James Arthur Flowerdew, the Man From Petra

The "Treasury" at Petra, via Wikipedia

Once there was a boy in Norfolk, England, who boasted the quintessentially English name of “James Arthur Flowerdew.”  His was a perfectly normal early 20th century childhood, until he reached the age of 12, when some odd and unsettling things began happening to him.  He began having unusually vivid dreams where he saw a large desert city.  These visions left him greatly agitated, although he could not understand why.  As his dreams of this mysterious city went on, they became increasingly detailed.  He saw a temple, a large volcano-shaped rock, streets, lanes, and various military and civilian structures.  So clear were Flowerdew’s tours of the city, he became convinced he was actually there.

One day when he was visiting the seashore, Flowerdew idly picked up some pink and orange pebbles.  As he toyed with them, the image of his desert city suddenly came into his mind.  From then on, whenever he would go to the beach and play with the orange and pink pebbles, he was instantly mentally transported to the city.  He realized that the pebbles were similar in color to the stones of the ancient metropolis.  Such visions were so common, he accepted them as a normal part of his life.  As time went on, flashes of his life in the city began to come to him.  Flowerdew believed that he had been a soldier, who was killed with a spear in or near the temple.

Aside from these strange visions--which he appears to have largely kept to himself--Flowerdew’s life went on in a modest, unremarkable way.  One day, the now-elderly retired Army officer casually happened to watch a BBC documentary about the ancient Jordan city of Petra.  As soon as he saw the ruins, he was stunned.  He immediately recognized it as the place that had haunted his dreams for so many years.

Flowerdew was so thrilled to finally be able to identify the city he had come to know so well, he contacted the BBC.  Perhaps surprisingly, he was taken seriously.  The BBC filmed a short segment about him, after which he was questioned by an archaeologist who was an expert on Petra.  The archaeologist came away perplexed by the depth of Flowerdew’s knowledge of the city--knowledge that Flowerdew could not have gotten without serious archaeological research.  And there was nothing to indicate that this relatively uneducated old man was lying when he insisted that he had never even seen a book about Petra.

Word of Flowerdew’s strange story reached the ears of the Jordanian government, who invited him to see Petra in person for the first time.  (Or for the first time in a very long while, depending on your views of such matters.)  Flowerdew appeared to be right at home, easily navigating the city unaided.  He commented in detail on the various landmarks, and even identified sites that had yet to be excavated.  When shown certain items and structures that were puzzling archaeologists, Flowerdew immediately gave plausible explanations for what they were.  When he went into a military barrack, he pointed out the location of the guardroom, and explained how the check-in system for the guards had worked--something that was unknown even to the experts.  He even showed the place where an enemy had murdered him in the first century B.C.

Throughout his visit, Flowerdew displayed such an intimate knowledge of Petra that the archaeologists, unable to catch him in the slightest error, were baffled.  He even politely corrected the experts when he believed they had wrong information.  One archaeologist commented, “He’s filled in details and a lot of it is very consistent with known archaeological and historical facts, and it would require a mind very different from his to be able to sustain a fabric of deception on the scale of his memories--at least those he’s reported to me.  I don’t think he’s a fraud.  I don’t think he has the capacity to be a fraud on this scale.”

Flowerdew died at the age of 95 in 2002, leaving everyone to wonder if this unassuming old man had somehow pulled off an incredibly challenging hoax, or if he had, as he insisted, once been a soldier in ancient Petra.