not already been seen by anyone else. Ever rigorous about terms, the Rhines were careful to distinguish this separate skill of clairvoyance , or seeing things that were hidden or at a distance in space, from telepathy as such, although confusion over the boundaries between these two forms of ESP persisted in parapsychology for decades and is still the norm among laypeople.

Participants in the Rhines’ lab tended to correctly guess more than the 20 percent that chance would dictate, but not by much, and participants’ scores tended to drop as they became bored with the tasks—a widely seen phenomenon in parapsychology experiments known as the “decline effect.” But over time, and after hundreds of experiments with large numbers of subjects, the support for telepathy and clairvoyance became substantial, at least statistically speaking. Nowadays we would say that the significance was high, while the effect size was low—an important distinction in all experimental research.

Initially it did not occur to the Rhines to study precognition—for instance by staggering the “sender’s” looking at the card and the “receiver’s” response in time. The mental model of thoughts being transmitted through space implied the same sort of simultaneity that would govern communication by telegraph or radio. Nevertheless, the Rhines and other researchers studying telepathy and clairvoyance found that participants in their experiments were sometimes able to guess cards or other targets before they were selected, without any apparent possibility of the subject predicting the result through ordinary inference. In this way, precognition emerged as a potentially separate, even more causally outrageous, third member of the ESP trinity. ⁷

An Anomalous Anomaly

A serendipitous early experimental display of seeming precognition occurred in the context of a series of experiments conducted in 1939 by an English psychologist named Whately Carington. Carington wished to depart from the boring Zener card tasks that were yielding significant but unexciting results in the Rhines’ protocols. Instead he reverted to an older method in telepathy research, using drawings as targets, but devised a scoring system that used independent judges and greater quantitative rigor than earlier drawing experiments had used.

On ten successive nights, Carington or his wife made a drawing of the first object named on a randomly selected page of a dictionary and hung the picture overnight on the wall of his office, which was curtained and closed to view by anyone outside. Meanwhile, from the comfort of their homes, 250 participants made drawings, on each night, of what they thought he had hung on the wall and then mailed their dated drawings to Carington. He repeated this ten-day experiment four more times, with some variations, for a total of 50 separate target drawings. Independent judges then scored the subjects’ drawings—2,200 in all—based on how closely they resembled the target on display when the response was made.

The results were perplexing. For any given trial, the number of “hits” did not rise much above chance—which would be expected by anyone skeptical of the whole enterprise. Yet surprisingly, many of the drawings did match target drawings in the larger 10-target set for a given experiment. People seemed to be making “displaced hits” either into the past or, more impossibly, into the future. ⁸

This seemed interesting, yet skeptical alarm bells will go off for any scientist, and Carington’s immediate thought was that this could simply reflect coincidence, the law of large numbers at work. It is never kosher to adjust your hypothesis after the experiment, and talking about “displaced hits” sounds like shifting the goalposts to produce a positive result. So Carington ran an additional experiment to compare with the results of the first series: He created a separate set of 50 drawings of randomly produced nouns, the same way he had created the original targets, and used this new set of drawings as a control group in a new analysis of the original results with a brand-new, naïve set of judges.

The new judges found no more matches between the subjects’ drawings in the five original experiments and any of the control drawings than would be expected by chance. These results seemed to confirm Carington’s sense that some kind of ESP had indeed been operative in the original experiments. It really seemed as though the test subjects had been affected or influenced by the set of target drawings in their particular experiment, but in some cases even before the target drawing had been made or the noun selected from the dictionary. It suggested that (as Louisa Rhine later put it in her discussion of Carington’s work) “to ESP, time is not the barrier it is in the world of sense perception.” ⁹

For Carington in 1940, when he reported on his drawing experiments in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , precognition was an anomalous anomaly, but it was not anomalous enough to challenge the prevailing model, inherited from the Victorians, that somehow information traveled through space and could somehow be received by individuals outside the ordinary sensory channels. Gradually, however, parapsychological researchers got more comfortable with the time- and mind-bending possibility that people can somehow gain information about future events, and designed experiments specifically to explore this bizarre realm of human psychology.

