Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: Powerful prophets

that can predict the fall of empires.

[bomb whistling, explosion]

Disturbing dreams... that envision deadly crimes.

And nightmare visions from which victims...

never wake up.

Can people really see the future?

Receive messages from across time and space?

For centuries, seers and prophets have come forward

offering dramatic visions of mankind's destiny.

But what happens

when the predictions turn... deadly?

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

♪

Craig Hamilton-Parker, an English psychic and medium,

posts a series of prophecies on his website--

some of them quite ominous and even oddly disturbing.

I've been a psychic medium all my life,

in touch with the spirit world, and sometimes make predictions.

And in 2015, I decided to put some predictions on my website.

I said that there'd be a massive earthquake in Japan.

I wrote that Brexit would happen, and at the time,

everybody was saying, "It's never gonna happen.

Everybody's gonna vote to remain. There's no chance."

I saw terrorist attacks in Nice in my vision,

and I put those in my predictions.

Sometimes I don't like telling the future.

SHATNER: Within a year,

the predictions Craig made came surprisingly,

and in some cases frighteningly, true.

On April 16, 2016,

Kumamoto, Japan was shaken by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

50 people were killed, and more than 3,000 people injured.

And then, on June 23,

over half of Great Britain voted to approve Brexit

and leave the European Union.

Finally, on July 14,

a 19-ton truck driven by a terrorist plowed

through a crowded market in Nice, France,

killing 86 people and injuring over 400.

Of course, not all of Craig's prophecies ended up happening.

For instance, he'd predicted

that a gas attack would take place in a European city,

but there was no such attack in Europe that year.

But the fact that he got three out of four predictions right

led many to believe that his uncanny ability

to see the future couldn't have been a mere fluke.

The natural question that people have is,

"Where does a priction come from?

Where is the so-called psychic getting this information from?"

The first explanation we go to is

that it's some sort of psychosis,

but that doesn't really hold up

because you can't turn crazy on and off.

And the fact is, if you meet most of these folk,

and I've met plenty of them,

they're perfectly ordinary, everyday functioning people.

SHATNER: According to Craig,

his ability to see events before they happen

is one he was born with.

Since childhood, he surprised his family

with what he called "flashes of the future,"

glimpses of things that hadn't yet come to pass, but often did.

And in his early twenties, he decided

to make a journey to India, where he studied the writings

of ancient oracles, and honed his raw talent.

HAMILTON-PARKER: So I became very interested

in this idea that there's an ancient tradition

that goes back right through time

over many, many centuries, maybe back tens of thousands of years.

For me, seeing the future is a bit like

a dream experience in many respects.

I use an old technique from India called "Trataka,"

which, I look into a candle, basically.

You go into a sort of a state of gazing,

and then move the image of that candle

into the middle of what we call "the third eye."

And you'll see it as an afterimage

on the back of the eye,

where all these visions will appear.

I see things-- things I know, things I don't know.

It's like the universe knows better than I do.

It gave me this information,

and it's kind of my duty to put it out there.

SHATNER: In the fall of 2016,

another of Craig's prophecies--

this time about the U.S. presidential election--

came to pass.

HAMILTON-PARKER: I kept getting glimpses of

this strange character, you know.

And I thought, "Who on Earth is this?"

And then suddenly,

Trump announces himself in the primaries,

and then I knew that's what I'd been seeing.

That was this strange figure

that kept coming into my meditations

and interrupting, uh, my thoughts.

Clearly, for me, Trump was gonna be president,

even though everybody at this time was saying,

"He don't stand a chance of ever being president."

But the unconscious seemed to know better.

SHATNER: But how is Craig actually getting these messages

about the future?

Are they really coming from his unconscious mind?

Precognition is, um, the scientific term

for things like premonitions.

And it's getting accurate information

about a future event that you didn't cause.

MICHIO KAKU: We think that the brain,

no matter how complicated and non-linear it is,

is still something that could be reduced down

to the laws of physics.

Now that doesn't mean that the brain can't imagine the future.

