Robert Todd Carroll
retrocognition
A type of clairvoyance involving knowledge of something after its occurrence through psychic means. Related to precognition.
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 and with the children alive and strapped into the back seat, she put the car in drive and watched as the car sunk into the lake with her sons, drowning them.
My sister tells me that she has no desire to be clairvoyant, and while the only other person who can testify that she had a precognition about the death in the lake of the children is her husband, I believe her story is essentially correct. That is, I don't think, after talking to her and her husband that she filled in the details of the retrocognition after the fact.
Did she foresee an event? No. She couldn't have, since the event had already occurred when she had her clairvoyant experience. So it wasn't really a precognition but a retrocognition. Still, isn't it uncanny that her feeling at the time she saw the news broadcast turned out to be essentially what happened? Not really. It is a sad commentary on our times, but false reports of crimes are not uncommon and mothers killing their children are not uncommon. They are probably less common than black carjackers kidnapping little boys. In any case, the suspicious feelings which 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 from the getgo, 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 were not. We tend to forget the times we're not. If we didn't, we wouldn't find the occasional correct "feeling" to be so surprising.
See related entries on clairvoyance, ESP, parapsychology, precognition, psychokinesis, and telepathy.
further reading
Robert Todd Carroll
retroactive clairvoyance