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Investigation byt the 'Ghost Research Society'

Before May 1979, David Booth had led an average life.  He was married and raising a family.  He had never had psychic-type dreams before.  But one morning, he was jarred awake by a dream of an impending airline crash.

“On the morning of May 16th, I had a dream.  I’m looking out to my right over a field and there’s this great big jet and it wasn’t making the noise that it should.  It wasn’t a feeling of impending doom or that it was going to crash or anything.  It just wasn’t making the sound that it should.  It just turns, with its wing up in the air, goes on its back and then it goes straight into the ground and explodes.  When the explosion would begin to die out, that’s when I would begin to wake up,” he said.

The next night he went to bed exhausted hoping that this night was more restful and that he wouldn’t have the dream again.  He dreamt it again and when he woke up, he discovered that he had been crying.  The main feeling that he had was urgency.  Feeling compelled to do something; to act. 

As the week progressed and the dream repeated itself every night, David found it harder to ignore but still kept the dream to himself. 

Tuesday, May 22nd, David had the dream for the seventh night in a row.  He felt that he could have no peace until he did something.  David contacted the Cincinnati office of the Federal Aviation Administration and spoke to facilities manager, Paul Williams.

“The first thing David described to me was the type of aircraft he thought it was.  First of all he identified it as an American Airlines plane.  I asked him if he knew specifically what type of aircraft it was but David didn’t know one type of aircraft from another,” says Williams. 

Williams asked David to search his dream in an effort to try to retrieve more information about the type of aircraft or any other details he could remember.  But each night it came back frustratingly the same.  All that week they spent hours reviewing the details.  He described an airplane with an engine on the tail rather than in the tail and Williams identified that as a DC-10.

At the start of the Memorial Day weekend, David had the dream for the tenth time.  Somehow he knew he would never have the dream again.  He was on the brink of a nervous collapse and went home early that day.  It was 4 o’clock; 3 o’clock at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

The worst airline disaster in American history occurred May 25, 1979 when American Airlines Flight 191 carrying 258 passengers and a crew of 13 fell from the sky killing all 271 people onboard.  The DC-10, took off from Runway 32 Right at 3:02 p.m. for a non-stop flight to Los Angeles, California.

At an altitude of 200 feet, while climbing and traveling a little more than 200 miles an hour, the left wing engine dropped onto or over the wing and bounced in flames along the concrete runway.  Witnesses said that after the engine fell off, the floundering craft went into a bank, nosed down and erupted into a pillar of flame as it hit the ground a half-mile northwest of the airport.

It slammed into an abandoned hangar on the site of the old Ravenswood Airport at 320 W. Touhy Avenue just east of the Touhy Mobile Home Park.  Two trailer homes were destroyed when hit by flaming debris.  Rescue workers found two bodies on the site of the Courtney-Velo Excavating Company.  They were believed to have been employees of the firm, which occupied one of the old hangars.

When Williams received the news from Chicago, he was sure that what David Booth had described to him before the fact, had actually come to pass.  After David found out what had happened, he emotionally just fell apart.  He immediately telephoned Paul Williams.  Williams said that he believed that David was blaming himself for not getting enough information soon enough to avert the disaster. Williams, however, assured him that he had done everything that he could have.