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CLAIRVOYANTS of poland.

The value of case studies.

A case study often involves an intensive examination of a specific issue and/or individual or event ... it has been suggested that more discoveries have emerged from using case studies than from relying on statistical analysis of large samples, (Vernon, 2021, pp. 12-13). The selection of studies presented in this chapter include a number of cases from Jackowskis dossier, chosen as representative of his kind of clairvoyance, and a number of impeccably documented cases from two other clairvoyant virtuosi as comparative material. Jackowskis cases are a small fraction of his dossier, and they are not presented in chronological order. Instead, we start with a case that may be the most remarkable in the range of aspects of clairvoyance it demonstrates, followed by an interview with the police officer involved, quoted in full.

Krzysztof Jackowski.

Case 1: Murder with roots in the past, 2006.

Location: Bedzin (Silesian Highlands, southern Poland).

Case summary:

In the winter of 2006 the fire brigade was called out to a fire in a block of flats at a street in the town of Bedzin, in southern Poland. The firemen succeeded in putting out the fire and preventing the whole building from being destroyed. One flat was badly damaged by the fire, the one inhabited by the owner of the block.

When the firemen and the police examined the damaged flat they made a macabre discovery: in the kitchen there were two charred bodies. The post-mortems showed that in both cases death was caused not by fire but by knife wounds. There was no doubt that the two people were murdered before their bodies were set on fire.

Investigation of the circumstances of this crime was not getting anywhere. Various hypotheses were explored but all came to a dead end. Finally, three investigating officers from Bedzin undertook the long journey from Silesia to Czluchow (Jackowskis home town in Pomerania, in north-western Poland). On arrival they presented the clairvoyant with bags of scorched rags, tied and secured but still with the smell of burning emanating from them. After an initial blankness, with the bags in the room, Jackowski got what he calls a vision:

He has an impression of a shop, a tiny shop with paints, owned by a young married couple. There is also a young girl there, employed as a trainee. The shop appears to be in the same block where the killing took place. Jackowski senses that the murderer is the man who manages the shop. He also becomes aware that the man has left his wife and is living with the trainee who worked in the shop. They were having an affair; the wife found out about it and that was the main reason for their splitting up. Another impression he has is that it all happened much earlier than the murder,  something like two or three years.

Jackowski then makes a note: the trainee knows that the shop manager killed the owner of the block and the other victim, a tenant. The clairvoyant suggests that the trainee should be the first to be interrogated.

When he reads out his notes to the policemen they do not believe him. None of it makes sense; his stories have nothing to do with the investigation. There is no shop in that block; its an old, dilapidated building. After the session, the police officers told Jackowski that there were quite a few homeless people always trying to spend the night in the cellar, and the owner kept calling the police to get rid of them. The police knew quite a lot about the homeless and were pretty certain it was one of them but they were a very closely-knit group so there were no clues (Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, 2012, vol 1 p. 136).

Disappointed, the policemen depart leaving the clairvoyant feeling guilty about his failure.

A few days later, when he was beginning to get over that unfortunate episode, one of the policemen from Bedzin telephoned him and told him that he was right. The police checked out his story and it turned out that three years earlier there had been a little shop with paint in that block, run by a married couple, and they had a girl trainee. The police located the wife of the ex-shop manager, who told them that her husband turned out to be a scoundrel, they were divorced, and her former husband was living in a village with their ex-trainee, who had a child by him. When the police went to that village and started interrogating the girl she admitted almost at once that her partner told her what happened, that he did not intend to kill the old woman. He owed her money and she threatened to take him to court, so he went to her to try to come to some agreement. Instead, they had an argument, he got upset, hit the old woman on the head with something and she fell down. At that moment a tenant from a neighbouring flat came in to find out what all the screaming was about and was also dispatched.

The decision to ask Jackowski for help was taken by the then district chief of police in Bedzin, Insp. Dariusz Brandys and his second-in-command, Insp. Zbigniew Klimus, who later became first deputy chief of police in the voivodship of Katowice, and recounted the case as follows:

In January 2006 a block of flats in Bedzin was set on fire; after the fire was extinguished two bodies were found, and the post-mortem established that these were the owner of the block and her tenant, explained Klimus in the monthly Policja 997 (June 2013). Their injuries pointed to homicide, but there was no motive. The investigation dragged on and we had done everything we could, so I decided to use a clairvoyant. My superiors were not too happy about it, but I was confident in my decision. The police went to Czluchow with objects that had belonged to the victims. Within a few hours the clairvoyant provided information about a witness, he told us to talk to the person whose location he gave us. The officers involved add: We went there: the witness [i.e. Jackowski] said the girl was troubled by the knowledge she had. Thanks to the information from Krzysztof Jackowski the criminals were caught. According to Inspector Klimus, Jackowski surprised the police officers who came to see him. He did not know whom to expect but he knew the policemens names and told them precisely what their role was in the investigation. It is the job of the police to find the criminals, and how they do it is their business. (...) I was never ashamed of this collaboration and later on I also had help from the clairvoyant on a number of occasions.

WE WOULD NOT HAVE SOLVED THIS CASE WITHOUT JACKOWSKI.

Based on Krzysztof Janoszkas interview with one of the police officers who visited Jackowski, Commissioner Edward Adamek, Superintendent of the District Criminal Investigations Department, Police Headquarters in Bedzin, in 2017 (now retired).

In January 2006 there was a fire in Bedzin, in a flat in an old apartment block, resulting (as initially thought) in the death of two people. However, it turned out that this was a case of arson, and the post-mortems showed that the bodies had incision wounds and craniofacial injuries, which meant that we were dealing with a double homicide.

The decision to seek help from Krzysztof Jackowski was taken by my then superior, Insp. Dariusz Brandys and his deputy Insp. Zbigniew Klimus. My attitude was very sceptical, all the more so since it was one of my last cases before retiring. Moreover, I am a non-believer, and that includes life after death. But on the other hand I thought, Whats the harm in trying? I found out from the police station in Czluchow how to contact Jackowski and then I set out on the night journey to Pomerania (north-western Poland) with two other policemen. We got there early in the morning. And when I saw that clairvoyant, lighting one cigarette after another, I felt even more distanced from the whole enterprise, because I did not really believe in those abilities he was supposed to have.

When we started talking he drew a few lines and said, I will throw a bit in here, and in here, and in here, but you with the knowledge you have will need to put it all together. He would give us the pieces of the puzzle and we were to put them together.

Jackowski did not even know where we were from. We only told him that we were from Silesia and it was the question of a killing. So, we gave him the clothes and photos of the victims. He smelled them and put them to his forehead. Every few moments he would get excited, get up, smoke and walk around the flat. It was all spontaneous. Suddenly he started explaining to us: This killing has two aspects. At the beginning the perpetrators killed their victims, and then returned to remove the traces. And then he started saying something we did not understand. I have this impression of some little shop, where the owners are a married couple. There is also a young woman there, a trainee. The husband was cheating on his wife with her. When she [the wife] found out she left him and he started living with that trainee in some village. He is the murderer. He owed some money to the owner of the block. His girlfriend knows all about it. I see a village and a white church eight kilometres from the place where the killing took place.

After I heard that I was totally mistrustful of his credibility and the point of our visit. What church, what eight kilometres from the murder scene? Some sort of windup! So I say: mate, what the f... are you talking about? And suddenly he says: There, where there is this church, that woman lives there who will tell you all about it. She worked in that shop. Her lover is the one who did it.

Suddenly he says he is getting confused, takes a piece of paper and writes Jaskol on it. He then says: Thats the word that comes into my mind,  Jaskola, Jaskol. I don't know what this might be? So I then say, Krzysztof, next to me is sitting Jacek Jaskolski, the policeman who was the first at the crime scene. And then he said: Its you, I am getting mixed up because of you! I was surprised then, and we kept the piece of paper as a souvenir.

On our way back from Jackowski we were confused, but later on we saw a way forward because we established that there really had been a shop in that block, run by a married couple, and a young girl did work there. Where was she from? From Wojkowice Koś cielne, some eight kilometres from Bedzin. And there really is a characteristic white church there. We also established that the victim,  the owner of the block,  lived alone; her whole family lived in Canada. She also had an apartment in the Old Town district in Warsaw, so she was quite well off. The perpetrator rented the premises from her and was behind with the rent. He was supposed to vacate them by 1st January [2006].

We needed a plan of action. Back in Bedzin we had a meeting in chief Brandyss office, with the chief and his deputy Insp. Zbigniew Klimus, later deputy police chief of the Katowice voivodship. We decided to put a plan into action in a few days' time. Three days later the police brought that girl from Wojkowice Koś cielne and she told the full story. There was building work being carried out, and when she was in the toilet she heard through a plaster wall her partner and his friend arranging the murder 39 . They were discussing how to solve the problem. The man was keen to continue his business (by that time he was running a small bar there), but the owner of the block not only demanded the outstanding rent, but also wanted to terminate his lease. So he decided that the simplest solution would be to get rid of the woman. We then got into his computer and found he had recently been looking at fires, explosions and such like.

His arrest was quite spectacular. We went with an antiterrorist unit to Iwonicz Zdroj, where he was having spa treatment. Thats where we arrested him, and he confessed to everything. He then tried to pretend he was ill, but the medics would not confirm it and he was judged to be fit.