We are genetically hardwired to have premonitions.

We can't stop it.

It's part of our makeup.

ANNE CLEARY: The feeling of premonition

might be an example

of how our memories orient us toward the future.

[tires squealing, thud]

So, current thinking among memory researchers is

that our memories are not useful to us so much

for their ability to enable us to recollect the past

as they are useful to us for enabling us

to navigate and predict the future.

And from that perspective, the idea that déjà vu,

which might result from a memory process,

might be accompanied by feelings of premonition, fits that.

HOROWITZ: If somebody has

an authentic intuitive or insightful gift--

and I do think such things exist--

I think it's a kind of ESP

in which certain individuals are able to glean information

in anomalous ways,

in ways that go beyond our ordinary five senses.

NICK POPE: The Internet, TV talk shows,

and the best-seller lists

are full of prophets and prognosticators

claiming to be able to divine the future.

And in a number of these cases,

they really seem to be able to do it.

SHATNER: If it's true

that there are such things as real psychics,

then where exactly does their incredible gift come from,

and how can we better understand it?

According to some researchers,

the explanation doesn't lie in the distant future,

but rather, the ancient past.

RABBI ARIEL BAR TZADOK: The Bible makes it very clear

that biblical prophets

were not arbitrary individuals, men or women,

who were just as if minding their own business,

and then God chose them.

It wasn't like that at all.

It was an internal experience

that the Bible calls a dream or a vision.

If you do not learn how to understand dreams,

you will never understand their message.

It is very clearly said in the Bible

that prophets had to go to school

to learn how to experience

and interpret the spiritual message which we call prophecy.

And the biblical teachings of prophecy were not limited

to those of the religious world.

Many people have been trained in these techniques,

and we don't even realize it.

SHATNER: Trained to see the future?

Could such a farfetched but also tantalizing notion

actually be possible?

I think our generation is on the precipice of a great question

about the extra-physical abilities of the mind.

I don't know that we'll answer it,

but I think it is coming

more and more into focus

that materialism just doesn't cover

all the bases of life anymore,

and that the mind has capacities,

including extra-physical capacities,

that are measurable, that are present,

and that we're only beginning to understand.

HAMILTON-PARKER: It's a natural part

of the human condition to make predictions.

And couldn't it be that maybe our predictive ability

is far greater than we've ever imagined?

That maybe every one of us somehow has a way

of seeing into the fabric of time?

We just have to trust that ability.

SHATNER: If each of us could learn

how to predict the future, would we accept our fate,

or fight to change it?

Perhaps the answer can be found

by studying the prophecies of the man who is considered

one of the greatest prophets of all time--

Nostradamus.

SHATNER: Astrologer and physician

Michel de Nostradamus publishes a volume

of four-line poems, called "quatrains."

Readers at the time are confused

by the author's use of multiple languages,

word puzzles, and what was even then

considered antiquated syntax.

But perhaps even more baffling is the volume's title,

Les Propheties-- The Prophecies.

HOGUE: Nostradamus had become

initially famous as an almanac writer.

You've got to understand that this is

during the time of the printing revolution,

and he was one of its first best-selling authors.

And then he embarked on a history of the future,

which would look at everything

up to the year 3797 AD,

nearly 1,800 years from now, and beyond.

SHATNER: The Prophecies was initially met

with outright skepticism and derision.

Many believed Nostradamus to be either a fraud

or mentally ill,

possibly both,

likely due to the fact that one of his verses

scandalously foretold of a particularly gory death

for Henry II, the king of France.

HOGUE: Nostradamus made a prediction

about Henry II dying in a jousting accident.

-[neighing] -Quatrain 35

read that a young lion would face the old

in traditional combat.

He shall be pierced

through a gilded cage.

Two wounds made one.

The joust happened exactly as he foretold it.

Both men had lions on their shields.

Large shards went through the gilded visor of the king.

One penetrated his forehead into his brain,

the other in between his eye and socket,

destroying his eye.

And he died of infection of the brain ten days later,

an agonizing death.

