If you could anticipate subtle changes in the environment with your five senses in ways that others can’t, how would you imagine this occurring? What if, when someone was being dishonest, you could collect an odd greenish hue emanating from them in your periphery? Or what about a noticeable electric sensation tingling the tips of your fingers when you shook hands with someone who found you attractive?

Using one’s imagination, it’s interesting to consider how things might appear around us if, rather than using extra-sensory perception (ESP), heightened awareness could be achieved using our five known senses. What would people’s innermost thoughts sound like as they rattled past one’s earlobes and into the consciousness of an unsuspecting eavesdropper? What would emotions like love, happiness, sadness, or fear smell like if they had particular aromas?At the Ask Doc Paranormal website, a recently ordained minister named Lydia from Butte, Montana, claims she can actually sense through smell whether couples she is marrying are compatible. “When couples stand before me, I can sense by scent alone, if these two individuals are meant for each other,” she claims. Lydia also says she has, in the past, been able to “smell” subtle differences in DNA and other minute traces of the human condition around graveyards and spooky locations. Lingering around places where the dead lay dreaming seemed to be having a bit of a negative impact on her life, so Lydia decided she would “do something positive for humanity” and undertake ministerial duties, whereby allowing her to unite young couples in holy matrimony.

Specifically, Lydia describes catching “the acrid odor of marital misery” around the time she has couples take their vows, even describing one incident where an elderly couple in their late 80s and early 90s married, only to have things turn sour the night of their wedding dinner! The newly wedded bride, disgusted with her husband’s excessive love of scotch, “packed her bags, moved into a retirement community, and filed for divorce.” Lydia claims about 40 percent of her marriages end up this way… and that her overactive olfactory can detect it before it happens!

Especially when it comes to human types, this is a rather odd thing to have manifest in the psychic realms of predictability. When it comes to animals, using the senses in extraordinary ways is an everyday occurrence… but what happens when, for instance, a feline is able to catch the scent of death before it happens?

Earlier this year, the English Telegraph reported the story of Oscar, a black and white feline who had been hanging around the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island. There, the furry fellow has a rather odd reputation for being able to sense the oncoming death of patients, who he often will accompany in their last hours by laying beside them. Geriatrician Dr David Dosa found the cat’s ability so unique that he compiled a report detailing 50 instances where he observed the cat’s appearance preceding the death of a patient Oscar had visited.

Dosa supposes that Oscar is able to detect ketones, which are biochemicals given off by dying cells that create a distinct odor some animals can perceive. In fact, there are also a variety of reports where dogs have the apparent ability to smell cancer. Therefore, could it be possible that a handful of humans, like Lydia the minister, might also be able to detect minute scents that are indicative of things to come?

Throughout history, a surprising number of fiction novelists have managed to spin plot elements into their stories which, though they had no idea at the time, would later prove to have startling ramifications in the real world.

In many instances where such startling similarities have occurred, names, dates, and places have even accurately been named, as though the authors had somehow tapped into actual future events and predicted their outcome.

One of the more startling instances of such “psychic novelist” activity involved Edgar Allan Poe, who managed to predict with frightening detail an exact series of events that later transpired at sea aboard a seagoing vessel called the Mignonette. In his longest (and arguably his strangest) story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the ship carrying the narrator and its crew encountered a freakish squall, in which only a handful of men survived. Among them was a lowly cabin boy named Richard Parker, who later was cannibalized in what was then known as the grim “custom of the sea.” Though this series of events was conjured from Poe’s mind, decades later the Mignonette was destroyed under almost identical circumstances, where a sudden 40-foot wave capsized the ship. Among the survivors–and first to be killed and cannibalized–was the cabin boy, whose name was none other than Richard Parker! Captain Tom Dudley, along with those who had helped devour young Parker, were later discovered alive, and were tried for murder.

Another instance of science fiction predicting strange incidents that would occur later involves Alexander Kazantsev, who wrote what appeared to be fiction based on an actual event, the Tunguska blast of 1908, in his 1946 story “A Visitor From Outer Space.” In the story, an alien spacecraft attempting to get water from Lake Baikal in Russia explodes in mid air. Although it is widely known that Kazantsev was perhaps the first to link aliens to the Tunguska event, in 2009, Russian Naval documents dealing with UFOs also revealed that 50% of all encounters with UFOs they reported had occurred under or near water. Strangely, a 1982 encounter military divers reported dealt with the appearance of “three humanoids clad in silver suits at a depth of 50 meters,” which resulted in the death of three of the divers. Perhaps Kazantsev had been closer to being accurate with his story than even he realized!

