FT264

If telepathy involves passing information from one person to another through direct mind-to-mind contact, and precognition is an extra-sensory apprehension of a future event, then clairvoyance is the ability to be aware – usually through a mental image – of something occurring elsewhere, at the time it is occurring, without a second mind acting as an intermediary. As we noted in the previous entry, it is often diffi­cult to disentangle these three aspects of extra-sensory perception (ESP); once having assumed ESP is at work, it’s not always possible to decide which one is at work in any particular case.

But here is what seems to be a clear-cut example of clairvoyance, reported by John Fairley and Simon Welfare in Arthur C Clarke’s World of Mysterious Powers (Collins 1984, p128).