SHATNER: After the king's death,

Nostradamus' reputation as a seer of the future grew rapidly,

which was, at the time,

not necessarily a good thing.

It is well-known that Nostradamus concealed

the nature of his prophecies,

which, at that time, was very politically incorrect

and could have gotten him in a lot of trouble.

He would come into great conflict with the church

if he p-put himself on a pedestal and be like

Noah or Moses or people like this.

SHATNER: Despite the controversy,

The Prophecies eventually became

one of the most widely read books in the world.

It both astounded and terrified readers with its predictions

about dreadful events to come.

-[whispering] -Is it possible

Nostradamus received his prophetic visions

because he was in touch with a higher power?

It's an interesting theory

and could help explain how Nostradamus was able to see

and know things that would not happen for centuries,

things he was trying to warn us about.

-[whistling] -[explosion]

1942.

With World War II

wreaking havoc throughout Europe and the Pacific,

it wasn't only the latest news

from the front lines making headlines

but also Nostradamus

and his prophecy centering

on the rise of a man named Hister.

HOGUE: What triggered his international fame

was a reference five times in his prophecies

about a man named Hister

with a Gothic "S,"

which has a "T" crossed.

Another push, push, nudge, nudge, perhaps,

in his work.

Hister is the ancient name of the river Danube.

Adolf Hitler grew up on the river Danube.

Nostradamus had a pattern of using a place as a person.

The river is a code,

and the things that are said in the other parts

of the prophecies indicate that it's a man.

The man who's called the captain of greater Germany.

SHATNER: Is it possible

Nostradamus predicted the rise

of one of the most evil men in history?

According to many who have studied these quatrains,

the answer is yes.

And as evidence,

they point to other things he foresaw,

things that a person who lived and died in the 16th century

could never know would one day exist.

This happened many times for me,

when I want to just slap the book shut

and say, "Oh, come on."

And then names suddenly come out.

A man named de Gaulle will lead France three times.

And it's factually true.

Charles de Gaulle led the free French,

led the provisional government

and then, finally, in his final years,

was president of France-- three times.

And that's one of hundreds of things I can cite.

How does he do this?

HOROWITZ: Nostradamus is one of the most enduring names,

perhaps the most enduring name,

in post-biblical prophecy.

His quatrains have been applied to hundreds upon hundreds

of events throughout history,

and people continue to feel that they can learn

what's around the next corner by studying his quatrains.

HAMILTON-PARKER: Nostradamus fascinates us,

because it's perhaps part of our fear instinct, isn't it?

When we're in difficult times, we turn to the seers,

we turn to the prophets to try to find out can they give

some insight into these chaotic times we live in,

particularly in today's time.

SHATNER: If it's true

that Nostradamus was able to predict so many things

with such incredible accuracy,

why aren't we scouring his works

in order to prevent the next natural catastrophe

or world war?

Perhaps because,

as scholars of Nostradamus have to admit,

of the thousands of prophecies he made

over the course of his life,

only a small fraction have actually come true.

And even his seemingly accurate predictions

have been questioned.

HAMILTON-PARKER: We kind of have a double problem with Nostradamus in some ways,

because some of the predictions are a bit vague

and people can project all sorts

of things into these vague predictions

and then relate them to something that's happening now.

But, also, sometimes they take

two completely unrelated sentences,

put them together, and it seems to relate

to something we have today.

KAKU: The brain is a pattern-seeking learning machine.

It constantly sees patterns,

even when they're not there.

Um, in fact, there's a name for it, apophenia.

We can't help it, because sometimes we were right.

Then we make leaps of logic.

What does he mean? What did he really mean by that?

And then we try to make sense of it,

because that's what the brain does.

SHATNER: Are Nostradamus' predictions

merely the ramblings of a madman,

which people deliberately interpret

in order to fit history after the fact?

As with anything,

it all depends on who you ask.

HOGUE: What makes Nostradamus so relevant today

is that he's found a way

through his obscurity to make everybody a sleuthsayer,

a detective.

