Our intuition processes a lot of information, much more than we realise. Sometimes, it seems like magic. When you drive your car, you may suddenly discover you have travelled a long distance without realising it. That is more likely to happen when you are a frequent driver using the same route. Research has demonstrated that we can train specific abilities to the point that they become a subconscious process. An important domain of our intuition is social information. Unless you are autistic, you intuitively read body language and facial expressions and adapt your actions to the clues others give. Mediums might be so good at asking the right questions to influence minds and reading body language and facial expressions that they appear psychic.
Between 2002 and 2010, a medium named Char appeared regularly on a Dutch television show. She performed readings and claimed to be in contact with the spirits of the dead. Sometimes, she seemed to retrieve specific information that only the person receiving the reading and the deceased could have known. In 2008, journalists from the Dutch television programme Zembla investigated her performances. People wanted to hear that their deceased loved ones were doing fine. And guess what? They were always doing fine up there somewhere.
Zembla claimed that the television show aired only the best parts of Char’s readings, making her performance appear better than it actually was. Char was often wrong, but the programme didn’t air many of her misses. James Randi, always willing to enlighten us, was kind enough to weigh in once again. Randi is sceptical of paranormal claims. He argued that Char could have extracted the information from the people receiving the reading.
The name Char equals the first four characters of the word charlatan. Notice the mention of characters in the previous sentence because this word starts with the same four characters. Interestingly, Zembla was discussing Char’s character, so this is indeed a remarkable coincidence. Yet, I still remember a few guesses she made that defy conventional explanation and left everyone on the scene dumbfounded. It seemed impossible to obtain this information from the individuals who received the reading. Zembla didn’t delve into these cases. If there had been fraud, like using actors, Zembla would have mentioned it.
So, can mediums do better than guessing? That must be possible if we live in a simulation running a script. A so-called gift can be an array of accurate guesses. These guesses are not coincidences. Otherwise, they couldn’t stand out in such a manner. It can make mediums believe they have a gift. The phenomenon is widespread and persistent enough to have caught the attention of scientists like cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, who has investigated it. The following is one of the accounts of precognition that she has learned about.
On an October night in 1989, a phone call and a scream awoke a four-year-old girl. She tiptoed barefoot through the hallway. Her mother’s voice said, ‘He died in a car accident!’ That hadn’t happened yet. When she threw her arms around her father before he boarded his flight for that fateful business trip, she knew she would never see him alive again.
Her own experience with psychic gut feelings led Mossbridge to study them. Scientists are seeking explanations. They come up with speculations reminiscent of New Age beliefs, such as the idea that precognition suggests that our consciousness reaches beyond the linear perception of time. And that time behaves in a much stranger way than how we experience it. Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of such precognition. In 1995, the CIA declassified its own precognition research after statisticians had reviewed it and declared it reliable.1
An incident in my life showed how premonitions can come true, and that the likely cause is scripted reality rather than time behaving strangely. On 9 February 2009, a severe storm struck northern France. A storm of this strength occurs only once or twice a decade. I predicted such a storm on this exact date two months earlier. Only I feared that it would be more severe and strike the Netherlands. It was a miss of 400 kilometres (250 miles), but that is still remarkable, most notably because of the events that made me make the prediction. On 19 December 2008, I posted a warning on an internet message board.2 On 9 February 2009, Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris had to be closed because of the storm.3
Somehow, I got a hunch that a superstorm might strike the Netherlands that day, causing widespread flooding in large parts of the country. It began with an article on an alternative website about the web bot, a piece of computer software that allegedly made accurate predictions in the past. The word ‘alternative’ is a bit deceptive here, as the website was about conspiracies, UFOs and the like. In the autumn of 2008, the web bot predicted that large areas of land would suffer permanent flooding in the first half of 2009. The website reported on it. The article didn’t mention a location or a date, but the word ‘permanently’ suggested that this area is below sea level. That narrowed it down to the Netherlands.
That came after I was haunted by time prompts like 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, and 5:55 on the clock at night, which pushed me into psychosis and made me open to suggestion. The date 9 February came up as I believed it was the birthday of a peculiar Lady I had learned to know as a student on the campus of the University of Twente. My memory for dates can be accurate. I remember the birthdays of some of my former schoolmates from secondary school and the exact date my father quit smoking. A genealogy site, however, states that her birthday is 7 February. And so, I might be wrong. However, this possible mistake made me think of 9 February, so it is like slipping on a banana peel to find a clue, which is in the true tradition of slapstick like Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau.