We made an operational note of our meeting with Jackowski but we said nothing about it in court because we would have been laughed out of that court. I don't even know whether the perpetrators know that it was because of him,  or thanks to him,  that they ended up in prison. It was Jackowski who made it possible for us to gather very strong evidence against them.

I used to be fairly sceptical about things like that, but after meeting Jackowski I came to believe that there must be something to it. There is no other option. Because,  how could he have known about it? It could not have been coincidence or luck. How could he have known that the killing did not take place somewhere in a forest, only in a building where there was a shop on the ground floor? That the name of one of the policemen is Jaskolski? That eight kilometres from Bedzin there would be a village, with a church, and the witness would be living there?

I live close to a church but I am not a believer. If I had not visited Jackowski personally I would never have believed it, even from the most trusted policemen. I would think they perhaps embroidered a little, perhaps some coincidence ... But I had   been there! FOR  I see a bloke who says  Jaskol and that if we go to see a woman who lives eight kilometres from the place where the killing took place she will tell us all about it and then we go to her, bring her to the station and she tells us everything, just as Jackowski said!

We never directed Jackowski in any way while we were there. He had no access to the case records, and got no clues from us. We only gave him the clothing and photographs of the victims. Whats more, when he was looking at the photograph of the man he said that he was not the killers' target and that his death was accidental. Later it turned out that this was true. The man heard shouting and went to see what was happening. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is no possibility that Jackowski could have staged this whole story. If it had been a case that had been in the media then perhaps you might try to think up some scenario, but nobody knew about that killing then, not even in Bedzin. To start with there was only news of a fire. But he gave us a witness,  who it was and where to find her!

The police never admit officially to working with Jackowski. When I hear the spokesman from the police headquarters say that he does not believe that a clairvoyant helped and that the police do not work with people like that, I say, Mate! What are you talking about, when you've only ever seen a corpse perhaps in formalin sometime in training! You were never at a crime scene! You have no idea what operational work is like and you talk that sort of crap? Or is that what you have been told to say? I've come all the way from constable to chief inspector, so I do know a thing or two about it. Obviously, it sounds better when a case is solved by superb police investigation methods and not by using a clairvoyant. But sometimes you need to tell people the truth. Undoubtedly in my case Jackowski helped and I am convinced that he is capable of helping other policemen. He has many statements from the police confirming his help in solving cases from all over the country. They are real, not forced or conventional courtesies, in spite of what some try to claim.

Nobody blamed us for deciding to use Jackowskis help. Of course it was quite risky. I myself did not believe on the way there, but on the way back,  I did. For solving this case Jackowski received from us thanks written by Chief Dariusz Brandys. I assure you he is not the kind of man who would have put his name to something that was not true, or some meaningless bit of paper. Although I admit that the acknowledgment was expressed somewhat diplomatically. It said that Jackowski helped us but in truth he solved the case for us.

The police have nothing to lose by collaborating with a clairvoyant. You become a policeman; you take on this job to solve cases; by what method? It doesn't matter. What is important is that it should be legal. If standard methods fail, why not use unconventional ones? Its no shame and no loss. Obviously, a clairvoyant will not serve the solution on a plate, telling you everything in detail and identifying the criminal by name. He will tell you something but the policeman investigating the case has to draw conclusions using that information himself.

Should I be ashamed that I worked with Jackowski? I'll be honest, I felt greatly honoured. We managed to put away two bastards who killed two people for the sake of two thousand zlotys [ca £500]. And that is not the only case where Jackowski helped! There are many of them! Even finding many missing persons,  fathers, mothers, sons. Is it not a relief for the families to be able to bury their loved ones and get closure?

Police press release about two killers being given a sentence of life imprisonment:
District Police Headquarters in Bedzin.

LIFE SENTENCE FOR A KILLING FROM THREE YEARS AGO.

The Regional Court in Katowice sentenced two residents of Bedzin to life imprisonment, the highest sentence possible in Poland. In a circumstantial prosecution two men aged 28 and 29 were sentenced for a killing, which they carried out nearly three years ago on the night of New Years Eve in 2005.

To recap: in the early hours of 2 January 2006 a fire started in one of the apartment blocks at Modrzejowska Street in Bedzin. During the firefighting action the bodies of a woman and a man were found in two flats. It was established that the fire was started deliberately, and that the people had died earlier. Thanks to the efforts of the police in Bedzin the probable course of events was established, and the perpetrators were identified and detained. The evidence gathered made it possible to take proceedings against them. They were also prosecuted for other crimes, i.e., bodily harm and threats.

The document reproduced below is the official statement thanking Jackowski and confirming his contribution in the case of the killing of Jadwiga S. and Tadeusz B. and arson at the apartment block, issued by the District Police Headquarters in Bedzin, signed by the District Chief of Police in Bedzin Insp. Dariusz Brandys and dated 7 August 2006. It reads:

Your version of events coincided with one of the lines of investigation pursued by the police. The information you provided added to the existing material details, which were not known previously. This enabled officers from the Criminal Investigations Section of the District Police Headquarters in Bedzin to undertake actions, which resulted in identifying a witness to the event and collecting the evidence that provided proof of the perpetrators guilt and his temporary detention.

With thanks for the help provided and hope for future collaboration.

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Case 2: Where to find evidence, 2001.

Location: Biedaszki Male, village in Masuria (north-eastern Poland).

Summary:

This killing took place in the village of Biedaszki Male in Masuria. On 20th May 2000 the police dug up the body of an elderly man, Waclaw G. The head was missing, having been hacked off. The previous day around noon the man took a scythe and went to cut some nettles. When he did not come back at the usual time his wife looked for him near the railway track where they always cut nettles, but could not find him. The next day, after an anxious night, she alerted her daughter and the police in Ketrzyn, the nearest town.

The police brought a tracker dog to Biedaszki. The dog caught the scent and led them to the railway track, where in a water-filled ditch they found a sheet for gathering nettles and the mans scythe. Traces on the side of the track indicated that somebody had crossed to the other side, and not far from there a policeman noticed that the earth had been freshly dug. They started digging and found the mans headless body about half a metre under, with a hand saw next to it, most likely the tool used to cut off the head.

They called in technical experts who suggested that the murderer might have forced alcohol down the victims throat, which would account for the high level of alcohol in the victims blood.

Apart from the murder weapon the police had no other clues; there were no possible motives, not one single anchor point. There were no indications that Waclaw G. had any enemies. A number of hypotheses were investigated, including the idea that the crime was committed by Satanists (because of the way the killing was carried out). However, none of these versions led anywhere and finally the case came to a dead end.

A year after the event the police decided to ask Krzysztof Jackowski for help. Two police officers from the CID section of the District Police Headquarters in Ketrzyn went to Czluchow.

They told the clairvoyant that the body of a middle-aged man had been found near a small village, next to a track, with the head missing. In a suitcase, in a paper bag, they brought the victims work trousers that he had on when his body was found, with dried mud still on them. Since this item was part of the evidence, the officers could not leave Jackowski alone with it, which meant that they personally witnessed Jackowski doing a reading.

He sat down opposite one of the officers, and, in spite of feeling a little awkward initially, he shortly seemed to become absorbed in the victim.

His first impressions were that the man was walking along the road alone. Quiet, modest but happy because he seems to have been paid quite a lot of money. He then met another man, about forty. They talked and went to that mans house, an old house in the country, quite dilapidated.

After a break the clairvoyant refocused and told the police officers that he felt the two men went into that house, that there was first a drinking session and then murder and robbery. In response to questions about the murderer Jackowski told them that the man had no wife or children, and that he lived with his father, who was very lame in his right leg.

He then sensed that a fight broke out after the men got very drunk, with the host grabbing an axe and hitting the victim many times. According to Jackowski, the murderer then dragged the bloodied body to the barn nearby, took the money out of the victims pocket, went back home and kept drinking vodka until he fell asleep. In the morning, when he woke up sober he remembered everything. He was probably in shock. He cleaned up quickly, washed the floor where the blood had splashed and dried. When things were more or less tidy he went to the barn, feeling frightened. He cut off the head, and seemed to have wanted to cut up the body and burn it in the stove, but after cutting off the head he gave up. He decided to get the body away, and thats what he did.

What followed after another break was the most important piece of information for the investigators. Jackowski felt that there was something that might provide evidence in this case, even though after a year it was unlikely there would be any traces. It seemed to him that the murderer hid the shirt he had on at the time inside the sofa bed in his room, and that had a lot of the victims blood on it. If that shirt was still there that would prove that the murder took place there.

A week later the suspect was under arrest. It was the victims neighbour, 42-year-old Kazimierz W., a bachelor who lived with his father who was in fact lame. In their carpentry workshop traces of the victims blood were found, and a bloodied shirt in the old sofa bed. This was the main piece of evidence against its owner.

In August 2001, the court in Ketrzyn had the man arrested at the request of the prosecutors office, but the evidence was found to be insufficient and he was declared not guilty. The first not guilty verdict was given on 4 June 2003 but the Appeal Court in Bialystok had it reviewed. The man was found not guilty again on 22 October 2004. The court did not question the DNA evidence, but it could not be established when and how the blood found its way onto the shirt.

