Original subtitles

Legendary seers who can predict the future with incredible accuracy.

Psychic spies with the ability to see inside enemy territory.

And clairvoyants that gain supernatural powers from the dead.

Throughout history, a number of people have been described as possessing a so

-called sixth sense.

Whether it's called clairvoyance, ESP, or second sight, these individuals seem

to have the ability to predict the future, communicate with the dead, and

times perform incredible physical feats.

But is this intuitive awareness outside the normal human perception

a real thing? And if so, does a sixth...

sense exist in all of us just waiting to be unlocked?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

For thousands of years, people have been fascinated with and fearful of

Unique individuals who possess the power of prophecy.

Great seers like Nostradamus, Gregorius Rasputin, and Edgar

Caythe have been revered for their seemingly supernatural abilities to

the future.

Could this so -called sixth sense simply be incredible intuition?

Or is it something scientific we have yet...

to understand when we study psychic phenomena when we study mediumship when

study things like precognition knowing information about the future when we

study telepathy getting information mind to mind from another person or

clairvoyance getting information about objects or things that are hidden from a

distance all of those would have been considered magic oh so long ago

And today, we still study these same things, but we don't call them magic

anymore. We look at them as science.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being skeptical. And by being

skeptical, I mean the true meaning of skeptical, which is that it's like,

I'm not sure.

Show me the evidence.

Now, the reality is when you look at the research that's been done in the last

150 years, the questions that still remain.

is really why is it that certain individuals seem to have exceptional

whereas the rest of us, myself included, sort of minimal abilities.

New Delhi, India, October 31st, 1984.

Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated in a surprise

attack outside her home.

The country is thrown into confusion and grief.

But incredibly, this tragic event was foretold in surprising detail 15

years earlier by a legendary psychic known as Baba Vanga.

It was in 1969 when Vanga said that Indira Gandhi would be killed by her

dress. Her dress is going to kill her, she said.

And what happened?

was that before a meeting, she put a dress which didn't allow for a

vest to be put under, and then she was shot dead by her security guard.

So this is a really strong example of a prediction attributed to her which

really happened.

While skeptics say Baba Vanga's eerily accurate prediction was nothing more

an extraordinary coincidence,

It's believed that Baba Vanga also predicted the September 11th terrorist

attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

And the election of the first African -American president of the United

And quite famously, a disaster involving a Russian nuclear submarine known as

the Kursk.

In 1981, Papa Vanga said that a big tragedy will happen around

the turn of the century in August 1999 or 2000.

Vanga is known to have said, at the turn of the new century, Kursk will be

underwater and the whole world will cry over it.

So these were her words.

And the whole world was shocked when...

At the turn of the century, indeed, in August 2000, the whole submarine sank to

the bottom of the ocean, 350 feet, down, with the whole crew dying.

How did Baba Vanga predict such a specific and tragic event with such

Many believe the answer can be traced back... to the 1920s, when she was 12

years old.

And a traumatic event unlocked her remarkable powers.

Baba Vanga was from the town, village of Stumitsche.

And at the time, in Macedonia, it was part of the Ottoman Empire,

just before World War I.

It's very simple. It's very small.

And Baba Vanga was a normal child, an average child in a way, with brown eyes.

But the life -changing incident that made Baba Vanga who she was

was the day where she was walking on a country road and she was caught up by a

tornado that literally carried her up in the

air.

and threw her into an adjacent field.

For dozens of hours, people in the village were trying to find her. And

they finally found her, they found her absolutely terrified and sobbing in the

field. The strangest thing was it was almost as if a lot of rock and dirt had

been stuffed under her eyelids.

Over a few days, the eyes became infected and she became blind.

As her physical senses started to deteriorate, she realized other senses

starting to grow.

She started to be able to see what was going to happen in the future.

She slowly began to develop psychic abilities that replaced her sight.

And it took a while for these to develop, but by World War II she was

have psychic visions.

and see what was happening during the war.

After that, people who were very concerned about their loved ones who had

on would come to her to see if she was able to communicate with the dead.

