Inexplicable

As a scientist, I am naturally sceptical of anything that defies current understanding. However, I also know there is so much we don’t understand.

This is a record of some of the inexplicable events that I have experienced.

Contents

The moving statue

It was in 1986 and I was 48. Recently separated, I had moved into a ground floor flat in a newly converted house in Croydon. The flat was the only one in the conversion with access, via French windows, to the back garden, sunk four feet below a wide solid concrete patio and surrounded by fences rising eight feet above the ground level meaning the sunken garden itself was surrounded by twelve foot high screening.

I developed the garden, ridding it of the builders’ waste and briar, constructing a path sloping down from the patio to the small lawn beneath, which I turfed. I added a heavy stone statue cum bird bath as a feature at the foot of the slope.

The turf needed a couple of weeks to embed which which was followed by a couple of weeks of heavy rain. Thus it was, that the lawn was long, requiring cutting but too wet to touch and the ground was muddy under foot.

One morning, on opening the curtains covering the French windows, I was surprised to see the bird bath had been moved from the foot of the slope to the middle of the lawn – a distance of about 5 metres (16 feet).

I went outside to see more.

There was no other access to the garden and no signs of any attempted access over the high fences, the opposite sides of which were populated by dense weeds and bramble.

The wet grass, about 20 centimetres (8 inches) tall by now, had not been flattened by any footprints, nor were there signs of any muddy footprints on the shingle-topped earth bank that formed the sloping path, nor the patio.

When eventually it was dry enough to walk on the grass, I moved the statue back to its original position. It was very heavy and as much as I could do to lift it.

So how had it mysteriously moved overnight? I guess we will never know.

Experiments

It was in the 1970’s that Lyall Watson brought out the book, “Supernature,” which challenged scientific thinking on many levels. I decided it could could provide some great projects for my class of ten year olds to experiment with to teach them the scientific processes which may be summarised as: Observe, Question, Hypothesise, Experiment, Repeat and Confirm, and Publish findings. I adopted an easier version of this for the children, and later for other teachers when I became an advisor for Science and Technology, of: Look, Ask, Suggest, Try, Tell – my “LASTT” acronym. (“Repeat and Confirm” is not spelled out in my LASTT acronym but is understood to be an essential part of the “Try” element.)

Telekinesis

One of the supernatural suggestions that was discussed in his book was telekinesis: the ability of the mind to make things move.

An experiment had been described whereby a recruit claiming to have telekinetic abilities had been tasked with moving a compass needle. This would be an easy subject for my child volunteers to focus on.

Half a dozen children lay a compass on the floor just inside the classroom door and lay on their stomachs with their heads close to it so they could concentrate on the compass needle. Their task was to image it moving to the right.

I left them to it as I concentrated on others working on other tasks. It was a few minutes later that the six of them simultaneously let out a cry.

A boy from another class had arrived with a message to give me. As he had stepped over the children spread out on the floor, he had accidentally trodden on one of the girls’ feet. At that instance all six of them swore they saw the compass needle twitch.

The children and I attempted everything we could to recreate the event. We jumped up and down on the floor which was too solid and any vibrations were insufficient to move the compass. The opening classroom door had no effect. We even asked the same boy messenger to return and step across the observers sprawled as before. The girl who had been trodden on even permitted the boy to tread on her toe again but all to no avail.

We surmised the surprise element was essential but to recreate that would not be possible as the observers would now be expecting it.

I have since considered whether our brains can transmit some kind of distress signal that could cause telekinesis, similar to one I have suggested that may explain possible telepathy.

Dowsing

Dowsing, or “water divining,” is an ancient practice whereby some claim they can find sources of water and other minerals underground using just a forked twig or two separate pointers.

Professional dowsers claim that new willow twigs are the best so that is what my class used. There was a small willow tree on the school site and, with permission, we carefully selected and pruned a branching twig of an appropriate shape and size which was cleaned up to be utilised.

Children operated in pairs. During their turn they would explore any of the school grounds. If they thought they found anything, they were to secretly record the location to be compared later when other pairs had taken part.

Most teams reported nothing but two pairs reported having experienced definite indications at a particular spot on the playing field; furthermore it was the exact same spot. As far as we were aware, there were no water mains nor water sources at that location and as we did not have permission to start digging up the football pitch, it was dismissed as a weird coincidence.

Razor Sharpening

Many have attributed magic powers to Egyptian pyramids.

