In chapter 8 we discussed the application of the law of truly large numbers as one possible explanation for reports of apparently precognitive dreams. Essentially, this law states that given a sufficiently large number of opportunities for a specified extremely unlikely (but not impossible) event to happen, it is virtually inevitable that it will happen. Given the extremely large number of dreams that are recalled every single night, it is inevitable that sometimes a dream will bear a striking correspondence to a future event purely on the basis of chance alone. Such coincidences, when considered in isolation, may indeed sometimes be extremely unlikely, but they should not be considered in isolation.
Chance is not the only relevant factor here. One of the most commonly reported examples of precognitive dreams is dreaming of the death of a loved one only to discover upon awakening that that person did indeed die in the night. But it is likely in many such cases that the dreamer was already aware of, say, the fact that the loved one was seriously ill before they had the dream. Their anxiety about their loved one’s health caused them to have a distressing dream of the death, but the death itself was pretty likely to happen under the circumstances.
In chapter 8 we also discussed the principle of “near enough is good enough,” and this again is relevant with respect to apparently precognitive dreams. Suppose your loved one did not die that night but a week later. You might still feel that your dream provided you with a psychic glimpse into the future. The same would apply if your loved did not actually die on the night of your dream but came very close to death, perhaps only surviving as a result of medical intervention. Furthermore, many people believe that dreams represent future events not in their literal form but in symbolic form, as indicated by several prophetic dreams reported in the Bible that required interpretation in order to be properly understood.
Although such factors may account for many apparently precognitive dreams, can they fully account for those exceptional individuals who claim to have such dreams on a regular basis? This is a very difficult question to answer. Consideration of the law of very large numbers would lead us to expect that quite a lot of people would experience one or two such dreams in their lifetimes, and even that a few individuals would experience several purely on the basis of chance alone. But if someone claims to have such dreams very regularly, it is not unreasonable to suggest that it might stretch the explanation in terms of coincidental matches beyond breaking point. The rest of this chapter describes investigations of two individuals making exactly this claim.
In 2002, I was approached by a television company making a documentary about David Mandell, a sixty-nine-year-old artist living in Sudbury Hill in northwest London, for the Extraordinary People series on Channel 5 in the United Kingdom. What was extraordinary about David was that he claimed that his dreams often foretold future events, particularly disasters and terrorist attacks. Being an artist, whenever he had one of his precognitive dreams he would try to fix an image of the dream in his mind as he woke up. He would then get up and paint or draw that image, sometimes with a few accompanying notes for clarity or extra detail. He would then wait, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years, for the events that he had dreamed about to occur. He never knew when this was likely to happen, but often, he claimed, he would see a news report in the media of the very event that he had witnessed in his dream, the level of correspondence between the dream and the event being so high that it could not possibly be explained, as far as David was concerned, as being a mere coincidence.
David was aware of one obvious objection to his claims. How could people know that he did not just paint his pictures after a newsworthy event had taken place and then simply claim that he had painted them in advance? In a charmingly amateurish attempt to rebut that accusation, David would often take his newly painted picture into his local bank and have his photograph taken as he stood in front of the date and time indicator on the wall. Of course, such photographs could have been faked even back then if David was nothing more than a clever fraudster, but for what it is worth, I felt then and continue to believe that David was totally sincere in his claims (while fully accepting that that is exactly what a clever con artist would want me to feel!).
We realized early on that it would not be possible, in the time available, to carry out any definitive test of whether David really was able to psychically foretell the future through his dreams. The main problem was that David himself had no idea when the events he had dreamed about would actually occur in the real world. So we could not simply take a sample of his dreams and then wait to see if the events occurred within some prespecified time frame. Instead, we took an indirect approach.
The most obvious nonparanormal explanation of the correspondences between David’s dreams and future events was that they were indeed simply coincidental. After all, the aftermath of one earthquake is likely to bear a resemblance to the aftermath of many other earthquakes—or, indeed, to a dream of the aftermath of an earthquake. But some of David’s dreams were much more specific than this. Perhaps his most striking prediction was the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. David had two dreams about this historic and terrible event—one of which occurred exactly five years before it happened.