That came after I was haunted by time prompts like 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, and 5:55 on the clock at night, which pushed me into psychosis and made me open to suggestion. The date 9 February came up as I believed it was the birthday of a peculiar Lady I had learned to know as a student on the campus of the University of Twente. My memory for dates can be accurate. I remember the birthdays of some of my former schoolmates from secondary school and the exact date my father quit smoking. A genealogy site, however, states that her birthday is 7 February. And so, I might be wrong. However, this possible mistake made me think of 9 February, so it is like slipping on a banana peel to find a clue, which is in the true tradition of slapstick like Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau.
And I found more clues. A blogger on the website Sargasso.nl wrote on 2 September 2008 (2/9) about a storm that would strike the Netherlands on 9 February 2009 (9/2), potentially flooding large parts of the Netherlands. The author wrote it as a what-if scenario, not as a prediction. The article on Sargasso.nl featured animated graphics that showed the flooding of parts of the Netherlands on 9 February 2009, making the images more impressive. The numerical coincidence of the dates was a bit peculiar. Compressing numbers makes them refer to 11:11 as 9 + 2 = 11. And it was precisely the date that I had guessed. Now, what are the odds of that? That frightened me even more. I saw this as an eerie warning sign. A flood of this kind would put millions of people in danger.4 And I had never come across this blog before. I found it as a result of searching for clues supporting my hunch. If you have a suspicion, you look for clues to confirm it. But you wouldn’t expect to find this. And it was about to get stranger yet.
On 13 December 2008, I went to Enschede with my son. We visited the University of Twente. My son didn’t know of my foreboding. I hadn’t discussed it with anyone yet. On the campus was a work of art, a church tower in a pond. It seems to refer to flooded land. It was evening. It was dark, the moon was shining, and a thin layer of ice had settled on the pond. Suddenly, my son told me he saw the coastline of the Netherlands reflected in the moonlight on the ice surface. I didn’t see it, but he kept pointing at the ice until I saw it, too, and very clearly. The Dutch coastline has a peculiar shape that is unlikely to be mimicked by some random incident. That was as eerie as it can get.
That freaked me out. The church tower in the pond refers to flooded land, and this storm threatened the Netherlands’ coastline. A lunar eclipse was to occur on 9 February 2009, another eerie coincidence. There were a few more strange things. The Dutch singer Boudewijn de Groot had made an album named Lage Landen (Low Countries). The 11th track, Lage Landen, is about a superstorm hitting the Netherlands. The song suggests that the storm will hit on a Monday, while 9 February 2009 was a Monday. Monday is the day dedicated to the Moon (Moon-day), which is noteworthy because of the lunar eclipse and the coastline of the Netherlands reflected in the moonlight.
The song was the 11th track and lasted 5:55 minutes, which was peculiar as the date, 9 February 2009, becomes 11:11 after compressing the numbers. It can be rewritten as 9-2-2009 while 9 + 2 = 11 and 2 + 0 + 0 + 9 = 11. When I first came to the University of Twente campus during the introduction weeks, I stayed at Club 9-2, the most notorious residence hall on the entire campus. This address refers to 9 February. It was indeed intriguing because there was a link with the campus and the Lady.
On 18 December 2008, I issued a warning on two message boards. I expected everyone to ignore it, except perhaps a few nutters. What proof did I have? I had never been psychic. I don’t have prophetic foresight. Only this unique long-term weather forecast was more accurate than chance allows. The events that caused me to make the prediction make it an incredible story. As a prediction, it was pretty useless, and luckily, no one took it seriously. Imagine that a large-scale evacuation had taken place. That is why I refrain from making predictions. Still, the incident sheds some light on why mediums can be highly accurate at times, and beyond what chance and mere guessing allow for, while making countless misses on other occasions.
Latest revision: 2 September 2025
Featured image: Church tower in pond on the campus of the University of Twente. Source Unknown. [copyright]
1. Your Consciousness Can Jump Through Time—Meaning ‘Gut Feelings’ Are Memories From the Future, Scientists Say. Elizabeth Rayne (2025). Popular Mechanics. [link]
2. De duistere zijde van de Maan. Maroc.nl (2008).
3. Storm shuts Paris airports. The Guardian (2009). [link]
4. Wat als het toch fout gaat? Sargasso.nl (2008). [link]
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