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The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold
From a rising star New Yorker staff writer, the incredible and gripping true story of John Barker, a psychiatrist who investigated the power of premonitions—and came to believe he himself was destined for an early death
On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a “premonitions bureau,” in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing future calamities.
Middleton was one of hundreds of seemingly normal people, who would contribute their visions to Barker’s research in the years to come, some of them unnervingly accurate. As Barker’s work plunged him deeper into the occult, his reputation suffered. But in the face of professional humiliation, Barker only became more determined, ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life.
In Sam Knight’s crystalline telling, this astonishing true story comes to encompass the secrets of the world. We all know premonitions are impossible—and yet they come true all the time. Our lives are full of collisions and coincidence: the question is how we perceive these implausible events and therefore make meaning in our lives. The Premonitions Bureau is an enthralling account of madness and wonder, of science and the supernatural. With an unforgettable ending, it is a mysterious journey into the most unsettling reaches of the human mind.
On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a “premonitions bureau,” in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing future calamities.
Middleton was one of hundreds of seemingly normal people, who would contribute their visions to Barker’s research in the years to come, some of them unnervingly accurate. As Barker’s work plunged him deeper into the occult, his reputation suffered. But in the face of professional humiliation, Barker only became more determined, ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life.
In Sam Knight’s crystalline telling, this astonishing true story comes to encompass the secrets of the world. We all know premonitions are impossible—and yet they come true all the time. Our lives are full of collisions and coincidence: the question is how we perceive these implausible events and therefore make meaning in our lives. The Premonitions Bureau is an enthralling account of madness and wonder, of science and the supernatural. With an unforgettable ending, it is a mysterious journey into the most unsettling reaches of the human mind.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published May 3, 2022
About the author
Sam Knight
1 book22 followersSam Knight is a staff writer for the New Yorker, based in London. He has previously written for The Guardian, The Financial Times and Harper's. "The Premonitions Bureau" is his first book.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 493 reviews
May 23, 2022
I'm not sure this non-fiction book is really about what the title suggests it is: The Premonitions Bureau. I suspect that just made a good title, or that it was going to be about that but Knight got distracted, or there simply wasn't enough content. But, I'm very pleased Knight got distracted, because this meandering-blind-alley kind of book was fascinating. In the 1960s, John Barker, a psychiatrist set up the Premonitions Bureau with Peter Fairley, the science correspondent of the Evening Standard, after Barker visited the Aberfan disaster and discovered that several people, including one girl who was killed, foresaw the disaster or even their own death. Really, there isn't too much to say (or write, it seems) about the bureau. People wrote or phoned in with their premonitions and Fairley or his assistant tried to see if they came true. Sometimes they did. Knight spends much of the book detailing the disasters that were predicted and looking at other kinds of foresight, and mostly writing Barker's biography and his time at Shelton Hospital (a mental health hospital, known as 'the mental' to the locals at the time) I really enjoyed all these side tracks, but I can see how readers, expecting one kind of book and getting something else entirely, might be irritated.
May 31, 2022
Meh. This wasn't at all what I expected it to be.
I was very intrigued at the start of the book, we're told about the Aberfan disaster and the locals who foresaw some part of the tragedy, we then get slowly introduced to John Barker, the creator of the Premonitions Bureau, he led a very interesting life working in various mental institutions and also newspapers as a journalist.
There are a number of fascinating stories throughout the book but I found it to be very disjointed and veered of the main subject an awful lot to the point where i put it down for days on end. I think if the narrative timeline had been more linear, rather than jumping back and forth then I may have been less confused and more inclined to pick it up and finish it sooner.
Ultimately I found it hard to engage with and the topics which would have been interesting we're buried within pages of inconsequential information.
Disappointing as I was really looking forward to enjoying this.
I was very intrigued at the start of the book, we're told about the Aberfan disaster and the locals who foresaw some part of the tragedy, we then get slowly introduced to John Barker, the creator of the Premonitions Bureau, he led a very interesting life working in various mental institutions and also newspapers as a journalist.
There are a number of fascinating stories throughout the book but I found it to be very disjointed and veered of the main subject an awful lot to the point where i put it down for days on end. I think if the narrative timeline had been more linear, rather than jumping back and forth then I may have been less confused and more inclined to pick it up and finish it sooner.
Ultimately I found it hard to engage with and the topics which would have been interesting we're buried within pages of inconsequential information.
Disappointing as I was really looking forward to enjoying this.
March 4, 2022
In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world.
Created in the aftermath of the 1966 Aberfan disaster (which saw an overflowing hilltop waste tip send a landslide of mining slurry onto the tiny Welsh town at its base, killing 144, mostly schoolchildren), the Premonitions Bureau was envisioned as a clearinghouse for augurous information that might, somehow, prevent such tragedies in the future. Conceived of by psychiatrist John Barker — a mental health reformer with an interest in unusual mental conditions and precognition — in partnership with self-promoting newspaperman Peter Fairley, the Premonitions Bureau made for good newspaper copy, but poor proof of presentiment: Of the thousands of tips that were sent in, only three percent could be plausibly linked to eventual occurrences. More than the story of this questionably useful project itself, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story is really about the people involved in it (and especially Barker) and author Sam Knight makes a fascinating tale of it. This might be a little padded with information that I didn’t find quite relevant (did I need to know that Robin Gibb was one of the passengers on a London-bound train wreck?) but even the padding was interesting in its own right (it was Robin Gibb after all), and I found this to be a thoroughly satisfying read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time. The second law of thermodynamics says it can’t happen, but you think of your mother a second before she calls. There is no way for us to see, or feel, things before they occur but they often seem to hang around regardless.
