Original subtitles

An imperial advisor who foretold the end of a dynasty.

A trance -like state of mind attained by a mysterious oracle.

And an entire organization founded on the ability to predict the future.

There's something about human nature that compels us to want to know what the

future will bring.

We use predictions all the time when it comes to weather or traffic or even the

stock market.

Well, most predictions are simply a best guess based on experience.

There are those among us who have the ability to see the future in vivid

Who are these mystics who possess the power of prediction? And just how do

tap into an unseeable realm to capture details beyond our reach?

And is the ability to see the future, A special gift?

Or something we all are capable of?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

In our modern world, it might be tempting to assume that prophecy

is merely an antiquated fantasy from the past that has no relevance today.

But the surprising truth is that millions of people still rely on

readers, and fortune tellers of all kinds for guidance about the future.

People want to know about the future. Our hopes get projected into prophecies,

the things that might get better.

Our fears get projected into prophecies, the things that might go bad.

And various writers and mystics attempt to tell us what is coming.

Sometimes they get it right.

Predictions continue to garner attention today because human nature tends to go

in the direction of something that it considers beneficial.

And so when we speak of prognostication or peering into the future, we at least

have to give credence to the possibility that prophecy works.

Is it possible that some people do in fact have the ability to peer into the

future?

Well, for thousands of years humanity has turned to so -called prophets for

information about what the future holds.

So perhaps a close examination of some ancient clairvoyance and their bold

predictions will shed light on the mysterious power of prophecy.

Zhejiang Province, China.

Deep in this remote mountainous region lies a small village called Nantian

Township.

In the center of this community, there is a commemorative square within which

stands a 15 -foot tall statue dedicated to an ancient prophet named

Liu Bowen.

Liu Bowen is one of the most well -known figures in all of Chinese history.

He's born in 1311. He died in 1375.

He was a close advisor of the emperor of the Ming dynasty, or the whole emperor.

In the surviving letters that we have, the emperor repeatedly and explicitly

refers to Liu Bowen's ability to see the future.

On account of Liu Bowen's access to this untapped knowledge about the future,

the emperor was able to...

predict where enemy troops were, when they would strike, and he was able to

defend or attack them successfully.

Very famously, there's a story that says he helped the Ming emperor secure the

throne and overthrow the Mongols who ruled over China previously for a few

hundred years.

So Liu Bowen was a very useful advisor, and he's seen as a kind of a cultural

hero nowadays in China.

Liu Bowen made thousands of predictions related to Chinese affairs of state.

But his most famous prophecy was of an event that took place not during his

lifetime, but rather more than 500 years after his death.

1911.

All across China, uprisings occur against the Qing Dynasty.

The revolution culminates in the abdication.

of the child emperor Puyi and the end of the Chinese monarchy.

This is one of the most important events in all of Chinese history because it's

the end of a dynastic system that had been in play since at least 221

B .C.

So we're talking about 2 ,000 years of history that end.

And the Obolwan is credited with having seen this, having seen the revolution.

In the 20th century.

For some, the idea that a man who lived in the 1300s could successfully predict

the overthrow of the last emperor of China in 1911 might sound impossible.

But many Chinese people believe that Liu Bowen did, in fact, do just that.

And as evidence, they point to a cryptic poem Bowen wrote that is called The

Song.

One of the most important parts of the song is it has a line about one of the

last emperors dying prematurely in his palace.

And this actually occurred. The penultimate emperor died as a result of

probably poisoning at a relatively young age in the palace.

And it happened only a number of years before the revolution.

Following this description of the emperor's premature death, there is a

about the appearance of a golden dragon.

Now, the term golden dragon in the Chinese culture refers to a ruler who is

adored by his people. And this is indeed what happened when Sun Yat -sen came to

power as the first provisional president of the Republic of China following the

revolution.

He was the savior and father of the Chinese nation.

Because of its parallels with the events of the 1911 revolution,

the ancient song of Sao Binh is considered an authentic prophecy in

culture.

And in fact, many people believe that Liu Bowen's predictions continue to have

relevance today.

