Dennis Bardens was the least likely ghost chaser. He was a man with his wits about him, plugged right into the unforgiving present. He knew human nature in all its foibles. He had been a spy behind enemy lines during WW2; perhaps his ingrained suspicion of how people could behave went into the notice he hung on his front door in Horbury Mews, Kensington: ‘OUT TO LUNCH….BACK IN FIVE YEARS…PLEASE WAIT!’ His was a ready wit. He was a distinguished journalist and broadcaster – the initiator of the TV household name ‘Panorama’ which came to him while looking put of the office window. Bardens had some 20 books to his name including ‘Churchill in Parliament’. A meticulous taker of notes, adept at ferreting out facts behind stories, Bardens wanted to get to the bottom of things, and so in many ways it should be to his sort of evidence one turns to see if there is sufficient factual basis to allow that pre-cognition might have a foundation sufficient to defy a fair-minded sceptic. ‘AHEAD OF TIME’ does not disappoint in this regard.

Detailed notes abound about and from the many people interviewed with stories about how they foresaw events before they happened. There is Paul Czarnecki the toddler who foretold his death within weeks and its circumstances and baffling his parents in the process. There is Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard flying over a disused aerodrome and describing in writing to incredulous colleagues the as yet undesigned new layout and the colour of the uniforms worn by workers there. (See Breaking the Time Barrier published in Light the ‘Journal of the College of Psychic Studies’ in 1966). Here there is an unknown person describing in a well-attested way public disasters before they happened, and there is this or that famous person, incorrigible by temperament, with nothing to gain and much to lose by telling weird tales of what they had ‘seen’ in dreams, talking of their of pre-visions. Abraham Lincoln foresaw his funeral bier in circumstances akin to his assassination weeks before it happened, as was recorded so saying contemporaneously. The evidence is piled high; what also intrigues are the observations by Bardens, viz:

Precognition and telepathy seem often related. Thoughts of the past present and future are projected in some unknown way, both between humans and animals.

And quotes from the pages of this book:

Eileen Garrett in ‘Many Voices’ (Allen & Unwin 1969): ‘The perceptions that I receive are clear-cut and distinct, like the unrolling of a film or spool. This is what living can be likened to: a continual unwinding of the thread from the spool – a current of feeling moving in space in the continuity of progress and unity of action.’

Sheila Scott (well-known aviator): there is one thing about flying. It increases all your sensations and makes one tremendously alert. One is conscious of something mysterious in all that space – one doesn’t know what it is but it is real enough.

J. W. Dunne: Time must have a time in which to move, and that time must have yet another time in which to move – and so on….imagine your life to be like a knife. You are walking along the edge of a knife. One end is your birth, the other end is your death. You move along this knife, watching your step lest you fall off or slide along it too quickly. It is only when you reach the end, when you die, that you awaken to the fact that the knife itself is moving, upwards and onwards, sweeping every atom of human experience, emotion and substance with it. You will die but your consciousness goes on in this unsuspected tide, finding itself in a four-dimensional world…in Time 2 one will be able to go backwards and forwards along the dimension of time at will. …I strong suspect that as one passes from one stage to another one will come nearer to the truth of the thing – which I think will prove to be the Deity…I am convinced nothing is ever lost.