Barker was interested in stories of people who had been literally scared to death — as in the “nocebo effect” (you can apparently kill yourself with inert pills if you believe them to be deadly) and “voodoo death” (dying of no apparent cause after your death has been predicted; even if just by your own hunch) — and he travelled to Aberfan as search and recovery was still ongoing, looking for stories that fit his thesis. What he found instead were many stories of people who had had mystical forewarning of the disaster (as in a girl who had reported a dream of the landslide and a boy who had drawn a picture of his school blacked out with the words “the end” written in the sky; both of whom would die in the tragedy), and that inspired Barker to co-create the Premonitions Bureau, initially focussed on recording premonitions related to Aberfan (and this was apparently not entirely an unscientific area of study: both Freud and Jung believed in telepathy and precognition to varying degrees). Knight tells the stories of several “percipients” (and especially the two who had had the most compelling visions of Aberfan), as well as the stories of Fairley and other newspapermen, Barker’s work as a reforming psychiatrist and the Victorian-era asylum where he practised — along with the stories of other psychiatrists and the Shelton Hospital itself — and if it can tend to feel like padding, it was interesting. Barker wrote and promoted the book Scared to Death (which has no reviews on Goodreads and a solitary one-star rating; whelp) during this period, and of it Knight states, “Barker wrote for a mass audience, presenting himself as an uncompromising investigator,” and that is precisely how I would describe the writing in The Premonitions Bureau as well. On Barker and his wife, Knight writes:
Barker had met Jane at St George’s Medical School, in London, in 1946. He was studying to be a doctor and she was training to be a nurse. Jane’s family was from Gloucestershire; the men served in the military or held posts in the colonies. Her father had been a district officer in Nigeria and died in a hospital for tropical diseases when she was seven years old. Jane grew up with her mother and two younger siblings in a cottage not far from Cheltenham. She had brown hair, which she kept short, above her shoulders, a wide mouth and extremely proper pronunciation.
I can’t call all of that pertinent (and there are many, many passages that are similarly detail-rich), but I did appreciate Knight’s thoroughness. And especially as Barker — the expert on dying by one’s own thoughts — would eventually be contacted (repeatedly and urgently) by his two most accurate percipients to warn him of his own impending death. As a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story that eventually rolls all of the disparate parts into a neat little ball, I am happy to report that I learned plenty about the times and was interested to the end. But the question remains: are premonitions a real phenomenon?
A useful definition of a delusion is not that it is an inaccurate belief about the world; it is a belief that you refuse to change when you are confronted with proof that you are wrong. The hypothesis fails. The pleasure principle is countermanded by the reality principle. Our best hopes and most extravagant fears rarely materialise. Prediction errors fire through the brain, turning the tiger back into a shadow. Prophecy reduces to coincidence. Your heart rate slows. The experiment does not repeat. The pattern won’t spread.
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June 7, 2022The peculiar tale of the PRemonitions Bureau, which really ought to have been an official crime-fighting organisation and I'm annoyed it wasn't. On the other hand this is a great story. After the Aberfan disaster, a doctor and a science journalist team up to look into premonitions, getting people from all over the country to send in their premonitions and attempting to see if any of them are in fact able to predict disasters.
Obviously, the answer is mostly no. There are however a couple of individuals who--if the accounts here are accurate, which is the question--did have a frankly uncanny strike rate for predicting train and plane crashes and so on. We then squirrel off down all sorts of intriguing byways, such as the meaning and nature of time, whether people can will or scare themselves to death (apparently yes) and whether prediction would be any use in preventing disasters (because, if they are seen forward in time, doesn't that mean their happening is inevitable?).
It's not a terribly linear book, which is fair enough, and rather inconclusive (ditto), but it's a fascinating subject, redolent of the 60s, and it's hard not to sympathise with the poor chap reluctantly afflicted with visions of calamity.
Obviously, the answer is mostly no. There are however a couple of individuals who--if the accounts here are accurate, which is the question--did have a frankly uncanny strike rate for predicting train and plane crashes and so on. We then squirrel off down all sorts of intriguing byways, such as the meaning and nature of time, whether people can will or scare themselves to death (apparently yes) and whether prediction would be any use in preventing disasters (because, if they are seen forward in time, doesn't that mean their happening is inevitable?).
It's not a terribly linear book, which is fair enough, and rather inconclusive (ditto), but it's a fascinating subject, redolent of the 60s, and it's hard not to sympathise with the poor chap reluctantly afflicted with visions of calamity.
May 7, 2023
I'm about as skeptical as it gets when it comes to stuff like precognition and psychic abilities. So every now and then I read a book like this to challenge my thinking. It didn't change my mind, but I still found it pretty intriguing.
Back in 1966, the Aberfan disaster occurred, a terrible tragedy that claimed the lives of 144 people, many of them children. John Barker, a psychiatrist with an interest in rare medical conditions, visited the site and was struck by stories of two kids who seemed to have predicted the fatal landslide. He wrote to Peter Fairley, the science editor of the Evening Standard, asking him to print an appeal for people who had experienced premonitions of the disaster to contact the newspaper, and they received 76 letters.
This prompted Barker and Fairley to set up what they called the Premonitions Bureau, in which they encouraged the public to send in their dreams and predictions of the future. The vast majority of them were completely wrong, but two correspondents in particular were able to forecast events with unusual accuracy. Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher, and Alan Hencher, a post office worker, both predicted a fatal train wreck in London the day before it occurred. They foresaw all kinds of assassinations and catastrophes, describing exact details with alarming precision.
After this is where the book lost me. Instead of investigating the two star predictors in further detail, it chooses to focus on the life of Barker. He enjoyed the limelight and his research brought him fame on both sides of the Atlantic. However, I wanted to know more about the subjects of Barker's study instead of the man himself. As for a conclusion on the powers of these Nostradamuses, Sam Knight leaves it up to ourselves to decide. An uncanny ability or a series of rare coincidences - you'll just have to read it to find out.