You can go online, social media, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. And there

lengthy, detailed discussions of newborn ones' prophecies and how they might

match current events. People read current events in light of those

And he's credited now with having foreseen coronavirus.

The prophecy describes a massive plague that will...

ravage China and the rest of the world.

It mentions that the brunt of this plague will occur in the year of the pig

the year of the rat, and this corresponds to 2019 and 2020.

The details are incredibly precise.

People revisited Yoboan's prophecies, and they see this reference to the

eruption of an epidemic.

And this seems to provide answers, to provide some sense of order, offer

guidance and clarity.

He did foresee this, just as he's foreseen other things.

Liu Bo 'an's predictions about the future of Chinese dynastic history took

hundreds of years to come to fruition.

But if you were looking for more timely advice thousands of years ago...

There was actually a place where people of all types could go to consult

directly with the gods.

Delphi, Greece.

Here on the slopes of Mount Parnassus lies the ruins of several holy

that were constructed by the ancient Greeks.

The most famous of these structures is the Temple of Apollo.

Built in the 5th century BC, the Temple of Apollo was the site of a sacred

ceremony in which farmers, merchants, and even kings would come to hear

prophecies about their future from a high priestess who was known as the

of Delphi.

The Oracle of Delphi is a unique individual in the past.

This is a woman who, through her prophecy, was able to see the future.

and people are coming to her and expecting to get information that helps

their actions.

So the Oracle at Delphi was one of the most powerful women in ancient Greece.

Inside the Temple of Apollo, the Oracle was seated on a high tripod and would be

open for consultations, and people would come from all over the world.

So kings would come.

Farmers would come if they wanted to know about the next harvest. Everybody

in the ancient world to Delphi with a life -changing question, and she could

then prophesy, give you a sign, what's the right way to go.

Her magical power to channel the prophetic gods was at your service.

The Oracle of Delphi reportedly predicted numerous important events in

ancient world, including the rise of Alexander the Great and the death.

of the Roman Emperor Nero.

Many historians believe a clue to her powers of prophecy can be found in the

writings of an ancient Greek historian named Plutarch.

Plutarch wrote three long pieces about Delphi.

And Plutarch described how when the Oracle is in the trance, the ecstasy of

prophecy, this breath came up from Mother Earth and Plutarch also said it

smelled sweet like perfume.

And when Mother Earth is breathing at Delphi, the Delphic Oracle goes into an

altered state, and she becomes like a ventriloquist dummy.

But the ventriloquist is the wisdom of Mother Earth spoken through the Delphic

Oracle in Greece.

What was the mysterious breath from Mother Earth that gave the Oracle her

prophetic power?

Well, in 2003, a team led by archaeologist Dr. John Hale uncovered

which suggests that the answer to this ancient riddle does, in fact, lie

in the Earth itself.

The Temple of Apollo had been built around a subterranean cliff.

We wanted to collect some rock to see if, by any chance, that big geological

fault. that runs under the temple, released intoxicating gases that the

got into her altered state from.

So we took our rock samples, we had them analyzed in the labs, and they showed a

cocktail of light hydrocarbon gases, methane, ethane, and

ethylene.

Ethylene is what puts the sweet smell in every flower and the grapes you

harvest.

in living things that smell sweet, and it is one of the most instantly

intoxicating gases known to humanity.

It's the ethylene that does it.

The woman is seated on that tripod directly above the class, and as the

come up and she inhales them, these sweet -smelling gases, with the first

she would be in an altered state, because it could go straight through her

passages and into her brain.

The Oracle of Delphi may have been in a state of intoxication that would give

visions to the prophetess.

Psychedelic substances bring about a relaxation of inhibitions, and there

are experiments that have been done that have raised tantalizing questions about

the possibility of precognition using what we would call narcotics today.

Did inhaling gas that rose out of the earth, Allow the Oracle of Delphi to see

the future?

It's a fascinating possibility.

And in fact, for thousands of years, priests, prophets, and shamans from all

over the world have used exotic substances to unlock prophetic

One of the best known examples is a curious drink called ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca is a brewed concoction made amongst a number of Amazonian tribes and

contains a number of different kinds of plants.