And they gave her the nickname Baba Vanga, which means like a wise

As Baba Vanga's popularity grew, she also attracted the attention of the

scientific community.

In the late 1960s, Bulgarian scientist Georgi Lazanov studied

Baba Vanga at the Institute of Suggestology, which is part of the

Academy of Sciences, with quite a lofty goal.

Can science unlock the secrets behind the sixth sense?

They made experiments with Baba Vanga from February to October 1967.

Lozanov thought that clairvoyance happens because some people, very few

are capable of receiving signals from the environment which cannot

be registered, they cannot be seen. So he tried to use the most modern

technology and equipment they were able to get.

to try and register and pinpoint those stimuli, those signals he was supposing

exist. They were measuring her brain activity while she was making

Unfortunately, they were not able to register what they were searching for.

So they also interviewed people visiting her to ask them whether what she said

really came true. It was a long -term project.

answer those questions with, yes, Baba Vanga really could say what will happen

to my life.

In 1996, Baba Vanga passed away at the age of 84, leaving behind

predictions for the coming decades that include deadly plagues, terrible wars,

and even extraterrestrial visitations.

And while we wait to see if her future prophecies prove accurate, researchers

continue. To study people who possess the sixth sense.

10 ,050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, California.

August 15th, 1969.

Six days after the shocking murder of actress Sharon Tate and four others in

home, Tate's husband, film director Roman Polanski, arrives to tour the

the crime with a rather unusual investigator, a psychic detective named

Peter Herkos.

Herkos was allowed to go to the scene of the Sharon Tate murders, and he

picked up some interesting details that were not known at the time.

He said that there were three murders.

And he said that he saw a vision of someone in this house who had taken

some bad LSD and visualized the devil.

And that's interesting because Tex Watson, who was one of the killers, when

came into the house, he said, I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's

business.

When Herkos got there, he kept getting the name Charlie.

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, over and over and over again.

And he was able to describe this man who was this force of destruction and

wiry and dark who was manipulating others.

It's very interesting because that's exactly who was behind these murders.

Charlie, of course, turned out to be the notorious cult leader, Charles Manson.

who was convicted of first -degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

What ability did Peter Herkes possess that allowed him to envision the

mastermind behind this heinous crime?

In 1941, Peter Herkes was doing a job painting a house, and he

fell off his ladder, falling about 40 feet, and he had a brain injury and

flipped into a coma.

So when he awoke out of the coma, he discovered that he had psychic ability.

And he discovered this almost immediately because he could sense

the other patients in the same hospital room as him.

Is a traumatic injury the key to unlocking a sixth sense?

While that may be the case for some seers, there are others who, like author

Laurelyn Jackson,

believe they were born with these remarkable gifts.

So I'm a psychic and a medium.

And being psychic means that I can read energy.

It was before I even had language that I would feel and read energy around me.

I'll see pictures.

I'll see images. I'll see things that are symbols for me to understand.

And then being a medium means that I'm able to connect with the consciousness

someone who's no longer in a physical body.

Sometimes it can be in the voice of a loved one who's crossed.

Sometimes it just arrives as a thought without much sound, where you just

suddenly know something in every ounce of your being, but there's no logical

you could know it.

It took me a very long time to fully embrace my abilities.

And part of that journey for me was getting tested in every way possible.

This will be interesting for me, too, because my readings for people usually

60 to 90 minutes. And so usually the first 15 minutes of a reading, I'm just

aligning my energy with the sitter's energy. I'm doing an aura reading. I'm

seeing what they're like. It's almost like tuning into that frequency.

And then it really starts. So I don't know how this is going to go. We're

to have to say.

In 2013, Laura participated in a fascinating experiment under the

psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Durant.

I'm going to turn it over, look at it, and say go. Okay. All right?

Go. Yeah.

Red. The goal was to analyze Laura's brain waves to see what's really

inside her head when she taps into her intuitive abilities.

What we did was we took a 19 -channel EEG cap, kind of looks like a

swimming cap with sensors built into it. What it allows us to do is then compare

her brain in different states.