For instance in the 1960s, as part of a research program studying sleepers’ ability to obtain dream impressions of paintings being viewed concurrently by another subject in a separate room (“dream telepathy”), psychologist Stanley Krippner, psychiatrist Montague Ullman, and parapsychologist Charles Honorton at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City ran two experiments with an experienced psychic “sensitive” to test whether he could dream of situations based on pictures randomly generated after the dream. In one of the experiments, over a series of eight nights, the subject scored five (of the possible eight) direct hits, again according to independent judges. It was experimental support (however modest) for Dunnean dream precognition. ¹⁰

Then, beginning in the early 1970s, two laser physicists at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, conducted a government-funded research program into “remote viewing”—a less occult-sounding version of clairvoyance. In the early experiments, a psychic would be asked to describe or draw the scene at some randomly selected geographical location that was unknown to him or her, right as it was being visited by one of the experimenters; the psychic then would be taken to the site afterward as a form of feedback. On one notable early trial, star psychic subject Pat Price provided a detailed, accurate description of the Redwood City Marina several minutes before the experimenters (Puthoff and another associate) actually arrived at the location. ¹¹ Targ and Puthoff then ran a series of experiments with another remote viewer, Hella Hammid, in which the target was selected and then visited by an experimenter after the subject had completed her viewing of the site; each of her four transcribed descriptions was matched correctly against the actual target by three independent (blind) judges. ¹²

Beginning in the mid-1970s, a modified version of remote viewing that used geographical coordinates as targets was deployed as an intelligence-gathering tool, first by SRI psychics under the supervision of the CIA and later in the Defense Department–funded Star Gate program. The latter boasted a number of stunning successes including locating lost planes and providing intelligence on new weapons developments in the Soviet Union. These have now been described in several excellent histories and memoirs of the program, so I will not attempt to summarize this interesting chapter in ESP research. ¹³ But in some notable cases, Star Gate psychics were able to accurately describe an event in advance of its occurrence, again suggesting that remote viewing could be precognitive. ¹⁴ For instance during a Friday afternoon remote viewing session at Fort Meade, Maryland, in May 1987, a Star Gate remote viewer named Paul Smith elaborately described what seemed like an “accidental on purpose” missile strike on a warship somewhere near a desert country. His impressions made no sense given what he and the assigning officer knew of then-current geopolitics, and the notes from the session were filed away. The following Monday, newspaper headlines carried stories of the deadly “accidental” Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf. ¹⁵ The looseness about chronology in remote viewing was similar to what had been observed in earlier telepathy and clairvoyance experiments, leading to much speculation about how remote viewing might really work and its relationship, if any, to time. ¹⁶

Over the span of two decades, from the mid 1970s until the mid 1990s, remote viewing experiments at SRI and at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC, which took over the SRI research program in 1989) produced substantial support for psychic functioning. ¹⁷ University of California-Davis statistician Jessica Utts assessed the results of this research in a report commissioned by Congress. She argued that they greatly exceeded what would be expected by chance and could not be accounted for by methodological problems or fraud. ¹⁸ Utts has continued to defend these findings and the scientific study of ESP more generally. In her Presidential Address to the 2016 annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, Utts stated: “The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without looking at the data!” ¹⁹

Between 1976 and 1999, another laboratory, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, conducted a large research program investigating “precognitive remote perception,” involving subjects recording their impressions of geographical targets that would later be visited by an experimenter or in some cases had been visited in the past. The researchers, Brenda Dunne and PEAR Director Robert Jahn, conducted 653 trials of this type with 72 individuals. All the trials were labeled “precognitive” because the target for a given trial was always selected at random after the trial ended even if the target had already been visited. Over a third of the trials were “hits,” as determined by independent judges, and the odds against chance of this success rate were determined to be 33 million to one. Participants were equally accurate no matter how far into the future (or past) they “viewed”—ranging from hours to weeks. ²⁰

In 1989, Charles Honorton and Diane C. Ferrari conducted a meta-analysis of 309 precognition experiments that had used forced-choice (e.g., Zener card) tasks by 62 investigators, involving over 50,000 participants, that had been conducted between 1935 and 1987. ²¹ They determined that 30 percent of the studies reached statistical significance, which may not sound like much, but only five percent would be expected from chance alone. With such a large number of experiments and trials (over two million), the overall significance of the meta-analysis was astronomical: on the order of ten septillion (10 ²⁵ ) to one. For the “file drawer effect” (leaving negative results unpublished) to negate that significance, there would have had to be 46 unpublished negative studies for each published study. ²² Those who cite this study often point out that while the overall effect size was small, it was comparable to or greater than major decisive studies in medicine, such as the study leading to the recommendation of using aspirin to help prevent heart attacks. ²³

