The mysteries of time raise intriguing questions

by PETER McCUE

     TO ME, some of the most interesting spontaneous cases in the field of psychical research are those involving oddities of time. There are reports of apparent precognition, where people seem to have glimpsed the future, and of so-called retrocognition (or 'timeslips'), where people have had visions related to the past. And then there are cases involving 'missing time', e.g. where witnesses of UFO events have been unable to account for significant chunks of time.

Of course, not all disruptions of memory are paranormal. After hypnosis, for instance, a subject might underestimate the duration of the session, or, less commonly, remember little or nothing of what happened (a phenomenon known as post-hypnotic amnesia). And some drugs can affect the sense of the passage of time. To someone under the influence of cannabis, for example, a period of five minutes might seem more like a quarter of an hour.

But let's return to cases suggestive of the paranormal.

I used to work as a clinical psychologist, and one of my patients told me about a dream in which she and her daughter were in a hall, with two small doors that led into another hallway. A tall man with blonde hair came from behind them and lifted her daughter up in his arms and tried to get through the doors. The mother tried to open the doors, but they didn't respond normally – they seemed to slide open. She managed to fight the man off, and she watched as he ran away. The woman told her family about the dream the next evening. Later that week, a very tall man with blonde hair tried to put a hand up her daughter's skirt. At the time, the daughter was in a lift with her cousin. They pushed the man and tried to hit him, and he ran off.

Clearly, some features of the dream matched the subsequent event. Was this simply a coincidence, or was the dream precognitive?

Another informant, Bill Paterson, had an interesting experience in the Scottish Highlands in the 1950s. Nearly five at the time, he was travelling with members of his family to the Black Isle. They were on the old A9 and had just passed Slochd Summit when Bill's elder brother noticed an unusual locomotive, which Bill then saw as well. The engine was old-fashioned, like one from a Western film. It was coming up a gradient, belching smoke from the stack, and exuding white smoke (steam?) from the sides. They asked their father to stop the car, so they could see it, and he pulled up just past a bridge that crossed the railway line. Bill notes that, 'We ran back to the bridge and looked over [but] there was nothing!' (i.e. no locomotive or smoke). That was odd, because Bill thinks that they could probably see for a mile up and down the track.

Did such a train engine once make journeys through that part of Scotland, and was the vision a glimpse into that past time? Even if the answer is 'No', the incident remains puzzling, since at least two members of the family saw the old-fashioned locomotive.

One night in the 1990s, James Montgomery and his friend Jane (not their real names) set out from the latter's house in Glasgow to buy some take-away food. On their way, they noticed a light that moved in the sky. They should have arrived back at Jane's house within about 25 minutes, but they were away for over an hour. When they got in, the food was no longer hot. They are unable to account for the 'missing time'.

Another informant, Susan (not her real name), had a similar experience one night in Glasgow about 40 years ago. She and a friend were heading home. They were both about 13. The girls got off a bus around 10.45 p.m. and saw a light in the sky, which seemed to be stationary. Then, as they were walking down a lane, the source of the light performed a series of movements, each of which alternated with a stationary phase. Susan was able to make out a structure with a circular base and a protuberance on top (a classic flying saucer shape?). There were two flashing red lights on the underside of the UFO, and also a circle of white lights, which may have been shimmering. At one point, the two girls huddled together with another pedestrian in mutual fear. The area they were in was then strongly illuminated from above. Susan assumed that the UFO was now directly above them. After what seemed seconds or minutes, things went dark again. When she looked up, Susan noticed that the UFO was still fairly near, although not directly overhead. It performed one or two further movements and shortly after shot up into the night sky and disappeared.

In total, the UFO encounter seemed to last only a matter of minutes, and Susan would have expected to be home by about 10.55 p.m. But she arrived around 11.45 p.m., to be greeted by an angry father!

In her book Time Storms (London: Piatkus, 2001), Jenny Randles relates cases in which people have encountered strange clouds or mists that produce unusual effects, such as experiences of 'missing time'. One such case, from 1977, involved a group of Chilean army recruits who were camping at 12,000 feet, under the charge of a Corporal Armando Valdes. The corporal went forward to investigate a fuzzy purple glow that was seen a few hundred yards away. He was soon swallowed up in the darkness of the night. Some 15 minutes later, around 4.30 a.m., Valdes returned - but from the opposite direction. He looked as if he were in a trance, and he was heard to say, 'You do not know who we are or where we are from.' After reaching the encampment, he collapsed and seemed to be unconscious.

At dawn, it was noticed that Valdes had several days' growth of beard, although he had shaved some hours earlier. His watch had stopped at around 4.30 a.m., but the date display indicated 30th April, five days on from the actual date! He regained consciousness around 7.00 a.m., but he seemed to be in a state of shock, with considerable memory loss, and lack of proper physical co-ordination. Interviewed by a journalist several years later, Valdes indicated that he still had no recall of the 15 minutes in question.

Of course, cases of the type cited above invite speculations about the nature of time. Regarding the Valdes case, Jenny Randles alludes to the interesting possibility that the corporal lived through five days in under 15 minutes! If so, another way of looking at it would be to say that his metabolism and watch ran, on average, about 481 times faster than normal during those 15 or so minutes. But if we assume that Valdes' watch displayed the correct date prior to this strange episode, and if we deem that the cause of his disorientation and amnesia was some sort of impersonal electromagnetic event, is it not remarkable that the extra ageing he experienced worked out so neatly at five days? (It wasn't, for example, 4.73 or 5.29 days!) In other words, assuming that the case has been reported accurately, we should perhaps consider the possibility that some form of intelligence was involved in producing the phenomenon.

A possible explanation of the 'missing time' element in the case of Susan (see above) is that she and her friend and the other pedestrian were huddled together for far longer than they thought – energy emissions from the UFO may have induced a state of stupor or paralysis and interfered with the creation of memory traces. But that still leaves a question: what was the UFO? Precognition and retrocognition also raise intriguing theoretical questions. If one can see into the future, does it already exist? If so, is our sense of free will illusory? And if the future already exists, does that also hold true for the past, thereby permitting instances of retrocognition? Or could it be that retrocognitive experiences are reconstructions, perhaps based on some sort of global psychic memory, rather than direct glimpses of the past?

If we knew enough about the present, it would be possible to predict the future. Possibly, then, precognitive dreams are predictions based on current information, some of which is gleaned, unconsciously, through telepathy or clairvoyance? If so, precognition would not be inconsistent with free will.