In Supernature, Lyall Watson describes how bodies of animals that strayed into the Great Pyramid had not decayed and in some way the pyramid itself may have helped the preservation. If indeed that is so and was known to the ancient Egyptians it would explain these massive edifices.

We decided to make some model pyramids as it would provide an interesting maths and craft lesson.

Whilst we pondered on the possibility of attempting to see how long a piece of meat would remain fresh in a model pyramid, we instead looked at the other supposed finding of them keeping razor blades sharp.

At that time, like many other men, I used a double edged disposable razor blade in a holder to shave each morning. Along with the children, I made a model to exact scale c-ordinates about 20cm (8 inches) high out of cardboard and constructed a box to fit inside on which to place the razor blade in the position corresponding to the burial chamber.

I set my pyramid up on my bathroom window sill correctly orientated north south as the real Giza pyramid. Many of my children’s fathers did likewise.

We were not able to design a safe way of measuring the sharpness of the blades so results were open to subjectivity. However I continued using the same razor blade for months and had reports from several fathers that they had similarly found their razors’ sharpness had been preserved.

Ghosts

I was the deputy head of a large junior school in Hampshire.

The school building was not particularly old or remarkable, though it was in need of maintenance, but there was a story of a ghost.

I was frequently the last person to leave, often after a late night meeting with governors or parents’ association and had the task of locking up.

I would have to switch off most of the buildings’ lights at the upper end of the main building’s site and make my way to the bottom end of the site where I would exit by the main entrance setting the burglar alarms en route. I was never concerned about the possibility of meeting a ghost as I traversed the corridors in the dark. I haven’t heard of anyone actually being attacked by a supposed ghost.

First experience:

One evening, however, we had a late night meeting of the senior staff in the head teacher’s office at the top end of the school. It was a warm evening and we left the office door open so it wouldn’t get stuffy.

In the middle of the meeting, we were all suddenly aware of someone passing the door. We got up to see who it was. They had been headed towards a corridor that was blocked off for some building work. The only egress was one single classroom. But there was nobody there! We had all experienced the shadow that passed the office door and there was nowhere else they could have gone to.

Second experience:

I had a phone call from the police at about six o’clock in the morning. I was one of three keyholders and as such on the list to be notified of any attempted break-ins. I had just got up anyway so left for work a little quicker than usual.

The other keyholders, the caretaker and head teacher, were already there when I arrived.

From the alarm logs showing timings when various alarm points were triggered, it appeared someone had broken in via a window in the admin office in the lower part of the building, exited via its door into the main corridor and continued to the upper part of the school past the head teacher’s office, exiting via the corridor to the new extension.
(The previous “sighting” had been part of this same route.)

The only problem was the window and alarmed doors the intruder was shown as having passed through, were all securely locked and no signs of any damage.

So is there really a ghost?

Telepathy

Twin Telepathy.

This is often reported though not observed in scientific testing.

Tests usually use packs of Zener cards. Developed in the 1930s by perceptual psychologist Karl Zener for parapsychologist J. B. Rhine, a standard deck consists of 25 cards featuring five distinct symbols: a circle, cross, wavy lines, square, and star.

One by one the cards are revealed, either by an experimenter turning them over or by a “transmitter” concentrating on them, out of sight of the “receiver”. Statistically, anyone should be able to get five correct answers out of 25. Although some have claimed success rates of 7 or 8 they are not significantly deviated from the statistical prediction nor always replicable. My hypothesis is that testing in this way is inappropriate as it’s not how I think telepathy works.

The classic suggestion regarding telepathy is that messages can be sent or received on demand but my experiences are inconsistent with that.

I am an identical twin. Both nature and nurture will have shaped me and my twin brother identically. Sharing the same genes and being in close proximity to each other as children, it was not surprising that we would have the same maladies as each other at the same time.

A little more unusual as we started getting older were the occasions when he would come home whistling the song I had had running through my head all day. Of course, that can be put down to coincidence and perhaps we may have been subconsciously triggered by overhearing it on a radio or something.

It was once we had both married and were living in different locations a hundred miles apart that we began to notice that we still shared symptoms if one of us was unwell.

As an example, one incidence in particular comes to mind. I had been feeling generally unwell with many symptoms and had visited my doctor who told me there was a virus going round that I had presumably contracted.

He read out a list of the symptoms, each of which I concurred with apart from one significant symptom that was missing – a headache. When I said no to that one, he shrugged that I must have been lucky.

On returning home, I told my wife what the doctor had said. She suggested I phone Martin to see how he was. “I’m fine,” he chirped, “but I do have a bad headache!”

