Farnborough Air Show Disaster - 1952

To say that I am excited about the material I have uncovered during my week at Cambridge University Library is an understatement. Some of the cases described could be re-written as individual episodes of the “Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits” they really are that good. I have no reason to disbelieve the individuals who were motivated to write in to J.B. Priestley in 1963. As I have stated before these are letters written by ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary events …. Individuals who seem to be embarrassed about describing what happened to them.

By the end of the week I had read around 450 letters and of those I have made full notes on around 67. I will be returning to the library soon to go through the remaining 800 or so letters. I cannot wait to read what amazing events they will describe.

One of the most interesting describes a series of events that took place in early September 1952. I am sure that this is the first time that this has been published in any shape or form, indeed, I suspect that I am only the third person to read this letter after Mr. Priestley himself and, possibly, his secretary.

These are my notes:

“In September 1952 “DP” and his wife were planning to drive home early from their holiday in Dorset to watch the Farnborough Air Show on the first public day and then carry on home after the show was over. As they were driving from Dorset his wife told him that she did not want to go to the show. The night before she had experienced a vivid dream that one of the aircraft had exploded during its exhibition and crashed into the crowd. She described the plane as silver with swept-back wings. However he convinced her that it was just a dream and that everything would be okay. They had already bought the tickets so she agreed to attend.

About half way through the show the DH.110 came out piloted by John Derry. This plane took off ready for its display. As it flew past David’s wife grabbed his arm and said “that’s the plane I saw in my dream – only it was silver not black”. Indeed this DH.110 was, indeed, black. She was really uneasy throughout the display but when the plane landed safely she was relieved.

They then travelled home to Welwyn. However the next day the evening papers carried the grim news that the DH.110 piloted by John Derry had crashed into the crowd killing twenty eight spectators. What was very odd was that the plane that crashed was, as his wife predicted, silver. It was not the machine that they had seen the day before. The black plane had been specially painted for the event but it had developed a fault on the Saturday morning. The first prototype was then used. This had not been painted and was still silver. John Derry had flown back to Hatfield to pick this reserve aircraft up and flew it back to Farnborough for the display.

This is an amazing precognition because it looked as if it was incorrect but then was shown to be uncannily accurate. In turn this dream was reported to somebody other than the dreamer before the accident took place.

The actual date was the 6th September 1952. The final death toll was 31 including the pilot.”

This is a short film about this event. In it you will note that the events that took place were exactly as described by DP in his letter to J.B. Priestley:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I-BkpWvwGc

For each case I have full supporting details including the writers name, address and, in many cases, original phone number.

Philip K Dick Letters

As an advance taster to what you are likely to find in my next book I would like to discuss the subject of the last chapter ... a gentleman that you all know seems to have some peculiar link with both ITLAD and possibly even myself (viz the Anarch Peak character in "Counter Clock World").

Throughout his life PKD called his Daemon many names but the one that he settled on was the Vast Active Living and Intelligent System, or VALIS. However it was not until 1981 that he was to write a novel by that name. Driven by the fact that his precognitive skills were telling him that he did not have long to live – again a precognition that was to prove correct as he was to die a year later of a stroke – Phil was keen to get his theories down on paper. For years he had been writing a narrative of his philosophy that he was to call Exegesis. However this was virtually unpublishable so Phil decided that he would write a fiction around the facts of his life.

For those of you who have read my first book Is There Life After Death? - The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die, (ITLAD), 'Valis' makes a simply fascinating read. Yet again we have Dick embroidering a state of consciousness that I argue is more real than reality itself into a barely disguised biography.

Right from the start Dick wants it made clear that he is two personalities. The main character is the curiously named Horselover Fat. Curious only if you don’t understand basic Greek and basic German in which case the pun is fairly clear. ‘Horse lover’ in Greek is translated as Philos Hippus and Fat is English for the German word Dick. So there you have it. Clearly Horselover Fat is Phil himself. However we soon discover that the narrator of this tale is a sober science fiction writer by the name of Philip K. Dick. We are already in the land of duality twins and doppelgangers that Dick was so fascinated post March 1974. However writer Phil expands on many of the other themes that had filled his life for seven years.

Horse Fat is convinced that reality is an illusion. He has come to this conclusion after years of reading Gnostic texts. Narrator Phil is not convinced of this belief but agrees to join Fat on a journey to Northern California to find a band called Mother Goose. Whilst there they meet a young girl by the name of Sophia. Clearly the name was picked by Dick to show that this girl is some form of Gnostic deity. Indeed this proves to be the case when she brings about the fusing of Fat and Dick into a single being. This is a clear reference to Dick’s belief that his personal amanuensis fused his Daemon and Eidolon in March 1974.

This fusing of his two personalities allows the narrator to perceive reality as having two versions;
Fat perceives the ‘Matrix’ whereas Phil has always existed within the confines of the ‘Black Iron Prison’ of the Demiurge.

