To verify an accurate retrocognitive experience, existing documents and human knowledge must be consulted, which raises the possibility that the information was already known contemporaneously.
If it is found that he did, indeed, kill a parrot at one time; it could be said that you "simply" obtained contemporary knowledge of this fact (by clairvoyance or telepathy, if need be, of the relevant documents, or someone's knowledge of them), rather than directly perceived – in the manner of retrocognition – any event in Churchill's past.
[citation needed] The most popularly celebrated case of retrocognition concerns the visions in 1901 of Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain – two scholars and early administrators of British university education for women – as they tried to find their way to Marie Antoinette's private château, the Petit Trianon.
Moberly and Jourdain described how they had become convinced, over the following weeks, that persons they saw and even spoke to on that occasion – given certain details of dress, accent, topography and architecture – must have been of a presumed recollection by Marie Antoinette, on 10 August 1792, of her last days at Trianon in 1789.
While often considered in popular literature as evidence for retrocognition, the book was immediately dismissed by Eleanor Sidgwick, a leading member of the British Society for Psychical Research, in an article published in its Proceedings, as the product of mutual confabulation.