Back in 1966, the Aberfan disaster occurred, a terrible tragedy that claimed the lives of 144 people, many of them children. John Barker, a psychiatrist with an interest in rare medical conditions, visited the site and was struck by stories of two kids who seemed to have predicted the fatal landslide. He wrote to Peter Fairley, the science editor of the Evening Standard, asking him to print an appeal for people who had experienced premonitions of the disaster to contact the newspaper, and they received 76 letters.
This prompted Barker and Fairley to set up what they called the Premonitions Bureau, in which they encouraged the public to send in their dreams and predictions of the future. The vast majority of them were completely wrong, but two correspondents in particular were able to forecast events with unusual accuracy. Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher, and Alan Hencher, a post office worker, both predicted a fatal train wreck in London the day before it occurred. They foresaw all kinds of assassinations and catastrophes, describing exact details with alarming precision.
After this is where the book lost me. Instead of investigating the two star predictors in further detail, it chooses to focus on the life of Barker. He enjoyed the limelight and his research brought him fame on both sides of the Atlantic. However, I wanted to know more about the subjects of Barker's study instead of the man himself. As for a conclusion on the powers of these Nostradamuses, Sam Knight leaves it up to ourselves to decide. An uncanny ability or a series of rare coincidences - you'll just have to read it to find out.
May 15, 2022
I guess my expectations were too high, given that both the author and editors are affiliated with the New Yorker. This was a chaotic mix of events that at times didn’t seem to be in the right place in the book. I kept wanting to see the outline to help me figure out the organization.
September 24, 2022
A kind of dry but fast read.
In 1966, Aberfan, Wales endured an unimaginable tragedy when a landslide of coal mining waste buried part of the town. One hundred forty-four people were killed, 116 of whom were children from seven to ten years old inside the school. Psychiatrist John Barker, on site providing aid in the aftermath, learned that several people experienced premonitions of what was to come.
A teacher in London awoke from a nightmare choking and gasping for air, convinced some sort of smothering or drowning disaster was imminent.
A week before the incident, a schoolgirl in Aberfan told her mother out of the blue that she wasn't afraid to die. When her mother asked her why she was thinking about death, she said she just wanted her mother to know she wasn't afraid.
In one of the saddest instances, the morning of the tragedy a schoolboy didn't want to get out of bed and dragged his feet all morning. His mother finally rushed him out the door, telling him to run if he was going to be on time for school. Stories like these captured Barker's interest, and he spent the remainder of his life researching this phenomenon even though it cost him his professional reputation.
Honestly, I think a lot of psychic claims are bogus, but I'm not egotistical enough to think I understand the limits of what is possible. The universe is a vast and unknowable place. As a kid in the '70s, unexplained phenomena was dinner table talk - and it wasn't just our family. Bestselling books like Chariots of the Gods, popular TV programs like In Search Of... and box office smashes like Close Encounters of the Third Kind captured the public's imagination. I'm not too proud to admit I picked this book partly out a hard-to-shake fascination with the unexplained.
In 1966, Aberfan, Wales endured an unimaginable tragedy when a landslide of coal mining waste buried part of the town. One hundred forty-four people were killed, 116 of whom were children from seven to ten years old inside the school. Psychiatrist John Barker, on site providing aid in the aftermath, learned that several people experienced premonitions of what was to come.
A teacher in London awoke from a nightmare choking and gasping for air, convinced some sort of smothering or drowning disaster was imminent.
A week before the incident, a schoolgirl in Aberfan told her mother out of the blue that she wasn't afraid to die. When her mother asked her why she was thinking about death, she said she just wanted her mother to know she wasn't afraid.
In one of the saddest instances, the morning of the tragedy a schoolboy didn't want to get out of bed and dragged his feet all morning. His mother finally rushed him out the door, telling him to run if he was going to be on time for school. Stories like these captured Barker's interest, and he spent the remainder of his life researching this phenomenon even though it cost him his professional reputation.
Honestly, I think a lot of psychic claims are bogus, but I'm not egotistical enough to think I understand the limits of what is possible. The universe is a vast and unknowable place. As a kid in the '70s, unexplained phenomena was dinner table talk - and it wasn't just our family. Bestselling books like Chariots of the Gods, popular TV programs like In Search Of... and box office smashes like Close Encounters of the Third Kind captured the public's imagination. I'm not too proud to admit I picked this book partly out a hard-to-shake fascination with the unexplained.
April 25, 2022
Easily the fastest I have devoured a book in a while!
Whilst not entirely as in-depth as I had imagined Sam Knight has constructed a riveting and enlightening examination of The Premonition Bureau and the man behind its foundation in 1966, Dr John Barker.
Consisting of just over 200 pages this book is a little gem that flits around the topics of the paranormal, philosophy (the concept of ‘free will’) and is actually an extension of his 2019 New Yorker article of the same title.
My inner X Files nerd delighted in reading about Barker and his research … I guess the closest we will get to a British Fox Mulder 🤣😂
Whilst not entirely as in-depth as I had imagined Sam Knight has constructed a riveting and enlightening examination of The Premonition Bureau and the man behind its foundation in 1966, Dr John Barker.
Consisting of just over 200 pages this book is a little gem that flits around the topics of the paranormal, philosophy (the concept of ‘free will’) and is actually an extension of his 2019 New Yorker article of the same title.
My inner X Files nerd delighted in reading about Barker and his research … I guess the closest we will get to a British Fox Mulder 🤣😂
December 7, 2022
In the 1960’s, Dr. John Barker, a British psychiatrist, teamed up with Peter Fairley, science correspondent for the Evening Standard, to create The Premonitions Bureau. People who had dreams or visions they perceived as forewarnings of coming disasters could contact the paper. A staff member would log their information, which would subsequently be back-tested (for-tested?) against actual events.