He understood that it would keep him topical

for four and a half centuries.

He even said that, "When I'm dead,

I will be far more famous than I ever was while I'm alive."

SHATNER: For skeptics,

the enduring mystery of Nostradamus

is nothing more than a testament

to the power of wishful thinking.

-[sirens wailing] -But others insist

that if we paid closer attention to his prophecies,

we might have been able to prevent

one of the greatest tragedies

of the last one hundred years,

9/11.

[shouting]

MAN: Whoa, whoa!

SHATNER: 19 terrorists overwhelm the flight crews

of four passenger planes

and send each of them crashing into prearranged targets.

-[sirens wailing] -[screaming]

MAN: Get out of here! Get out!

SHATNER: They are chosen to inflict

massive casualties and cripple the morale of the United States.

[screaming]

It is a tragedy that has become a permanent part

of our collective consciousness

and a day that forever changed the world.

But had the event been predicted?

-[siren wailing] -And if so,

could it have been prevented?

"I'm gonna die soon, and it's gonna be a plane crash

or a car accident."

That's what my sister told me

about two weeks before the planes crashed

into the towers on 9/11.

My sister and I were super, super close.

She was eight years older than me,

so she was like a second mom.

My mom and my sister and I were all very close,

like a warm family.

Marisa had a job at Cantor Fitzgerald,

which occupied the top floors of Tower One.

On the eve of September 11...

September 10 is my mom's birthday,

and we all were invited by my sister

to Windows on the World, the top of Tower One.

And, um,

you know, everything I talked to her about that night

was kind of like she was talking to me for the last time,

in a weird way.

And I thought back, you know,

a few weeks before when she said,

"I know I'm gonna die, and it's gonna be soon."

And, uh, she started to cry.

And I said, "How do you know that?"

She said, "Just trust me. I know I'm going to."

Never in a million years did I think

a plane was about to smash right into where we were sitting

just about 12 hours later.

Everyone died that was at Cantor,

because the plane hit perfectly.

My sister was, um...

one of those people.

SHATNER: Since 2001,

hundreds of accounts similar to Marisa DiNardo's

have surfaced,

all of them suggesting that,

in the days and weeks leading up to the tragic event,

many of the 9/11 victims

had dreadful premonitions

about some sort of deadly catastrophe.

DINARDO: I remember hearing

about a story where a man had a dream

of a plane hitting a building

a few days before 9/11.

I also remember reading about a woman

that was sitting at the PATH station

and had this vision

of the World Trade Center falling on her.

It was the same week that 9/11 happened.

There was, um, another story

of a man that didn't want to get

on to one of the flights because of a-a dream

or-or a premonition that he had.

SHATNER: According to some experts,

these premonitions, unlike predictions made

by so-called "professional prophets,"

are a part of an innate, biological

early-warning system

that all of us possess.

Usually intuition is more of a gut feeling or a feeling

that you just knew something, and it typically results

from pattern recognition, or our mind's ability

to very quickly decipher patterns in the environment.

And because we usually can't articulate the basis

of our gut feeling or how we just knew something,

it can often feel like ESP or a sixth sense

or like we had a successful premonition.

SHATNER: If humans do have

an instinctual danger sense, designed to help us

anticipate what's around the corner,

could that explain how so many people

seemed to know the 9/11 attacks were coming?

There are some who believe the answer may be found by examining

a strange occurrence that happened on that fateful day.

HOROWITZ: There was a paranormal research lab

at Princeton University

that placed a number of machines around the world,

referred to as random number generators.

A random number generator is actually

a machine that you use all the time.

It spits out a random pattern of numbers.

And it's used to create passwords for Web sites

or safes or any number of devices that need to be secure.

There are million-to-one odds

against any patterns showing up

in the data that comes out of a random number generator.

What the Princeton researchers found

was that when the tragedy of 9/11 occurred,

these random number generators demonstrated

an interruption in the random pattern.

They demonstrated symmetry where there shouldn't be any.

