Imelda’s fantastic tale could be true

“Mon, i want to consult you whether to reveal what i know about the marcos gold which appeared in today’s pdi page A2, which was personally told to me by Swedidh (sic) psychic Olof Jonsson in 1987. Olof was the psychic hired by marcos to find the Yamashita treasure. But Olof died already. Can i call u? Jimmy.”

This note, sent to this columnist via text message on Thursday, came from Jaime Licauco, himself a psychic and a fellow columnist in this paper.

Jimmy Licauco, who has written many books on extrasensory perception (ESP) and mysticism, said Jonsson told him that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos discovered the legendary Yamashita treasures through his “psychic reading.”

The treasure, believed by many to be the fruits of plunder by Japanese Imperial Army Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita in Southeast Asia during World War II, was found by Marcos in Baguio and nearby places, Licauco said, quoting Jonsson.

Yamashita was captured by American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas in Baguio, tried for war crimes and executed in Los Baños, Laguna, on Feb. 23, 1946.

“Jimmy, did Jonsson get rich for tipping off Marcos the location of the Yamashita treasure?” I asked Licauco.

Jimmy said Jonsson escaped from the country when he sensed that Marcos, through Gen. Fabian Ver, wanted him silenced.

I was skeptical about Jonsson so I Googled his name on the internet.

The following are excerpts of an article about Jonsson that appeared on May 24, 1998, on The Chicago Tribune, written by Meg McSherry Breslin:

“Olof Jonsson may have lived a relatively ordinary life as a Chicago engineer had it not been for some unusual habits.

“He could answer questions before they were asked, predict events for friends with unbelievable accuracy and even solve murder mysteries by re-creating the crime scene in his mind.

“Mr. Jonsson’s psychic abilities eventually made him an internationally known figure, the subject of a book and numerous magazine articles and scientific papers and a constant source of fascination.

“Despite such fame, he remained in his job as an engineer with the Chicago architectural firm of Schmidt, Garden & Erikson for nearly two decades. He stayed in Chicago until 1980, when he moved to Las Vegas.

“Mr. Jonsson died on May 11 in Las Vegas at age 79.

“One of Mr. Jonsson’s most famous extrasensory experiments occurred during Nasa’s Apollo 14 mission to the moon, when he collaborated with astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell. Mitchell arranged a set of ESP cards with different symbols on them from his space capsule, and Mr. Jonsson tried to picture the sequence of the cards from thousands of miles away. He named the cards in the correct order about half the time, a score far higher than pure chance would allow.

“The experiment became a cover story in Life magazine, and Mr. Jonsson used it as proof that ESP works as well in space as it does on Earth.

“While telepathic work like Mr. Jonsson’s has had many skeptics over the years, some experts in the field said he was clearly an exceptional mind.

“‘I have never met anybody like this before,’ said Norman Don, director of research for Chicago-based Kiros Foundation, which supports research in cognitive neuroscience and alternative healing. ‘Mr. Jonsson was able to do things that I thought were impossible. I thought he was really a very extraordinary individual.’”

“Mr. Jonsson did establish an international reputation as a psychic as a young man growing up in his native Sweden. After a small town in Sweden had a series of bizarre murders in which 12 women were brutally slain, police authorities contacted Mr. Jonsson, who had a detailed vision of the crimes and the murderer. After Mr. Jonsson identified the suspect as a young policeman, the officer confessed the crimes in a suicide note.

“Mr. Jonsson later told the Tribune that the situation disturbed and depressed him, and he swore to never again get involved in solving violent crimes.

“Yet, throughout his life, he continued to try to help people when he could, sometimes assisting in searches for missing children and occasionally acting as a healer for the chronically ill. Mr. Jonsson also worked to help create more acceptance of parapsychology in the scientific community.”

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So, if Jimmy Licauco indeed interviewed Jonsson about the Yamashita treasure, chances are Imelda’s claim that the Marcoses became super-wealthy because of the treasure and that she still had tons of gold bullions stashed somewhere could be true!