Sam Knight’s book The Premonitions Bureau explores the phenomenon of premonitions through the gripping account of a British experiment run in the late 1960s. For 18 months, psychiatrist John Barker and the Evening Standard’s science correspondent, Peter Fairley, operated the Premonitions Bureau, collecting premonitions from the newspaper’s readers and publishing those that appeared to come true. Here, Knight explains how the Bureau’s research blurred the line between science and the supernatural, and how the phenomenon of premonitions can reveal something fundamental about the way we see and interpret the world around us today.

George Upton: What is a premonition?

Sam Knight: The definition I find most useful is that it’s not just a hunch or an intuition, which anyone might ha...