by FlameHorse via Listverse

Precognition involves the theory that people are able to think of an event before it happens. It is still considered supernatural—a form of clairvoyance—and not generally accepted as possible. The most famous literary example is Morgan Robertson’s Futility: or the Wreck of the Titan, to which Listverse has already drawn attention. Here are eight other examples to stretch your belief in coincidence.

• 8 – Game of Death and the Death of Brandon Lee

Game of Death was Bruce Lee’s final film, and he died before he could finish it. The film is about villains kidnapping his character’s girlfriend, and forcing him to fight them one on one. In an early scene, his character, who plays a martial arts action star, is rehearsing for a scene and is supposed to be shot at with blanks. One of the villains loads his gun with a real bullet and shoots Lee’s character in the face.

Twenty years later, Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon, was filming The Crow, which is about an ordinary man who is killed by a gang of thugs who rape and kill his fiancee as well. Lee’s character comes back from the dead and exacts revenge. With the film almost completed, one of the scenes required Lee to walk on set and be shot by FunBoy, played by Michael Massee.

The weapon is a .44 magnum revolver, and a few days earlier, a scene required a close-up view of the weapon loaded with what appears to be live ammunition. These are dummy rounds: a bullet, a casing, and a primer if the primers are required to be shown, but no gunpowder. If the primers are not shown, they are either spent primers, or the casings are unprimed. This particular gun did not require live primers, and had spent ones in its ammunition.

One of the handlers tested the weapon by dry-firing it to be sure it was safe, and heard a loud pop. Upon inspection, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, and the weapon was set aside. What had happened was one of the dummy rounds had a live primer, which it should not have had. In the absence of powder, the bullet was pushed out of the casing, but not out of the barrel.

In the fatal scene, Massee had no idea the gun had a bullet in it, and fired what he thought was a blank. The full charge of powder propelled the the bullet out of the barrel and into Lee’s abdomen just as if a live round had been used. He was shot point-blank with a .44 magnum. The bullet perforated his intestine and lodged in his spine. He bled to death about six hours later despite surgery.

• 7 – The Lone Gunmen Pilot and 9/11

The Lone Gunmen was a spin-off from The X-Files, and featured the three titular characters experiencing adventures surrounding conspiracy theories, government cover-ups, and computer hacking. The pilot episode premiered on March 4, 2001, and proved very popular. It depicted the trio uncovering a United States government plot to have a commercial airline hijacked and flown into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The government’s intent is shown to be a desire to sell more weapons to American civilians, and militaries around the world in the ensuing global fear of terrorism.

Six months and one week later, both World Trade Center towers were in fact destroyed by commercial airliners hijacked by Islamic terrorists. The Lone Gunmen episode aided immeasurably in fueling paranoia about a US government conspiracy and cover-up. The conspicuous height of the WTC towers always provided fear that a plane could strike them. It was no secret that they were the most obvious targets in the entire city, much wider at their tops than the Empire State Building, which tapers. But the similarity with the pilot episode is no less uncanny.

The Lone Gunmen Pilot

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• 6 – Platform and the 2002 Bali Bombings

Platform is a 2001 novel by French author Michel Houellebecq, in which the main character, Michel Renault, travels to Phuket, Thailand, a popular international tourist spot, for various purposes, among them sex with cheap prostitutes. While there, he is an eyewitness to a terrorist bombing of a night club that kills two hundred people. Houellebecq stated later that one number was as good as another, and he chose two hundred arbitrarily. The terrorists are depicted driving a minivan loaded with fertilizer explosives into the building.

On 12 October 2002, in Bali, Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiya terrorists detonated minivans filled with potassium chloride, sulfur, and aluminum powder, wrapped in PETN detonation cord in the street between Paddy’s Pub and Sari’s Club. A suicide bomber had first killed himself by detonating his backpack inside Paddy’s, forcing the patrons into the street where the car bomb exploded. Two hundred and two people were killed, and another two hundred and nine wounded.

The two locations are 1,134 miles (1825km) apart, but this seems to be trumped by the similarities in attack methods and numbers of dead.

• 5 – The Illuminati Card Game and 9/11

This trading card game has been marketed by Steve Jackson Games since 1982 and is still popular. Expansions, in the way of cards, are frequently added to the game, and in 1995, new conspiracy theories were propagated for the game revolving around the Illuminati effecting a “fire sacrifice to Satan” by nuking the World Trade Center in New York City. At the same time, they nuked the Pentagon.

Cards were sold depicting precisely this, and the card for blowing up the WTC is now legendary across the Internet. Though it predated the actual terrorist bombings by six years, the fiery explosion appears to occur in the South Tower, at almost the very spot where the plane struck, about the 80th floor. The tower is drawn on the card as toppling over, exactly as it did in reality, not pancaking straight down as the North Tower did.

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Related articles

• 8 Examples of Precognition in Literature (listverse.com)
• World Trade Center Owner Challenges Airline’s ‘Act of War’ Defense for 9/11 Attacks (insurancejournal.com)
• Telepathy (illuminutti.com)
• Precognitive Poem for 1949: ‘Ode to the Welfare State’ (illinoisreview.typepad.com)
• Precognition software used to predict which prisoners will murder (salon.com)