The Premonitions Bureau is about whether certain people successfully predicted a number of tragic events. Sam Knight, a New Yorker staff writer, avoids leaving himself open to charges of blatant credulity about soothsaying, but if my understanding of the book is correct, he insinuates discreet affirmation of augury into his text. Hence, my disdain for paranormal gimcrackery prompts me to declare the book problematic. Others, of course, will judge differently.

On October 21, 1966, a landslide of coal-mining waste inundated the Welsh village of Aberfan. The catastrophe killed 144 people, 116 of whom were children. After the disaster, the book’s protagonist, a 42-year-old psychiatrist named John Barker, went to Aberfan. He was “a senior consultant at Shelton Hospital, a mental institution” in England. He didn’t go to Aberfan to help. News items claimed that a “boy had escaped from [a] school unharmed but later died of shock,” and Barker, who was writing a book about the possibility of being scared to death, wanted to obtain more information on the topic. He quickly understood that with the horrors and chaos abounding in Aberfan, “it would have been quite inopportune,” as he wrote later, “to make any enquiries about this child.” But while in the village, he heard stories of premonitions about the landslide, and these too stoked his curiosity.

Barker was, depending on one’s point of view, a sympathetic and erudite explorer of the paranormal whose studies of that realm should have been encouraged and extolled; or he was remarkably gullible and lacking in common sense. “He was, in every outward sense,” Knight says, “an orthodox psychiatrist. . . . Barker was a modern doctor; he pursued his more esoteric inquiries with what he described as a ‘conscious rationalism.’” However, Knight also points out that Barker “had long been interested in subjects that struck others as macabre or inexplicable”; was convinced that doctors ought to scrutinize “fringe or psychic” phenomena; belonged to Britain’s Society for Psychical Research (“founded in 1882 to investigate the paranormal”); for some years had been interested in the problem of precognition (i.e., clairvoyance); and, if I understand some of the book’s anecdotes correctly, apparently gave credence to the existence of ghosts. In other words, a skeptic of pseudoscientific claims would not be surprised that Barker was quickly beguiled by hints he picked up in Aberfan that there were legitimate portents of the calamity that engulfed the village. (Dear reader, would you have wanted to be John Barker’s patient?)

Barker had an inspiration, “an idea,” Knight writes, “for an unusual study. Given the singular nature of the [Aberfan] disaster and its total penetration of the national consciousness, he decided to gather as many premonitions as possible of the event and to investigate the people who had them.” Barker persuaded Peter Fairley, the science editor of the Evening Standard, a London newspaper, to publish his plea for those premonitions. The paper did so in October 1966 and eventually received 76 replies. One was from Kathleen Middleton, a private music teacher in London, and another was from Alan Hencher, “who worked on the continental telephone exchange for the Post Office.” These two would play important roles in Barker’s life. Of the “sixty plausible premonitions” — Middleton’s and Hencher’s among them — “there was evidence that twenty-two were described” before the landslide commenced. “The material convinced Barker that precognition was not unusual among the general population.”

Fairley followed up by pitching a proposal to Barker: Invite the public to send post-Aberfan premonitions to the Standard “as they occurred and see how many were borne out in reality.” (Would you employ this man as a science editor?) Barker agreed (a reveler in publicity about himself, he must have sensed — no irony intended — a publicity craver’s jackpot), and on January 4, 1967, the newspaper proclaimed that the Premonitions Bureau was open for business.

Barker, notwithstanding his ardor for publicity, was in earnest about what he believed the bureau could accomplish. “Ideally,” he maintained, “the system would need to be linked with a computer, to help exclude trivial, misleading or false information. . . . With practice, it should be possible to detect patterns or peaks which might even suggest the nature and possible date, time and place of a disaster so that an official early warning could then be issued.” (Computer, patterns, peaks: They seem so precise, so mathematical.) Middleton and Hencher were noteworthy contributors to the Premonitions Bureau. The bureau survived into the 1970s; at its termination it contained more than 3,000 premonitions, “of which,” Knight writes, “around 1,200 had been checked”; however, “ninety-seven percent of its predictions did not come true.” Moreover, “no early warnings were ever issued.”

The Premonitions Bureau outlasted Barker: He died in August 1968, at the age of 48: “A vessel had burst in his brain.” His untimely death had been supposedly predicted by Middleton and Hencher, and he knew it — because they told him. Knight writes: “Doctors and scientists are not immune from delusions, or from being caught up in other people’s. We like to imagine that they work on a higher plane of reason or operate with greater doubt. But there is an argument that they are more susceptible than the rest of us.” True enough: Martin Gardner (1914–2010), one of the all-time great debunkers of paranormal claims, believed physicists were more easily duped by such claims than professional magicians. (He also wrote, “Above all, I am grateful to whatever gods there be that the future is mercifully hidden from us.” Amen.)