Sophia brings about the joining together of the two aspects of Phil’s personality because she is the embodiment of a ‘VALIS’, as we have already seen this is an acronym for Vast Acting Living Intelligence System. This is a form of metaphysical DNA that can replicate itself inside the brain. Like a virus it can spread through the cortex and in doing so open up that persons consciousness to perceive the reality of the ‘Matrix’. Once this takes place the person becomes a ‘homeoplasmate’ or a unified being that perceives the Matrix as true reality.

In this way the real Philip K Dick explained to his readers what had happened to him in 1974. For Sophia/Valis read my Daemon. I contend that although involved in Dick’s life from a very early age the Daemon could only communicate with its Eidolon in a more directing way when Phil’s brain structures became open to the communication. This may have been brought about by the onset of temporal lobe epilepsy in his later years. It is possible that Phil’s contention that when a young man he was diagnosed with schizophrenia was why the messages were garbled and unclear until 1974.

If my theory is right then Phil Dick’s Daemon, under the pseudonym VALIS, made a concerted attempt to have its famous writer Eidolon set out in fictional format the philosophy of reality that I was later to describe in my book Is There Life After Death? Literally everything is there. However Phil was to misunderstand the message and confuse some of the elements. However a careful reading of his work in the light of mine may bring you to some startling conclusions.

But there is one really fascinating proof of Dick’s Daemon and its precognitive abilities. I believe that I have discovered evidence that his Daemon gave Phil an image of his own final moments.

As you may recall I have discovered a thus far unpublished treasure trove of letters sent by Phil to a pen pal in the early 1970s. As I was looking for a suitable ending to this chapter I came across one written on February 25th 1975. This letter carried the following fascinating postscript:

I was up to 5 a.m. on this last night. I did something I never did before; I commanded the entity to show itself to me – the entity which has been guiding me internally since March. A sort of dream-like period passed, then, of hypnogogic images of underwater cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not still; a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch."*

On February 18th 1982 Phil’s neighbours become concerned that they had not seen him that day. They knocked on his door then forced their way into the apartment. They found Phil lying unconscious in the living room. This was a place that Phil in 1975 would not have recognised. It is likely that he would have been found in exactly the position and location described so clearly in Phil’s Daemon-evoked hypnogogic almost exactly seven years before. Phil was not dead at this time but clearly in his dream-vision Phil could not have known if the man was actually dead or unconscious. He was to die about a week later without really gaining consciousness.

Now please note that Phil was quite precise in his command to his Daemon – he requested that it show itself. I believe that that is exactly what the Daemon did. It showed a future Phil in the last few moments of his conscious awareness before the stroke severed his links with ‘reality’ as he perceived it. In doing so the Daemon implied that it was Phil himself in the final moments of his life – existing in the half-life described in Ubik and explained in my first book.

Could this be another Daemonic clue that we do, indeed, Cheat The Ferryman?

*Dick, Philip K Letter to Claudia Krenz - 25th February 1975.

Philip K Dick's precognition in Dean Radin's 'Entangled Minds'

A very curious case of coincidence/synchrondipity has just taken place.

I have recently been in contact with American science writer and researcher Dean Radin. I placeca comment on his blogger site (http://deanradin.blogspot.com/) and he responded with interest in both my theories and my website. I am hopeful that at some stage Dean will also take a look at this excellent (thanks to you guys) blog. As I have recently joined the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in which Dean is a senior scientist I am keen to have his involvement.

If you look on Amazon USA you will find that a high percentage of people who buy ITLAD also buy Dean's book Entangled Minds. I now have my own copy and I settled down to read it this morning. I am very much enjoying it and I can highly recommend it to anybody wishing to look into greater detail the implications of quantum physics. However I was stunned to discover that on page 25 Dean discusses our very own Philip K Dick. As I have a whole chapter of my book dedicated to PKD I was keen to read Dean's 'take' on this great man. Dean takes a quote from Dick's autobiographical work "How To Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later". I have not read this because if I had the following quote by Dick would have had pride of place in "The Daemon":

'In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy - this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to make her give dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restaurant together, Kathy stopped short and said "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."

Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition.'

Now what is really interesting about this is that in my chapter on PKD in The Daemon I cite many examples of his precognitive abilities (including having a vision about his own death which, as far as I am aware has not been published anywhere else) but none about him using events yet to happen as plot devices. However the book has many examples of other writers who have done this. I argue that there is strong evidence to presume that PKD had TLE and that he had a particularly active Daemon - a Daemon that was to become even more active in March 1974 (three years or so later than these events) when PKD experienced what he called his 'theophany'. Now if CTF is correct then PKD was subliminally aware that the future was, in fact, the past, a past that he had experienced in his previous loop round the Bohmian IMAX. As such he subconsciously (or via direct Daemonic inspiration) wove the 'real' events that he was about to experience into a story.

With TLE being a major topic after Daza Vu's contribution this 'discovery' is particularly significant.