Skeptics might object that what David painted in this notable picture does not correspond exactly to what happened on that unforgettable day. Although his painting is undoubtedly a depiction of the New York skyline, the tower on the left in his picture is depicted as toppling over into the tower on the right, whereas in fact both buildings collapsed vertically downward independently of each other. Furthermore, David himself had originally thought that the collapse of the buildings was the result of an earthquake, not of a terrorist attack. For all that, it is undeniable that the pictures do portray the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Although the collapse of the Twin Towers was arguably the most impressive of the predictions based on David’s dreams, several other major news events were said to be depicted among the hundreds of other paintings and sketches that David had in his collection, including the collision on the river Thames of the pleasure steamer Marchioness with the dredger Bowbelle in 1989, resulting in the deaths of fifty-one people; an earthquake in San Francisco in 1989; a mortar attack by the IRA on Heathrow Airport in 1994; the Braer oil tanker running aground off Shetland in Scotland in 1993; the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, killing thirteen people; the suicide in prison of serial killer Fred West in 1995; riots in Oxford Street, London, in 1994; fifteen people injured in a mass stabbing in Rackham’s department store in Birmingham, UK, in 1994; a train crash in Watford, UK, in 1996 that killed one person and injured sixty-nine others; the death of Princess Diana in Paris in 1997; the Dunblane massacre in Scotland in 1996, in which sixteen pupils and one teacher at a primary school were killed; and Concorde crashing into a nearby hotel in Paris shortly after takeoff in the year 2000, killing all 109 people on board as well as four people in the hotel.
The task that my PhD student Louie Savva and I set ourselves was to see if we could find other reports in the news archives that matched David’s paintings at least as well as, if not better than, those chosen by David himself.1 Forty of the pictures that David felt were good matches to subsequent real events reported in the news were selected from his collection of two hundred or so precognitive pictures. These were presented to thirty volunteers, each one accompanied by a brief description of the event that David felt he had predicted as well as a brief description of an alternative news event that we felt also matched the picture to some extent. Where available, copies of actual reports in newspapers were also provided, as David felt that some of the photographs that accompanied the articles contained details that clearly matched his pictures. Our volunteers were asked to take as long as they needed to carefully study each picture and then rate the degree to which they felt it matched the news events chosen by David as well as the alternative news events chosen by us on a 7-point scale (where 1 = no match at all and 7 = a perfect match).
To give the reader a clearer idea of what was involved in this task, here is a more detailed description of just one of the forty trials—but please note that not all of the news stories featured in this study were as horrendous as this particular example. The picture itself was not particularly gruesome. It appeared to show a hand hammering a chisel into something and a lot of red paint. The note written on the picture itself was considerably more disturbing:
Dream SATURDAY MORNING 11 MARCH 89 [dates were edited out of the pictures used in the study] of three women’s faces covered with canvas type cloth with slashed slits for the eyes in it. Then a man with a large cold chisel and hammer smashed their faces in hammering the cold chisel several times in different parts of the faces through the cloth—it was awful dream!
David believed that this dream picture was a description of a particularly vicious crime that occurred some years later. Here is the description of that crime used in our study:
10th July 1996: The three female members of the Russell family were attacked with a claw hammer in a country lane near Chillenden, near Canterbury, Kent. Only Josie, aged 9, survived. Both Josie and her mother were blindfolded and suffered severe blows to the head. Meagan, aged 6, was hit at least seven times. The words hammer and hammering appear in the text.
A copy of the report of the crime from the Times accompanied the picture.
Our suggested alternative news event, selected from the archives, was described as follows:
27th September 1986: Donna Jester (aged 37), her blind cousin Dalpha (aged 64), and Laura Lee Owens (aged 20) were discovered dead in Lancaster, Texas. All three died as a result of numerous chopping wounds to their heads and faces, which were inflicted with a hatchet. The text refers to three women.
