Believers in paranormal powers of precognition have long maintained that the sinking of the Titanic was perceived in advance by extrasensory perception. Their prize example is Morgan Robertson's sea novel, The Wreck of the Titan, published fourteen years before the Titanic went down. This unusual short novel is reproduced here in full, along with a selection of other writings that seem to foretell the Titanic's fate, including an excerpt from a novel by the famous British journalist and spiritualist W.T. Stead, a short story called "The White Ghost of Disaster", and several poems about ships hitting icebergs in the North Atlantic.
Gardner, a well known skeptic of ESP, argues persuasively in his introductions to these selected works that the parallels in these writings are coincidences entirely within the bounds of normal statistical laws of chance.
Now that the raising of the Titanic from the depths of the North Atlantic is a distinct possibility, this book is a necessity for those who want to put one of the greatest of sea tragedies in its proper perspective.
Martin Gardner is well-known for his contributions to Scientific American and is the author of The Magic Numers of Dr. Matrix, Order and Surprise, Science: Good, Bad and Bogus and many other books on science, mathematics and literature.