There’s a big problem, though. Despite years of searching, no researcher has ever detected any electromagnetic energy carrying ESP information across space, such as between participants in a Zener card telepathy task or between a remote viewer and some distant site or target object. Researchers in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. often used Faraday cages, which shield against most forms of electromagnetic radiation, and also conducted tests between land and submarines (since seawater also shields against such radiation) and found that psychic abilities did not diminish as a function either of distance or of shielding—suggesting strongly that whatever is happening to produce the consistent positive experimental results, there is no physical transmission of information, at least not as we ordinarily understand it. ²⁴ And as we will see later, even the evocative quantum-physical concept of entanglement , often indexed in popular books on ESP, cannot explain a transmission of information across space that would be necessary to explain telepathy or clairvoyance. As far as anyone knows, there is no meaningful quantum entanglement between separate individuals’ bodies, or between a person’s brain and a distant object or a picture in an envelope. This lack of an obvious physical mechanism has been one of the major impediments to making psi (the Rhines’ neutral term for the principle underlying ESP) believable or even palatable to scientists outside the small field of parapsychology: Despite what the data purport to show, there is no physical way it ought to be possible.

Or is there? There is one thing that is very hard to “shield” against, and that is the psychic getting some form of feedback later in his or her life. Experiments testing alleged telepathy or clairvoyance/remote viewing in laboratory contexts frequently include some form of direct feedback to the participants immediately following a session, letting them know how well they did. Even when there is no feedback given as part of the experiment, it may often be possible to find out “the right answer” later. If precognition is real, then any kind of confirmation available later could theoretically be the origin of what only seemed to have been information gained via some other, easier-to-comprehend ESP modality.

This argument has been floated cautiously again and again in the literature on ESP. ²⁵ It is essentially the conclusion reached by J. W. Dunne based on his forensic scrutiny of his own dreams, for instance. However much it seemed on the surface like clairvoyance or some other psychic modality, information that “came true” in his dreams could always be traced to his own future experiences, including reading experiences about distant events like a volcano eruption. Yet his Serialism theory, with its multiple levels of consciousness and the implication that our highest consciousness transcends the physical body, tended to distract from the more materialist conclusion his data pointed to: that precognition was, as it were, “all in his head”—his brain communicating with itself across time.

In 1974, Columbia University physicist and futurist Gerald Feinberg proposed a brain-based theory of precognition at a meeting of quantum physicists and parapsychologists in Geneva, Switzerland. If precognition exists, he argued, it is most likely a neurobiological phenomenon related to memory, but in reverse—or what he called “memory of things future.” ²⁶ He speculated, given the small effects seen in laboratory ESP research, that this faculty may be linked only to short-term memory, and thus works mainly for near-future experiences, and that in any case it could only bring information on events occurring or learned about during an individual’s lifetime. He also suggested, tentatively, that many, perhaps all, other kinds of ESP “can be explained in terms of ordinary perception combined with precognition.” ²⁷ Feinberg was a bit of a maverick, who had made waves in physics circles as well as the popular science press in the late 1960s with his hypothesized particles called tachyons , which travel faster than light and thus backward in time. ²⁸ Tachyons have never been found and are today no longer believed to exist. But as I will be arguing later, his suggestion about precognition and its relation to memory may have been highly prescient.

More recently, physicist Edwin May, who directed the ESP research at SRI after 1986 and then headed the program researching “anomalous cognition” (May’s preferred term) after it was transferred to SAIC, and psychologist Sonali Bhatt Marwaha have also argued that all forms of ESP are likely precognition misinterpreted or misidentified. ²⁹ Unlike Feinberg, they do not assume precognition is solely an “inside the head” phenomenon ³⁰ ; but reducing anomalous cognition to precognition is a bold step that may move the field of parapsychology forward by, as they say, “collaps[ing] the problem space” ³¹ of these phenomena. What has always seemed like several small piles of interesting but perhaps not overwhelming data supporting various diverse forms of psi or anomalous cognition may really be a single, impressively large pile of evidence for the much more singular, astonishing, and as I hope to show, physically plausible ability of people to access information arriving from their own future.