For the forty pictures used in this study, our volunteers gave significantly higher correspondence ratings between seven of the pictures and David’s choice of matching news event compared to our chosen alternative news stories. Or, to put it another way, there was no significant difference between the correspondence ratings of David’s choice and our suggested alternative for 82.5 percent of the pictures. Having said that, a comparison of the average ratings for each participant across the full set of forty pictures did reveal a small but highly significant difference (just over half a point on our 7-point scale) in favor of David’s choices.
What is one to make of these results? Given that these were, in David’s judgment, the best examples of correspondences between his dreams and subsequent events, believers in precognitive dreams might be disappointed that our alternative news events were judged to correspond at least as well to the pictures as David’s choices in the vast majority of cases. It should also be borne in mind that, whereas David had the luxury of selecting news events as they occurred over many years, our selections from the archive had to be made within a couple of weeks in order to meet the filming schedule of the program makers. Given more time, we may well have been able to come up with even better matches. I suspect that believers in the paranormal will, with some justification, be more impressed by the fact that David’s choices were rated as better matches than ours for seven out of forty of the pictures and better matches overall. Personally, I’d be happy to class this one as a tie.
When going through the papers that I had stored relating to this study, I came across copies of eight pictures with brief descriptions, all with the words “Event has not occurred yet” written on them. I could not help but wonder if any of the foretold events had occurred in the two decades since David gave me these pictures. Here are the notes accompanying those pictures:
- • CIVIL WAR NORTHERN GREECE (dream occurred around May 2002): This painting depicts a civil war in Northern Greece. Mr. Mandell thinks it is occurring on the border. The image shows hotels burning, and “military men,” including a “little Hitler type Commisar telling us hotels were on fire on hills.” Notes also state: “the Salonica threat.”
- • CHILD KILLERS (dream occurred 11 June 2002): The painting depicts a “gang of 5 or 6 children who are child killers” led by “a girl in a blue spotted dress.”
- • PLANE WITH PLASTIC STRIPS (dream occurred 28 April 2002): Mr Mandell envisioned this event happening at “Heathrow or City Airport.” He dreamt about a “plane with plastic type strips trailing behind the tailplane” which cause “very violent movement sideways of tail of airplane.” The plane is “trying to crash land over water near to airport.”
- • ROYAL LONDON HOSPITAL—HELICOPTER (vision occurred 19 February 1995): This vision concerns the helicopter that operates from the roof of the Royal London Hospital, unable to make a safe landing (for further details see letter enclosed, form [sic] Mr Mandell to the hospital). Notes on painting: “Descent too fast to stop or slow down”; “Top of building hiding landing ramp.”
- • EARTHQUAKE IN LONDON (dream occurred 28 April 1992): See notes on copy of drawing for details. [Notes on and accompanying this drawing indicate that the dream was in two parts. In the first part, buildings viewed through a window were seen “moving sideways past each other” and then swinging back “to return to their original positions.” In the second part, the building that Mr Mandell was in lifted up and down several times. “It was just like being on a seaside rollercoaster.”]
- • BEATLE SHOT (dream occurred 30 November 2001): The drawing shows a member of the Beatles being shot by a left-handed gunman.
- • PLANE HITTING DARK GLASS BUILDING (dream occurred around May 2002): This painting shows a plane exploding, that has flown into the side of dark plate glass building that looked “like new towers side of Canary Wharf” [by the River Thames]. Mr Mandell’s notes state that “tower collapsed just like NY tower did.”
- • PADDINGTON BRIDGE CRASH (dream occurred 11 January 2002): This painting depicts a “bad accident” at “perhaps Paddington,” caused by a “collapsed steel girder bridge.” The word ‘bomb’ is also noted on the painting. Mr Mandell shows “devastation around bridge.”
