Last week, Michigan man Austin Larson went missing while working in the woods. After his mother posted about the incident on Facebook, local psychic Kat Girard got in touch. She drew a blue circle on her phone map. Larson was found in the place she marked. 

Girard is part of a long line of people who have claimed to predict the future. In Ancient Rome, haruspicesPlural of haruspex. The word combines the archaic Latin word for intestines haru and with suffix meaning to watch spec. would examine the offal of sacrificed animals to predict the future. The 16th-Century astrologer NostradamusA 16-century French astrologer and physician whose prophecies earned him fame both during and after his lifetime. These included being credited with predicting the rise of Adolf Hitler, the atomic bomb and the Kennedy Assassination.   predicted that London would burn in "the year 66". The year of 1566 passed without crisis, but 1666 brought the Great Fire.

The Premonitions Bureau, a new book by the journalist Sam Knight, tells the story of an English psychiatrist called John Barker. Between 1966 to 1968, Barker collected and investigated predictions of the future.

Barker's interest began after the Aberfan disaster. Two nights before, a 10-year old called Eryl Mai Jones had a nightmare that seemed to predict the catastrophe. She told her mother: "I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it." 

Wondering whether these visions could be used to stop future horrors, Barker advertised in a newspaper. He eventually received 732 responses. All but 18 were wrong. Most of the right ones came from two Londoners, Kathy Middleton and Alan Hencher. Between them they predicted fires, a train crash, a plane disaster - and, when the time came, Barker's own sudden death in 1968.

Many are sceptical about such claims. Magic is not real. As James McConnachie says in New Scientist: "Premonitions aren't true. If you deal in them, you are deluded or a charlatanA person who falsely aims to have a certain skill or knowledge. It was first used in English in the 17th Century to describe someone who sells fake medicines, and descends from an Italian verb meaning to babble. ." They could stem from confirmation biasWhere people interpret past information in a way that supports what they want to believe..

We only tend to remember premonitions when they appear to contain truth. The thousands that were wrong are forgotten. Or they could be simply the result of chance. As Knight writes: "The rational response to premonitions is that they are a coincidence."

What appear to be premonitions might come from what we already know. In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a novel about an ocean liner called Titan. It hit an iceberg and sank, 14 years before the real-life Titanic. Morgan later denied that he had predicted the future. Rather, his expertise on ships allowed him to imagine something that might happen.

Yet there are some today who believe knowledge and analysis can allow some people to see the future. The social scientist Philip Tetlock has identified some people as superforecasters, whose way of sifting through information makes them able to more accurately guess events. To the average person they may as well be magic.

Others claim that science may come to explain premonitions. In 1935, Albert Einstein identified quantum entanglement, when two particles in different places influence each other. Some scientists believe that such events could occur in the human brain. Powers like prophecy, telepathy and psychokinesisThe ability to move things without touching them. As with telepathy, there is no good evidence that it exists. may be the result of these tiny subatomicSubatomic particles are those which make up an atom. movements.

Yes: For all the advances of science, we still know only a tiny amount about the workings of our minds and the world beyond our physical existence. New evidence might emerge that changes everything.

No: Some people might seem to have incredible predictive power in some situations. But this rests on a combination of scraps of knowledge and coincidence, rather than a real ability to sense the future

Or...  It depends what you mean by a premonition. If you mean a prediction that defies all logic, no. But if you mean a prediction that seems to defy logic but may have a rational explanation, then yes.