SHATNER: Patterns created by machines

programmed to avoid them?

There are many who believe that the so-called "computer glitch"

that occurred at the same time as the 9/11 attacks

was no mere coincidence.

And according to researchers familiar with

the Princeton incident, certain events, such as catastrophes,

actually have tangible, measurable effects

not only on humans, but on electronic devices.

Could it be that major events that have a huge effect

on history maybe act like a sort of a bomb of some sort?

That send ripples through time,

both forward in time and backwards in time?

And people see this, we see it like a light on the horizon.

We see parts of it, but not all of it.

We get the energy from the future

reaching back to us here in the past.

I believe that there is

certainly a higher power,

an energy or whatever you want to call it

'cause I really do feel with every sense of my being

that my sister knew and that she was going.

I mean, how else can you explain the things she said

and, uh, what she knew.

Could the horrifying attacks of September the 11th

have been prevented,

not by law enforcement, but by those who literally

saw it happen in advance?

There are those who believe that not only is the answer yes,

but that the ability to predict the future can be harnessed

in an effort to ensure

mankind's destiny.

SHATNER: News organizations broadcast

a series of horrific images that stun viewers across the country.

A tidal wave of mud and shale has swallowed the small,

coal-mining town of Aberfan in its entirety.

Of the 144 people killed by the landslide,

116 are schoolchildren.

And for this tight-knit community,

many of whom have lived in Aberfan for generations,

the loss is devastating.

POPE: One of the first people

to respond to the disaster is psychiatrist John Barker.

Initially, he arrives

to offer consultation to the survivors.

VIVANCO: So, when he gets there, he's interviewing

parents that had lost children.

He was really surprised to hear that there were premonitions

before it happened.

One boy drew a picture of people amassed on the hillside,

digging into it, and he wrote underneath, "the end."

Also, there was

a young girl who told her mom about a dream where

she said there was this black mass over the school

and she couldn't get in.

Both of these children later went to school and died.

POPE: Barker begins to wonder whether

these premonitions could be used

as a sort of early warning system

that might prevent future disasters.

So he asked Peter Fairley, who ran the science desk

at the national newspaper, the London Evening Standard,

to consider setting up a program

to collate people's premonitions.

Fairley not only agreed, but he set up

an entire bureau to act as a focal point.

Starting in January 1967,

the bureau commences operations.

Reports come in, and the bureau staff--

they devise an 11-point system, looking for patterns.

Five points for unusualness, five points for accuracy,

and one point for timing.

SHATNER: The British Premonitions Bureau,

as it would come to be called,

collected 469 predictions in its first year.

Unsurprisingly, many never came true.

But those submitted by two individuals--

Alan Hencher and Lorna Middleton--

stood out from the crowd.

POPE: Alan Hencher and Lorna Middleton

made headlines in March 1967

when they both predicted a train accident

just days before a passenger car derailed, killing 49 people.

Hencher also had a premonition about a fatal plane crash,

predicting the number of people who would die.

That kind of accuracy is staggering.

SHATNER: For John Barker,

the notion that Hencher and Middleton's predictions

might allow him to warn people of disasters ahead of time

was an exciting one.

For the next year, he sent hundreds of what he believed

to be credible predictions

to the editors of the London Evening Standard.

But in the summer of 1968,

there was one deadly premonition that he chose to ignore.

-[phone ringing] -One that was shared

by both Hencher and Middleton,

and it involved John Barker himself.

VIVANCO: Around 1:00 in the morning,

Hencher calls Barker.

He's in a panic.

He's got a-a terrible premonition.

He says, "Do you have a dark car?"

Barker says, "Yes."

And he tells Barker, "You have to be careful.

Be very, very careful."

Then Barker asks him, "What? Am I in danger?"

Hencher says, "Yes."

POPE: Barker wrote a memo the next day

explaining that Hencher could only explain

that the dark car was somehow connected to Barker

and a potentially deadly outcome.

It all seemed pretty vague,

and perhaps that wouldn't have worried Barker so much

were it not for the fact that there was another warning

from his other superstar Lorna Middleton.