As far as I have been able to ascertain, none of these predicted events have taken place in the two decades or so that have elapsed between David giving me copies of these pictures and the time of writing. It may be, of course, that events will take place in the future that do indeed bear a striking resemblance to some or all of these dreams (although the earthquake dream sounds especially unlikely). If that is the case, it would certainly provide some support for the claim that dreams can sometimes provide a psychic glimpse into the future. But I am struck by the fact that David’s hit rate appears to have plummeted over the last two decades compared to the years preceding our test. One can only speculate regarding the possible reasons for this decline.
The reason that we could not directly test David Mandell’s claim that his dreams matched future events to a greater extent than could be explained by coincidence and other normal factors was, as stated, simply that David himself had no idea whether his dreams would come true within days, months, or decades. If he had been able to give specific dates for his predictions coming true, or at least a reasonably narrow range of dates, directly testing his claims would have been much easier. Fortunately for us, the opportunity to test someone who claimed to be able to do precisely that presented itself a few years later. That person was Chris Robinson, the self-styled “dream detective.” Our test of Chris’s precognitive ability was featured in (yet another) program in Channel 5’s Extraordinary People series, first broadcast in the United Kingdom in 2007.
Chris believes that through his dreams he has foreseen the future on dozens of occasions, a skill that he acquired following a near-death experience. Like David Mandell, he claims to be particularly gifted when it comes to predicting terrorist attacks (such as the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and the bombings in London on July 7, 2005) and disasters (such as that at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986). He also claims to be able to solve crimes and find missing persons through information received in his dreams, information that he claims is sometimes provided to him by the spirits of the dead.
Chris generates his allegedly precognitive dreams by thinking about the specific topic that he would like to dream about before he goes to sleep. On occasion, he may even write down a specific question before going to sleep or have a relevant object, such as an item of clothing belonging to a missing person, beside his bed. Upon awakening, he will record details of his dream in a dream diary. According to Chris, sometimes his dreams are a literal representation of a future event, as though he was directly witnessing it as it happened, and sometimes the events are represented symbolically. However, the symbols often have consistent meanings such that dreams of dogs always represent terrorists, snow always represents imminent danger, meat always represents carnage, and so on.
The advantage that Chris has over other psychics from the point of view of testing is that he claims to be able to “dream to order,” so to speak. Thus, if Chris knows that on a prespecified day he is going to be taken to a mystery location, he claims that his dreams prior to being taken there will contain specific information corresponding to that location.
Parapsychologist Gary Schwartz was convinced that Chris’s claimed ability was real on the basis of the results of a ten-night study in which Chris’s dreams from the previous night bore a striking correspondence to a series of mystery locations that he was taken to. The degree of correspondence between the dreams and the locations was such that Schwartz did not believe that it could be explained purely on the basis of coincidence. The problem, as the reader has no doubt already realized, is that this approach makes absolutely no allowance for the possibility of subjective validation as discussed in chapter 9. With this technique, we have simply no way of knowing for each trial if the level of match between aspects of the target location and elements of Chris’s (very detailed) dream description are higher than we might find for an alternative possible location. Fortunately, this methodological problem was relatively easy to solve.
For our test of Chris’s claimed ability, we tweaked the approach taken in the Schwartz study in small but important ways. As in that study, Chris was informed that he would be taken to a mystery location on a particular day and asked to record his dreams, as usual, in his dream diary. However, whether his dream was deemed to match the location was not decided purely on the basis of looking around the location to see if there were any details that appeared to match the dream. Instead, a pool of six possible target locations was assembled in advance by Lesley Katon, the producer and director of the documentary. Lesley made an effort to choose six very different locations, and neither I nor Chris had any knowledge of them. On the specified day, Chris and Lesley would discuss the dreams that Chris had recorded and Lesley would decide which of the six locations was the best match to the contents of those dreams. It was only then that the actual location was decided on—by the roll of a die. Chris was then taken to the location, whether or not it was the location deemed to be the best match to his dream, as the logic of the methodology required this to be the case.
