Premonitions Of Baseball Great Roberto Clemente's New Year's Eve Plane Crash

January 1, 1973, was a memorable New Year's Day for me.

 

My mother had been in the bed sick for several days. Christmas break from school was almost but not quite over for me and I had spent that New Year's Day curled up at the foot of Mom's bed comforting her. Thinking back some four decades now I can still recall the evening newspaper being delivered and me lying there and unfolding it to find the shocking headline among the front page's stories: "Baseball's Clemente Dies In Plane Crash." 

 

Well now, here was a baseball (my favorite sport at the time) superstar I had watched many times in televised baseball games and had collected his bubble gum cards over the years, someone I genuinely admired, and he had suddenly died in a plane crash while on a humanitarian effort to carry much needed supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.  

 

I was genuinely happy to have my mom's company at that moment. And a familiar and much discussed family saying (one of my dad's favorites, as I recall), "life is uncertain but death is sure," was considered anew.

 

A month after I read of Clemente's death, another story appeared, written by AP correspondent Will Grimsley, that detailed the premonitions the baseball great's family had experienced. Roberto Jr., who was seven years old at the time of his father's death, is quoted as saying to his maternal grandfather, with whom he was spending the evening, "Grandpa, Daddy is leaving for Nicaragua, but he is not coming back."

 

In a New York Times story many years later Clemente Jr., on his childhood experience:

 

"I can still remember just feeling that something wasn't right,'' he said. ''I told my mother, 'Don't let Daddy go. That plane's going to crash.' She yelled at me. I ran outside. He came out and said, 'I'll come back soon and we'll play catch. I told him, 'You're not coming back.' ''

 

But that is not all. Grimsley also reports that the father of Roberto Clemente had a premonition as well in the form of a dream:

 

"I had this terrible dream," the father said, "I saw the plane crash, and Roberto go down with it."  

 

What I came to learn only later was that Clemente himself seemed to have had a premonition that he would die young.

 

In the authoritative The Pittsburgh Pirates Encyclopedia, authored by David Finoli and Bill Ranier, the plane crash is discussed in some detail on page 588. There we learn that a Pirate's teammate, Jose Pagan, was concerned about Clemente's well being and attempted to warn him about the plane's safety. The authors write:

 

Roberto responded by telling his teammate that he believed in the people who were preparing the DC-7 and if it were time for him to die making the trip, then he would die. Clemente had many premonitions in his life about an early death and was convinced he would never make it to middle age.

 

The authors then continue with the effort of another Clemente teammate, catcher Manny Sanguillen, to avoid the disaster. Sanguillen had originally planned to go with Clemente on the plane trip but backed out amid concerns about the plane being unsafe:

 

He tried to get to the airport in time to warn Clemente and try to convince him not to go, but he had car problems and was unable to make it in time.   

 

We are told that for days after the crash Sanguillen dove repeatedly into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean searching for his friend. Clemente's body was never recovered.

 

Again we are left to ponder "what if?" Clemente seems to have had a fatalistic streak in his psyche. Moreover, being the caring and giving individual he was, it is certain that even absent said fatalistic streak he would not have backed out of his mission. He died trying to aid suffering people.

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A Change In Outlook

Since youth the world has struck me as an odd yet wonderful place. Being raised as I was in a very religious environment it was only natural that I viewed life through the prism of my religious belief system. The problem there was that when I got older and lost my religious faith I had no way to make sense of everything. I moved away from the spiritual way of thinking and moved to the material.

 

The interest I have shown lately in premonitions, prophetic dreams, and other forms of the manifestation of what has been called a "sixth sense" (I suppose that phrase isn't as popular now as it once was) or deep intuition made sense enough when I was knee-deep in the framework of my Christian worldview, but not so much when I moved on to a freethinking and scientific materialist one.

 

Perhaps most striking to me was the fact that the Cosmos seems to be designed, or at least it makes a certain sense. Again, easy enough when I thought that back of it was the Christian God, harder to think about without some idea of a creative intelligence.

 

So when I became a freethinker I was forced by the adoption of the materialist science outlook to dismiss the uncanniness of life as an amazing chain of coincidences and nothing more. As for the organization of the universe, literally Cosmos or harmonistic system, ah, that too had to be dismissed as an astoundingly fortunate coincidence. 

 

I held that stance with increasing uneasiness the more I thought back over my life, the more I listened to the experiences of others, and almost just as moving, as I started documenting the experiences that others had. I came around to suspecting that the skeptic's "magic thinking" meme was more a belittling pejorative than a serious charge.