Barker’s curiosity about premonitions began when he learned of a number of people in Aberfan, Wales, who were said to have sensed in advance the disastrous collapse of a coal mining tip that buried much of the village including a school full of children. The possibility that such premonitions could be real appealed to Barker, always eager to make a name for himself on the fringes of psychiatry. He had been deeply engaged in the use of aversion therapy (think Clockwork Orange) and was fascinated by people who seemingly brought about their own deaths by a conviction that they were about to die.
Much of the book is about Barker, the outdated, dismal psychiatric facility at which he worked, British attitudes toward mental health at the time, and about his colleagues, Fairley and fellow psychiatrist David Enoch. Detailed explorations of the lives of two of the “precipients” also feature prominently.
All in all I found it a worthwhile read. If you are expecting lots of stories of accurate premonitions and little else, you might be disappointed. But if you enjoy those books that seem to have a fairly narrow scope, but eventually incorporate a broader range of topics, you might find it as interesting as I did.
I can’t close without giving credit to the narrator, Julian Rhind-Tutt. He’s fast becoming one of my favorites, one of the few who could actually influence my decision to listen to a book.
Barker’s curiosity about premonitions began when he learned of a number of people in Aberfan, Wales, who were said to have sensed in advance the disastrous collapse of a coal mining tip that buried much of the village including a school full of children. The possibility that such premonitions could be real appealed to Barker, always eager to make a name for himself on the fringes of psychiatry. He had been deeply engaged in the use of aversion therapy (think Clockwork Orange) and was fascinated by people who seemingly brought about their own deaths by a conviction that they were about to die.
Much of the book is about Barker, the outdated, dismal psychiatric facility at which he worked, British attitudes toward mental health at the time, and about his colleagues, Fairley and fellow psychiatrist David Enoch. Detailed explorations of the lives of two of the “precipients” also feature prominently.
All in all I found it a worthwhile read. If you are expecting lots of stories of accurate premonitions and little else, you might be disappointed. But if you enjoy those books that seem to have a fairly narrow scope, but eventually incorporate a broader range of topics, you might find it as interesting as I did.
I can’t close without giving credit to the narrator, Julian Rhind-Tutt. He’s fast becoming one of my favorites, one of the few who could actually influence my decision to listen to a book.
August 10, 2022
Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category.
Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly).
As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawed from the start, the idea was to ask readers to write in with any premonitions they received for the future, and to see if there were any solid predictions, or any convergence where multiple individuals predicted the same disaster.
Barker apparently had the idea that, if successful, this would make it possible to offer such a service for the public good, though this did open up the slightly mind-bending worry for him that if premonitions made it possible to prevent a disaster, how could the premonitions exist in the first place?
Although what's in the book is very reasonable and genuinely fascinating, the frustrating thing is a lack of analysis by Knight. He is a good storyteller, but all too often just tells us what happened without saying if it made any sense. The best example of why this matters is the Bureau's first big 'success', a premonition of a plane crash made in March 1967. The 'seer', a man called Alan Hencher, who had already claimed (after the event) to have predicted Aberfan, described a very detailed dream. A Caravelle jet airliner would crash shortly after takeoff after passing over mountains. About 124 people would be killed.
Knight comments on the similarities of this prediction with the Nicosia plane crash of 20 April 1967, which killed 126 people. This was assumed by Barker to demonstrate the reality of the premonition. But apart from the casualty numbers, there was hardly any correspondence between the prediction and reality. (For that matter, given the size of planes at the time, this was the kind of number you would make up to represent a big tragedy.) Hencher got the aircraft type wrong, and was wrong in saying it was a jet - the plane was a propellor-driven Britannia. The crash wasn't soon after takeoff - the plane had been flying for hours. But the really big problem is that the crash didn't happen until 30 days after the prediction. Lots of people have dreams about plane crashes, and planes were less reliable then. There were at least 14 fatal airliner crashes with significant numbers of deaths in 1967. If they waited long enough, inevitably this prediction would have 'come true' given the level of leeway applied - the whole thing was highly dubious. Yet Knight does not explore this.
Some of the other predictions mentioned are more impressive - though if you are constantly receiving guesses about the future, statistically some will eventually be close enough to be considered a success. Knight focusses particularly on two big hitters, Hencher and a Miss Middleton, but again fails to explore crucial information, for example: how many predictions they got wrong.
The book is at its best when it is following its main thread of Barker's life. He seems to have hated his job at a crumbling mental asylum, particularly when the authorities were less than enthusiastic about his real passions - the paranormal and an obsession with death that led to his writing a successful book Scared to Death about people who apparently died from purely mental causes. Less effective are parts where Knight breaks up the story with short, often very loosely connected, asides, for example on Ancient Greek philosophers’ ideas about fate, or an obscure French philosopher’s thoughts on death - these feel like padding.
Whether or not you believe paranormal phenomena exist, they are fascinating (the psychology of thinking they're real, and the work of fakers is just as interesting as the concept itself) - I enjoyed researching and writing about these subjects and scientific attempts to study them in a more general way in my book Extra Sensory. With its large, moody, black and white illustrations and excellently written text, Knight tells Barker and Fairley's story extremely well.
Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly).
As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawed from the start, the idea was to ask readers to write in with any premonitions they received for the future, and to see if there were any solid predictions, or any convergence where multiple individuals predicted the same disaster.
Barker apparently had the idea that, if successful, this would make it possible to offer such a service for the public good, though this did open up the slightly mind-bending worry for him that if premonitions made it possible to prevent a disaster, how could the premonitions exist in the first place?
Although what's in the book is very reasonable and genuinely fascinating, the frustrating thing is a lack of analysis by Knight. He is a good storyteller, but all too often just tells us what happened without saying if it made any sense. The best example of why this matters is the Bureau's first big 'success', a premonition of a plane crash made in March 1967. The 'seer', a man called Alan Hencher, who had already claimed (after the event) to have predicted Aberfan, described a very detailed dream. A Caravelle jet airliner would crash shortly after takeoff after passing over mountains. About 124 people would be killed.