It was extremely important in the interests of fairness that the independent judge choosing which of the six locations was the best match to Chris’s dream was someone whom he trusted and who wanted Chris to succeed. After all, a mean skeptic who wanted Chris to fail the test could simply have chosen the worst match even if Chris really did have the ability he claimed to have. For that reason, Chris was allowed to choose who the independent judge would be. The program maker herself was the obvious choice. Lesley would clearly have a much more interesting documentary on her hands if Chris could pass a test set by a skeptical psychologist rather than if he failed.
Three trials as described above were set. The probability of Chris being successful on each trial on the basis of chance alone was one in six. Therefore the chances of him being successful on all three trials on that basis was one in 216 (that is, 6 × 6 × 6). If Chris could pull it off, that would be a pretty impressive performance. So, how did he do?
Here is part of what Chris had to say about one of his dreams on Day 1: “Paint, white, sheets painted all white. In the dream, it wasn’t my house, it was a person I knew when I went to school, who was an artist. He could paint and draw anything. So ‘painting’ is like a key word if you like. You have got to choose from your pool of places which one you think that little lot matches the best.”
Lesley chose location number four from the pool of possible targets as being the best match. This was the private home of a painter called the House of Dreams, an apparently excellent match to aspects of Chris’s dream. Unfortunately, when the die was rolled to determine the actual target location, it came up with number two, corresponding to the ICEBAR, a cocktail bar in London. Given the logic of the experimental design, based as it was on the fundamental claim that Chris would dream about where he was actually taken, we then had to take Chris to the ICEBAR even though we already knew that, from his point of view, this trial was a failure. To make matters even more surreal, Chris had insisted that he should be taken to all target locations blindfolded. He reasoned that if this precaution were not taken, he might dream about the route to the target location not the target location itself. Interestingly, very few Londoners even batted an eyelid as I led this blindfolded man along the street from the taxi to the bar.
Chris’s reaction when his blindfold was removed was to exclaim, “There’s a lot of white.” Clearly, subjective validation was at work. Any thoughts of “painting” being the key word were forgotten as Chris insisted that he was “surrounded by white.” In fact, the walls of the ICEBAR consisted of pure, transparent ice, not white snow, with the gray walls behind them clearly visible. However much Chris might have wanted to explain it away, this trial was a clear miss.
Regarding one of his dreams for the second trial, Chris had this to say: “This was an observer dream so I am watching other people. It’s not as if I’m part of it. And I’m rolling or unrolling something. That could be, if you’re in a printing works, it could be rolls of paper. Somebody’s now made a pie, so it could’ve been pastry. And we then put this pie in the oven. And there was a joke about not putting the oven on for too long so you don’t burn it. And I see these faces of people go past me.”
Finding a match was trickier this time, but Lesley finally chose target location number one, St. Bride’s Crypt in Fleet Street, on the basis of this famous street’s historic links with the printing industry. Unfortunately for Chris, when the die was rolled, it came up with number five, corresponding to a city farm. This time, I not only had to lead Chris blindfolded into the farm, knowing full well that this was another failed trial, but help him up onto a horse while still blindfolded. The things I do for science! When the blindfold was removed, Chris simply said, “There’s a surprise,” and made no attempt to try to claim this as another hit.
For the third and final trial, here were some of Chris’s comments on his dream: “In the dream, I’m in a sort of a room and there are people that are sort of people.” Pointing to his dream diary, he continued, “And there in big letters I’ve put ‘DEAD.’ It’s in this room. There was actually glass cups and glasses. Now, cups is always the same. Cups, if I see them, means dead people. And if we don’t go where there are dead people, I don’t know what that was all about!”
