The Psychic

Still unconvinced.  A bit.

Claimed experiences in the paranormal is, to many people, the result of an overactive imagination.  To others such experiences are very real. I confess that I belong to the former category even though my mother was the seventh child of a seventh child and was believed by her family and friends to have significant predictive powers.

In my long and mainly unimpressive career as a military and later an airline pilot, I have consistently avoided the usual questions fired at me during conversations such as have I ever seen a UFO and how many crashes have I had.  The answers are simple.  Yes and two.  None of these incidents have any psychic significance apart from a warning given to me by my mother when I was first learning to fly in the RAF about travelling in a machine with a windmill on the roof.   She had no knowledge of helicopters and could not possibly have predicted the training accident which I survived without a scratch.  Neither could she have predicted that the fighter aircraft containing my weapons systems officer and myself would be scrambled to investigate a mysterious object some ninety thousand feet above the North Sea and that we would see it clearly but never reach it.  The service ceiling of a Javelin was around fifty thousand.

She did, however predict that I would have several attempts at a stable relationship before finally marrying a “good Scots lassie”.  I did, in fact have a pretty good stable relationship.  Her name was Cindy and she was a sixteen-one Clydesdale.

She also predicted the number and the gender of my children by my first wife.

As far as she was concerned, the whole psychic thing was just rubbish and depended on a profound knowledge of human nature.  But, she would read tea leaves with astonishing accuracy, tell fortunes using playing cards and on rare occasions would be persuaded to use a planchette, a sort of Ouija board on wheels without the letters but with a pencil through the board that apparently writes messages on the paper underneath.

A family friend, a Canon in the Anglican church, continually expressed concern that she was tampering with the dark side but those concerns were laughed off.  To mum, it was all a load of nonsense!

The list of her predictions would occupy far too much time but they were many.  Most were pleasant and a very few were less so.  She preferred to keep unpleasant things to herself and to treat her alleged competencies as a “bit of fun” although she regularly demolished her opponents at Bridge.  I tried without success to teach her to play Poker.  We would have made a fortune.

Although there can be absolutely no possible significance, she passed away at the age of ninety-eight, on the seventh day of July, seven days before her ninety-ninth birthday.  Do the math!

I am both an engineer and a pilot.  My training in both disciplines confirms that all things may be explained scientifically.

Or can they?