JACKOWSKI SHOWED US THE WAY.

Based on Krzysztof Janoszkas interview with Krzysztof Pieniak, retired officer from the Police District Headquarters in Ketrzyn, November 2013.

I think we need to employ all the methods that might help to solve a case so long as they are legal. I think that some of the information obtained from Jackowski can be of practical use; I don't know about all of it. We got Jackowski to help us in three cases; in one case thanks to his visions we found evidential material.

The man takes no money from the police; he never did. All he wants is confirmation in the cases where he really helped. He truly cares about documenting his work.

We were being hassled all the time: why did we go to Jackowski for help? For me, working in the police force at that time, that was normal,  a personal source of information, thats all. I did not spend any official money on it. So if you have nothing it is worth trying to get help, to get some anchorage.

Where Jackowski is concerned, I need to start by saying that we had nothing, absolutely nothing to go on. Somebody had hidden a sheet with cut nettles in a culvert under the railway bank, that was all. There was no anchorage at all. Satanists, all sorts, the versions that were circulating! Just about everything was being considered. But at the end of the day we were left with nothing, and thats why we went to see Jackowski.

We gave him the dead mans clothing, and suddenly he started doing a session in front of us. He took the clothing in his hands, he crumpled it; he smelled it. Then he got up and walked around the room smoking. Then he told us what he sensed. He also asked for a bit more time so that he could try to put it all on paper. In a little while he brought us four sheets torn out of a notebook, full of very detailed information.

Among other things, he said that the killing involved father and son, farmers who have cows and horses. There are traces of blood in the building where there used to be a barn. The two managed to cut off the head.

I have no idea how he could have known this. First of all, he never asked us what kind of killing was involved. All he wanted to know was what our problem was, and we said it was murder. Then he said that he wants to know the victims first name, age, and something that had belonged to him. Nothing else.

After he gave us his version of the events we started checking out all the locals and we did establish that the victims neighbours were a father and son, and that they had a farm and a carpentry workshop. We had already interviewed them a number of times.

We then brought in the technical people from the forensics lab and they conducted a thorough inspection of the flat at the farm and that workshop. And they did find traces of blood in the workshop and in the flat. It was not a large amount, not such that one would get when hacking off a head, because there would be a lot of splatter. But there was blood. We found it on the clothes of the suspect and in the workshop on the floor, on a rag. It turned out to be the blood of the murder victim. Before these things went to be examined we asked the suspect whether the murdered man ever visited him, whether he had perhaps cut himself on something there? But he said the murdered man had never visited and his blood could not be there. And then, when it turned out that the blood was there he spent a year under arrest, until he was pronounced innocent by the court.

We found the blood exactly where Jackowski told us it would be; that is why it says so in the letter of confirmation. There is no untruth there! Jackowski also wrote that the perpetrators tried to remove the traces, wash off the blood, but we would certainly find something.

He gave us specific information. The only thing is that he kept calling the building a barn. There was no barn there anymore because it was converted into a carpentry workshop, but everything else was accurate.

That building belonged to one of the accused, the son. He did away with the farm, opened a carpentry workshop. Blood was found in the building indicated by Jackowski.

As well as the building where we found traces of blood Jackowski also indicated the place where the victims head was hidden. In his opinion we should look in the area of an old gravel pit; he even marked its location on a map. It turned out that there really was an old clay pit there.

However, we never found that head. We looked where the clairvoyant said, but we did not have any additional technical equipment. We just looked around and checked out any places where the earth looked disturbed, but found nothing. Anyway, by then it was a year since the murder.

But Jackowski helped us a great deal in that case. He identified the perpetrators and thanks to him we found evidence in the form of the victims blood. Unfortunately the court pronounced them innocent because the evidence was insufficient, but in my opinion we found the guilty ones.

I have no idea why the killing took place; we did not find a motive. And Jackowski was not just talking rubbish; he gave us very specific information.


And thats how we regarded him, as an informant. When you have a problem with an investigation and data is scarce you start an operational investigation and thats what we did. In the investigation file there is a memo but it does not say that we used a clairvoyant; he was regarded as an informant.

The court asked me whether we had been given any information about the suspect and how did we know that there would be traces of blood at that very location. I said we established it during operational investigations.

Before we decided to consult Jackowski we obtained our superiors' consent.

Jackowski gives specific, concrete information that the police can use. In our case that was a great help. That is why I cannot say, as did the police spokesperson, that information from clairvoyants is unreliable. That is rubbish. I don't have a problem with that statement, but no working police officer would tell you that. In our case what Jackowski said was 100% true and that is why we wrote the letter confirming his contribution.

To start with I did not believe Jackowski had special powers and that anything would come of it. But having checked it out I can confirm that such an approach makes sense.

In reports from various investigations you will not find the word clairvoyant. If it is not officially recorded then you can say that such a person does not in fact help the police ... The only trace in the operation is the use of a certain source of information. But Jackowski has many documents confirming and thanking him for his help.

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Official letter of thanks confirming that Jackowski helped to establish the identity of the killer by indicating where the victims blood would be found (the building and the perpetrators clothing), which enabled the police to secure the blood as evidence. From the District Police Headquarters in Ketrzyn, signed by the Head of the Criminal Investigations Section, Chief Zbigniew Lomecki, dated 8 August 2001.

Case 3: Tracking the murderer, 2000.

Location: Radom, Masovian voivodship, east-central Poland.

Summary:

The letter from the police (Janoszka, 2014, p. 298) refers to two cases in which Jackowski made a contribution. One of them involves a brutal murder of four members of a family (Siennica, January 1996), where the version of the events provided by Jackowski was totally correct in relation to the event which took place, but unfortunately the perpetrators were never found.

However, the second case is significant in highlighting Jackowskis clairvoyant tracking ability. The letter confirms that Jackowski provided the police with the precise location (the town, the street, the building and apartment) where the wanted murderer was hiding. The town was Koszalin, near the Baltic coast; the building was an old, dilapidated apartment block. To quote the relevant passage from the official letter issued by the Voivodship Police Headquarters in Radom dated 28 September 2000 and signed by the Chief Inspector:

At this point I would like to express my sincere thanks to you for indicating the precise location of a wanted dangerous criminal who was in hiding in September of last year. The information you provided, including precise identification of the street and the building, made it possible to apprehend him.

When interviewed about Jackowski, Professor Ryszard Jaworski, who heads the Chair of Criminology at the University of Wroclaw, draws attention to the above document as a factual piece of evidence. Jaworski had already encountered the results of Jackowskis readings in the early 1990s, at the beginning of the latters career, over a case that involved successful recovery of a large amount of stolen cash. (Janoszka, 2014, p. 124)

Case 4: Tracking the victim, 1993.

Location: Zambrow, northeastern Poland.

Summary:

This account is based on an interview with Andrzej Jaż dż ewski, police superintendent in Jackowskis home town, who in the 1990s provided the main link between Jackowski and the various police forces seeking his help (Szczesiak, 2000, pp. 128-9). Police officers from Zambrow and Lomż a arranged to see Jackowski to get information about the murder of the head of the local tax office. They gave him a notebook in a black cover and no other objects or information. They sat next to Jackowski who for a long while kept moving the notebook in front of his forehead. At one point he started talking: the owner of the notebook is dead; he was murdered; he was an office worker, aged 40 plus. He was attacked in the morning in front of his garage, as soon as he opened it. Jackowski also added that after the killers left, a woman turned up, known to the victim. Police were amazed, because that was exactly what happened, including that the woman was a bookkeeper at the same tax office and usually got a lift from the victim. Jackowski also said that in the body of the victim there was an elongated piece of metal between the ribs, above the kidney (this was confirmed, the killers knife broke and a piece stayed in the body, which was revealed by the post mortem). The clairvoyant also described the appearance of the killers, and said there were two of them. That was all, but the police took him to the victims grave in the hope that this might reveal more. Nothing happened, but then they took him, as an experiment, to show him the place where the crime took place. They started from the main square and Jackowski walked to the right place, into the gate between old blocks and found the right garage. It turned out that the route Jackowski took was the route usually taken by the victim.

Case 5: Spur of the moment suicide, 2008.

Location: Lanckorona, southern Poland.

Summary:

Jackowski was consulted by the family of a missing post office manager a few days after she suddenly disappeared. An inspector from the head office arrived unexpectedly at the post office and asked to see the accounts; the manager told him that she had left the keys to her office at home and would pop back for them, since she lived nearby. She was in her 40s, well known and liked. When she did not come back after a few hours the police were called in but the search was in vain, and a few days later the family contacted Jackowski and took to him her personal belongings. He felt she was dead, and saw her body in a lying position, around her neck a dark strap that seemed attached to a dead tree branch on an embankment. He drew a map that was faxed to Lanckorona and the next day she was found at that spot, where she hanged herself on the strap of her handbag that she hooked over the branch. Later it was found that some funds had been misappropriated from the post office.

Jackowski felt that at the time she was very frightened yet determined, something that is likely but cannot be confirmed; however, there is a letter of confirmation of the facts from the local mayor. It expresses much admiration and gratitude for the help in finding the missing person, Lucyna G. and states:

Your instructions were amazingly correct and detailed. Without them the body might not have been found, or found in some distant future. Your instructions saved the uniformed services and others who took part in the search much effort, as well as pain and uncertainty for the family of the missing woman.



