The book did mention a study of train wrecks in the 1950's by William E. Cox (at J.B. Rhine's Duke University laboratory) that found that trains that crashed or derailed on the east coast had significantly less ridership on the day of the crash even taking in account the weather.
Well, like I said it's a possible proof. They give the actual load vs the average load for that flight, which I take to be the average for that flight on the same day in prior weeks.
So I think it's more of an indication that the type of plane and how empty the flight was were some of the things terrorists considered when they decided to board a flight.
It's too easy to have that information in advance, though, even without any sort of special airline connections. I've done it many times, called the airlines and asked what sort of plane they were using for which flights and how crowded the flight was. It costs more for a ticket by then, of course, but nowhere in that article did it say that the tickets were bought way in advance, either.
The article goes through flight by flight in a who's who and their reasons for not flying - if anything the amazing # of rationalizing comments like: "I didn't feel like getting up that early" points to the unawareness of the upcoming doom but the reaction to it nonetheless. If you doubt his sincerity - he lists 249 articles etc in the notes of where he got his data from.
Thanks, Mimsey. I think something like premonition happens at times, but it's undependable, unfortunately. Rather than assume, as a Scientologist would, that the ones that DID show up and were murdered on those flights were dolts and blockheads stuck in meatbodies that were too unaware and dense to have or follow a premonition, or that they 'deserved' to die due to bad karma or some such, what if we assume instead that most passengers were fairly equal in their receptiveness and responsiveness to premonitions of danger and their characters and spiritual abilities were no better or worse than those who canceled their flights and lived?
The premonitions I have had in my life, while mundane, are kind of an a or b affair. A fork in the path of life. I had one recently where I had this nagging feeling if I did A I would regret it, and that I should do B. A seemed the more logical thing to do. I ping ponged back and forth in my mind, then decided to listen to this feeling and chose B, and a few moments I discovered had I done A it would have been a mess.That's interesting.
That would mean some were meant to receive and respond to a premonition while others were not. Some needed to live because they had to do something else, maybe, or through some otherwise inconsequential action have an affect on something or someone that has a chain reaction for something bigger?
And that gets into a whole different concept, the concept of a grand design, something that I believe in. Like the game, ''Kerplunk," you can pull out stick after stick and the amount of energy expended is the same and many times you pull a stick and it makes no difference at all, but then you pull a central stick that the other sticks require to hold all the marbles in place, and the marbles go down. Kerplunk! Yet all sticks are equal. By random selection, some are in key positions and others are not. Yet the design of the game itself makes some sticks important to the overall success and others not so much unless they are pulled in a certain sequence. There is always more than one possible series of actions that can be played in order to win. And that is what I mean by grand design: it is not dependent on one individual and there are always alternatives in case that stick doesn't get pulled.
Yeh, I get you. It's just that sometimes when I feel that nagging feeling, it's wrong, too. Years ago I paid far too much attention to feelings and there were a lot of unfounded fears behind some of them that I was better off ignoring. So I analyze instead.
Beyond those minor little nagging feelings, a few times in my life there were very POWERFUL pushes away from potentially bad, dangerous situations. Those came out of nowhere and were actually impossible to ignore and twice saved my life. They were not premonitions.
I've had dreams of places that I visited afterward, that was weird. Hasn't happened in many years. The dreams never affected anything, though, so whether I paid attention to them or not didn't matter. Plus, realistically, who knows if I originally saw something similar on television or somewhere else. Since it never affected the outcome, I don't worry about dreams anymore. Too hard to interpret. Every now and then one stands out that wakes me up though. Whether that's my subconscious working things out or spirit or God, I try to take back some sort of lesson on resolving my problems from those types of dreams.
WEIRD! Freaky idea.