Knight comments on the similarities of this prediction with the Nicosia plane crash of 20 April 1967, which killed 126 people. This was assumed by Barker to demonstrate the reality of the premonition. But apart from the casualty numbers, there was hardly any correspondence between the prediction and reality. (For that matter, given the size of planes at the time, this was the kind of number you would make up to represent a big tragedy.) Hencher got the aircraft type wrong, and was wrong in saying it was a jet - the plane was a propellor-driven Britannia. The crash wasn't soon after takeoff - the plane had been flying for hours. But the really big problem is that the crash didn't happen until 30 days after the prediction. Lots of people have dreams about plane crashes, and planes were less reliable then. There were at least 14 fatal airliner crashes with significant numbers of deaths in 1967. If they waited long enough, inevitably this prediction would have 'come true' given the level of leeway applied - the whole thing was highly dubious. Yet Knight does not explore this.
Some of the other predictions mentioned are more impressive - though if you are constantly receiving guesses about the future, statistically some will eventually be close enough to be considered a success. Knight focusses particularly on two big hitters, Hencher and a Miss Middleton, but again fails to explore crucial information, for example: how many predictions they got wrong.
The book is at its best when it is following its main thread of Barker's life. He seems to have hated his job at a crumbling mental asylum, particularly when the authorities were less than enthusiastic about his real passions - the paranormal and an obsession with death that led to his writing a successful book Scared to Death about people who apparently died from purely mental causes. Less effective are parts where Knight breaks up the story with short, often very loosely connected, asides, for example on Ancient Greek philosophers’ ideas about fate, or an obscure French philosopher’s thoughts on death - these feel like padding.
Whether or not you believe paranormal phenomena exist, they are fascinating (the psychology of thinking they're real, and the work of fakers is just as interesting as the concept itself) - I enjoyed researching and writing about these subjects and scientific attempts to study them in a more general way in my book Extra Sensory. With its large, moody, black and white illustrations and excellently written text, Knight tells Barker and Fairley's story extremely well.
February 11, 2024
4.5
„Biuro przeczuć” to historia psychiatry Johna Barkera, który badał zjawisko umiejętności przeczuwania złych wydarzeń. O czym mówię? A no o tym, że dziewczynka budzi się rano i opowiada swojej matce sen, w którym jej szkoła zniknęła, „zasypała ją góra czegoś czarnego!”. Sen okazuje się proroczy i tego ranka szkoła dziewczynki zostaje zasypana hałdą węglową, która osunęła się z pobliskiego wzgórza. Dziecko ginie w tej katastrofie, wraz z ponad setką innych ofiar.
To konkretne wydarzenie i związane z nim przeczucia, które dotknęły kilka osób było przyczyną zainteresowania się tematem przez Barkera, a potem wspólnie z dziennikarzem Peterem Fairleyem zakładają tytułowe Biuro Przeczuć, do którego mają zgłaszać się ludzie, które doświadczają takich proroctw.
Ja wiem, że brzmi to niewiarygodnie i raczej pop niż naukowo, ale w książce omówione są takie przeczucia, które według mnie nie były przypadkami. Bo jak wyjaśnić, że dwoje niezależnych osób zglasza, że przeczuwa ogromną katastrofę kolejową i kilkanaście dni później proroctwo się spełnia? Jak wyjaśnić, że ktoś przeczuwa katastrofę samolotu i podaje dokładną liczbę ofiar i znow kilka dni później to się wydarza? To tylko przykłady, jest tego więcej. Nie powiem wam ile % badanych przeczuć faktycznie się spełniło, ale dla mnie każdy z nich nie do ogarnięcia racjonalnym myśleniem. Sięgnijcie same/i i wyróbcie sobie własne zdanie.
Knight pisze bardzo po amerykańsku więc tego typu styl reportażu albo się lubi albo nie. I tak, jest gawędziarsko, jest budowanie napięcia, dramatyczny vibe i odtwarzanie atmosfery danego zdarzenia, zachowania ludzi czy tego co mogli czuć w danym momencie, tym samym urealniając ich i ożywiając. Dzięki temu książka wciąga jak dobry thriller i ciężko było mi się od niej oderwać. Fascynujące 🤯
„Biuro przeczuć” to historia psychiatry Johna Barkera, który badał zjawisko umiejętności przeczuwania złych wydarzeń. O czym mówię? A no o tym, że dziewczynka budzi się rano i opowiada swojej matce sen, w którym jej szkoła zniknęła, „zasypała ją góra czegoś czarnego!”. Sen okazuje się proroczy i tego ranka szkoła dziewczynki zostaje zasypana hałdą węglową, która osunęła się z pobliskiego wzgórza. Dziecko ginie w tej katastrofie, wraz z ponad setką innych ofiar.
To konkretne wydarzenie i związane z nim przeczucia, które dotknęły kilka osób było przyczyną zainteresowania się tematem przez Barkera, a potem wspólnie z dziennikarzem Peterem Fairleyem zakładają tytułowe Biuro Przeczuć, do którego mają zgłaszać się ludzie, które doświadczają takich proroctw.
Ja wiem, że brzmi to niewiarygodnie i raczej pop niż naukowo, ale w książce omówione są takie przeczucia, które według mnie nie były przypadkami. Bo jak wyjaśnić, że dwoje niezależnych osób zglasza, że przeczuwa ogromną katastrofę kolejową i kilkanaście dni później proroctwo się spełnia? Jak wyjaśnić, że ktoś przeczuwa katastrofę samolotu i podaje dokładną liczbę ofiar i znow kilka dni później to się wydarza? To tylko przykłady, jest tego więcej. Nie powiem wam ile % badanych przeczuć faktycznie się spełniło, ale dla mnie każdy z nich nie do ogarnięcia racjonalnym myśleniem. Sięgnijcie same/i i wyróbcie sobie własne zdanie.