Case 6: A missing blind person, 1999.

Location: Karlino, western Pomerania.

Summary:

The police turned to Jackowski in the case of a man who went missing on 17 December 1998 in Karlino. Jackowski had a strange feeling that he could not see even when he focused, only had an understanding of what he should see. He sensed a narrow river, and a man walking along the bank, not noticing a root sticking out, stumbling, falling into the river and drowning. Then the body floated about 3 km away and got caught on a branch leaning in. Jackowski drew a map, which enabled the police to find the body. Until he was given official confirmation he did not know that the man who had drowned was blind.

The letter from the chief of police in Karlino confirms the use of Jackowskis services, that his sketch and description of the location of the body are part of the operational records (giving their number), and adds that they successfully used a dog to investigate the area indicated on the sketch.

Case 7: Two bodies instead of one, 2001.

Location: Zabrze, Silesia, southern Poland.

Summary:

A 14-year-old boy disappeared there towards the end of winter 2001, and his uncle (who lived somewhere else) came to Jackowski for help. The boy had been missing for two days. All Jackowski knew was the boys name and that he went missing in Zabrze. Jackowski used a photo of the boy to focus; he felt that the boy was under water, but not alone: there was another body next to him. He had the impression of two small ponds and the name biskup. He looked at a map of Zabrze that showed the district of Biskupice, where there were two ponds next to each other. He marked on the map where he felt there were two bodies.

A few weeks later a police officer from Zabrze telephoned with the information that they found the missing boys body where Jackowski said it would be, as well as the body of his friend. They probably went onto thin ice. To start with, the police ignored the information and the map because, based on other information, they assumed that the boy was alive and would return home. The body was found by a passer-by but the police honourably provided official confirmation, in the form of a letter from the Police Headquarters in Zabrze, of the fact that the information provided by Jackowski regarding two missing boys from Zabrze-Biskupice was accurate, that he had sent them a map showing the location of the pond where the bodies were, and that was where they were found.

Case 8: Missing person: from intuition to calculation, 2005.

Location: Turek, central Poland.

Summary:

In April 2005 the family of an elderly woman asked Jackowski to help find their relative who went missing, was diabetic and would die without medication. They supplied him with a photo and clothes, and suddenly he sensed that she was dead. She had been walking along a winding narrow river, fell in and drowned. Jackowski thought this strange because the river was as narrow as a ditch, so it seemed unlikely that she could have drowned there.

He also had the feeling that he had to calculate the distance from a little concrete bridge close to the road. He drew a detailed map where he marked all these elements, the winding river and various branchings from the path along which the woman had been walking. While he was drawing he saw next to the womans body, close to the bank, a cement bollard. The family would not accept this version, that the old woman would have walked so far, and Jackowski himself doubted his vision. However, the decision was made to search the area he indicated, 4 km from the bridge, and they did find an overturned old bollard, but no body, yet the water was too shallow for them to have missed it.

But when they looked again they found the womans body in the water: next to the concrete bollard beavers had built a dam and the water rose in that particular place to about 2m. The police confirmed in an official letter that the body was found where the clairvoyant claimed it was, quoting the case number, while Janusz Szalewski from the Regional Prosecutors Office in Turek made a statement to the local newspaper (Przeglą d Koniń ski April 2005, No. 15):

We use scientific methods, but we pursue all clues. We did so in this case. I have to admit I was shocked when we found the body in the precise location indicated by the clairvoyant. He drew the map of the area as if he'd been there himself. The branching of the paths, the little bridge, even this thicket. We were looking for the missing woman somewhere completely different, and if it hadn't been for this map we would not have gone there at all.

Case 9: The body that wanted to be found, 2007.

Location: Wegorzewo, Masuria, northeastern Poland.

Summary:

Nineteen people drowned when a sudden, powerful storm hit the lake district where people were sailing. All the bodies were located except that of Jozef Lipina. His son, who had been in the boat with his father but survived, was determined to find his fathers body, and took his fathers recently worn clothes and a photograph to Jackowski. According to Jackowskis account, he felt strange, as if there were someone with him in the room. He took a shirt out of the bag with the clothing and put it on, as if something had made him do it. He looked in the mirror, held the other clothing and suddenly knew where the body was, which enabled him to draw a map with lots of details. The police thought it was unlikely that the body was at the location drawn by Jackowski, since it was 4 km from where the man had drowned. However, they checked it out anyway and found the mans body.

The events are confirmed by a number of documents. There is a letter from the Regional Police Headquarters, dated 10 October 2007, thanking Jackowski for his help in finding the body of Jozef L., the last one to be found of the victims of the deadly squall that hit the Masurian lakes on 21 August 2007. It enabled the police to end the search, which had gone on continuously using much manpower and equipment, and allowed the family closure. There is a letter dated 1 October 2007 from the mayor of Ruda Ś lą ska thanking him for his invaluable help in finding the body. And most touchingly, there is a letter from the family, worth quoting at length:

We turned to you on 29 September 2007 to ask for help in finding the body of the late Jozef L., who was lost during the squall in Masuria on 21 August 2007.

Nearly six weeks had passed from that accident, with firemen, police, Volunteer Water Rescue Service and divers searching the lake and the surrounding area where the tragedy took place, unfortunately without success. Eventually the search was limited to twice daily patrols on the lake, and we did not know what else to do.

In pain and desperation we went to you, and you did not refuse, even though you were not well (flu).

You gave us a map which next day, in Masuria, turned out to be invaluable [bolded in the original text]. This map showed the shore of the lake with a cross marking the location of the body, immobilised, in an enormous reed bed. We listened with great care to everything you said so as to pass the exact information to the police.

On 30 September I went with the police and others in motorboats onto the lake Labap. About 11:30 the firemen, the police, the volunteers and I myself, we all went into the reed bed to search the area you indicated. About 14:45 one of the policemen and a fireman found the body,  exactly at the location you marked.

Thank you for your help from the bottom of our hearts. There are no words to express what we feel. Thanks to you we found our beloved father, uncle and friend. That was a profound experience for us, that had a spiritual dimension. Thanks to you the body was recovered and we could arrange for a proper burial, which took place on 5 October 2007 at the church of Mary Mother of God in Ruda Ś lą ska. We shall think of you every time we visit Jozefs grave.

With best wishes for you and your family, we owe you a great debt of gratitude. Signed by family members.

Case 10: Intervention by murder victim? The case of Sylvia filmed by TV crew.

Jackowski did not think that the dead spoke to him when he started out as a clairvoyant. He thought he was just getting mental impressions of the past, but since then he has changed his mind, and the main case which caused him to do so took place in 2003. It involved an attractive young woman, aged around 30, called Sylvia. Sylvia disappeared without a trace a year earlier from Czestochowa, a city in southern Poland. The following account is taken from Jackowskis autobiography, giving his impressions:

I approached this reading like many others. I received a blouse of the missing person and a photograph showing an attractive 30-year old woman with dark hair and beautiful eyes. I only knew that her name was Sylvia, that she was 30 years old, and that she disappeared a year earlier in Czestochowa. The situation was not typical, because I was to carry out the reading facing a camera placed before me. The reason was simple, they were making a series about me called Experiment,  Clairvoyant [Polsat, 7th episode] with myself in the main role. This case was brought to me by the producers of the programme, who were asked to do so by the police from Czestochowa.

I sat there, stared at the picture, smelled the blouse ... after a short time I sensed something:

The woman lives alone but she has a daughter, I said tentatively. She liked a freewheeling life. She was very scared of the man she did not live with but they were linked by some secret ...

I increasingly got the feel of her. That is always the case in clairvoyance: the longer you keep reading, the more you sense the inner person, the personality. Sylvias inner person was making me quite uneasy.

The girl is cunning. She is blackmailing someone ... She knows about someones death. She knows something about a murder!

My anxiety kept growing.

She knows about someones death; it is a killing! I repeated. She is dead; she was murdered. She was murdered by two men she knew. She was in this detached house; to the side was a garden, an orchard. She quarrelled with these men; she wanted something from them; she was murdered in that house. She was strangled ... After she was strangled she was dragged to the garage and the whole body was wrapped in plastic sheeting.

I suddenly stopped the reading, thinking that the story is too sensational, that perhaps it is not what I am seeing but my imagination at work.

Apart from the camera facing me in the room there were Ania Janusz, the director of the series, and Pawel Kasprzak, cameraman and sound mixer all in one. I looked at them uncertainly, as if to ask if what I said made sense, but they only looked at me blankly.

After a while I looked at the photo again.

Yes, yes, she was murdered I said but with less conviction. But it is strange, where her body is ... There is another body there, only I don't know if it is a woman or a man, but not in that house ... It is somewhere outside. It is some sort of dumping area.

(Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, 2012, vol. I, pp.12-17)

The director told him that his story was better than any of Hitchcocks but was unlikely to make sense; they had little information from the police but whatever they knew pointed to the woman being alive and having gone abroad with a German boyfriend; that she really had a little daughter that she left with her mother. When the police officers gave things to the crew they only said that since the divorce she has had a number of rich men friends and led a dissolute life.