So what we're looking at in these images...

are a comparison of Laura Lynn Jackson's brain activity comparing a conversation

to a psychic reading.

And really what you notice is this dramatic increase of activity in the

right quadrant.

Here you see it starts to turn a little more white, which is an even greater

increase. And so this is showing this strong increase, especially in these

fast brain waves during a psychic reading.

Looking at the data.

This clearly suggests that for her, a psychic reading and a regular

are distinct states of consciousness. They're different.

And they don't look the same in the brain.

So, for me, the question becomes, why?

This, to me, is the mystery right now.

At one point, you had three in a row.

Okay. Dr. Tarrant's brain scan experiment revealed a lot of very

information. When he looked at my brain in resting state to just get baseline,

he asked me if I had ever had traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Tarrant shared with me that my brain looked very similar to people who have

had traumatic brain injury, and yet I've had no traumatic brain injury.

It didn't really make sense to me.

So I think the question really is, is there a possible physiological component

to being able to access this sixth sense or these other abilities?

And I think that there is.

Some people have these abilities unlocked after some sort of neurological

incident or a traumatic brain injury.

But then other folks, they're just born with these abilities. I think what this

suggests is that... Whether it's through an injury or whether it's through some

sort of practice of altered states or meditation, somehow we have to shift the

brain out of its normal functioning.

But there's still actually a lot that we need to understand in terms of how it

is possible to unlock our sixth sense.

It's exciting to think that if we can find the key to unlock our minds, we

all possess extrasensory power.

In fact, recently declassified files reveal that both the United States and

Russia spent decades trying to identify and train people suspected of having

psychic abilities. Not just to discover their true potential, but also to

recognize them.

The Arctic Ocean, 1958.

The United States Navy's first nuclear -powered submarine, the USS Nautilus,

dives deep below the waves outside of radio contact.

A sailor inside the submarine holds up a series of cards that have various

shapes printed on them.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Maryland, a psychic tries to visualize

cards the sailor is presenting using only the power of the mind.

With the sub under the Arctic ice cap, they did several runs of completely

shuffled cards. I believe it was 160 guesses.

112 turned out to be correct when everything was compared after the sub

That's a 70 % hit rate.

The Soviets heard about this. They did a check apparently with some sources who

said, yes, that's what happened, and decided to start spending.

It turned out to be billions of dollars to investigate the possibility of

telepathy as well as other psychic phenomena.

While the U .S. Navy denied these psychic tests were taking place, the

alone inspired the Soviet Union to invest in programs with the goal of

developing psychic weapons.

The Soviets started to recruit special people to help them with their studies.

They recruited one woman named Nina Kolizhina.

Nina Kolizhina was from Ukraine, and she was a housewife who said that she could

control different objects without touching them.

She was mainly able to sensibly move objects with psychokinesis, mind over

matter.

At one point, they had her try to use her psychokinesis to try to stop the

of a frog.

And it did. At least that was what was reported.

Is it possible to turn someone's sixth sense into a deadly weapon?

While it's a matter of debate, we do know that this Soviet program would

a top -secret psychic arms race.

American intelligence realized, oh my goodness.

They're getting ahead of us.

We need to start our own psychic spying program.

They wanted to see if they could have people who were psychics get information

about the Soviet Union where their satellites could not get information.

This was a form of clairvoyance, the ability to see objects or events from a

distance called remote viewing.

According to declassified documents from 1972 to 1995,

The CIA, Army, and Defense Intelligence Agency engaged in a joint effort to

recruit and train remote viewers as psychic spies for the American

This top -secret program was called Project Stargate.

The Stargate program ran from 1972 to 1995.

During that period, there were 20 people on staff.

There were nine consultants and two visiting scientists.

I was one of the visiting scientists, and I was there for the calendar year

1985.

It took me about nine months to get all of the clearances, but it ended up

having to be a top -secret clearance.

If an agency came and asked, you know, could you look into this thing, whatever

it happened to be, these remote viewers would do their best to describe what it

is.

The CIA and the FBI and a bunch of other agencies, they came back again and

again and again.

There's something like 450 missions that these remote viewers were asked to do.

