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Patterns of Prophecy – Alan Vaughan

Perhaps the. greatest problem in trying to deal with psychic premonitions is that they rarely carry an accurate sense of time. As happens sometimes, the premonition will come years before the event although the sensitive thinks it applies to the near future. A good example was given by the French psychical researcher Dr. Eugene Osty, who became director of the Institut Metapsychique following the accidental death on July 14, 1924, of the then director, Dr. Gustave Geley.

Dr. Geley had been in Warsaw for a conference and took the offer of a lift in a private airplane back to Paris. Both Geley and the pilot died when the airplane crashed.

Madame Peyroutet

Dr. Osty, who was making a special study of precognitive sensitives, went regularly to a Madame Peyroutet, a clairvoyant whose predictions were often fulfilled. More than two years before the accident, she made her first reference to it (March 18, 1922):
"You attend a dinner regularly at which only men are present. One of them will undertake a journey and will have an accident followed by death."(Geley and Osty were in a club of fifteen diners.)

• (April 24, 1922): "Death of one of your friends by an accident. He will fall to his death. He is a scientific man.”
• (May 23, 1922): "You will learn of the death of a friend through a serious accident. There will be two deaths."
• (July 15, 1922): "I always see with you the death of a scientist, your friend. But what is the catastrophe. There will be two deaths."
• (September 23, 1922): "Oh! Doctor, I always see near you this death by accident. It may give rise to an offer being made to you, which will change your professional career."
• (January 20, 1923): "You will hear of the death of a scientist by an accident . . . instant death. Double death, during a journey in a distant country."
• (February 17, 1923): "Always an accident and the death of a scientist whom you know well. Accident and death during a departure."
• (March 17, 1923): "Oh! You will hear of an accident- death from a fractured skull. I see a death which will be the cause of something like a new undertaking, a new work for you."
• (April 21, 1923: "This death of a scientist is always near you! Surely, Doctor, you have no intention of going in an airplane? "
• (December 1, 1923): "What sad news of a death awaits you. Accidental death from a fall. Two dead. The day when you hear of it draws near."
• (March 22, 1924): "Before long you will learn of the death of a scientist whom you know well. A doctor will fall. A motor accident, or something else, far, far away, during a journey."
• (April 4, 1924): "Near you there is a death, which I still continue to see. An accidental death, abroad; something like a small ship sinking."
• (May 31, 1924): Accidental death of a man you know well. Death during a departure, in a foreign country."
• (July 9, 1924): There will be a death which will greatly surprise you. An accidental death. A departure during a journey. Death of a scientist, which will cause a revolution in your life."

On July 19, Madame Peyroutet once more made reference to this death, but this time in the Past tense-accurately. Osty had given no warning to Geley since he did not realize to whom the prediction applied. The most distinctive information-that he was one of fourteen men Osty regularly dined with-had been given on the very first sitting, more than two years before.

Pascal Forthuny

The warning that "the day when you hear of it draws near" was given a year and a half before the accident.  But quite ironically (or synchronistically), Dr. Geley had been warned by another sensitive three months before his fatal accident. The sensitive, named Pascal Forthuny, had been sitting at his desk when he suddenly received a clairaudient warning to go to Paris to warn Dr. Geley of the approaching death of a French doctor in Poland, who would fall victim to an airplane accident.

Forthuny called on Geley and told him the warning, which Geley wrote down. Then, naturally enough, Geley asked him who the doctor was. Forthuny fumbled for a moment and gave the name of a famous French doctor. It apparently did not occur to Geley, when in Poland and being offered a ride in an airplane three months later, that he was the one.

Would Dr. Geley have declined the airplane ride if Forthuny had accurately told him that he was the one in danger? Geley, an expert on psychic phenomena, might be presumed to take seriously the warnings of a sensitive with whom he had worked. Yet, a sort of amnesia can develop to block out such warnings from memory.