Knight pisze bardzo po amerykańsku więc tego typu styl reportażu albo się lubi albo nie. I tak, jest gawędziarsko, jest budowanie napięcia, dramatyczny vibe i odtwarzanie atmosfery danego zdarzenia, zachowania ludzi czy tego co mogli czuć w danym momencie, tym samym urealniając ich i ożywiając. Dzięki temu książka wciąga jak dobry thriller i ciężko było mi się od niej oderwać. Fascynujące 🤯
May 29, 2022
Very underwhelming and unengaging..
Maybe because I expected something entirely different, but even then.. It is very chaotic and broken up.. Throughout the whole book I didn't feel like I was reading a wholesome story.
It feels like too many details were given about the events in question (or even unrelated ones) and too little time was spent talking about the premonitions themselves..
I wanted to like it, I tried, but I just couldn't..
It doesn't hold your attention, we're jumping from one topic to another and then are left with an aftertaste of disappointment..
Maybe because I expected something entirely different, but even then.. It is very chaotic and broken up.. Throughout the whole book I didn't feel like I was reading a wholesome story.
It feels like too many details were given about the events in question (or even unrelated ones) and too little time was spent talking about the premonitions themselves..
I wanted to like it, I tried, but I just couldn't..
It doesn't hold your attention, we're jumping from one topic to another and then are left with an aftertaste of disappointment..
June 8, 2022
3.5*
Readable and with some interesting ideas - but sometimes it jumped around too much, both in structure and ideas.
Readable and with some interesting ideas - but sometimes it jumped around too much, both in structure and ideas.
February 22, 2022
Looking at it from this side of the Premonitions Bureau era (spoiler: it no longer exists) this seems like such a far fetched idea to persist into relatively recent memory and that's what makes it so enticing to read. A respected psychiatrist, the Evening Standard and a volunteer helpline for those who feel they've perceived a premonition (the precipients) work together over the course of years and multiple disasters come to match these psychic warnings with real-life events.
June 27, 2022
A bit dull. Too many tangents into events and disasters where those details weren’t that relevant to the premonitions. And ultimately the Bureau is less interesting than it sounds; nothing here is genuinely eerie, it’s all just a selection effect in practice.
May 2, 2022
Somewhere between 3 - 3.5
A curious book about an unlikely topic: a bureau created by a psychiatrist in the wake of the Aberfan disaster in 1966 in an attempt to predict future disasters around the world (a few children killed in the Welsh mining village are also said to have foreseen the tragedy). Attracting premonitions from around the globe, two of the "percipients" were said to have predicted plane crashes, RFK's assassination and the Hither Green train crash.
Whilst rather readable, this is something of a sui generis book - I really don't know who I'd recommend it to given that it doesn't slot neatly into any particular genre. The book did feel like it could have been slightly shorter or better edited but this is a minor niggle. I don't regret my time spent reading it and am sure it will find its fans in those who have an interest in science and niche moments in history.
Thank you Netgalley and Faber & Faber for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
A curious book about an unlikely topic: a bureau created by a psychiatrist in the wake of the Aberfan disaster in 1966 in an attempt to predict future disasters around the world (a few children killed in the Welsh mining village are also said to have foreseen the tragedy). Attracting premonitions from around the globe, two of the "percipients" were said to have predicted plane crashes, RFK's assassination and the Hither Green train crash.
Whilst rather readable, this is something of a sui generis book - I really don't know who I'd recommend it to given that it doesn't slot neatly into any particular genre. The book did feel like it could have been slightly shorter or better edited but this is a minor niggle. I don't regret my time spent reading it and am sure it will find its fans in those who have an interest in science and niche moments in history.
Thank you Netgalley and Faber & Faber for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
May 8, 2022
As the book description says, an English psychiatrist named John Barker became fascinated by the idea of premonitions after hearing claims of foreseeing a deadly disaster that took place in the Welsh village of Aberfan. Although it got him in hot water with the traditional medical authorities, he decided that a formal study of premonitions was needed, and he teamed up with the journalist Peter Fairley of London’s Evening Standard newspaper to make a public call for people to report their premonitions, which would then be collected and analyzed.
What the book description doesn’t tell you is that in the end, the premonitions bureau found only 3% of reported premonitions panned out. You won’t be surprised to learn that the bureau is long gone. But the fact that this was a failed study doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth writing about.
Author Sam Knight examines Dr. Barker’s life, his dissatisfaction with the treatment of mental disorders, his increasing interest in unusual psychiatric phenomena, and the bureau’s most reliable percipient’s warning of Barker’s own death. Barker was right to want to reform Britain’s mental asylum system, but some of his ideas of treatment were wrong-headed, such as curing the urge to infidelity through electric-shock aversion therapy. He did some fascinating work about the flip side of placebos; i.e., “nocebos.” A nocebo, a harmless pill, could cause physical harm and even death if the person taking it believed it would. He wrote a book, Scared to Death, on the subject of how mental conviction alone could cause death.
The book also looks at such related subjects as the personalities of two of the bureau’s percipients, Barker’s trip to the US to promote Scared to Death, and some specific foretold disasters, including plane crashes, the crash of a train (with the added information that the BeeGees’ Robin Gibb was on the train), and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. It can feel a little discursive at times, but in more of a quirky, freewheeling way. It’s an unusual book, but I enjoyed it, especially because the audiobook version is read by one of my very favorite narrators, Julian Rhind-Tutt.
What the book description doesn’t tell you is that in the end, the premonitions bureau found only 3% of reported premonitions panned out. You won’t be surprised to learn that the bureau is long gone. But the fact that this was a failed study doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth writing about.