So somebody somewhere found it to be useful.

In an unassuming building in Fort Meade, Maryland, Project Stargate's military

unit performed hundreds of remote viewing missions.

And one of these psychic spies was a gifted Army officer named David

In 1986, I was recruited to become a member of what at the time was

called Sunstreak. Now everyone knows it as Project Stargate.

In a remote viewing session, you're going to be over in the viewing room.

What you're doing is calling together all of your senses to go to a target

is unbeknownst to you to determine what the temperature might be, what the

sounds are that you're hearing, what the visual representations of things are

that you're perceiving.

Now you're developing an overall picture of it and then putting a summary

together and turning it in.

Three targets a day, 90 minutes each, working it.

Remote viewers used their psychic abilities to search for lost spy planes,

inside top -secret military facilities, and even targeted wanted criminals for

the United States government.

Just how successful were they?

December 21st, 1988.

Pan Am Flight 103, bound for the United States, mysteriously explodes in midair

over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11

the ground.

And while a traditional investigation is launched,

Morehouse and a team of psychic spies at U .S. Army Base Fort Meade begin their

own analysis of the shocking event.

Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

We, of course, didn't know this. We were assembled, and we did our work.

We identified it as an explosion.

We were even able to identify where the explosion came, below the passenger

level, in front of the leading edge of the right wing.

We were the first to identify the explosive device.

being hidden inside of a boom box.

What the Renault viewing team did was provide essential information to at

determine, in part, what happened on that fateful night.

Project Stargate was officially shut down in 1995.

But considering the project's longevity and reported success, you have to

wonder, is it possible that the United States government still uses... Psychic

spies today?

Do I believe that the Central Intelligence Agency is still utilizing

viewing, buried it somewhere deeper, darker, more protected in some other

intelligence agency, whether it's the NSA, Directorate of Science and

Technology, or some other agency, as they're evolving?

Yes, of course they are.

If the United States government is in fact still trying to weaponize psychics,

it's no wonder why the program would be kept secret. In any case, some experts

believe an even better use of a person's sixth sense is not to launch attacks,

but to prevent them by looking into the future.

Shorewood, Wisconsin, October 26, 1935.

Nestled along the blue waters of Lake Michigan, all is calm in this quaint

Milwaukee suburb until 7 .32 p .m., when a peaceful autumn evening

is interrupted by a massive explosion of dynamite.

There was an explosion at the Shorewood Village Hall.

It exploded and shattered all the windows and left a huge hole in the

Then, less than 24 hours later, two branches of the First National Bank

had explosions about a half hour apart.

So by now, the city is in panic because it appears there's a mad bomber on the

loose.

Four days after the explosions at the banks, Two different police stations are

bombed within about 10 minutes of each other.

These dynamite bombs caused serious damage.

Nobody could quite understand why this was happening. Were these anarchists?

Were these communists? Were these people just trying to sow terror?

No one knew the cause.

From October 26th to November 3rd, 1935, this series of bombings would

become known as the Seven Nights of Terror.

And while these shocking attacks caught the townspeople off guard, they were no

surprise to a local psychic named Arthur Price Roberts, who predicted the event

and its location just one day before the first explosion.

Arthur Price Roberts, throughout his life, was known by many names. Some

him Doc Roberts, Professor Roberts.

But his very favorite thing to be called was psychic detective.

The story that gets the most attention is the story of the mysterious bombings.

In fact, the reason that we even know of his prediction is because he gave it at

a live psychic show.

He talks about police buildings, government buildings, banks being

people who are at that show.

start contacting Shorewood police saying there's going to be a series of

bombings in Milwaukee.

And the police instantly dismissed that.

And then, just a day later, the Shorewood Village Hall is dynamited.

So now the police turn to Roberts, and Roberts informed police that there's

going to be one more explosion.

And he said that it would happen south of the Menominee River.

And that's exactly what happened.

The two bombers who had been responsible for this had been making the bombs in a

little shed pretty close to the river, and they accidentally blew themselves up

along with their entire supply of dynamite.

