The Search for Scientific Proof for Premonitions

When it finally happened, shortly after nine o’clock in the morning on October 21, 1966—when the teetering pile of mining waste known as a coal tip collapsed after days of heavy rain and an avalanche of black industrial sludge swept down the Welsh mountainside into the village of Aberfan, when rocks and mining equipment from the colliery slammed into people’s homes and the schools were buried and 116 young children were asphyxiated by this slurry dark as the river Styx—the anguished public response was that someone should have seen this disaster coming, ought to have predicted it.