DAVE MAYNARD'S PREMONITION

“Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee. “ (Isaiah 47:13)

Can it really be twenty-five years?

January 28, 1986 is one of those days stamped on my memory- like November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001. It’s the date of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

I do NOT remember exactly what day President Ronald Reagan announced the plan to put a teacher into space on a shuttle mission,but the whole country was excited about the prospect and hundreds of teachers applied. Christa Corrigan McAuliffe was the perfect choice: pleasant, friendly, smart, charismatic, inspiring, engaging, physically and mentally fit. I mean this with no disrespect but she was SUCH a perfect choice it was almost like she came out of “central casting”. But she was the real deal, and America fell in love with her. New England was proud of her, too, especially Concord, New Hampshire where she lived and worked as a schoolteacher, and Framingham, Massachusetts where she’d grown up.

I did not live in Framingham at the time, nor was I familiar with Marian High at the time. I do recall that the first time I’d ever heard of Marian High School (her alma mater) was seeing a television clip on the evening after the explosion. The video showed a nun leading a classroom full of kids in the Lord’s prayer immediately following the explosion. That morning, I was working in my office at Christian LIfe Center church in Walpole. Shirley the secretary took a brief phone call. Sounding stunned she announced, “Betty Nickerson says the space shuttle just blew up!” That just didn’t sound possible. Immediately I flicked on a portable radio in my office which was reporting that something terrible had indeed happened at Cape Canaveral.

Denny Seler, another pastor on staff burst into my office and said, “Bob, turn your TV on!” I had forgotten my tiny analog black and white television set. I did turn it on, and several of us crowded around looking at the clip of the Challenger explosion as it was replayed over and over.
Of course, my family and I later moved to Framingham. All three of my kids went to Marian High School and now my wife has worked there for several years. During the years I when my kids were students, we were on “financial aid” so I was required to volunteer at the school one day a week. (It was THAT or helping run the Saturday night Bingo games, and there was no way I was going to do that!) One of my most interesting experiences on a volunteer day was overhearing a student interview the school nurse who’d been in Christa’s class (1966) at Marian for a school project. The nurse had all sorts of interesting stories about Christa as a student. Hearing it all was like watching a segment of “60 Minutes”!

As I pondered these things earlier today, I also remembered Dave Maynard’s premonition. I debated writing about it, and I almost didn’t. Evangelical Christians are very leery at best of speaking and writing about matters which would be classified as “psychic” or “E.S.P.” or “fortunetelling” or anything of the kind. And rightly so. There are a number of Old Testament passages which absolutely condemn anything that stuff. And, it’s also true that probably 80% of what’s passed off as “psychic” and “supernatural” is total bunk. Even so, there ARE certain things that just can’t be explained away and are difficult to understand. Again, I’m not ENDORSING psychic phenomena or anything like that. Many devout Christians believe such stuff is “of the devil” and I think a lot of it IS. The late evangelical Chinese Christian mystic and philosopher, Watchman Nee, had a different point of view about “psychic phenomena” believing most of it was not specifically “of the devil” (as Western Christian culture does) but in a much more Eastern way wrote that such things are tapping into areas that humans were designed to have before the fall of Adam and Eve but that NOW such stuff is forbidden by God. We learned in Bible College that Adam was a “supra natural” being. Not SUPER natural but SUPRA natural. He was created with incredible intelligence and abilities, far beyond what we could imagine, but that God closed that supranatural stuff off after the fall. Thus tapping into it, or trying to tap into it is very much a rebellion against God and should not be done.
I Samuel 15:23 in the New King James Version says:
“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,
And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.”

Nee explains that some people are prone to this stuff from birth, but that they should NOT explore it or feed it. I know this is a very long introduction to Dave Maynard’s premonition, but I felt it needed a lot of clarification. Anybody who grew up in the Boston area in the 1960s and 1970s knows who Dave Maynard is. He was a major personality on WBZ radio and television. In the 1970s he hosted the corny talent show, “Community Auditions”, Dave’s still alive. He’s in his 80s and I understand he is legally blind. Dave Maynard also hosted the morning drive show on WBZ radio for at least fifteen years.

In the middle 1980s, I used to have our bedroom radio set on WBZ. This was mainly because it was a 24-hour clear channel station. It didn’t go to static once it got dark the way most AM radio stations do. At night, we’d often fall asleep listening to the Larry Glick show, and we’d wake up to “Maynard in the Morning”. About two months before the Challenger disaster, Dave announced he was having major feelings that something significant was going to happen “in the sky”. He said this happening would be huge. He did not know what it would be or when it would happen, but it was coming. He seemed to think it had particular significance for Boston, and might well be in the skies over the Boston area. Dave announced this premonition a number of times over the final few weeks of 1985 and the first few weeks of 1986.

One morning during that time, there was some sort of a strong and unusual meteor shower over the Boston area. There was a lot of talk about it. At least one caller to the show asked Dave Maynard if that meteor shower was the fulfillment of his premonition, but Dave flatly said, “NO that wasn’t it.”

When I was watching the news reports, and the comments of President Reagan on January 28, 1986, Dave Maynard’s premonition was the furthest thing on my mind. The next morning, as you could well imagine, Dave’s show was jammed with callers weeping, talking about their grief, how they’d been affected by the disaster, how bad they felt for Christa’s family, etc. Throughout all this, Dave did not mention his premonition.

After a number of calls, Dave Maynard took a call from an emotional male caller. “Dave?” the guy started off with a nervous, trembling voice, “THAT was the thing you talked about in the sky, wasn’t it?”

With a very choked up voice, Dave Maynard said, “Yes, that was it.”

January 1986. How could we ever forget it?