And this explosion was so big that they could hear it for about eight miles

away. And that was it.

The seven nights of terror were over.

To this day, the motive behind the dynamite bombings carried out by 20

-old Hugh Rutkowski and 16 -year -old Paul Giovanni remains unknown.

But how was Doc Roberts able to predict these bombings with such uncanny

accuracy?

Many believe it was because he possessed a rare psychic ability known as

precognition. And precognition?

What we're talking about is someone getting information that they could not

project from the current circumstances, things that they could never know.

Now, this is very different from someone who is able to look at the current

world and make predictions on what's going to happen next.

We're talking about someone who is able to know an unpredictable event,

something that no way they could know.

With Robert, He was accurately able to do this. As a psychic, he was able to

perform precognitive feats quite regularly.

Roberts actually predicted his own death in 1940.

He said to friends, I will be dying on January 2, 1940, and he did.

What I love about precognition and studying precognition in the human mind

that it allows us hope.

that if we can know about something in the future, we can prepare, which is

incredibly important for our well -being.

Like, for instance, a particular crime happens.

And so if you can predict the what and the when, how can you manage that?

I think it opens up a lot of questions about, does the crime actually have to

almost happen?

But then you stop it just before it does.

If they're wrong and someone is thought to be a criminal and they're not, what

happens then?

There's all sorts of ethical problems with this.

The widespread prediction on the eradication of crime does have some

issues. And how would you even find such a large workforce as psychics to

accomplish such a lofty goal?

Well, some believe the answer may be found in Argentina.

Because in 2024...

Argentina's security forces announced plans to predict and prevent future

crimes, not with psychics, but with artificial intelligence.

Some people believe that you can use artificial intelligence to predict what

crimes are going to occur. And if you are looking at patterns of what happened

in the past, with artificial intelligence, you may be able to project

going to occur in the future.

The very premise...

is not just that it gathers and weighs information, but it devises new ways,

methods of gleaning information.

If AI lives up to its potential as a public tool, it would be foolish of us

to conclude that it couldn't be used as an instrument of foresight.

There's no telling where that wheel stops turning.

This peaceful, quaint community.

is often referred to as the psychic capital of the world.

In 1894, George Colby, a medium who could commune with the spirits of the

established the Casadegas Spiritualist Camp here.

And today, his legacy lives on with residents of the camp like spiritual

and teacher, Reverend Louis Gates.

The Casadegas Spiritualist Camp is

The biggest spiritualist camp in the southeastern part of the United States.

It's a place for mediums together.

People live here to do their work and to teach and instruct.

But also the camp is here to allow people to come and to get readings and

connect with their loved ones and people who have passed over in the spirit

world.

Camps were actually formed back in the day when there was no place for

spiritualists to meet.

And spiritualism really majorly took off because when we have wars, Civil War,

World War I, II, all the wars we've had, when people have lost loved ones,

people want to hear from their loved ones.

But it has always been a form of communication.

Shamans, part of the tribe, had that communication with spirit.

It's always had some kind of connection with death.

While holy men have communicated with the dead since antiquity, spiritualism

a religious movement and belief system that began in the mid -1800s.

Through seances and human conduits to the spirit realm, known as mediums,

spiritualists believe we can communicate with the dead and receive messages and

guidance from beyond the veil.

Spiritualism started in New York State in a town called Hydesville in 1848.

And it started off really in the house of the Fox family.

There were three sisters in the house, Kate, Margaret and Leah.

And they started to hear noises, strange bangs in their house.

And they soon realized that they could communicate with these noises.

They would do one knock for yes.

Two knocks for no.

And they were able to determine that it was the spirit of a peddler who'd been

murdered a few years earlier.

And later on, they found human remains down in the cellar.

It became a big news story.

The Fox sisters announced that they had worked out a code to communicate with

intelligences from the other world.

People descended on the cabin to investigate the girls, clergy, lawyers,

newspaper reporters, scientists, and many came away proclaiming them

Americans were ready to believe, and they embraced the claims.

So the movement of spiritualism began.

It's been estimated that by the late 1800s, the American spiritualism

had upwards of 6 million followers.