Author Sam Knight examines Dr. Barker’s life, his dissatisfaction with the treatment of mental disorders, his increasing interest in unusual psychiatric phenomena, and the bureau’s most reliable percipient’s warning of Barker’s own death. Barker was right to want to reform Britain’s mental asylum system, but some of his ideas of treatment were wrong-headed, such as curing the urge to infidelity through electric-shock aversion therapy. He did some fascinating work about the flip side of placebos; i.e., “nocebos.” A nocebo, a harmless pill, could cause physical harm and even death if the person taking it believed it would. He wrote a book, Scared to Death, on the subject of how mental conviction alone could cause death.
The book also looks at such related subjects as the personalities of two of the bureau’s percipients, Barker’s trip to the US to promote Scared to Death, and some specific foretold disasters, including plane crashes, the crash of a train (with the added information that the BeeGees’ Robin Gibb was on the train), and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. It can feel a little discursive at times, but in more of a quirky, freewheeling way. It’s an unusual book, but I enjoyed it, especially because the audiobook version is read by one of my very favorite narrators, Julian Rhind-Tutt.
August 31, 2022
Mostly fascinating, except for some long-winded digressions about mental hospitals scattered throughout, where our psychiatrist John Barker, founder of the Premonitions Bureau, worked primarily. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the workings of the mind and/or another realm beyond our five senses.
December 8, 2023
This was a good read, I especially liked the sections about the Aberfan mine disaster, but it is very dry, and not really how it is described in the blurb.
September 26, 2022
You know, for a book about premonitions and foretelling disaster, this was pretty boring.
Back in 1966, there was a major industrial accident in Aberfan, Wales. Several tons of coal mining debris collapsed, slid down the mountain it was perched at the edge of, and buried a school. Several people all around the world experienced premonitions of the event, in the form of dreams of black or a choking feeling. John Baker, a psychiatrist, collected all this information, and became convinced of the idea that people can and do experience predictive moments. That future disasters could be staved off if only he could harness the power of these predictions. Thus, the Premonitions Bureau was established.
If the book had actually been about this Premonitions Bureau, maybe it would've been more coherent and interesting to me. Unfortunately I think this book suffers from a compelling idea without a lot of information behind it. NPR's review of the book says that this book was written based on an article in The New Yorker from 2019 about John Baker (can be found here), and honestly after skimming the article, there isn't much else about the Bureau that wasn't included in the article.
What can be found in the book is a lot of meticulously researched ideas and examples of premonition in human history. Lots of weird coincidental events, people dreaming of disasters, visions of something happening, that actually come true. None of them are related to one another and there's barely a mention of the Premonitions Bureau throughout, but mildly interesting on their own nonetheless.
Ultimately this was a miss for me, though. It wasn't cohesive, I couldn't really tell why I was reading each event or how it related to the book until quite a bit in, and honestly it was dry as dust throughout. I thought the most interesting part of the book was learning about the mining disaster up front, honestly.
Back in 1966, there was a major industrial accident in Aberfan, Wales. Several tons of coal mining debris collapsed, slid down the mountain it was perched at the edge of, and buried a school. Several people all around the world experienced premonitions of the event, in the form of dreams of black or a choking feeling. John Baker, a psychiatrist, collected all this information, and became convinced of the idea that people can and do experience predictive moments. That future disasters could be staved off if only he could harness the power of these predictions. Thus, the Premonitions Bureau was established.
If the book had actually been about this Premonitions Bureau, maybe it would've been more coherent and interesting to me. Unfortunately I think this book suffers from a compelling idea without a lot of information behind it. NPR's review of the book says that this book was written based on an article in The New Yorker from 2019 about John Baker (can be found here), and honestly after skimming the article, there isn't much else about the Bureau that wasn't included in the article.
What can be found in the book is a lot of meticulously researched ideas and examples of premonition in human history. Lots of weird coincidental events, people dreaming of disasters, visions of something happening, that actually come true. None of them are related to one another and there's barely a mention of the Premonitions Bureau throughout, but mildly interesting on their own nonetheless.
Ultimately this was a miss for me, though. It wasn't cohesive, I couldn't really tell why I was reading each event or how it related to the book until quite a bit in, and honestly it was dry as dust throughout. I thought the most interesting part of the book was learning about the mining disaster up front, honestly.
May 17, 2022
4.5 stars. I thought this was fascinating! Not so much for the possibility of some paranormal revelations--although there are some intriguing tidbits, if you're into that. But the look at the research and the times that inspired it, the man behind it, and the peripheral characters--all fascinating!
December 14, 2022
entirely unconvinced that this book had an editor but I enjoyed most of the ramblings anyway
October 2, 2022
I ran across this book while browsing available e-books on Overdrive. At the time, I already had 12 books from the library (4 being e-books) and my own endless Mount To Be Read bookcase but there I was anyway. This is a tale of psychiatrist Charles Barker and his Premonitions Bureau.
"In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world."
Created in the wake of the Aberfan disaster (you might remember this from The Crown). The Aberfan disaster was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, and overlaid a natural spring. A period of heavy rain led to a build-up of water within the tip which caused it to suddenly slide downhill as a slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed Pantglas Junior School and a row of houses. (wikipedia and yes I know there are better sources)
Barker dreamed of a national warning system based on premonitions although the truth is, only 3 % of the premonitions they collected could be verified. He was all in. He also studied cases of people being scared to death and published a book about his findings (don't know that you would actually call them findings but whatever). He was also all in on aversion therapy so there's that.
The book meanders at times but it was interesting enough to keep me reading.
"A useful definition of a delusion is not that it is an inaccurate belief about the world; it is a belief that you refuse to change when you are confronted with proof that you are wrong."
"In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world."
Created in the wake of the Aberfan disaster (you might remember this from The Crown). The Aberfan disaster was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, and overlaid a natural spring. A period of heavy rain led to a build-up of water within the tip which caused it to suddenly slide downhill as a slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed Pantglas Junior School and a row of houses. (wikipedia and yes I know there are better sources)
Barker dreamed of a national warning system based on premonitions although the truth is, only 3 % of the premonitions they collected could be verified. He was all in. He also studied cases of people being scared to death and published a book about his findings (don't know that you would actually call them findings but whatever). He was also all in on aversion therapy so there's that.