Jackowski was cross with himself that evening: why did he come up with that nonsense? At 5 pm the next day he went back to the hotel to face the camera, with Ania and Pawel. Ania told him they would not continue with Sylvias case and it would not be included in the series because of his obvious mistake. She then gave him a photo and an object belonging to a young man, the next case. He tried to concentrate but was getting nowhere. All the time he had Sylvia on his mind and the question: Why did I make a mistake? Why did I feel it so strongly?

He decided to go back to Sylvias case and had an argument with the director who did not want to waste time on material that would not be included in the series. But he insisted, spent some 15 minutes staring at the photo, felt her cunning, her free and easy attitude again but could not say anything. Then suddenly he heard two sentences and said them aloud to the camera:

I was brought up by Granny Freddy! [feminine form in Polish] I lived through Bogdans death!

He was told off for wasting time and got on with another case. But later, when the crew returned Sylvias things to her mother, who also did not believe Sylvia was dead but wanted to see the recording, they learnt that the two items of information were true: as a child Sylvia had spent a great deal of time with her granny whose name was Freddy (Fredzia), and with her father, Bogdan, who was divorced from her mother and with whom Sylvia kept in touch, and had died two years before her disappearance.

A month later the TV people got in touch again and told him that Sylvia had been murdered. The police, while investigating a different case, that of a missing man, found two suspects who admitted to the murder and to getting rid of the body. Sylvia was the wife of one of the suspects. She knew about the murder of the other man, tried to blackmail her husband and ended up wrapped in plastic foil as well.

What stunned Jackowski were the two sentences that he said to the camera: the two details that related to Sylvia, that proof of identity of the victim, rather than details about her death. As he put it, this was not a dead memory; this was in the here and now. We will look at the implications of this case in a wider context later, but the main problem it poses for the materialist worldview is pinpointed by the operational officer in charge of the case:

INTERVIEW WITH THE OPERATIONAL OFFICER BY IGOR T. MIECIK.

(Newsweek, 19.08.2009).

The case of a missing person that I was in charge of interested the makers of the TV series Experiment,  clairvoyant, with Jackowski as its chief character. We were looking for the missing Sylvia S. She supported herself with casual jobs and, to put it politely, she was not averse to male company. She would often travel abroad to work. We hypothesised that she went to Germany with one of her lovers. The programme makers let us have a cassette with the recording of Jackowskis vision.

Two months later, colleagues from Czestochowa, working on a totally different case, arrested Sylvias murderers, her ex-husband and his brother. They did kill her, because she knew about a murder they had committed earlier. Bodies of the two victims were found in the same place, a rubbish tip in Brzeziny. Sylvias body was wrapped in foil.

The officer adds: Jackowski claimed that he was transmitting what Sylvia said: I was brought up by Granny Freddy; I lived through Bogdans death. Just so that we're clear, he claimed that he had been spoken to by a person from beyond the grave. The body was supposed to provide facts unconnected with the investigation so as to improve its credibility in the eyes of the living. I'm sorry, for me thats just too much. But the information about Freddy and Bogdan was true; it was confirmed later by Sylvias mother.

Some other confirmed cases

There are many more well documented cases where Jackowski provided vital details that helped the police to establish the circumstances of a persons disappearance, find perpetrators and discover motivations, from the 1990s until the present day. In one case a group of five young people, three of them teenage girls who left home saying they were going for a pizza, did not return. Both the families and the police were convinced that they had run off as rebellious teenagers sometimes do, but, as the search kept coming up with dead ends, one of the mothers approached Jackowski. After holding the photos of the girls, the clairvoyant felt that they were dead, and that the boy who drove the car chose a less frequented route so as to avoid being stopped by the police and the car ended up in the river. The police initially did not want to follow this unexpected lead, but, after the chair of the local council intervened, a sonar was employed at that spot and showed a large object at the bottom of the river. That was the car, and the bodies of five young people were in it. In a letter of thanks to all involved in the search, the chair of the local council also thanks Krzysztof Jackowski for providing the map, which largely contributed to finding the missing people (Janoszka, unpublished documentation, Tryń cza, 2017).

In his autobiography, Jackowski reports a case that did not involve working with the police but perhaps goes further than most in its lack of glamour and sophistication in much of his clairvoyance work. On this occasion, in February 2007, Jackowski was asked to locate the missing village elder from a village in Mazovia. Since his first vision was vague, apart from the feeling that the man was dead, and a search of the general area he indicated did not produce results, he was asked to visit it himself. He spent the day searching the forest with the others, following various clues provided by the locals, and by the afternoon felt totally discouraged and embarrassed, until a friend reminded him that running around and searching was not what he would normally do. So he sat down in the missing mans room, picked up a shoe, and then got the message look for me next to the potato stack. The family told him that potatoes were kept in the barn; they all rushed out there, and when they disturbed a thick haystack next to the potatoes they disturbed the body and were nearly overcome with the odour of decomposition. The mans widow started cursing someone and it emerged that she blamed their neighbour, an alcoholic, who organised secret drinking sessions even though he knew the husband had health problems and was not allowed to drink alcohol. It was in fact the neighbour who hid the body after the man collapsed, as was later established by the police investigation (Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, 2012, vol. II, pp.13-15).

On a less sombre or unpleasant note, there is also a letter from the year 2000 from the regional police headquarters in Czluchow, thanking Jackowski for his help in establishing the identity of the burglars who broke into a house. Jackowskis version of events, different from that envisaged by the police was fully confirmed, as was his description of the burglars, which enabled the police to apprehend them, and the police hope for future collaboration. There are letters from grateful families thanking him for help in locating relatives with dementia and other problems, who have wondered off, got lost but were found alive. He finds missing objects, art objects of great sentimental value stolen from well known people, machinery and money, all confirmed by letters from relatives and grateful owners. There is also the case of finding a missing dog, working from a photograph, when the name of the street Kwiatowa comes into his mind. The owner (in another town, in Bydgoszcz) went knocking on all doors along the street and someone had taken the dog in (Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, 2012, vol. 2, pp. 128-9).

Jackowskis clairvoyance: the process.

In all these cases we find varying volume of information provided, and, at least in some cases, we get clues as to the routes by which it is obtained. What they have in common is the focus on the intent; on reaching a target that can be quite complex, yet the starting point is a photo, sometimes not even a name, and a personal item. Retracing in detail the steps of a missing person, a murder victim or a criminal may be astounding enough, but in the case of the double murder and arson Jackowski homes in on the motive, and that involves describing a location that no longer exists and relationships that reach years into the past; he then suggests a future course of action that may not qualify as precognition, but is the kind of prediction that sounds very much like Smiths truncated causal chain involved in precognition: if the police question the murderers girlfriend, she will break,  which is in fact what happens. The truncated part is the clairvoyant knowing what the girl knows and her likely response. The outcome: the target is exactly what the police need, a route to the identity of the murderer, initially through motive. Yet in the case of the murder in Biedaszki, the motive remains unclear, and it may never have been clear to the murderer in a drunken state; what is important is evidence. Jackowski knows that evidence is a problem after so much time has passed, but what, apart from his intention to find it, could have led him to the shirt hidden in the sofa? If the memory of it had been in the mind of the perpetrator he surely would have got rid of it. This brings to mind the comments by many of the sitters in the mediumistic séances of Mrs Piper mentioned earlier: the impression that she digs out information buried somewhere in the recesses of their minds but not present in their conscious memory (Gauld, 2022).

When we examine the clairvoyant process in Jackowskis cases, it is very much as described by Joe McMoneagle, starting with the initial taste, an intuitive clue with unknown (truncated) origin, which provides possibilities for combining intuitions with rational calculation. For example, when he is looking for two missing boys (Case 7), his intuition tells him that they are dead, that there are two ponds, and the name biskup is somehow involved. He then does some research using a map but eventually relies on intuition again to pinpoint the bodies. A similar situation arises when he locates a missing dog from a photograph brought by an elderly lady from Bydgoszcz, desperate to recover her companion (Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, 2012, vol 2 p. 128-130). He did not think he could do it, assuming that the information source of his clairvoyance had to be human, but he focused as he would for a human being and the taste was that the dog was alive. When the name Kwiatowa jumped into his mind he looked up a map of Bydgoszcz on his computer and found Kwiatowa Street at the other end of town from where the lady lived. In Case 8, Jackowski senses death but has no understanding and no emotional clues; he draws a detailed map with a winding river, then has to calculate the distance from the road to the little bridge that he envisaged, and then he intuitively pinpoints a cement bollard next to the body. So, again as in the case of McMoneagle, the taste is not enough: both intuition and research are involved.

As Jackowski recounts it, after the first taste there is a feeling of doubt, that he is only imagining things. He then tries to put the case to one side until the flashes start coming spontaneously; he then begins to get the atmosphere of the event. When he has an image in mind he writes down what he senses and draws a map. Usually it is more than a vague idea of water, a forest or perhaps a road; it will contain very specific elements that can be verified before the actual search begins.