Ayahuasca has been purported to elicit feelings of flying, and shamans use

ayahuasca to have an ability to see the future or to be able to make prophecy.

Ayahuasca is often ingested in religious ceremonies in the Amazon basin.

and used as a sacred ceremonial substance or

sacrament.

It is said to release the mind into a deeper, realer state of being, of

to help somebody glean information that they might be closed off from under

normal circumstances in an effort to foretell the future.

The fact that ancient cultures around the world used mind -altering substances

to enable prophecy raises a fascinating question.

Did these concoctions actually help our ancestors see the future as people have

believed for centuries?

Anytime you're playing with intoxicants, and your brain especially is being

affected, you can't always be sure of what's going to happen.

Delphi shows us an example of a culture in which when they say there was

an external force coming up out of the rock that triggered the transit, we can

back that up with the geology to show people, take these ancient accounts

seriously.

We'll never know if the power of the prediction witnessed in the Oracle of

Delphi was merely fume -induced fantasy or the actual ability to see the future.

What can we learn about the secrets of the past by examining the abilities of

modern -day prophets?

Eastleigh, England, September 2015.

Craig Hamilton Parker, an English psychic and medium, posts a series of

prophecies on this website.

Some of them quite ominous and even oddly disturbing.

I've been a psychic medium all my life, in touch with the spirit world, and

sometimes make predictions.

And in 2015, I decided to put some predictions on my website. I said that

there'd be a massive earthquake in Japan.

I wrote that Brexit would happen. At the time, everybody was saying it's never

going to happen, everybody's going to vote to remain, there's no chance.

I saw a terrorist attack in Nice in my vision, and I put those in my

predictions.

Sometimes I don't like telling the future.

Within a year, the predictions Craig made came surprisingly, and in some

frighteningly true.

On April 16th, 2016, Kumamoto, Japan was shaken by a 7 .0 magnitude earthquake.

50 people were killed and more than 3 ,000 people injured.

And then, on June 23rd, over half of Great Britain voted to approve Brexit

leave the European Union.

Finally, on July 14th, a 19 -ton truck driven by a terrorist plowed through a

crowded market in Nice, France, killing 86 people and injuring over 400.

Of course, not all of Craig's prophecies ended up happening. For instance, he

predicted that a gas attack would take place in a European city, but there was

no such attack in Europe that year.

But the fact that he got three out of four predictions right led many to

that his uncanny ability to see the future couldn't have been a mere fluke.

The natural question that people have is, where does the prediction come from?

Where is the so -called psychic getting this information from?

The first explanation we go to is that it's some sort of psychosis. But that

doesn't really hold up, because you can't turn crazy on and off.

And the fact is, if you meet most of these folk, and I've met plenty of them,

they're perfectly ordinary, everyday, functioning people.

According to Craig, his ability to see events before they happen is one he was

born with.

Since childhood, he surprised his family with what he called flashes of the

future. glimpses of things that hadn't yet come to pass, but often did.

And in his early 20s, he decided to make a journey to India, where he studied

the writings of ancient oracles and honed his raw talent.

So I became very interested in this idea that there's an ancient tradition that

goes back right through time, over many, many centuries, maybe back tens of

thousands of years.

For me, seeing the future is a bit like a dream experience in many respects.

I use an old technique from India called Tretkaka, which I look into a candle,

basically. You go into a sort of a state of gazing and then move the image of

that candle into the middle of what we call the third eye. And you'll see it as

an afterimage on the back of the eye, where all these visions will appear.

I see things, things I know, things I don't know.

It's like the universe knows better than I do. It gave me this information, and

it's kind of my duty to put it out there.

In the fall of 2016, another of Craig's prophecies, this time about the U .S.

presidential election, came to pass.

I kept getting glimpses of this strange character, you know, and I thought, who

on earth is this?

And then suddenly Trump announces himself in the primary.

And then I knew that's what I'd been seeing. That was this strange figure

kept coming into my meditations and interrupting my thoughts.

Clearly, for me, Trump was going to be president, even though everybody at the

time was saying he don't stand a chance of ever being president.

But the unconscious seemed to know better.

But how is Craig actually getting these messages about the future?

Are they really coming from his unconscious mind?

