36.07 - MU Podcast - Strange Powers of the Mind

Summary

Hosts Brandon Thomas and Joe Hodgdon dig into Warren Smith's 1968 book 'Strange Powers of the Mind' and its accounts of premonitions, mind reading and mental mastery. They cover a Wisconsin teen who ignored a fatal premonition, a Polish count buried alive under a baseball diamond, and a German mentalist who allegedly read a murderer's mind to find a hidden rifle. They also discuss the 1944 Mad Gasser of Mattoon panic, Kenyan witch doctors cursing soccer matches, and hypnosis used to boost athletes' performance.

Key takeaways

• 1The source book is 'Strange Powers of the Mind' (1968) by Warren Smith, with a foreword by Brad Steiger. Smith also wrote under pseudonyms including Eric Norman.
• 2In March 1967, Doreen Williams, a 17-year-old from Juda, Wisconsin, had a premonition of disaster before her senior trip. She went anyway and was among nine students killed when a DC-8 crashed into their New Orleans motel.
• 3In 1966, Chicago oil executive Harold Pelvin went home on an intuitive warning and stopped armed robber Robert Dunlop, who was threatening his mother.
• 4On July 25, 1932, Count Roman Ostoja, the 'White Yogi', was reportedly buried alive in a state of 'samadhi' under a baseball field in Inglewood, California, and revived after the game.
• 5In September 1944, the 'Mad Gasser of Mattoon' panic hit Mattoon, Illinois, drawing the FBI and Illinois State Police; officials later closed it as mass hysteria. The hosts speculate about early CIA chemical testing.
• 6In 1928, mentalist Hans Lay allegedly read the mind of Alberta murderer James Johnson to locate the hidden .303 rifle, which led to Johnson's confession and hanging.
• 7Kenyan soccer teams employed witch doctors to curse opponents, and a 1966 Johannesburg experiment found hypnosis improved golfers' putting.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

This is season 36, episode number 7. Today we're going to investigate some strange cases of some strange powers of the mind. I'm your Mentally Sound host, Brandon Thomas, and with me as always is the original mental ninja, Joe Sun. Hodgdon. How are you, fella? Mentally sound? Are you sure about that? Um, you're, are you talking about me mentally sound? You, yeah. Well, from my perspective, I'm mentally sound. If we're going off of my metric, yeah. Buddy, we are as sound as she comes. Yeah, so taking a kind of a hard left, huh, from the last six, you know, the series you were doing on Visitors from Within. And I did want to mention, too, for the, since this is a free show and people on YouTube and everything, if you're missing a couple parts of what we do, it's because it's on Plus. I just wanted to put that out there. So it's not that it's missing from YouTube or the free feed. It's in the subscriber feed. So if you want to catch those episodes, that's where you would find them. And you obviously go to the links in the show notes to find them. And I'm not sure, do you know, but how far back does the free feed archive even go? Because that is one of the perks of, especially if you sign up to MU Max, you get the entire back catalog. All of Ben and Aaron's 20 years worth of shows. And so if you're not getting the Plus shows and the extensions, you're missing probably over half the context of what we're going after here. So just putting that out there. Yeah, it's two thirds. ...

Excerpt from Mysterious Universe, Aug 21, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.