Was the Aberfan Disaster Britain’s Mothman Event?
An Unbelievable Series of Precognitive Events Lead Up to an Incomprehensible Disaster
On October 19, 1966 a man from Lancashire in the UK had dreamed that he was trying to buy a book. He was standing in front of an electronic machine with a lot of buttons which had a screen on it. Decades before the personal computer existed, he thought it was some sort of computational device. On the screen, he could make out the letters of a word that made no sense to him: “ABERFAN”. On October 20, a young Welsh boy named Paul Davies drew a picture of people digging into a hillside under the words “The End”. Two weeks before, a girl named Eryl Mai Jones had told her mother she was not afraid to die, something that made no sense at the time. On the same night Paul Davies would have his own feelings of foreboding, she had a dream that she had gone to school only to discover it was no longer there because “something black had come down all over it”. Jones’s mother, father and minister signed sworn statements that she had told them those things. The next day, on October 21, both children would be found dead, buried underneath thousands of tons of coal slurry. Thirteen months later, the Mothman Sightings and their associated premonitions in Point Pleasant, a mining town across the Atlantic in West Virginia, would echo many of the same features as the Aberfan mining disaster.
The day before the disaster she said to her mother, “Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night.” Her mother answered gently, “Darling, I’ve no time. Tell me again later.” The child replied, “No Mummy, you must listen. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it!” — Quote by Glannant Jones, Jones’s Minister, Signed by Her Parents and John Barker
The Foreseen Disaster
The Aberfan mining disaster of 1966 was a catastrophic event that shook a small Welsh village to its core. The incident, which occurred when a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto a school, resulted in the death of 144 people, mostly children, a curious fact that may help explain why the psychic events preceding the catastrophe rippled so far out into the minds of others.
In the early hours of October 21, the spoil tip above Aberfan gave way, engulfing Pantglas Junior School. The first casualties arrived at St Tydfil’s Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil at 9:50 am, but by 11:00 am, no more survivors were found. The rescue efforts, led by local miners, were hampered by thousands of volunteers who had flocked to the scene after hearing the news on the BBC. This influx of untrained helpers echoes the chaotic scene in Point Pleasant during the Mothman sightings, where the presence of numerous witnesses and investigators often impeded official investigations. In addition, as the slip continued to move through the village, it was estimated that two broken water mains added between 2 and 3 million imperial gallons of water to the spoil slurry. This uncontrollable flow of water mirrors the unexplained flooding and visions of water associated with the Mothman prophecies.
The NCB’s response to the disaster was slow and inadequate, with the organization’s chairman, Lord Robens, choosing to attend a university ceremony instead of visiting the scene. The aftermath of the disaster was no less harrowing. A makeshift mortuary was set up in Bethania Chapel, where parents could only identify the bodies of their children one at a time due to cramped conditions. The Aberfan Calvinistic Chapel was also used as a second mortuary, further adding to the atmosphere of grief and despair. This somber scene is reminiscent of the funerals and memorial services held for the victims of the Silver Bridge collapse, which many believe was foretold by the premonitions people had in the weeks and days before the bridge collapsed.
The Premonitions Bureau
The Aberfan disaster had a profound impact on John Barker, a psychiatrist who was working on a book called “Scared To Death” at the time. The idea behind the book was that hearing a premonition of one’s death may result in deep fear, which could affect the body’s immune system and lead to death, sometimes called “voodoo deaths”. This concept, combined with the stories of foreboding he heard in Aberfan, led Barker to establish the Premonitions Bureau, which was a system of collecting, cataloguing and verifying predictions before catastrophic events occurred, which he thought may lead to preventing such events. Much like John Keel, the investigator who became obsessed with the Mothman event, “looking into the abyss” took over Barker’s life.
After advertising in newspapers that they were looking for anyone who had had a premonition of the Aberfan disaster to get in contact with them, they narrowed their focus to 67 people who they would stay in contact with in order to collect premonitions. The bureau quickly began to receive numerous predictions, including some that appeared to foretell actual events. For instance, Alan Hencher, a switchboard operator, predicted a plane crash involving 123 people, which came true nine days later.
The achievement rate of the bureau, was not impressive on the whole, with only 18 out of 723 predictions being successful. Amazingly though, 12 of these accurate predictions were made by just two individuals, Alan Hencher and Kathleen Lorna Middleton, a teacher, who consistently foretold future events with uncanny precision.