Given Barker’s longtime fascination with pseudoscience, it’s not mind-blowing, as I suggested earlier, that he would be credulous about reports of precognition. Moreover, it’s also obvious from the biographical information in the book that Barker was high-strung, professionally unhappy, and somewhat alienated from the run of humanity (unfortunate traits for a psychiatrist). Which is to say it’s unsurprising that he would be vulnerable to the power of suggestion. After contributing to the Premonitions Bureau for a while, Middleton and Hencher, Knight says, “wanted recognition and a little bit of looking after. Some money wouldn’t hurt.” They received neither; nor did they get the respect they felt they deserved from Fairley, the Standard editor. What if — here I’m riotously hypothesizing — they shrewdly perceived that Barker, his mind stuffed with paranormal humbug, bedeviled by numerous anxieties, could be manipulated into believing that his death was imminent — and so they took out their buried rage (as we all know, England is a repressed society) on him? In effect, they might have deliberately killed him. They wouldn’t have been deploying premonitions when they informed him of what prematurely awaited him; instead, they were engineering a calculated murder plot. If this sounds bizarrely far-fetched, surely it is less so than the possibility that Middleton and Hencher were virtuoso (or haphazard) fortune-tellers.

My disquiet about The Premonitions Bureau isn’t about the craft that went into it — as one would expect from a New Yorker writer, Knight’s book is lucid, urbane, and smoothly written — or even about the troubled, troublesome John Barker, whose pseudoscience shtick and psychological travails I frankly found rather trivial and uninteresting. What I did find interesting, and unsettling, about The Premonitions Bureau is Sam Knight’s subtly ambiguous attitude toward his material. It’s possible I’m, once more, going out on a limb here, but I think he believes that there is something genuine about premonitions. The author never comes right out and asserts that there is something tangible about precognition. The closest he comes is this: “The Premonitions Bureau was right three percent of the time and, by the end, Barker found that he was within the three percent. Unusualness. Accuracy. Timing. There was an expectation that he would die. And there was an observable reality. I see and I know.”

Knight’s reluctance to be explicit presumably induced him to enlist, as it were, oblique allies. The book is ornamented with some impeccably highbrow names and concepts — the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, Freud — that are used, I’m forced to conclude, to lend credibility to precognition. “The rational explanation for premonitions,” Knight writes, “is that they are coincidences. But it is not easy for us to accept this. Our brains argue against it. As creatures, we prefer patterns to none. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant proposed that instead of passively absorbing reality and taking things as they come, our minds are much more active and constructive — we infer and imagine, shape and constrain our perceptions even as we have them. ‘Objects,” he wrote in 1787, ‘must conform to our cognition.’”

Eddington, in 1928, “invented the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to describe its non-reversible nature.” The notion of time’s arrow is inseparable from the concept of entropy, a word coined by the 19th-century physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius, “who had observed that a proportion of energy is always wasted — dissipates to nothing — when heat is transferred from one object to another.” Entropy “is our only physical proof that time cannot run backwards as well as forwards.” Knight sums up: “The entropy of the universe will not decrease. All of us must die. But seeing things before they happen is how we, as mortal souls, can seek to slow down time.”

This is suggestive, but even if Knight’s purpose with the above quotations was merely to explain the appeal of a conceit like premonitions, I don’t think that his flaunting of those savants and their theses accomplishes even that.

And Freud? He is presumably included because, Knight says, “he could never quite make up his mind about the occult.” He quotes Freud’s statement in a 1921 letter: “I do not belong with those who reject in advance the study of so-called occult phenomena as being unscientific, or unworthy, or harmful.” Sometimes even important thinkers can be wrong. (Anthony Storr, the late British psychiatrist and man of letters, in his nice, mostly admiring little book Freud, mentions his subject’s “irrational conviction about the occult significance of numbers.” Incidentally, I would love to know whether Storr knew about John Barker’s more outré activities and what, if anything, he thought about them.)

Knight conducted interviews as part of his research. Why didn’t he interview someone at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) about his investigation? (Disclosure: I wrote a couple of pieces for the CSI’s journal, the Skeptical Inquirer, a long time ago.) The CSI would have revealed the error of Barker’s ways, would have disclosed the outlandish errors of his embrace of seer flair. That’s what the committee does: It casts a cold eye on claims of real-world pseudoscientific incidents and explains why the “uncanny” is quite likely rather mundane. I ask but I don’t expect an answer.