Precognition is the scientific term for things like premonition.

And it's getting accurate information about a future event that you didn't

cause.

We think that the brain, no matter how complicated and nonlinear it is, is

something that could be reduced down to the laws of physics.

Now, that doesn't mean that the brain can't imagine the future.

We are genetically hardwired to have premonitions. We can't stop it.

It's part of our makeup.

The feeling of premonitions might be an example of how our memories orient us

toward the future.

So current thinking among memory researchers is that our memories are not

to us so much for their ability to enable us to recollect the past as they

useful to us for enabling us to navigate and predict the future.

And from that perspective, the idea that deja vu, which might result from a

memory process, might be accompanied by feelings of premonition fits that.

If somebody has.

an authentic, intuitive, or insightful gift.

And I do think such things exist.

I think it's a kind of ESP in which certain individuals are able to glean

information in anomalous ways, in ways that go beyond our ordinary five senses.

The Internet, TV talk shows, and the bestseller list are full of prophets and

pronosticators claiming to be able to divine the future.

And in a number of these cases, they really seem to be able to do it.

If it's true that there are such things as real psychics, then where exactly

does their incredible gift come from, and how can we better understand it?

According to some researchers, the explanation doesn't lie in the distant

future, but rather the ancient past.

The Bible makes it very clear.

that biblical prophets were not arbitrary individuals, men or women, who

just as if minding their own business and then God chose them.

It wasn't like that at all.

It was an internal experience that the Bible calls a dream or a vision.

If you do not learn how to understand dreams, you will never understand their

message.

It is very clearly said in the Bible that prophets had to go to school

to learn how to experience and interpret the

spiritual message, which we call prophecy.

And biblical teachings of prophecy were not limited to those

of the religious world.

Many people...

have been trained in these techniques, and we don't even realize it.

Trained to see the future?

Could such a far -fetched but also tantalizing notion actually be possible?

I think our generation is on the precipice of a great question about the

-physical abilities of the mind. I don't know that we'll answer it, but I think

it is coming more and more into focus that materialism just doesn't cover all

the basis of life anymore, and that the mind has capacities, including extra

-physical capacities, that are measurable, that are present, and that

beginning to understand.

It's a natural part of the human condition to make predictions.

And couldn't it be that maybe our predictive ability is far greater than

ever imagined? That maybe every one of us somehow has a way of seeing into the

fabric of time? We just have to trust that ability.

If each of us could learn how to predict the future, would we accept our fate or

fight to change it?

Are people who have the power of prophecy chosen, like the Bible

Or is there a hidden capability each one of us has that simply needs to be

unlocked?

For a young man in Selma, Alabama, it was the ability to receive remarkable

information while in a deep trance that would make him world famous and earn him

the name, the sleeping prophet.

Selma, Alabama.

In this small city at 21 Broad Street stands what looks like an ordinary brick

building.

But curiously, a historic marker plaque explains that this was once the home of

an extraordinary man named Edgar Cayce.

In the 1920s, people from all over the country came to Selma to visit Cayce and

seek information about the future.

from the man known as the Sleeping Prophet.

Edgar Cayce was a man born in the agricultural south in the late

1870s, but as he grew older, he detected in himself the ability

to enter into a sleep -like trance state and be able to perform

what were considered medically clairvoyant readings of subjects.

He was said to have the ability to diagnose and prescribe cures for

bodily ailments.

In his writings, Edgar Cayce described the process

as accessing information.

And he would read that information.

Speak it in trance.

Edgar believed that disabilities were a gift, but that it wasn't a power

of his own.

He was channeling a higher power.

Casey comes at the time when there was a strong interest in fortune tellings of

all kinds.

For one thing, there were tea rooms in which you could sell tea.

And someone could look at the tea leaves, usually a fortune teller.

But on the other hand, Edgar Cayce is a little different.

The level of prophecy, the predictions he's making, are way beyond anything

happens in a gypsy tea room.

At first, it was just local people coming for these consultations. But

gradually, over time, his fame spread.

And Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla.

Woodrow Wilson asked his advice about what might be coming up.

