Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: 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.

While 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 detail.

Who are these mystics

who possess the power of prediction?

And just how do they 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.

♪ ♪

SHATNER: 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 psychics, palm readers

and fortune tellers of all kinds

for guidance about the future.

JONATHAN YOUNG: 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.

MITCH HOROWITZ: 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.

SHATNER: 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 clairvoyants

and their bold predictions will shed light

on the mysterious power of prophecy.

Deep in this remote, mountainous region

lies a small village called Nantian township.

In the center of the community, there is a commemorative square,

within which stands a 15-foot-tall statue

dedicated to an ancient prophet named Liu Bowen.

DAVID ROBINSON: Liu Bowen

is one of the most well-known figures

in all of Chinese history.

He's born in 1311, he dies in 1375.

He was a close adviser of the emperor

of the Ming dynasty, or the Hongwu Emperor.

In the surviving letters that we have,

the emperor repeatedly and explicitly refers

to Liu Bowen's ability to see the future.

DOMINIC STEAVU: 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 adviser,

and he's, uh, seen as a kind of

a cultural hero nowadays in China.

SHATNER: 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.

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 BC.

So, we're talking about

2,000 years of history that ends.

And Liu Bowen is credited with having seen this,

having seen the Revolution in the 20th century.

SHATNER: 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 of Shaobing."

STEAVU: 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 what was 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 line 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.

SHATNER: Because of its parallels

with the events of the 1911 Revolution,

the ancient "Song of Shaobing"

is considered an authentic prophecy in Chinese culture.

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

continue to have relevance today.

ROBINSON: You can go online, uh,

social media, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera,

and there are lengthy, detailed discussions

of Liu Bowen's prophecies

and how they might match current events.

People read current events in light of those prophecies,

and he's credited now

with having foreseen coronavirus.

STEAVU: 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

and the Year of the Rat,

and this corresponds to 2019 and 2020.

The details are incredibly precise.

ROBINSON: People revisited Liu Bowen'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.

SHATNER: Liu Bowen'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.

SHATNER: Here on the slopes of Mount Parnassus

lies the ruins of several holy sanctuaries

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 Oracle of Delphi.

The Oracle at 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 sway their actions.

So the Oracle at Delphi was one of the most powerful women

in ancient Greece.

HALE: 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 came, in the ancient world, to Delphi

with a life-changing question,

and she could then prophesize, give you a sign,

what's the right way to go.

Her magical power to channel

the prophetic gods was at your service.

SHATNER: The Oracle of Delphi reportedly predicted

numerous important events in the 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

was in the trance-- the ecstasy of the 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.

SHATNER: 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 evidence 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 cleft.

We wanted to collect some rocks and see if, by any chance,

that big geological fault that runs under the temple

released intoxicating gases

that the woman 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,

in 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 cleft.

And as the gases come up and she inhales them,

these sweet-smelling gases, With the first whiff,

she would be in an altered state,

because it could go straight through her nasal passages

and into her brain.

HOROWITZ: The Oracle of Delphi may have been in a state

of intoxication that would give visions to the prophetess.

Psychedelic substances

bring about a-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.

SHATNER: 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 abilities.

One of the best-known examples

is a curious drink called ayahuasca.

LACY: 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 vision,

to help somebody glean information

that they might be closed off from

under normal circumstances,

in an effort to foretell the future.

SHATNER: 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?

HALE: Anytime you're playing with intoxicants

and your brain especially is being affected,

you can't always be sure 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 trance,

we can back that up with the geology to show people,

"Take these ancient accounts seriously."

SHATNER: 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?

SHATNER: Craig Hamilton-Parker,

an English psychic and medium,

posts a series of prophecies on his 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, uh, 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, and at the time,

everybody was saying, "It's never gonna happen,

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

I saw the terrorist attacks in Nice in my vision

and I put those in my predictions.

Sometimes I don't like telling the future.

SHATNER: Within a year, the predictions Craig made

came surprisingly

and, in some cases, frighteningly true.

On April 16, 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

and 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 believe that his uncanny ability

to see the future couldn't have been a mere fluke.

The natural question that people have is,

"Where does a 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.

SHATNER: 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.

HAMILTON-PARKER: 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 trataka,

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.

SHATNER: In the fall of 2016, another of Craig's prophecies,

this time about the U.S. presidential election,

came to pass.

HAMILTON-PARKER: 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 primaries, and then I knew,

that's what I'd been seeing.

That was this strange figure that kept coming into

my meditations

and interrupting, uh, my thoughts.

Clearly, for me, Trump was gonna be president,

even though everybody at this time was saying,

"He don't stand a chance of ever being president."

But the unconscious seemed to know better.

SHATNER: But how is Craig actually getting

these messages about the future?

Are they really coming from his unconscious mind?

Precognition is, um, the scientific term

for things like premonitions,

and it's getting accurate information about a future event

that you didn't cause.