[siren blaring]

SHATNER: On August 18, 1968,

less than two years after he had opened

his Bureau of Premonitions,

John Barker was suddenly rushed to the hospital.

POPE: Barker died of a sudden brain hemorrhage, age 44.

The British Premonitions Bureau closed down shortly thereafter.

SHATNER: As for the dark car?

There are many who are convinced that the answer is simple.

It was the funeral hearse that conveyed John Barker's body

to its final resting place.

It raises the question, was Barker's own death

just a coincidence?

Was it self-fulfilling prophecy,

or like the rest of the bureau's predictions,

was fate simply too powerful to be stopped?

Was the leader of the British Premonitions Bureau

literally scared to death by other people's visions?

Perhaps. But does the ability

to see the future mean our lives are preordained?

Or is it possible that by knowing the future,

we can change and even improve... our destiny?

Maybe we'll find out the answer by investigating

yet another form of prognostication...

dreams.

SHATNER: Cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge settles

into bed after a long day.

It's a night's sleep that begins like any other...

until she experiences a strange

and disturbing dream.

MOSSBRIDGE: This dream was horrible.

I was taken

to someplace in the Middle East. I didn't know where.

I met this man.

He shows up sometimes in my dreams.

He's like a guide.

There was this outdoor building.

It was mosque-like

in that it was built out of stone

and there were breezeways.

It was the middle of the day. People are praying.

SHATNER: In the confusing fog of her dream,

Julia pieces together an unsettling picture.

It seems that her guide is desperately trying

to warn her of something that is going to happen.

Something dire.

MOSSBRIDGE: And he's showing me this event.

There was rubble because there was

a terrorist explosion when people were praying.

And he showed me this writing.

It was Arabic.

There was the letters for "I" and "S,"

and I knew that stood for Islamic State.

SHATNER: But before she can awaken herself

from her nightmare, she realizes

he still has one more message to deliver.

MOSSBRIDGE: He called the place we were in Kyuck Kyuck.

He kept saying "Kyuck Kyuck."

And I didn't know what that meant.

Since I was a kid,

I have had precognitive dreams.

Usually they're describing an event that happens

the next day, the next week, the next month.

So, when I woke up, I wrote it in my dream journal

because that's my habit. I never had

a precognitive dream of something horrible

like that on a, on a major world scale.

It shook me.

During the day, I got the news report

of a bombing in Kuwait City, Kuwait.

I figured, "Oh, that was the Kyuck Kyuck."

I had it almost right but not quite.

This happened during noontime prayers.

Responsibility was claimed by ISIS, Islamic State.

I felt heartbroken because I saw it happen.

SHATNER: Dreams have long been known

to reflect the dreamer's subconscious mind.

Desires, anxieties,

long-forgotten memories all bubbling to the surface.

But precognitive dreams?

Is it really possible that dreams,

like the ones we have every night,

can actually predict the future?

KAKU: When we take a person who's dreaming

and put him in a brain scan machine,

we begin to realize something very interesting.

Blood flow to the front of the brain

is turned off for the most part.

Second, blood flow goes to the emotional part of the brain,

and you start to have nightmares.

You start to have fears.

You imagine the future or have a premonition.

Dreams are important because it allows us

to articulate the fears and premonitions

that we have in the unconscious mind,

and then we're able to evaluate it

with the conscious mind.

SHATNER: As unbelievable as it may have seemed

to her scientific mind,

Julia firmly believed she had seen the future

before it happened.

Having been in this position before

and regretting not doing anything about it,

Julia wasn't going to let the same thing happen again.

In fall of 2017,

I had another one of these world stage-type dreams

that felt precognitive

and that did not feel good.

There was a cruise ship.

And there were these cartoon

sort of creatures on the cruise ship.

I thought, "Oh, no. Disney."

And then, after that,

thwas a bridge structure.

There was this arching--

it was actually quite beautiful--

this arching bridge structure.

And the concern in the dream

was, that's where the explosion would happen.