Edgar Cayce had a series of readings we call the World Affairs Readings in

which he actually predicted the crash of the New York Stock Exchange

in 1929.

He also described the Asian involvement in the European War, World War II.

Another fascinating aspect of Edgar Cayce's readings is that he foresaw and

talked about the Dead Sea Scrolls long before they were discovered in 1947.

He was talking about it in the 30s and 40s. And so Edgar Cayce had a great deal

of success with his psychic readings.

Edgar Cayce is considered by many to be the best documented prophet of the 20th

century.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Cayce was widely believed to be not a showman

or an entertainer, but rather a genuine clairvoyant.

But just where was this information he prophesied coming from?

Cayce's method to perform acts of clairvoyance was to glean

information from what he called the source, or what he at other times

to as the Akashic Records.

The concept of Akasha extends back to ancient Vedic culture.

And according to Hindu tradition, it was like an ethereal hall

of records in which all events that ever occurred were imprinted.

And Edgar Cayce said that this was the record book that he was using.

to gain access to extrasensory information.

Was Edgar Cayce somehow able to tap into a universal source of knowledge that

existed outside of his own mind?

For now, the answer is unclear.

But people continue to read Edgar Cayce's predictions in hopes of

more prophecies that actually came true.

Edgar Cayce's readings first started being recorded systematically in 1923,

and there are 14 ,308 surviving readings,

and there are thousands of readings that have never been fully explored.

There is a vast amount that could be studied that might have information

the future.

And it's fascinating to theorize about.

But

what

if this ability to see the future could be put to the test by an institution set

up to rigorously study this phenomenon?

It just so happens that such a place exists, and it's called the British

Premonitions Bureau.

South Wales, United Kingdom, October 21st, 1966.

News organizations broadcast a series of horrific images that stunned viewers

across the country.

A tidal wave of mud and shale has swallowed the small coal -mining town of

Aberfan in its entirety.

Of the 144 people killed by the landslide, 116 are schoolchildren.

And for this tight -knit community, many of whom have lived in Aberfan for

generations,

the loss is devastating.

One of the first people to respond to the disaster is psychiatrist John

Initially, he arrives to offer consultation to the survivors.

So when he gets there, he's interviewing parents that had lost children.

He was really surprised to hear that there were premonitions before it

One boy drew a picture of people masked on the hillside digging into it, and he

wrote underneath the end.

Also, there was a young girl who told her mom about a dream where she said

was this black mask over the school, and she couldn't get in.

Both of these children later went to school and died.

Barker begins to wonder whether these premonitions could be used as a sort of

early warning system that might prevent future disasters.

So he asked Peter Fairley, who ran the science desk at the national newspaper,

the London Evening Standard, to consider setting up a program to collate

people's premonitions.

Fairley not only agreed, But he set up an entire bureau to act as a focal

point.

Starting in January 1967, the bureau commences operations.

Reports come in, and the bureau's staff, they devise an 11 -point system,

looking for patterns.

Five points for unusualness, five points for accuracy, and one point for timing.

The British Premonitions Bureau.

as it would come to be called, collected 469 predictions in its first year.

Unsurprisingly, many never came true.

But those submitted by two individuals, Alan Hensher and Lorna Middleton, stood

out from the crowd.

Alan Hensher and Lorna Middleton made headlines in March 1967.

when they both predicted a train accident just days before a passenger

derailed, killing 49 people.

Hensher also had a premonition about a fatal plane crash, predicting the number

of people who would die.

That kind of accuracy is staggering.

For John Barker, the notion that Hensher and Middleton's predictions might allow

him to warn people of disasters ahead of time.

It was an exciting one.

For the next year, he sent hundreds of what he believed to be credible

predictions to the editors of the London Evening Standard.

But in the summer of 1968, there was one deadly premonition that he chose to

ignore.

One that was shared by both Hensher and Middleton.

And it involved John Barker himself.

Around one in the morning, Hensher calls Barker.

He's in a panic. He's got a terrible premonition. He says, do you have a dark

car?

Barker says yes. And he tells Barker, you have to be careful. Be very, very

careful.

Then Barker asks him, what? Am I in danger?

Hensher says yes.