But could there be another reason spiritualism became so popular, besides

longing to speak with the dearly departed?

Well, some believe that it could be a path to unlock mysterious powers.

There are different kinds of mediums. Probably the most common forms that

familiar with are called clairvoyant mediums.

They go into a trance.

and then different spirits will start to communicate through their bodies.

And then physical mediumship is where the medium is causing objects to

or move.

Their physical body might change in different ways.

You might see their faces transform.

They might become larger or smaller and things like that.

Can some mediums really gain otherworldly physical powers from the

Perhaps the answer lies with one legendary seance from the 1800s.

Ashley House, London, England, December 1868.

Members of London's intellectual elite gather to participate in a seance led by

famed Scottish medium Daniel Douglas Hume.

It is during this...

that he earns the nickname, the flying psychic.

And he earns it by somehow levitating above the table, hovering above

it, and then somehow physically flying out of the window of the seance room and

in through another window. No one knows how he did it.

There were no wires. There was no one in the room that was working with

him. It was just the people at the seance and Hume conducting

this amazing feat that we are still talking about and still puzzling about

today.

After the fact, people have raised doubts about what took place on that

But the fact that there were so many witnesses in the room, that they were

supposedly respectable members of society, observing these events from

angles, and they were adamant that what they'd seen was a real phenomenon.

He had a gift that not everybody else has.

But there are mediums that have gifts, that have a connection to gifts from the

spirit world.

I do believe that people can unlock a sixth sense by meditating, by breathing,

by working at it, to open their mind to...

Other realms, other places become in contact with spirit.

If you keep working at the same thing, day after day after day, the energy will

get stronger.

McLean, Virginia.

From 2011 to 2015, a government agency known as the Intelligence

Advanced Research Projects Activity conducts a series of competitions.

designed to answer a fascinating question.

How effective are regular, everyday people at predicting the future?

These contests are known as forecasting tournaments.

Forecasting tournaments are competitions where people try to predict a future

event, something that's of global importance, like will this country

its troops from this other country by such and such a date?

Will the yen go up by two points on Thursday?

Really detailed questions that are very hard to predict.

And these are just ordinary people.

They could be someone who works at home raising their kids.

These aren't special PhDs or anything. But when they're grouped together, they

become this kind of super forecasting unit that together can predict future

events much better than even intelligence officials with classified

It was reported that when grouped together, future predictions made by

people outperform intelligence analysts who had access to classified data by

about 30%. And the question becomes, why?

When we look at the work of super forecasters, there's the debate about

what they're doing is just kind of listening to their intuition.

versus maybe some sort of precognition, the ability to know things in the

future. Our mind -body is picking up on something before it materializes.

This is probably an evolutionary adaptation that we've developed.

We all have intuitive abilities, but many times we don't listen.

We're not aware of it on a conscious level, but we have a feeling.

In terms of the super forecasters, maybe they're really good at listening.

Can the sixth sense really come down to highly attuned intuition, something that

everyone has?

And if so, is it possible not to entertain one very exciting possibility?

Through practice, can anyone develop these mysterious powers of the mind?

People are very curious about unlocking a sixth sense. People ask me.

You know, you're a neuroscientist. What do I do to my brain to make it so that I

can have these capacities?

You actually think it's part of how the brain works?

So it's not really unlocking something that's locked away.

It's more like using what's already there, but taking it seriously.

You're already getting in the information, not judging it, not

assuming it's wrong, but testing it out.

So, for example, if I meditate, am I more aware of my thoughts that seem to

out of the blue?

That might help me with a problem I'm working on.

It's more like attending to what's already there.

It's intriguing to consider that the ability to predict the future may be a

skill that can be taught to all of us.

Whether it's seeing events before they happen, communicating with the spirit

world, or...

reading someone else's thoughts.

The human mind seems to be capable of feats that defy our understanding.

Are these abilities a freak combination of luck and intuition?

Or could they be evidence of an elusive sixth sense locked away within the human

mind?

It's an intriguing mystery that, for the moment, remains unexplained.