In Part Two, where I address the possible “nuts and bolts” of this ability, I will be making a case for precognition being something close to Feinberg’s “memory of things future”—an all-in-the-head information storage and retrieval process, but one that is not limited to short-term memory. Evidence from life and laboratory suggests it may be possible, within limits, to “premember” experiences days, months, and years in our future, albeit dimly and obliquely, in a manner not all that different from how we remember experiences in our past. The main qualitative difference would be that, unlike memory for past experiences, we have no context for recognizing information from our future, let alone interpreting or evaluating it, and thus will seldom even notice its existence. We would also have little ability to directly search our memory for things future, the way we can rummage in our mental attic for information we know we acquired earlier in life. Yet things we will learn in our future may “inform” us in many non-conscious ways, and this information may be accessed in dreams and art and tasks like ESP experiments that draw on ill-defined intuitive abilities.

It is a hypothesis that remains to be explored and tested, but it could elegantly explain not only many anecdotal claims of precognition but also many experimental findings across ESP research, such as Whately Carington’s “displaced hits.”

* * *

Again, precognition was still a new and poorly-thought-out idea in 1940, and Carington did not know how to grapple with the implications of his results, so the possibility that participants might have been precognizing later feedback or information they might acquire through normal sensory channels after the experiment never occurred to him. Nor did it occur to later commentators like Louisa Rhine. But what we now need to realize, in light of the strong evidence supporting precognition, is that whether or not Carington actually hung the drawings up on his wall may have made no difference. In fact, he might not have needed to make drawings at all, but only say he did … in his published results.

If precognition is the influence on an individual’s behavior of information that will be conventionally acquired later, including interesting future reading experiences as Dunne observed with his dreams—and by extension, even false or erroneous reading experiences taken as true —then any experiment participant who read Carington’s article, “Experiments on the Paranormal Cognition of Drawings” in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1940, would have had higher-than-chance odds of making drawings that matched some of the targets during the experiment a year before, in 1939. In his article, Carington explicitly lists the 10 targets for each of the five experiments—“bracket, buffalo, hand,” and so on. The article was effectively what May and Marwaha call an “answer book.” ³² Psychics and remote viewers may be people who intuitively know how to cheat by peeking at this book when making responses to questions they couldn’t conventionally already know the answers to.

The precognitive hypothesis could account not only for the higher-than-chance correspondence between the participants’ drawings and Carington’s drawing sets for each experiment but also for the displacement factor. Even though all five experiments were written up in the same article, the lists of ten target objects for each group were listed separately, distinctly identified by their dates, as was identifying information for each group of subjects (e.g., “students in Dr. Thouless’s lecture class” or “members of Mr. O. L. Zangwill’s Workers Educational Association psychology class,” etc.). Readers curious about how well they had done in the experiment a year earlier would have been quickly able to find their own experiment and the list of drawings. Getting the exact day right would have been unlikely, however—it would mean “pre-membering” exactly on which night you drew which picture, a tall order at a year’s remove even for memory going the usual direction. ³³

A further detail also supports this interpretation. The published article gives verbal labels for the targets (the nouns extracted randomly from the dictionary) rather than reproducing the target drawings that Carington and his wife made of them. As might be expected if participants were making their drawings informed by future reading of his article, Carington noted that the “hits” seemed as if the subject had responded to the verbal label for the object (e.g., the word “hand”) rather than to the picture:

There is virtually no indication that subjects in any sense ‘see’ and copy the original. On the contrary, everything seems to happen much more as if those who scored hits had been told, ‘Draw a Hand,’ for example, than ‘Copy this drawing of a Hand’. It is, so to say, the ‘idea’ or ‘content’, or ‘meaning’ of the original that gets over, not the form. ³⁴

Interestingly enough, this is nearly opposite the pattern reported in other early drawing experiments and in remote viewing experiments at SRI when feedback was available, which usually consisted of being taken to the site after the remote viewing session or being shown the object or picture visually. In those cases, subjects reported getting sketchy visual impressions during the task, with no sense of the identity or meaning of the object/location. ³⁵ This has always been interpreted as a function of the distinctly nonverbal, non-analytical, “right-brained” nature of ESP. ³⁶ Could it instead simply reflect the format (visual versus verbal) in which the feedback will be later received?