The way that the information arrives also varies. It can be a birds eye view, as in seeing a dead little girl, I saw her from above. She was lying there curled up. I could see her back. Why did I see her like that? Was she also perceiving herself from a birds eye view at that moment? (Janoszka, 2018, p.29) This is the question that Jackowski asks again and again, in dozens of cases of drownings, where nobody knows the bodys location and position.

We then come to the question of psychometry. Jackowski describes the photos, the smelling and the handling of personal belongings as his technology (Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, 2012, vol 2 p. 130), and clearly he relies on the ritual. This is a very personal aspect of clairvoyance since remote viewers, dowsers and indeed mediums have quite different procedures that do not involve psychometry. On the other hand, we do not know by what channels the information arrives in truncated chains, and the senses of smell and touch seem to be very significant for Jackowski: something particularly apparent in the case where he puts on the drowned mans dirty shirt and feels his presence.

There are many clairvoyants with impressive track records (Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Eileen Garrett, or the Pole, Rev. Father Klimuszko 41, are some that spring to mind). However, the most relevant detailed comparative material in which to place Jackowskis cases in terms of reliable reporting and contrasting yet convergent targets and attitudes is provided here by two psychic virtuosi, Joe McMoneagle and Stefan Ossowiecki.

Joe McMoneagle.


Background.

Joe McMoneagle (1946- ), a distinguished American Army officer, now retired, has been described as the best Operational Remote Viewer in the history of the U.S. Armys Special Project,  Star Gate (McMoneagle, 2002, front page). He was selected for the remote viewing project by the army because he was one of the small group of people who kept surviving the most dangerous situations against all odds in various ways, somehow knowing when something was about to happen in a particular location, to the point when others would mimic his actions in the field.

After graduating from high school, McMoneagle joined the US Army. In 1978 he took part in a trial of psychic ability carried out on behalf of the Army by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute. He was one of six people selected for the project of remote viewing (generally now known as Star Gate), and this was the beginning of his career as a 'remote viewer' in the military, working on operational requests from various bodies, including CIA, FBI, Army Intelligence and a number of other agencies. He retired from his career in the army after 13 years, with the Legion of Merit Award for distinguished military service. (McMoneagle, 2006) His task as a remote viewer in the Star Gate programme was to locate and describe military and other facilities using geographical coordinates as targets, and to provide detailed descriptions of devices kept inside such facilities. The case described below is probably his most famous exploit and provides a detailed account of the process.

The case of the Typhoon Submarine: seeing the present and the future

There are many accurate accounts of the viewing of the Typhoon submarine, probably the best known, most detailed and perhaps the most astounding case of remote viewing. The one given here is based on that by Paul Smith, another famous remote viewer, a military outsider who later became an insider (Smith, 2015, pp. 45-63):

The story of the remote viewing of the Typhoon is not hearsay. It is not just another old war story that my fellow Star Gate remote viewers and I expect you to believe just on our say-so. The provenance (the chain of custody) for this information is impeccable. Copies of nearly all the original documents that still exist became available when the CIA publicly released the Star Gate projects archives in 2004. Until then they had been in the protective custody of the CIA. The account I have given in this book of the remote viewing of the Typhoon is authentic, taken from the actual records and not from anyones faulty memory.

There were 10 remote viewing sessions over 2 months in the autumn of 1979. They were aimed at discovering what was happening inside the building at Shipyard 402 on the White Sea in what was then the Soviet Union.

The remote viewers were Joe McMoneagle and Hartleigh Trent. They reported that inside the building the Russians were building submarines. This was regarded as impossible, because the building had no access to water, while the submarine described by Joe was totally unlike any known submarines: twice the size of anything that existed, built against the principles of naval architecture, with missile tubes in the wrong place. The National Security Council dismissed the data as fantasy.

However, soon after, an enormous canal was excavated between the building and the water, and almost 11 months after the remote viewing sessions the first Typhoon super submarine, of the new design precisely as described by Joe McMoneagle, was photographed in the new canal alongside the building on 28 September 1980. In the words of Paul Smith:

At the time, I was serving as the strategic intelligence officer for the Special Forces command in Germany and had not yet even so much as heard the term remote viewing. It was my job to review ... the latest top-secret intelligence obtained by the Special Security Office in Munich. I still recall the almost panicked tone of the intelligence cables and briefs I read and passed on to the colonel. The Soviets had outmaneuvered the Western intelligence services, taking them completely by surprise, and both sides knew it.

In this case we also learn about the process of remote viewing, from Joe McMoneagle himself (McMoneagle, 2006, p. 124). His first target was a set of geographic coordinates from which he was able to describe the location and the facility. He saw the right place, a cold wasteland with ice, rocks, a very large industrial building and a harbour and sea with ice caps in the distance. Next he was given a photograph of a large building of industrial type, near a large body of water, with general materials stacked outside, located somewhere in Russia (it later turned out to be Severodvinsk on the White Sea (p. 121). As he describes it: Spending a considerable amount of time relaxing and trying to empty my mind, I imagined myself drifting down and slowly passing through the shed-like roof to the inside of the structure. ... I felt as though I was hovering inside a building that was the size of two and a half to three shopping centers, all under one roof. I had completely misconstrued the size of the building ... [here McMoneagle gives a detailed description of the inside, of giant bays between walls, scaffolding, interlocking steel pipes, cylinders being welded...] ... I felt as though I were standing inside the building and able to actually see vividly what was going on. This rarely occurs in remote viewing, but for some reason it was happening on this target ... My vision of the target was so precise that it almost seemed unreal. ... I had an overwhelming sense that this was a submarine, a really big one, with twin hulls.

The case of the kidnapped general

This ability to focus extends to pinpointing the location of a kidnapped general and being aware of his thoughts. Brigadier General James Dozier, deputy chief of staff at NATO headquarters in Italy in Verona had been abducted in December 1981 by members of the Italian Red Brigade. Three remote viewers, including Joe, were charged with trying to locate him. They were given a picture of Dozier; initially they were not totally accurate about the course of the kidnapping, but all gave similar accounts. They targeted the general over a number of days and had similar impressions: We all reported him alive and having his eyes and mouth taped shut, with a set of earphones taped over his ears, as if he were being forced to listen to music he didn't like.

A later, very successful session by McMoneagle started ... with an almost perfect image of a coastline the right-hand side of Italy towards the north. It was followed by vivid images, which felt as if he was floating over the area, able to see what he wanted to see. He seemed to be following in the footsteps of the kidnappers:

I suddenly found myself hovering directly over a fairly large town not far from the coast and just south and southeast of a very large mountain range. I moved closer to the ground and began to pick out roadways and buildings. I followed the roads and eventually found myself near a small central plaza, across from some kind of a fountain, and picked up the smells of a butcher shop, and the faint hint of a place where they did some kind of tanning or worked with hides. I got an image of a very large apartment building and settled in on the second floor. I came out of the session knowing that I could pretty much replicate the images and streets that I had seen. McMoneagle produced a regional map that was specific enough to identify the city as Padua. He then sketched a rough street map, pointing out the location of the apartment house where the kidnapped general was being held on the second floor.

General Dozier was released unharmed from an apartment in Padua after 42 days (not on the basis of the information provided by remote viewers, which was not used). However, the General judged their viewing accurate, especially stunning in thought-content, the personal aspect: information in our reports had originated within his own thoughts while he was being held,  blindfolded, tape across his mouth, being forced to listen to hard rock, heavy-metal music through headsets ... (McMoneagle, 2006 pp. 116-120).

McMoneagle also successfully finds missing persons and on at least two occasions accurately locates dead bodies, very much like Jackowski. This is something which was done spectacularly on one occasion by Stefan Ossowiecki, although he is more famous for other things.

Stefan Ossowiecki (1877,  1944)picture.

Background.

Stefan Ossowiecki became famous as a clairvoyant during the 1920s and 1930s, achieving international fame through the experiments carried out with him by such renowned researchers as Gustave Geley and Charles Richet, and published contemporaneously in Revue Metapsychique, the journal of Institut Métapsychique International. However, Ossowiecki was never a professional psychic, and by the time he became well known he was already a man in his 40s, with a turbulent life story behind him. He came from a wealthy family of a Polish industrialist settled in Russia, and was heading the family business when the Soviet Revolution upended his life. He came to Poland in 1918 and became active as a businessman again, but it is his career as a psychic that really took off at this point, working with a very active group of psychical researchers from Poland and abroad. He never used his psychic abilities for financial gain or personal betterment, and put himself at the disposal of researchers.

Most of the experiments with Ossowiecki involved concealed (usually in sealed envelopes) writing or drawing, occasionally photos and packages with various objects. Sometimes the description of the wrappings and their history appears even more impressive than the successful identification of the target (as when the clairvoyant recounts the history of the box containing the target, and describes accurately where and who bought the cotton wool in which it was wrapped) (Barrington et al, 2005, pp. 71-72). At the International Congress of Psychical Research in Warsaw in September 1923 a high point in the history of psychical research was reached when the then SPRs Research Officer Eric Dingwall, who had prepared the target, an intricately wrapped drawing and writing, confirmed that the package had not been opened and drew it on the blackboard next to the drawing previously made by Ossowiecki. It was a perfect match (Dingwall, 1924; Barrington et al., pp. 62-64).