MICHIO KAKU: We think that the brain,

no matter how complicated and nonlinear it is,

is still 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.

ANNE CLEARY: The feeling of premonition might be an example

of how our memories orient us toward the future.

(horn blaring)

So, current thinking among memory researchers

is that our memories are not useful to us so much

for their ability to enable us to-to recollect the past

as they are useful to us for enabling us

to navigate and predict the future.

And from that perspective, the idea that déjà vu,

which might result from a memory process,

might be accompanied by feelings of premonition, fits that.

HOROWITZ: 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.

NICK POPE: The Internet, TV talk shows, and the best seller lists

are full of prophets and prognosticators

claiming to be able to divine the future.

And in a number of these cases,

they really seem to be able to do it.

SHATNER: 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.

RABBI ARIEL BAR TZADOK: The Bible makes it very clear that biblical prophets

were not arbitrary individuals, men or women,

who were 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 the 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.

SHATNER: 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 extra 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 bases of life anymore,

and that the mind has capacities, including

extra physical capacities, that are measurable,

that are present and that we're only beginning to understand.

HAMILTON-PARKER: 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 we've 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.

SHATNER: 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 describes,

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.

SHATNER: 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.

HOROWITZ: 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 different bodily ailments.

In his writings, Edgar Cayce described the process

as accessing information.

And he would read that information,

speak it in trance.

(muttering)

Edgar believed that his abilities were a gift.

But that it wasn't a power of his own.

He was channeling a higher power.

YOUNG: Cayce comes at the time when

there was a strong interest in fortune tellings of all kind.

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-are

way beyond anything that happens in a gypsy tearoom.

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 of 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.

SHATNER: 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, referred 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.

SHATNER: 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 uncovering 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's a vast amount that could be studied

that might have information about the future.

And it's fascinating to theorize about.

SHATNER: Does the answer to prophetic visions

lie in the subconscious?

In that elusive state between wakefulness and sleep?

After all, the fact that we dream

is evidence that our minds never truly shut off.

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.

SHATNER: News organizations broadcast a series of horrific images

that stun 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.

POPE: One of the first people to respond to the disaster

is psychiatrist John Barker.

Initially, he arrives to offer consultation to the survivors.

VIVANCO: 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 happened.

One boy drew a picture of people

amassed 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 there was this black mass

over the school, and she couldn't get in.

Both of these children later went to school and died.

POPE: 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 staff,

they devise an 11-point system looking for patterns.

SHATNER: 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 Hencher and Lorna Middleton--

stood out from the crowd.

POPE: Alan Hencher and Lorna Middleton

made headlines in March 1967,

when they both predicted a train accident

just days before a passenger car derailed, killing 49 people.

Hencher also had a premonition about a fatal plane crash,

predicting the number of people who would die.

That kind of accuracy is staggering.

SHATNER: For John Barker, the notion that Hencher

and Middleton's predictions might allow him to warn people

of disasters ahead of time 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 Hencher and Middleton,

and it involved John Barker himself.

Around 1:00 in the morning, Hencher calls Barker.

He's in a panic. He's got a-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 asked him, "What, am I in danger?"

Hencher says, "Yes."

POPE: Barker wrote a memo the next day explaining

that Hencher could only explain that the dark car

was somehow connected to Barker

and a potentially deadly outcome.

It all seemed pretty vague and perhaps

that wouldn't have worried Barker so much

were it not for the fact that there was another warning

from his other superstar, Lorna Middleton.

SHATNER: On August 18, 1968,

less than two years after he had opened

his Bureau of Premonitions,

John Barker was suddenly rushed to the hospital.

POPE: Barker died of a sudden brain hemorrhage, age 44.

The British Premonitions Bureau closed down shortly thereafter.

SHATNER: 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 powerful to be stopped?

SHATNER: In the heart of the city stands the Louvre,

one of the most renowned museums in the world.

Of the hundreds of thousands of artworks

contained in its prestigious galleries,

the biggest attraction is the Mona Lisa,

which draws roughly ten million visitors every year.

The Mona Lisa is one of the many important paintings

created by celebrated Renaissance artist

Leonardo da Vinci.

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

he was also a pioneer 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.

STEPHEN BULL: 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.

SHATNER: 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 his dream of flight.

For decades, modern historians have wondered

did da Vinci actually discover the secret

to soaring through the sky,

centuries before the invention of 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

to try to figure out how birds flew under their own power.

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

that he envisions in his notebooks

are in fact ornithopter designs, very much like birds

where they flap their wings to generate the lift for flying.

And then he progressed on to designs which were

much more like gliders.

MICHAEL DENNIN: One of the really fascinating things

about da Vinci's efforts is 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.

SHATNER: Leonardo da Vinci's principle of a single screw

turning a propeller to create 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.

MATTHEW LANDRUS: 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.

ADLER: 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

to 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

we will all be able to access our psychic potential

and practice the power of prediction.

But for now, what the future holds

remains... unexplained.

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