St. Bride’s Crypt was still in the target pool as, although Lesley had chosen it as the best match on the previous trial, it had not actually been used. This time it seemed an even better match so Lesley chose it again—and this time when the die was rolled, it did indeed come up with number one. So Chris scored one hit out of three trials, very far from a statistically significant result. In commenting on his failure, he explained that the information he receives in his dreams is “bandwidth limited,” allowing him to only see the “silhouette” of the future event, not the details. One cannot help wondering why this limitation only seems to occur when Chris is tested under properly controlled conditions, not when subjective validation is given free rein.
Despite the general lack of empirical support from well-controlled studies for the claims of Chris and other similar seers, there continues to be a demand for their services. One source of such demand is from desperate people who are searching for a missing loved one, including the parents of forty-three-year-old Marcy Randolph. Marcy had set off on a sightseeing flight from Deer Valley Airport, fifteen miles north of Phoenix, Arizona, in a plane piloted by fifty-four-year-old William Westover on September 24, 2006. It was believed that the pair were intending to fly to Sedona Airport and then return to Deer Valley on the same day. Sadly, radar contact with what was believed to be that plane was lost about nine miles southwest of Sedona.
It was arranged for Chris to fly to Arizona in the hope that his dreams might provide vital clues in the search for the missing plane, which was now presumed to have crashed somewhere in the area. Previous searches for the wreckage in the rugged and extreme terrain had proved unsuccessful. On the basis of information in Chris’s dreams, it was decided to focus the search in an area around Snake Canyon and Diablo Canyon. Unfortunately, this search also failed to discover the crashed plane, but the viewer was left with the strong impression that it might indeed be somewhere in that area.
In April 2009, however, long after the documentary had been broadcast, the wreckage of the plane was found, along with the skeletal remains of its occupants. It turned out that on the day the plane went missing, a couple of hikers had reported seeing a small fire in remote Loy Canyon northwest of Sedona. They reported the fire to the authorities, but neither they nor the authorities to whom they reported the fire were aware that a plane had gone missing at that time, so no one connected the two events. It was not until over two years later that someone fortuitously happened to come across the report, thus sparking further searches in that area by volunteers including Phil Randolph, Marcy’s father, who had never given up in his tireless efforts to locate the missing plane. These volunteers narrowed the search area down further by matching aerial photographs to a photograph taken by the hikers, but it was ultimately the hikers themselves who found the physical wreckage after returning to the area. The wreckage and the remains of the occupants of the plane were found many miles away from the area searched as a result of information provided by Chris.
I had known Chris Robinson for many years prior to submitting him to the test just described, our paths having crossed many times on live TV shows and elsewhere. On one memorable occasion in April 1993, both Chris and I took part in a late-night live discussion program. At the time, it was very common for regional TV channels in the United Kingdom to broadcast such programs on Friday nights, presumably aimed at people coming in from the pub after a few drinks. I do not remember the details of most of the program (I did a lot of them and they all became a bit of a blur in my memory). But I do recall that Chris, in the final seconds of the program, was challenged to give the name of the winner in the following day’s Grand National race held annually at Aintree Racecourse near Liverpool. Chris was not expecting the question, and although he did offer a name that I cannot now recall, he told me immediately after the program that he had simply felt under pressure to say something and had little, if any, confidence in his answer. This seemed reasonable to me, as Chris had not been expecting to be asked the question and had not sought the information using his usual dream diary technique.
The TV company had provided overnight accommodation for us in a local hotel. When Chris came down for breakfast, he was very excited, as he had now sought the information in his dreams regarding who would win that day’s race. Although he did tell me—and it was indeed a different horse than the one named the night before—I am afraid I cannot now remember the actual name he gave me. What I found fascinating, however, was Chris showing me his dream diary and explaining how he uses it to predict future events. Chris’s dreams are usually long and detailed, providing many potential elements that could match future events (the brief descriptions provided above from our documentary are but a fraction of the details provided by Chris for each dream). Given that sometimes the dreams represent events literally, sometimes symbolically, and sometimes a mix of the two, the scope for subjective validation is enormous.