Middelton had sensed the Aberfan disaster because she awoke from her sleep on the day of the disaster with a horrible feeling of foreboding:
“I awoke choking and gasping and with the sense of the walls caving in” — Middleton
She told her landlord, Alexander Bacciarelli, about the feeling and he offered to make her tea, something she did not normally drink, which they took together. An hour later, workers at Aberfan were taking tea on top of the area when it began to slide.
In the autumn of 1967, both Henchner and Middleton began relaying predictions to the Premonitions Bureau of a railway disaster on a train line leading into London. Neither Henchner nor Middleton were in communication with each other. On November 1st, Middleton claimed to envision a crowd gathered on a railway platform with the words “Charing Cross” coming to her mind. Tragically, just four days later, a passenger train from Hastings traveling to Charing Cross was derailed while heading to the station, resulting in the loss of forty-nine lives. All of these premonitions were recorded and time stamped before the events occurred.
On April 23, 1967 Middleton claimed to the Premonitions Bureau that she had a vision of a “spaceman” who was “petrified, terrified and just frightened”. The next day, the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died while returning from space. The death of Komarov was not known in the West, due to Soviet secresy until months later.
Ominously, Middleton began to receive powerful images of Robert Kennedy in the Spring of 1968.
“The word assassination continues. I cannot disconnect it from Robert Kennedy.” — Middleton to Barker on March 11th, 1968
On June 4th, Middleton frantically called the Premonitions Bureau 3 times, about the increasingly strong visions, in a desperate attempt to save the young senator’s life. Robert Kennedy died 2 days later.
After this event, Middleton became worried that Barker himself would die. She dreamed her mother pushed her out of a black car and interpreted the dream to mean someone close to her was going to die. She wrote to the Premonitions Bureau on July 28th:
“THIS MAY MEAN DEATH …. All day I have felt as if in a trance.” — Middleton to the Premonitions Bureau
Barker died of a brain of a brain hemorrhage 3 weeks later, on August 18, while at home.
The Legacy of the Premonitions Bureau
With nobody to continue Barker’s work, the Premonitions Bureau became a thing of the past. In many ways, the Premonitions Bureau can be seen as the British analogue to the Mothman event in the United States. The Mothman was a creature reportedly seen by numerous people in the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia from November 12, 1966, to December 15, 1967. The Mothman sightings coincided with a period of unusual events and disasters, most notably the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1967, which resulted in the deaths of 46 people. Prior to the event, many people claimed to have a sense of impending doom, much like Aberfan.
The Mothman event was investigated by two researchers, who famously came to very different conclusions. Interestingly, one of these researchers, Gray Barker, the more skeptical and cynical of the two, shared the same last name as the investigator involved in the Aberfan tragedy. The other was John Keel, played by Richard Gere for those familiar with the movie.
Because the Mothman sightings had been reported prior to the collapse of the bridge, Keel had already been investigating them. He had formed relationships with newspaper reporters, one of whom shared her predictions with him prior to the disaster.
“I had a terrible nightmare. There were a lot of people drowning in the river and Christmas packages were floating everywhere in the water. Its like something awful is going to happen.” — Mary Hyre to John Keel on November 19th 1967
Eerily, the bridge collapsed in heavy seasonal traffic as people were returning from or going to shop for Christmas presents. Virginia Thomas also had a premonition of people dying in the Ohio River, shortly before the event. Unlike Aberfan, however, the sightings of a winged creature, now dubbed the Mothman, overshadowed the nature of these precognitions.
Both Keel’s work and the Premonitions Bureau generated a great deal of interest and speculation, and both have become enduring mysteries in their respective countries. However, unlike the Mothman, which remains a subject of debate and fascination, the Premonitions Bureau is largely forgotten, its legacy overshadowed by the failure to prevent any disasters.
Despite its limitations, the Premonitions Bureau serves as a reminder of the human desire to understand the unknown and to protect ourselves from the unpredictable. However, it stands out in paranormal research due to the quality of predictions as well as the fact that the predictions were recorded and verified prior to the events they predicted. The research was passed on to Cambridge University where all of the mysterious details can still be read. Barker was only 42 when he died and one has to wonder how far into the mystery he might have gotten if he had been able to carry out the work for another decade or two. Research into precognitive events has always been a source of controversy but even the most skeptical of readers will find the details about the “Aberfan prophecies” highly, highly strange.
