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retrocognition

Retrecognition is a type of clairvoyance involving knowledge of something after its occurrence through psychic means.

My sister related an apparent case of retrocognition to me. She was watching television when a report came on about a woman (Susan Smith of Union, South Carolina) who claimed that her two young children had been kidnapped by a black man who carjacked her in some small town in the south. She claimed the black man drove out near a lake and let her out of the car and drove off with the two children. My sister said she immediately sensed that the children were dead and that they were in the lake. About a week later, the world was told that the woman herself had driven her car to the lake with the children alive and strapped into the back seat. She had put the car in drive and watched as the car sunk into the lake with her sons, drowning them.

It is a sad commentary on our times, but false reports of crimes are not uncommon and mothers killing their children, though much rarer that false crime reports, do occur. Mothers killing their own children, in fact, are probably more common than black carjackers kidnapping little white boys. In any case, the suspicious feelings that my sister had concerning the mother/murderer were probably shared by many people who saw the broadcast. It is evident that the police in the small southern town were skeptical too, not because they are clairvoyant but because they know a little bit about human nature and human behavior. If one was suspicious of the mother's story, the fact that she said she was driven to a lake leaves little to the imagination to fill in the blanks.

I'll admit that I've had similar feelings myself. About a year ago an alleged rape victim was interviewed on television. I had a feeling she was lying while I watched the broadcast. It turned out that she had been lying. Other people I talked to had seen the news broadcast, too, and also weren't convinced that her story was true. Were we clairvoyant? I don't think so. We all make judgments about people's stories. Sometimes we're right and sometimes we're not. We tend to forget the times we're not. If we didn't, we wouldn't be so surprised when the occasional feeling or hunch we have turns out to be right.

See related entries on clairvoyance, confirmation bias, ESP, parapsychology, precognition, psychokinesis, and telepathy.

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retrospective falsification