Some readers may be thinking that it is unfortunate that I can no longer remember the name of the horse that Chris had predicted would win the Grand National on April 3, 1993. I can assure you that, at the time the race was run, I had the name of that horse at the forefront of my mind, and, as you might imagine, I watched the race on TV with considerable interest. As some readers may recall, 1993 was the first and to date only occasion upon which this famous steeplechase was declared void. This was because thirty of the thirty-nine runners set off despite there being a false start. If Chris had told me over toast and marmalade that that was what he expected to happen in the 147th running of this race, I would have been most impressed! But he didn’t. He told me who the nonexistent winner would be.
The technique used in our test of Chris’s claims in the 2007 documentary was in fact based on a previous test designed in collaboration with Chris, parapsychologist Keith Hearne, James Randi, Richard Wiseman, and others a few years before. Keith Hearne is convinced that dream precognition is a genuine phenomenon and fully expected Chris to pass the test. He was very familiar with Chris and his technique for interpreting his dreams. Finalizing the protocol took a great deal of effort, with many email exchanges, not least because many of Chris’s supporters not only did not trust Randi (or me or Richard) but actively despised him.
Prior to us agreeing to test Chris’s claims, his more extreme supporters would often declare that the “closed-minded” skeptics would never dare to actually test him, as proof of his psychic powers would show the world what fools they were. As soon as we agreed to carry out such a test, those same people pleaded with Chris for him to refuse to take part on the grounds that any test would be rigged by the evil skeptics so as to ensure that Chris failed. This type of paranoid distrust, especially that directed at Randi, sometimes reached hilarious heights. When one of Chris’s supporters learned that we intended to use a coin to make a random choice on each trial, he sounded the alarm, pointing out that magicians have various techniques for influencing the fall of a coin. That may be so, but the concern was misplaced for two reasons. First, due the experimental design used, the person tossing the coin would not know at that point whether heads or tails would lead to success or failure. Second, Randi would actually be on the other side of the Atlantic, not in Chris’s hometown of Dunstable in the United Kingdom when the test took place. Now, Randi was indeed a great magician, but influencing the fall of a coin on the other side of the Atlantic would have been a big ask even for him!
Although the basic idea was the same as that for our 2007 test described above, one major difference was that there were only two potential target locations on each trial, not six (hence we could decide the actual target for each trial by a coin toss). This meant that on each trial, there was a 50 percent probability of the correct location being chosen purely on the basis of guesswork. The plan was to have ten such trials. If the correct location was chosen across all ten trials, this would strongly indicate that more than mere chance was at work, as this outcome would only be expected to occur one time in every 1,024. Keith Hearne himself was the person chosen by Chris to decide which location was the better match to Chris’s dream on each trial. He was a perfect choice, having worked with and been impressed by Chris for many years prior to the test. It was also agreed that the study would continue until all ten trials had been run, even if Chris failed on any trials, as this would allow the protocol to be refined with a view to carrying out further studies in the future.
It had been agreed that a TV company would film the first trial so that it could be included in a documentary. It struck me as being a bit silly to only include the first trial in a documentary, given that there would be a 50 percent chance of success purely on the basis of chance. This would be like trying to assess whether someone could psychically influence the toss of a coin on the basis of a single coin toss. But I supposed that it would at least give the viewing public an idea of how paranormal claims can be put to the test. They would get some indication of the amount of time, effort, and careful planning that is required. Of course, the TV company also went to a great deal of effort and expense to film the proceedings, requiring as it did a director and film crew for a full day.
In the event, I need not have worried about a single trial being presented as if it was any kind of meaningful test of Chris’s alleged ability. Without going into details, suffice it to say that he failed on the first trial, an outcome that surprised and upset Keith Hearne greatly—and none of that footage was ever included in any documentary. Had he been successful on that single trial, I am sure it would have been, given the time and resources that had been required to film the trial. Sadly, Keith Hearne appeared to lose interest in the study at this point, and no further trials were ever carried out.