And that scared me.

I'd never seen a bridge like that.

So I googled

the shape of the bridge,

and the first thing that shows up

is the Coronado Bridge in San Diego.

I remembered that I'd promised myself

that I was gonna go to authorities

even if I felt stupid.

MULLEN: I was detailed

to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force

in San Diego, California.

Julia contacted

somebody within NCIS,

and my boss got word of it

and said, "Hey, just look into this."

I knew very little, if anything, about precog.

I was curious.

I knew from the very second that I started talking to her

that there was no ulterior motive.

When she gave me the information, she was

very specific on the location and the time.

She had actual information and wanted somebody to run with this

to prevent something that she saw in a dream.

Most cops don't like using information

that they can't explain.

And precog is something that is unexplainable.

But if this is something that would actually work,

why not give it a try?

The Coronado Bay Bridge in San Diego is one of the big things

that we try to protect, along with all of the Navy assets.

There are always threats.

We were able to move patrol boats

-to provide coverage around the bridge... -[siren wailing]

...and nothing happened.

Did nothing happen because there were patrol boats,

and somebody who was looking to do something nefarious

against the bridge basically said,

"I don't want to be caught"?

Or was the attack not even going to happen?

The simple fact that nothing happened was,

in my mind, a win.

MOSSBRIDGE: If you're going to go into this world and use this talent

to create data that can be used to prevent something,

sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

But as long as the bad thing doesn't happen, good.

SHATNER: There are those who believe Julia Mossbridge prevented

a dangerous attack by seeing the future

and acting on her vision.

And there are skeptics who question whether

there was any danger in the first place.

But perhaps both sides are missing the target.

Because, according to one incredible theory,

the past, present and future

may actually be the same thing.

SHATNER: The International Data Corporation publishes a report

which estimates that, by the year 2022,

over $270 billion will be spent annually

on a new form of prophecy.

It's called predictive analytics.

Only this time, the prophets will be made of ones and zeros

instead of flesh and blood.

Predictive analytics is a fancy way of saying

"Look at the data and figure out why things happen."

Very important.

Banks, corporations, computer companies

spend hundreds of millions of dollars

sifting through tons of data,

trying to find instances of causality.

If I raise the price of a product,

does my profit margin go down?

Will I go bankrupt?

In other words, corporations constantly try

to predict the future.

That's the name of the game.

You predict it wrong, you zag when you should zig,

you go bankrupt.

I think predictive analytics operate very similarly

to how our brains work.

Our minds come equipped to make predictions about the future

based on our past experiences,

and they operate very similarly.

In fact, machine-learning algorithms,

the type that carry out predictive analytics,

are often called neural network models

because they're designed to mimic

how neurons work in our brains.

SHATNER: The idea of advanced computers pulling information

from the cloud in order to predict the future

may sound like science fiction.

But in truth this idea has been around

for thousands of years.

Every culture in history has had some concept

of a universal mind.

The Greeks used to call it nous, or a great overmind.

In Vedic tradition, it's sometimes called Akasha,

or a kind of universal ether.

People like Nostradamus and any seer

will tune into what we call the Akashic record.

This is like the memory of all things.

It's the universal mind.

We enter it by going into a state of meditation

and connecting with the past, the present and the future.

One of the great secrets of the mystical tradition is that

all human souls are one.

So we are part of a collective whole.

In later psychology, it has been understood

to be called a collective unconscious.

In ancient times

it was referred to as a collective soul,

which is the collective mind of all humanity,

past, present, future.

MOSSBRIDGE: I think the people who work in this way,

what they're doing is they're tapping into

some source of information.

I don't think the question is

"Why are we able to get information about the future?"

I think the question is more like,

"Why don't we get more information about the future?"

A universal mind,

all-knowing and all-encompassing.

But do we really want to know everything

before it happens?

Time of our own death, perhaps?

Or the fate of our loved ones?

Or... how about the end of the world?

Perhaps we're better off not knowing.

Letting those things remain...

the unexplained.

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