Alongside the experimental evidence, there are also many real-life cases corroborated in detail by witnesses. They involved locating missing objects or persons with the aid of psychometry, i.e., handling an object associated with the target. Ossowiecki was also responsible for a unique and almost accidental case of pure clairvoyance, when in 1935, he described accurately the contents of a package, which were unknown to anyone living. The package was mislaid and in the meantime the person who created it had died 10 years before the experiment took place without revealing its contents to anyone (Barrington et al., 2005, pp. 80-84; Semczuk, 2014).

A quite distressing case, where the nature of the target was known but its location was obscured by the presence of some 700 similar targets in its proximity, involved the identification of a corpse in a mass grave. Again, the information required was not known to anyone living.

A body in a mass grave

The account, which follows, is confirmed by Ossowieckis widow, who described her late husbands experience.

Letter to Zofia Ossowiecka from Jerzy Olewiń ski, dated 27th August 1946.

... My brother, Ensign Janusz Olewiń ski, was killed during a cavalry charge in the locality of Palmiry near Warsaw, on 22nd September 1939... After being exhumed from the battlefield his body was put into a collective grave of about 700 Polish cavalry soldiers in the parochial cemetery of Kielpin, district of Lomianki near Warsaw 42 ... I intended to transfer his remains to our family vault in Radom ... and tried therefore to locate the approximate place where his body lay in the over 200m long grave ... the task seemed hopeless ... I therefore contacted and visited, together with my mother, Engineer Stefan Ossowiecki to whom I brought a photograph and a letter written by my brother.

After examining both, Mr. Ossowiecki drew a detailed sketch of the cemetery and the grave, marking the spot where my brother lay. He further defined the cause of my brothers death, a heavy wound on the right side of the abdomen and groin. He also stated that he had died unattended after an hour in great pain. The sketch contained details of which we were unaware (for example, the belfry).

On our entreaties, Mr. Ossowiecki attended the exhumation in September 1940. Before the digging began we left him alone, at his request. After walking up and down the burial ground several times, Mr. Ossowiecki stopped and said that was the spot where my brother lay (it corresponded to the one marked on the sketch) and that the corpses lay in great disorder in several layers.

Upon this the workers began the digging, supervised by Mr. Ossowiecki. After setting several bodies aside he told us the next one would be the one of my brother and asked for it to be taken out of the grave. After it had been washed, my mother, sister and I recognized the body by the stature, military rank, personal garments and gold crowned tooth. The doctor attending the exhumation found the wound to the right part of the abdomen and groin. The clenched fingers proved that my brother had died in great pain ... (Barrington, 2005 p. 116.)

In the original letter there are two comments not included in the previous versions:

The Germans denied the permission to move the body, so I interred my brother again and marked the spot. Only after the war did I transfer his remains to the family vault.

A few weeks after the experiment, Mr. Ossowiecki told me that while walking along the grave in Kielpin he had clearly seen my brothers ethereal form.

Jerzy Olewiń ski.

Since the publication of the book by Barrington et al., some unpublished notes came to light which Ossowieckis widow, Zofia, was making for a programme about her husband. This account is not first hand and not corroborated, but it does come from someone who did her best to preserve Ossowieckis legacy, and make it available to researchers. In her notes Zofia talks about the difficulties faced by Ossowiecki on that occasion, and about the lost manuscript of Immortality, the book Ossowiecki was working on at the time of his death, which contained an account of this experience. According to her, the experience was very stressful for the clairvoyant, so he tried to focus, asked for Gods help and began calling the missing man in his mind. After a while, he saw in front of him what looked like a long, vertical, misty shadow, which slowly moved towards the longest of the graves, of which there were a few. He then followed the shadow, called for the people with the spades to follow him, and pointed out where they should dig, about the middle of the grave. The top layer of the soil was removed; the first bodies were those of a major and some officers, all of them in a state of disarray. From the outset, Ossowiecki stated that the body of the cadet would be found deeper, and that was what happened. When the ninth body was brought up, he called out, without looking, that that was Janusz Olewiń ski.

And, finally, a case of viewing very distant past.

The ancient settlement of Biskupin.

During 1936-1942 Professor Stanislaw Poniatowski, an ethnologist, carried out a series of archaeological experiments with Ossowiecki. Poniatowski was looking for information about prehistoric cultures, and believed that Ossowiecki could supply it clairvoyantly, using psychometry to connect to specific cultures in the past, very much as he did when he connected through the objects he was given to hold with their owners and their circumstances. For a variety of reasons (one of them the probable misidentification of the psychometric objects by the archaeologist), the 33 experiments held under carefully controlled conditions and witnessed by a number of university professors gave very mixed results 43 . However, this experiment, in 1937, resulted in a remarkably precise description of a distant location that was still to be fully excavated and therefore contained information unknown to anyone. The location was the settlement of Biskupin, in north-central Poland, discovered in 1933, now known to date from the 8th century. Excavations started in 1934.

Poniatowski was the only person who knew that the piece of ceramic that served as the psychometric object came from Biskupin and, since very little of the area had been excavated, Ossowieckis description seems to have been based purely on clairvoyance. He described people and animals, of greatest interest to Poniatowski, but it is the nature and environment of the settlement for which there is reliable verification.

Excerpts from Ossowieckis narrative:

Valleys ... enormous areas under water. Rows of wooden single-storey houses, one line separated from the next one by some thirty, forty, up to fifty steps ... The impression as if there was a whole city, a small town built on such stilts ... (...) I am losing it now ... water ... I see these parallel planks, stretching far ... trees cut down, rough, all covered in moss and ... If you look down on it, its like one enormous roof, and from a distance they are separated by these trees ... whole row of houses, in one direction, and another ... fifteen ...

A strange entrance, now I see ... and then from here it goes down and there is lots of water... there is water here as well, but further there is more and it goes... river, not a river... a lake of some sort ... such rows I see ... difficult to draw. There is a road ... and a passage to the water ... I see five, seven eight rows like that, and then it is blurred ... From the shore I see a wooden fence that stops the water flooding this whole apparatus... but it is all wood ... thin ... quite technical... And here to the right diagonally (shows on the drawing) these animals ... within the fencing, and then enormous forests all around ...


Biskupin was a fortified settlement on the peninsula of Lake Biskupin. Originally it was an island, about a 100 m from the shore. Along the shores of the peninsula there was an oak-pine palisade, consisting of a number of rows, intended both as a breakwater and a defensive measure. The main defensive construction was a rampart built of wood and soil, with a gate and a wooden bridge, which linked the island to the mainland. Inside the rampart there were 106 houses arranged in 13 rows, divided by 11 parallel streets, which joined the widest and longest ring road. The tops of the houses touched each other and had similar dimensions, similar skeletal construction and similar household equipment. Ossowieckis description of the enormous areas under water, rows of wooden houses, a town built on stilts with wooden ramparts protecting it from flooding, is thus accurate. However, the most exciting remarks came at the end of the experiment:

... here where the (settlement) ends, there is a lot of water and beyond the water there is yet another city, larger than this one; it does not exist anymore, but is at a distance of one kilometre, only larger, now buried ... enormous city ... Beyond the lake... The same people (in this other city) ... Now there is a forest there ... a town on land, but buried ... that lake flooded that city.

The local Lusatian settlements were not thoroughly researched until after the Second World War. Ossowieckis statements about another, enormous city north of Biskupin were verified (obviously only to some extent) in the second half of the twentieth century, towards the end of the 1950s, when excavations 10 km north of Biskupin revealed a previously unknown settlement from the Lusatian culture, probably some three times larger than the settlement at Biskupin.

Kinds of clairvoyance, kinds of clairvoyants: what they have in common.

When I started looking for clairvoyant virtuosi for this research, I found a lot more potential ones than those presented here. Bearing in mind that my research was restricted to only those cultures to which I have easy access, Anglo-Saxon and Polish, and to the best-documented cases, the world is probably much richer in virtuosi than the ones who have left a trail for psychical researchers to follow. Joe McMoneagle is probably right when he says that many people are potential psychics but do other things with their lives rather than devote them to clairvoyance as a profession.

There are many spectacular, spontaneous cases that involve clairvoyance, and many people have flashes of clairvoyant intuition; that is what one would expect if psi is an inseparable aspect of consciousness, a fundamental unconscious engagement with the world, rather than an anomalous ability. On the other hand, while there are many psychic claimants, practitioners of clairvoyance with a verified track record are few, and they tend not to identify themselves in terms of a concept that for much of the populace brings to mind supernatural powers and associations with the occult, while probably even more people regard it as nonsense. There are, of course, various sections of Anglo-Saxon society where mediumship is acknowledged, taught and practised within well-established organisations, and various organisations that practise and research remote viewing; however, that is not the case in Poland (see next chapter).

More importantly, the virtuosi of clairvoyance become virtuosi because they specialise in what they do. This may happen because their life path takes a specific direction (such as when Joe McMoneagle agreed to participate in the remote viewing programme), or because one event leads to another as in the case of Jackowskis fame spreading among the local people, or because they choose a specific course of action, such as Matthew Manning choosing to become a healer rather than researching his psychokinetic abilities. A number of mediums practise healing, testifying to a connection between various aspects of psi, and Jackowski had much success at giving medical diagnoses at the beginning of his career.

