The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Read Free Page A

might be able to use black holes to travel across the universe. Russian and American scientists have been experimenting with ESP as a means of communicating with submarines under the polar ice. Suddenly the question of the limits of the human mind has become a question of major scientific importance. If we are merely chance products of a material universe, then our position is basically that of spectators, and the extent to which we can “intervene” is limited. But if – to take just one example – Sanderson’s vision of fifteenth century Paris was not a hallucination, but was some kind of glimpse of a hidden power of his own mind, then it would challenge the whole Darwinian picture of evolution.
    Consider the strange case of the calculating twins discussed in the article on identical twins. A prime number is a number that cannot be divided exactly by any other number, like 3, 7 and 13. But there is no easy, quick way to tell whether a number is a prime or not: you just have to patiently divide all the smaller numbers into it and see if any of them “goes” precisely. If a number is very large – say five figures – then the only quick way to find out if it is prime is to look it up in a table of prime numbers. Yet these twins can do it instantaneously, and that is absurd. Quite apart from the mystery of how they can do it, there is the even more baffling mystery of how such a power could have developed during the course of human history. According to Darwin, the basic mechanism of evolution is “survival of the fittest”. The cheetah can run faster than a man and the kangaroo jump higher because they had to inorder to survive. Most animals cannot count beyond a few figures. Man had to learn to count as his social life became more complex. Even so, most people are “bad at figures”. So how could any human being have developed this amazing ability to recognize five figure primes instantaneously, when even a computer would be unable to do it?
    There can only be one answer: that we are wrong to think that human intelligence has to operate like a computer. It seems to have some “alternative method”. And presumably it was the same alternative method that accidentally allowed Sanderson his curious glimpse of the past. That statement sounds reasonable enough, for we all agree that “intuition” seems to operate in mysterious ways. But then we come upon a case in which someone has clearly foreseen the future, and we know this is not simply a question of intuition. The notion that time has a one-way flow is the very foundation of western science; everything depends on it. If precognition is possible, then our basic assumptions need revising.
    For the scientists of the nineteenth century, such an idea was deeply disquieting; that is why so many of them were so hostile to “psychical research”. It seemed the opposite of what all science stood for; a return to superstitions and old wives’ tales instead of experiment and analysis. In 1848 this reaction of science had swung so far that a novelist named Catherine Crowe decided it was time to protest. So she went to a great deal of trouble to gather together some of the best authenticated cases of the “supernatural” she could find – the kind of cases that would later be carefully examined by the Society for Psychical Research – and published them in a book called The Night Side of Nature . It had a considerable impact on thoughtful people.
    But Mrs Crowe was unfortunate. The year of its publication also happened to be the year when strange poltergeist disturbances took place in the home of the Fox family in New York State – curious rappings and bangings that occurred in the presence of the two children, Kate and Margaret. In a code of raps, the “entity” claimed to be a murdered peddler who had been buried in the basement. (In fact, a human skeleton was found buried in the basement in 1907.) These manifestations caused a sensation, and soon