The most dramatic example, however, was as I was leaving school one day. I used to give a lift to another teacher. As we drove down the school drive, I became quite nauseous and feeling quite faint. I had to stop the car. My passenger went to get help. With the caretaker’s help I was almost carried into the building where I was seen by the school’s welfare assistant. (We had them in those days.) She was a trained paediatric nurse who cared for me as I had some water and said to see my doctor when I got home.

My headteacher drove me home where I found my wife was home before me. She put me to bed and phoned the doctor.

It was surgery time so he couldn’t do anything there and then (Practices worked differently in those days.) but said to phone again if I got any worse.

Although feeling very strange and poorly, I was no worse so the doctor was not summoned.

Two days later, I was as bright as normal and went into school. The first person to see me was the welfare assistant.

“I didn’t expect to see you so soon,” she said. “I’ve seen so many children go down with appendicitis, I thought that’s what you had.”

What she didn’t know but I did by then, as I had had a phone call from my mother, was that my brother had been rushed into hospital with appendicitis at the same time As I had become faint in the car, and that his operation coincided exactly with when I felt better.

---

At the beginning of 1988, I was sitting in my flat in Croydon, South London, one Saturday thinking what shall I do today, when I decided I fancied exploring the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) that had opened some months previously.

I drove to Greenwich Park and parked near the observatory.

I walked down the hill to the Cutty Sark to the foot tunnel under the Thames, where I was surprised to see a large dog running loose, and thence to Island Gardens, the Southern terminus of the DLR at that time. I caught the train which took me through the Isle of Dogs, that used to the location of the London docks and was now an aspiring commercial development area, to its other terminal at the Tower of London. I spent a little time there before my return.

On the Monday, I phoned my mother for a chat, as was my habit, and told her of my adventure. She then told me she had recently got off the phone to my brother who had done exactly the same thing.

I met up with Martin a few days later and we exchanged stories. Feeling at a loose end, he had driven up from Hastings where he then resided, and had parked near the observatory in Greenwich Park. He had walked through the Thames tunnel and seen the same loose dog. He had caught a train from Island Gardens to the Tower.

We had both kept our tickets as a kind of souvenir. They were time stamped with the time they were purchased. They were bought just two minutes apart. We must have been on the same train!

Partner Telepathy

When you live with somebody, you will usually adopt similar habits and can experience some coincidences because of that. Some married couples and others in a close relationship will also have experienced what may be considered a kind of telepathy.

When I first separated from my first wife, I had befriended a woman who was also experiencing marital difficulties and we used to talk a lot on the phone to console each other.

It reached a point , however, where I would only need to think of her and she would phone, or vice versa.

We later lived together for many years and I started experiencing some of the same sensations as I had done with my twin brother. For example, when she was taken sick at work, I felt it and couldn’t wait to get home to see how she was. Fortunately it was nothing that a couple of paracetamol couldn’t cure.

Similarly with my second wife. She bruises extremely easily. When she took a nasty tumble down a steep six foot bank in the garden, she ended up black and blue all over but I was the one who felt it.

Presently she has a lot of eye problems and is undergoing various surgery. I don’t like to mention that I am also experiencing eye problems as they are nothing compared to hers but, as we have often noticed, I am just picking up her symptoms.

Suggestions

In observations regarding claimed telepathic communications, it has been discovered that they are usually reported between people whose brain waves are in sync in some way or other. Twins, particularly identical ones as I am, will usually always be in sync as will anyone in a close relationship.

My own theory is the “shock wave” idea, although whereas that may provide some sort of explanation for serious illness or injury, it doesn’t explain other coincidences like the DLR experience.

Are our brains capable of transmitting some kind of energy wave when provided with particular stimuli, that can be detected by someone else on the same wavelength?

Reported on social media in 2025, Princeton researchers found human brains emit ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic waves that form a coherent global “neural network.” These signals can influence other brains up to 10,000 km away, suggesting human consciousness may be subtly interconnected across vast distances. I have been unable to find the source of this information to verify it.

Many life forms – animal and vegetable – appear to exhibit an alarm response. The smell of newly mown grass is actually it sending pheromone messages to warn other plants.

If a predator attacks a beehive, bees will return from long distances to protect the queen.

In fact, animals can often seem far more “in tune” with us than we are with each other. Using other senses, especially the increased sense of smell in dogs, they can pick up on signals we may miss. Dogs can often detect cancer for instance and close pets seem to understand our emotions.