Barker wrote a memo the next day.

explaining that Hencher could only explain that the dark car was somehow

connected to Barca and a potentially deadly outcome.

It all seemed pretty vague, and perhaps that wouldn't have worried Barca so much

were it not for the fact that there was another warning from his other

superstar, Lorna Middlepool.

On August 18, 1968, less than two years after he had opened his Bureau of

Premonitions, John Barker was suddenly rushed to the hospital.

Barker died of a sudden brain hemorrhage, age 44.

The British Premonitions Bureau closed down shortly thereafter.

As for the dark car, there are many who are convinced that the answer is simple.

It was the funeral hearse that conveyed John Barker's body to its final resting

place.

It raises the question, was Barker's own death just a coincidence?

Was it self -fulfilling prophecy?

Or like the rest of the Bureau's predictions, was fate simply too

stopped?

Paris, France.

In the heart of the city stands the Louvre, one of the most renowned museums

the world.

Of the hundreds of thousands of artworks contained in its prestigious galleries,

the biggest attraction is the Mona Lisa, which draws roughly 10 million visitors

every year.

The Mona Lisa is one of the many important paintings created by

Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci.

But curiously, da Vinci was much more than just a painter. He was also a

who envisioned futuristic technologies.

Leonardo da Vinci is widely regarded as the quintessential Renaissance man

because he did it all.

He was an artist, he was a gifted engineer, and he was

also a great craftsman.

So he had a wide array of skills combined with a brilliant mind.

When we think of da Vinci, we often think about his sketches of amazing

machines. And he compiled this vast collection of sketches in his notebooks.

He was designing fortifications, port facilities,

canals, catapults, and tanks.

These sketches would be completely at home in the notebook of an engineering

student today.

Leonardo certainly had an amazing imagination.

But one has to say that Leonardo's ideas were too advanced for his time in the

sense that he was stymied by the lack of the right materials in the period.

However... The fact that very few of the things Leonardo depicted actually were

done shouldn't really blind us to his genius.

While most of da Vinci's concepts were too advanced to be built in the 15th

century, incredibly, some traces of his actual achievements can be seen today.

In Milan, a canal system designed by da Vinci has been preserved, and a military

stronghold he constructed in Switzerland.

Still stands But of all the futuristic machines envisioned

by Leonardo da Vinci His most famous designs were in pursuit of a stream of

flight For decades modern historians have wondered did da Vinci actually

discover the secret to soaring through the sky centuries before the invention

the airplane

Leonardo's understanding of flight was certainly a lot deeper than many of his

contemporaries. He was one of the first people to study actual bird motion, try

to figure out how birds flew under their own power.

If you look at Leonardo's flying machines, the first machines that he

in his notebooks are, in fact, ornithopter designs, very much like

they flap their wings to generate the lift for flying.

And then he progressed on to designs which were much more like gliders.

One of the really fascinating things about da Vinci's efforts, if he was very

creative in thinking about how humans might spin things or turn things, one of

the designs he had was an aerial screw.

And it's a particular structure, like a propeller, to provide lift and have

something fly.

Leonardo da Vinci's principle of a single screw turning a propeller to

lift is strikingly similar to the mechanics behind the modern helicopter.

And over the years, engineers have been inspired to bring da Vinci's visionary

designs to life through real world experimentation.

In 1976,

The Gossamer Condor was flown, and it was the first human -powered flying

machine with one person operating this propeller -driven glider, essentially.

It was the first attempt at what Leonardo was trying to make.

A crew at the University of Maryland used Leonardo's design for the aerial

screw.

the quadcopter design worked. The air screws actually did provide enough lift

lift the quadcopter up, and so there is some promise for a design like that.

So Leonardo, even today, does inspire people in their designs.

Was Leonardo da Vinci simply a genius who was ahead of his time, or were his

inventions the result of an ability to see the future?

Whatever the case may be, there's no question that the unique capability to

perceive what is yet to come, has influenced the world as we know it for

thousands of years.

Whether it's called clairvoyance, mysticism, or prophecy, perhaps one day

will all be able to access our psychic potential and practice the power of

prediction. But for now, what the future holds remains

unexplained.