The book meanders at times but it was interesting enough to keep me reading.
"A useful definition of a delusion is not that it is an inaccurate belief about the world; it is a belief that you refuse to change when you are confronted with proof that you are wrong."
May 4, 2022
How much you enjoy this book may be dependent on how open you are to the idea that premonitions are a believable phenomenon and can be scientifically evaluated. I'm not a believer and there's nothing in this book, which centres around psychiatrist John Barker, remotely convincing to change my mind. On the other hand, it's a brief, entertaining read, and diversions into how the human mind thinks, works, evaluates life are interesting.
October 26, 2023
An quick read about an interesting little topic - though at times I think it veered much more into being a biography of the Bureau's founder. Also a lot of content about mental health and institutions in England which I wasn't expecting.
Was entertained while reading but don't think it will be particularly memorable.
Was entertained while reading but don't think it will be particularly memorable.
May 14, 2022
4.5*
It’s so far-fetched, I love the strangeness of it all
It’s so far-fetched, I love the strangeness of it all
January 28, 2023
Well, at least I can say this book has proven that I really don't care about premonitions. It turns out that even if you have them, there's not much you can do to stop them. Who would have thought? I got bored with this book's many tangents and ended up listening to the audiobook at 2x the speed to get it over with.
September 4, 2023
This is tricky. It’s not that this book is boring - on the contrary - it’s full of really interesting threads and anecdotes. But they are jumbled and confusing, too often inconclusive, the timeline feels skittish, and the weird hop from sidebar story character back to main character (either Barker or Fairley) doesn’t feel very well thought through. It’s more that it all doesn’t add up to what you thought you were getting.
By the end - I realised the author was aiming at a sort of biography of John Barker, the psychiatrist behind the Premonitions Bureau. But there’s not enough personal insight or detail here to really constitute a biography. Plus, there’s a strong sensation around this that a canny publisher knew more readers would queue up for the curious promise of the Premonitions Bureau itself, than the frustrated life of one the men behind it. It’s weirdly pitched therefore as something that will sell, but isn’t really that - and remains defiantly not really the thing that it could be.
The problem is that there’s really still not much to say about either the premonitions or Barker and Fairley’s deeply unscientific approach to their subject. Of course it’s interesting, all of it. There’s some credible but superficial riffs about the psychology of foresight - but much more energy spent on a dozen or so minor characters whose ‘examples’ are intended, I think to at least make you think that the door is open to premonition, even if only a fraction.
I found the start of this very off putting, distasteful - about the Aberfan disaster and those who claimed to have predicted it even if only partially - and then I realised of course that such events always bring such characters out of the woodwork, 911, various earthquakes, disasters - we always do give air space to people who claim to have seen it in advance. That part of it, our persistent, simple credibility , doesn’t seem to have changed no matter how sophisticated we become, think ourselves. We do always want somebody, a person to know more than there is currently, to explain the why. This book is interesting, but infuriating in its random attack, and doesn’t leave you thinking the author has any more of a command of the material, or the why, than you do.
By the end - I realised the author was aiming at a sort of biography of John Barker, the psychiatrist behind the Premonitions Bureau. But there’s not enough personal insight or detail here to really constitute a biography. Plus, there’s a strong sensation around this that a canny publisher knew more readers would queue up for the curious promise of the Premonitions Bureau itself, than the frustrated life of one the men behind it. It’s weirdly pitched therefore as something that will sell, but isn’t really that - and remains defiantly not really the thing that it could be.
The problem is that there’s really still not much to say about either the premonitions or Barker and Fairley’s deeply unscientific approach to their subject. Of course it’s interesting, all of it. There’s some credible but superficial riffs about the psychology of foresight - but much more energy spent on a dozen or so minor characters whose ‘examples’ are intended, I think to at least make you think that the door is open to premonition, even if only a fraction.
I found the start of this very off putting, distasteful - about the Aberfan disaster and those who claimed to have predicted it even if only partially - and then I realised of course that such events always bring such characters out of the woodwork, 911, various earthquakes, disasters - we always do give air space to people who claim to have seen it in advance. That part of it, our persistent, simple credibility , doesn’t seem to have changed no matter how sophisticated we become, think ourselves. We do always want somebody, a person to know more than there is currently, to explain the why. This book is interesting, but infuriating in its random attack, and doesn’t leave you thinking the author has any more of a command of the material, or the why, than you do.
June 3, 2022
A disgraceful book. First, one has to say it fails to deliver on its promise - it is merely an unremarkable account of an unremarkable doctor who is seduced by the quasi-supernatural fads of his age. Secondly, it is very curiously written: we have unwarranted pen-portraits of every passing character, however minor; and unfathomable digressions that seem designed mainly to fill space. Thirdly, it veers toward the exploitative in its unnecessarily extensive accounts of various tragedies - most particularly that of the devastating shale-slide at Aberfan - which are justified only on the basis of vague "premonitions" relating to them. And finally, it approaches its subject with an irritating lack of scepticism. It's also funny that the author tut-tuts about the sensationalist US cover of his subject's book, Scared to Death, whilst nodding through a similarly lurid cover (not the one used by Goodreads) for the UK edition of his own book. Avoid.
May 9, 2022
I may be a skeptic, but I also always like to keep an open mind. The subject of this book was intriguing to me as soon as I heard of it. The book opens with the Aberfan (South Wales, UK) disaster, when 150,000 tons of slurry rushed down and covered the local school and some surrounding dwellings, in 1966, killing 144, 116 of whom were children. Several people said they foretold this disaster in some way, and this led to the starting of The Premonitions Bureau to examine this phenomenon by John Barker, a British psychiatrist. Whatever your feelings on the subject, this is a very interesting read, both regarding the phenomenon and the people involved.
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