As an explanation for Carington’s results, the precognitive hypothesis can be only that, a hypothesis. There is at this distance no way of knowing the identity of the individual participants or what their subsequent reading habits consisted of, including which ones went on to read his article later in their lives or otherwise may have received feedback directly from Carington. “Participants’ Life and Learning Experiences Subsequent to the Experiment” are never included in published results of ESP experiments (or any psychology experiments), and it is obviously impossible to know, when you publish an article, who is destined to read the article later. Interestingly, Carington noted that a group of participants at Rhine’s lab across the Atlantic at Duke University participated in the fourth and fifth experiments and scored exceptionally well. One possibility is that, having prior interest and experience in the field of telepathy research, as well as ready access to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , this group may have been more likely than the other participants to peruse Carington’s article a year later. ³⁷

Attempts to experimentally assess the role feedback may be playing in ESP performance have produced inconsistent and unclear results. The SRI researchers considered feedback important to ESP performance, but they generally interpreted its role as psychological—the importance of feedback in learning a new skill, as well as bringing closure to a trial before moving on to the next one. ³⁸ Later, Edwin May and two colleagues conducted studies of anomalous cognition at various intensities of feedback flashed on a tachistoscope, including a complete absence of feedback in certain trials. They reported that the two most experienced participants (of four) scored well at describing or drawing unseen, randomly selected target images both when the images were flashed after the session and in trials when they did not see this feedback, leading the researchers to conclude that feedback is not necessary. ³⁹

On the other hand, Marwaha and May reported an interesting experiment in which participants remote viewed randomly selected photos of sites around the Bay Area; the photos had been taken months earlier, but feedback consisted of being taken to the actual site after the remote viewing session. Participants’ drawings and descriptions tended to match the sites as they existed when visited, in some cases differing significantly from the photographs (e.g., ponds had dried in the interim, or there was new construction). In other words, psychics’ responses conformed to the feedback, not the intended “target.” ⁴⁰ In their meta-analysis of precognition studies, Honorton and Ferrari found a difference between studies that included feedback to the participants and those that did not. The strongest results were from experiments that included participants who had done well in previous experiments, were tested individually, and received feedback after each trial. ⁴¹ Performance in precognition tasks seems to correlate with the availability of confirming information in the participant’s (near) future, yet the reason why is still debated.

The “precognition only” argument is not widely held among parapsychologists or remote viewers, who often report a subjective conviction that some part of their consciousness has left their body and is actually present at the location they are “viewing.” But the most storied and successful living remote viewer, Joseph McMoneagle, concluded that his successes were not a function of mentally traveling across space but of receiving information from his future self. McMoneagle distinguished himself (and even earned a Legion of Merit award) for a series of stunning psychic exploits during his years on the Star Gate program. For instance, in late 1979, he was shown a photograph of a large building near a body of water and asked to describe what was going on inside it; he was told only that the building was somewhere in Russia. Over the course of a few sessions, he described and drew in detail a huge double-hulled submarine being constructed inside the building. Unknown to him, the building was adjacent to the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, yet construction of a submarine at that location seemed impossible, given that there was no access to the ocean from the building. Authorities at the National Security Council who reviewed his notes and drawings thought what he had “seen” was absurd. But early the following year, his report was confirmed by satellite images showing a new deep trench that had been dug from building to the water, and a new enormous “Typhoon” class sub (the vessel featured in Tom Clancy’s novel The Hunt for Red October ) with numerous specific details matching his description. ⁴² When asked over a decade later how he thought remote viewing works, McMoneagle put it plainly:

Simply put, I think that I am sending myself information from the future. In other words, at some point in the future I will come to know the answer to whatever question has been put to me in the past. Therefore, whenever the information is passed to me in its accurate form, that is when I send it back to myself in the past. ⁴³

According to such a logic, many if not all anecdotal accounts of spontaneous “telepathy” experiences could also be precognition in disguise. Notoriously, for example, some twins report telepathic connection, being able to feel each other’s injuries or knowing of crises happening to each other even when living far away. But you cannot know for sure your twin sister broke her arm until you call her on the phone and find out about it—some physical, real-world confirmation is the only way to verify a “psychic” intuition. That phone call (or letter, or email) may in many or even all cases be the real source of that psi-acquired knowledge. (We will see later why it would be very easy to misattribute the source of anomalous insights gained via precognition.)

Whether and to what extent precognition can account for all ostensible forms of ESP—a still-open question—it is reasonable to suppose that precognition, not telepathy (or some cosmic alignment of archetypes a la Jung’s synchronicity), was at work in the Vonneguts’ case too. The butterflies that brushed Kurt’s cheek did not fly all the way from his drowning brother-in-law James Adams in New Jersey; they flew from himself in his own future, when he was informed that Adams had been on the ill-fated train—a tragic piece of news with huge implications for his own future and that of his family. They were precognitive, not telepathic, butterflies.