Then take into consideration Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer, who managed to weave a strange psychic prediction into the plot of his novel Barbary Shore, in which a Soviet spy character is living undercover in a New York Boarding House. The setting for the novel is based loosely on the apartment building in which he lived while writing it, and strangely, after its publication it was revealed that a soviet spy had actually been living upstairs, just as written about in Mailer’s fiction! Perhaps Mailer had his own affinity for psychic phenomenon, as this great quote illustrates with its mention of “psychic bullets”:

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell. –Norman Mailer

Jules Verne, one of Edgar Allan Poe’s proteges, also went on to be rather predictive with his fiction. Verne discussed the future of space flight in his book From the Earth to the Moon, which ended up describing events uncannily similar to what later became NASA’s real Apollo Program. In the story, three astronauts are launched from the Florida peninsula and later recovered through a splash landing. Also, in the book the spacecraft in question was launched from what Verne called “Tampa Town.” Tampa, Florida is approximately 130 miles from NASA’s actual launching site at present day Cape Canaveral.

So next time anybody brings up the old phrase “truth is stranger than fiction,” you’ll have no problem correcting them; if anything, it’s often apparently only as strange as the fiction that predicted it!

“Your plane looks like a silvery ghost in the moonlight,” Telepathic journal entry Harold
M. Sherman to Hubert Wilkins, December 7, 1937

How does the blind Mexican cave fish keep from crashing into rock walls? What invisible thread draws the catfish directly to its prey? Do their tiny fish brains have room for a sixth sense? Biophysicists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen have recently solidified their understanding of the fish’s gelatinous “remote sensing system,” but the concept is anything but new.

Seventy years ago, Harold M. Sherman came to a startlingly similar conclusion about the source of human telepathic powers, but no scientists paid attention to the remarkable book, Thoughts Through Space, he co-authored with famed Arctic explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins. The now nearly forgotten 1942 book chronicled a six-month North Pole mission undertaken by Wilkins to rescue the crew of a downed Russian plane. Before embarking Wilkins and Sherman a much published “student of mental powers” agreed to transmit thoughts to Sherman at a certain time several days each week. They both kept journals, and Sherman immediately sent his telepathic impressions by mail to Dr. Gardner Murphy, professor of psychology at Columbia University and to a mutual friend of the co-authors, a skeptic, Samuel Emery as proof of date. Sherman’s success rate and the specificity of many of his hits extraordinary. In his introduction to the Studies in Consciousness reissue of the book, renowned remote viewer Ingo Swann said he’d been “amazed and staggered” by Sherman’s accomplishment, which he originally stumbled upon in a used book bin in 1970.

So, what was Sherman’s theory of the forces behind human telepathy? “It may well be that we all exist in a vast sea of consciousness and that particles of thought can make instant union forming lines of force which carry messages from one sympathetic mind to another. …Mass consciousness is electrical in manifestation and most thoughts have a rate and character of vibration determined by the nature of the individual’s emotion reacting to external experience.”
How does fish telepathy compare? Scientists at Technische Universitaet Muenchen have found that fish have “lateral-line” organs aligned along the left and right sides of their body, around the eyes and mouth consisting of gelatinous flags called “neuromasts” that detect changes in the water’s motion and pressure.
“These changes can arise from various sources: A fish swimming by produces vibrations or waves that are directly conveyed to the lateral-line organ. Schooling fishes can recognize a nearby attacker and synchronize their swimming motion so that they resemble a single large animal. The Mexican cave fish pushes a bow wave ahead of itself, which is reflected from obstacles. The catfish takes advantage of the fact that a swimming fish that beats its tail fin leaves a trail of eddies behind. This so-called “vortex street” persists for more than a minute and can betray the prey.”

My own sixth sense tells me that it won’t be long before scientists discover that human’s too have “neuromasts” most likely residing in our huge gelatinous brains, but shriveled from eons of ignorance. And once “discovered,” ESP will suddenly go from shunned voo-doo to established science. Let’s hope the names on the Noble prize are Wilkins and Sherman.

[THOUGHTS THROUGH SPACE]
[Physicist Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox]
[Sir Huber Wilkins]