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Mary Rose Barrington, Ian Stevenson and Zofia Weaver, A World in a Grain of Sand: The Clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki,  2005.

The Formal Experiments

When I arrived at the Institute there were a dozen people already there, and in due course I was introduced to M. Stefan Ossowiecki. While waiting for other people to arrive we were seated round a large table. M. Ossowiecki was placed beside someone and had a lady whom I did not know on his right. I was at the other end of the table on the opposite side. There was talk among the several groups of people round the table. As for me, I had the good luck to be sitting next to Prof. Vallee, and we engaged in lively conversation.

After a little while, we were told that all the guests were now assembled on the floor below, and we all stood up and one by one left the room by the door near the end of the table where M. Ossowiecki was sitting. Instead of going through the door first, as he had been invited to do, he stood beside it-despite repeated exhortations-as if he wanted to be the last to leave the room. And because of where we had been sitting, Prof. Vallee and I were indeed the last to approach the door.

To my astonishment, at the moment when I was about to pass through the door, M. Ossowiecki made for me, grasping my arm and saying: "Sir, I don't know you and I know nothing about you. But from the start of the reception I noticed you and I felt myself irresistibly drawn to you. I can't describe what I felt. Several times I asked the people sitting next to me what they could tell me about you, but they don't know you. Then suddenly I read your thoughts and saw into your mind, your very being, your whole life." (At this point he enlarged on my intellectual merits and moral values and on my personality, which are matters of no interest here).

"I also feel towards you a total sense of intellectual and moral empathy. Everything interests you, and you work much too hard. For years and years you have pursued a goal. You would have achieved it and risen to great heights, but your life has been shattered from the viewpoint of health. You have had to endure a lot of suffering, continually, and for many years, and you resist it with fierce strength. Just now, while you were talking, I felt that you had terrible pain, though nothing showed. You mustn't overwork yourself as you do, because you will wear yourself out. Though your life is so painful, and in spite of your progress being slowed down by your state of health, you will nevertheless fulfil your destiny, but you must not kill yourself by carrying on the way you do. I think your health may improve. I should like to help you. I feel what you are suffering; let me take your head in my hands; I shall tell you what has happened and where you feel it most."

I agreed to this, and he then took my head between his hands and massaged the exact place on my neck and the occipital region, doing this in front of several people who had come back into the room and formed a circle around us. M. Ossowiecki was very strung up; his hands trembled; he had a far away look. Then suddenly he called out:

"I'm there; I see what's wrong; you were wounded in the war by an exploding shell; you nearly died; wait, wait; I shall tell you where you were wounded; it's there, on the neck; and you have a lot of pain there; there is a lot of congestion and thickening there. It's there that you need to be operated on, it's there." And he indicated the whole lower occipital region.

I have to say that I was astounded; leaving aside M. Ossowiecki's kind appraisal of my spiritual qualities and his predictions about the future, everything that he had just told me was absolutely right.

M. Ossowiecki did not know me; he had never heard anyone talk about me; did not even know that he was going to meet me that evening; no one (I later made painstaking inquiries) had told him anything about me; also, he could not have been guided by an obvious scar from the wound, bearing in mind that I had been injured by a shell case that had penetrated very little and its sole effect had been by way of shock from the impact, and in fact the very small scar was in any case covered up by my high collar.