 

After all, it finally occurred to me that if "magical thinking" or a more metaphysical and less materialistic worldview is so widespread and has been widespread (almost universal at one time in human evolution), perhaps it is just as natural as breathing. I'm not arguing that this is a proof of the truthfulness of "magical thinking," but that at the least it is natural - say, something "hardwired" into the human mind, as has been suggested.

 

In fact, it seems to take a great deal of effort to deprogram one's self from the "magical" outlook.

 

Now it seems that a small minority, an intelligentsia as it were, has made so-called magical thinking a symbol of credulity and simple-mindedness. I would instead call "magical thinking" a sense of wonderment and mystery, an admission that our knowledge, the greatest knowledge of the greatest human minds, is at best limited in scope by the very nature of the case.  

 

Perhaps, I've allowed myself to conclude, the basic concept of "magical thinking" is not against what modern science tells us about the Universe. Perhaps in time some of today's "woo woo" will become the knowledge of the future. History seems to give ample reason for that suspicion.

 

I can only imagine how incredible to ancient minds the idea of space travel would have been. Human flight used to be solely the domain of myth. Even as late as a few hundred years ago it was deemed a scientific impossibility. Yet today humans routinely travel around the globe at astounding speeds, and of course space travel is common. These represent achievements not only of human skill and technical savvy but human imagination as well.  

 

The myths of yesteryear from which the great religious traditions of the world sprang have much to tell us about the human psyche. Which brings me around to the concept of mind. I've come to embrace a suspicion that mind is all there is and that animal minds are just small manifestations of the overmind, the great Logos of the Cosmos. I've come to accept that we interact with the Cosmos and that not only do we speak to and engage it, but that it also speaks to us and engages us. (Personally, I don't think that is "woo," but protoscience awaiting further development.) Myths, then, are true in the sense that they are expressions of how we connect to the cosmos and how it connects with us. 

"I Get Impressions From The Universe At Large"

I recently did a post about scientist and inventor George Washington Carver, whose story impressed me so much in my youth. Well, really Carver still impresses me. Carver expressed a sense of intuition that came to him through the avenue of the divine as expressed through nature.

 

Also in my youth I became familiar with another inventor scientist, Thomas Alva Edison. His name was familiar to me from youth because by great-grandparents on my mother's side of the family hailed from Michigan and my great-grandfather actually knew Edison. I never knew my great-grandparents, for they died before I was born, however my mom was very proud of the family connection to Edison and related it often. My great-grandfather actually visited Edison in his laboratory.

 

Thomas Edison was widely sought out for his views about almost everything. He seemed to have strong opinions of most things. He also expressed a view of intuition similar to Carver's:

 

I have never created anything, I get impressions from the Universe at large and work them out, but I am only a plate on a record or a receiving apparatus -- what you will. Thoughts are really impressions that we get from outside.  

 

Now that doesn't seem odd considering his overall outlook as expressed in the following quote:

 

I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.

 

Edison was not a believer in the popular notions of God and religion. He was good friends with the Great Agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll, whom he admired greatly. But he did hold, as the ancient Stoics tended to, that back of existence there is a mind or Logos. Evidently he felt, as do many intuitive scientists, that the reason the universe is understandable is because it is meant to be understood.

 

That is my view, too. For many of us that is enough.

 

Strange Truth

It was the incomparable wit and writer Mark Twain who said: "Truth is stranger than fiction...." What doesn't usually get included in that quote is the rest of his thought: "... but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

I once had a close friend who was (except in his rare weaker moments) a strong atheist and scientific materialist.  We spent many happy hours together drinking intoxicating beverages and debating the question, "What is truth."

Once I made an offhand comment - and it was offhand and not at all meant to be taken in a strict sense - that "anything's possible." Who of us hasn't said that or at least have heard someone say it? My friend almost became unhinged and started explaining to me why "no, not anything is possible," coming at me from a Einstenian deterministic philosophical position.

I had to have a chuckle and poke a little fun at him for his almost religious zeal in defending what he considered to be orthodox truth. I didn't know then and don't know now exactly what is and isn't possible in this grand universe of ours, But coming as I did from a religious background that thought the (Protestant) Bible was literally God's Word and absolute truth, I couldn't help but recognize the similarity in people's devotion to various perceived orthodoxies.

After my friend exited my life and we lost touch, I admit that I did slowly and gradually over the years allow myself to become locked into a skeptical worldview that put me at odds with what the majority of my fellow humans take for granted - that is, that there is, for lack of a better way of putting it, a mystical, almost magical element to life. That isn't to say that now my open-mindedness has no limit. No, I'm just becoming more aware of how some people have allowed themselves to take the miracle of life for granted. I will say this: Now I'm less inclined to talk about Truth than I am truths. I'm less willing to debate and more willing to listen and exchange ideas.