Most psychics are probably capable of a lot more than they do, but,  and this is crucial,  practice makes, if not perfect, then certainly above average.

According to Stefan Ossowiecki, he learnt the essential techniques for entering the right state from an old Jewish mystic, and worked on improving his knowledge. Joe McMoneagle points out that, particularly with remote viewing, he was basically paid to do that [spending] 12-hour days for years and years just learning and perfecting (McMoneagle, 2012). Jackowski has now been a successful clairvoyant for more than 20 years. And the virtuosi get very good at what they do most often: Joe McMoneagle learns to do remote viewing almost as routine, but has to learn to manage his out-of-body experiences, which, according to him, are a very different state, and looking for what he describes as mental triggers takes him months of effort. By the time he becomes involved in regular tests, Ossowiecki can read through dozens of envelopes without trying very hard.

Practice means training oneself to follow certain procedures, one of which is to induce in oneself an intentionally simplified altered state that enables one to seek out the target and focus on it. Remote viewers and parapsychologists are explicitly aware of this and apply techniques to facilitate such a state as, for example, in the ganzfeld conditions and relaxation techniques. Ossowiecki used to ask those present to talk among themselves rather than pay attention to him, while Jackowski, where possible, seeks environments that provide distractions. Creating a suitable environment seems to be the easiest aspect of the process to identify and recreate, while the most crucial and hardest seems to be the ability to recognise what McMoneagle calls the taste; this sudden knowing is the truncated part of the process. It is different from the usual kind of scanning that is described by Carpenter as first sight that is similar to responding to subliminal stimuli and not all that strange; however, it does strike us as strange when the clairvoyant describes a scene from a thousand years ago, as does Ossowiecki when holding a piece of ceramic from Biskupin, or a submarine which does not yet exist as does McMoneagle when given the coordinates of its location, or peers into a sofa bed miles away to find the incriminating bloodied shirt that was placed there more than a year before, as does Jackowski when given a photo and a pair of old trousers to hold. What is provided is exactly the information that is wanted.

Joe McMoneagle makes the valid point that for accurate focusing, one needs to be specific about dates and times when choosing the target (he mentions a whole series of failures at Stanford Research Institute where no time was specified and the target buildings he saw were not built until years later), and to expect bleed-through from the immediate past and the immediate future (McMoneagle, 2013, loc. 2132). Yet there may be more to accurate focusing in real life cases when the intention is very specific, such as looking for a piece of evidence or being highly emotionally motivated, as when putting on the dead mans shirt that produces certainty about the bodys location.

The next stage of the process is more like the sensory processing based on physical senses. It is best to follow the maxim of remote viewers: say what you see, not what it looks like (for example, if a stimulus is interpreted as a swarm of bees, that conclusion precludes considering any idea that is contrary to it; but if you stop at a confusing cloud of shapes you remain open to broader interpretations (Carpenter, 2012, pp. 27-9)). That is why every effort is made to avoid front loading in remote viewing, and why Jackowski prefers not to know anything about the case before he starts working on it. He is particularly wary of highly publicised cases, since it is impossible to switch off the knowledge one already has (Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, vol. 2 p. 131).

However, what McMoneagle calls a taste, that basic sensation, is followed by further focusing that now involves conscious actions, such as drawing a map and providing specific elements. So this is not a simple process where suddenly all is clear; there is interaction between the intuitive and the logical, and the conclusions are based on both interpenetrating processes, complex and prolonged, and this is one of the ways in which professionals take psi processing to a different level. In remote viewing there also might be many sessions by a number of remote viewers revisiting the target before coming up with a report. Remarkably, they tend to get much convergent accurate information.

What is also remarkable is the complexity of the channels through which the information arrives. When it is visual, there seem to be multiple axes of vision; we have the distant birds eye view such as McMoneagles first impression of the landscape around the building housing the submarine, or of the city of Padua where General Dozier is held, or Ossowieckis first impressions of enormous waters around Biskupin, or a belfry near the burial field that holds the body he is locating, or Jackowskis view of the village with the characteristic church where the girl with the vital evidence is to be found. But then you get detailed views of the design or the characteristics of the target, the submarine, the identifying marks of the buried body, the features of ancient settlement, or the underwater spring next to which the drowned body is to be found in one of Jackowskis cases. It seems that the mind at large operates differently, in a way that resembles some of the near-death experience accounts, like that of a woman who in that state saw a plaque with the manufacturers name under the operating table she had been on, which was later found to be there. She described it as having multiple axes of vision, from many places at once (Rousseau, 2011, p. 208).

Relevant information can also be heard: when looking at a photo of the missing dog Jackowski hears the name Kwiatowa [adjectival form of flower, which makes him think it refers to Kwiatowa/Flower Street]. This turns out to be correct, yet is unlikely to have come from the missing dog. As he puts it when talking about the information that seems to come from the dead, it is not so much hearing as understanding (Ś wią tkowska & Jackowski, vol. 2, p. 56). This brings to mind an explanation of how the messages from the dead reach her, given by Feda, supposedly a young Indian girl who acted as the control of the famous medium Mrs Osborne Leonard:

Well, sometimes I sees a thing that I ought to hear, but I can't hear it, so I sees it, do you see? ... And sometimes I can only hear a thing and I can't see it at all. Some sittings I just happen to be in what you would call ... the seeing vibration. And if I gets into it then it is easier to see whatever has been told me; it is easier to see it in pictures or in symbols. But another time, if I happen to get into a hearing vibration ... then it is easier to hear.

This does not provide greater illumination; it just demonstrates that the channels of communication have been open for a long time and remain mysterious.

As has already been said, it seems that the most perceivable targets are emotionally significant or dramatic (Schwartz, 2014, p. 12), but this does not mean emotional involvement by the clairvoyant/remote viewer, as opposed to strongly engaged intent. Mediums can also be remarkably matter of fact about contacting the discarnates when they do it professionally (Gauld, 2022). However, in the case of Jackowski, emotional engagement seems to play a vital role. It may be that his attitude and manner of working is affected by the kinds of targets he deals with, becoming immersed in the current human distress that becomes very real to him. For him, physical contact with a photograph or personal possession seems essential, as it did for Ossowiecki, and a number of other clairvoyants have felt that handling an object belonging to someone helped to establish contact. The significance of psychometric objects is not clear, but there is one interesting semi-anecdotal account that may have some bearing on the subject. During some experiments organised by professors from Warsaw University in 1963, Father Klimuszko was given a number of photographs to comment on, which he did successfully. However, in one case he gave a reading that applied to the person who stole the photograph rather than the person pictured in it. The photograph showed the experimenters daughter, but Klimuszko described a psychopathic monster who was causing a great deal of concern to the person caring for her. This fitted the personality and events surrounding a deeply disturbed girl, an orphan who stole the photograph and carried it on her person for two weeks (Klimuszko, 1989, p. 38). There is also the case of Ossowiecki asking for a different, more personal object when he attempts to make contact with the target person (Barrington, 2005, p. 113), while some of Jackowskis readings can involve intense physical immersion (smelling, handling). This may be yet another channel of information flow that is present to a greater degree in some individuals.

The clairvoyants discussed here are very different personalities, come from different backgrounds and cultures, but achieve success in similar tasks involving psi. They also have other things in common: they know how to shape the conditions required for success, even if they don't always work; they have their beliefs and rituals, which they have worked out over years of experience that give them confidence; they know how to calm themselves, to reduce unnecessary input and to fire but control their imagination; they have the resilience to accept failure, and the analytical judgment to hold back the intellectual overlay when it would interfere with the experience, but employ it in interpreting the experience.

However, if psi is operating all the time, why are there so few clairvoyants around, and why does it appear that only 1% of us are capable of making use of this innate ability, and even that 1% often gets it wrong (65% success rate being regarded as high)? Why can't more of us make use of it? Practice indeed makes a difference, but there appears to be something else that distinguishes the virtuosi. It has been suggested that most mediums had some kind of traumatic experience in their past, and this is certainly true of the virtuosi discussed here. Ossowiecki is reported to have had psychic experiences since puberty, but it seems to have been the trauma of imprisonment and being sentenced to death during the Bolshevik revolution that released what he regarded as his spiritual powers. Joe McMoneagle had a difficult, quite traumatic childhood and was probably psychic all his life; but he did not realise it and accept responsibility for it until after he went through a near-death experience at the age of 24, when he watched the efforts to resuscitate him, finding himself popping in and out of his body (McMoneagle, 2006, p. 177). Father Klimuszkos psychic development followed traumatic experiences during World War 2 when he was beaten and tortured by German soldiers. Jackowskis trauma seems to be on-going, and involves an unresolved urge to seek the meaning of life and his experiences.

So perhaps it is having an NDE, like Joe McMoneagle, or a traumatic experience like facing a death sentence for Ossowiecki, or rejecting your life like Jackowski, that is the link between these people; perhaps it somehow unbalances the usual relationship between mind and body and enables them to enter states of consciousness, which are not available to those of us who have avoided trauma; perhaps it means a degree of disengagement from the reliance on physical senses. Which brings us to back to Grossos question mentioned earlier: if psi is universal on a small scale yet seems to work only sometimes and only for some individuals that are unusual in some way on a scale that can make a big difference, then what is it for?