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Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them ? —Henry IV For all the enormous achievements of science in posting the universe that man inhabits, odd things keep slipping past the sentries. The tap on the shoulder may be fleeting, the brush across the cheek gone sooner than it is felt, but the momentary effect is unmistakable: an unwilling suspension of belief in the rational. An old friend suddenly remembered, and as suddenly the telephone rings and the friend is on the line. A vivid dream that becomes the morning reality. The sense of bumping into one's self around a corner of time, of having done and said just this, in this place, once before in precisely this fashion. A stab of anguish for a distant loved one, and next day, the telegram. Hardly a person lives who can deny some such experience, some such seeming visitation from across the psychic frontier. For most of man's history, those intrusions were mainsprings of action, the very life of Greek epic and biblical saga, of medieval tale and Eastern chronicle. Modern science and psychology have learned to explain much of what was once inexplicable, but mysteries remain. The workings of the mind still resist rational analysis; reports of psychic phenomena persist. Are they all accident, illusion? Or are there other planes and dimensions of experience and memory? Could there be a paranormal world exempt from known natural law? Both in America and abroad, those questions are being asked by increasing numbers of laymen and scientists hungry for answers. The diverse manifestations of interest in so-called psychic phenomena are everywhere: > In the U.S., The Secret Life of Plants becomes a bestseller by offering an astonishing and heretical thesis: greenery can feel the thoughts of humans. > At Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, the image of a painting is transmitted by ESP, and seems to enter the dreams of a laboratory subject sleeping in another room. > In England, a poll of its readers by the New Scientist indicates that nearly 70% of the respondents (mainly scientists and technicians) believe in the possibility of extrasensory perception. > At the University of California, Psychologist Charles Tart reports that his subjects showed a marked increase in ESP scores after working with his new teaching machine. > In Los Angeles, a leaf is cut in half, then photographed by a special process. The picture miraculously shows the "aura" or outline of the whole leaf. > In Washington, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency assigns a team to investigate seemingly authentic psychic phenomena at the Stanford Research Institute. > On both sides of the Atlantic, Uri Geller, a young Israeli psychic, astounds laymen and scientists alike by bending spoons and keys apparently with the force of his thoughts. > In the Philippines, Tennis Star Tony Roche is relieved of painful "tennis elbow" when an incision is made and three blood clots are apparently removed by the touch of a psychic healer, who knows nothing of surgery or of modern sanitation. > In the U.S., the number of colleges offering courses in parapsychology increases to more than 100. > In the U.S.S.R., researchers file reports on blindfolded women who can "see" colors with their hands.
> In California, ex-Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who while on the Apollo 14 moon mission conducted telepathy experiments with friends on earth, founds the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His new mission: investigate occurrences that will not yield to rational explanation. > In London, Arthur Koestler examines psychic research with the zeal of the believer. Koestler, one of the foremost explicators of Establishment science (The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation), speaks of "synchronized" events that lie outside the expectations of probability. In anecdotes of foresight and extrasensory perception, in the repetition of events and the strange behavior of random samplings, Koestler spots what he calls the roots of coincidence. In his unforgettable metaphor, modern scientists are "Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity." That keyhole is stuffed with ancient biases toward the materialistic and rational explication and, consequently, away from the emerging field of psychic research. Once skeptics abandon those prejudices, says Koestler, they will be free to explore fresh concepts and new categories. That exploration is already being conducted by a number of serious paranormalists in a wide range of disciplines. In his Foundation for the Research on the Nature of Man, in Durham, N.C., the grand old man of paranormal studies, J.B. Rhine (see box page 70), still keeps watch on test animals for precognitive powers. At the nearby Psychical Research Foundation, William Roll and a research staff investigates "survival after bodily death." In studies with a "sensitive" and his pet cat, Roll finds evidence for a human ability "to leave" the body and "visit" the animal. At the University of Virginia Medical School, Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson also studies the plausibilities of reincarnation. At the Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics of the Maimonides Medical Center, Dr. Montague Ullman directs tests in which message senders "think" images into the brains of sleeping subjects. "If we had adequate funding," says Ullman, "we could have a major breakthrough in this decade." In Connecticut, Businessman Robert Nelson directs the Central Premonitions Registry, meticulously recording the prophecies of the dreams and visions that people send him. All of these researchers believe to some extent in the existence of some form of paranormal psychic powers. But the forms are open to wide debate. Says Psychologist Gardner Murphy, professor at the District of Columbia's George Washington University and a dean of psychic researchers, "It may well turn out that parapsychology will be a multidisciplinary thing, owing much to psychiatry, neurology ... medicine, biochemistry, social sciences." One of parapsychology's most famous proponents, in fact, is an anthropologist: Margaret Mead. It was her passionate advocacy that helped give the Parapsychological Association its greatest claim to legitimacy. After several vain attempts to enter the eminent American Association for the Advancement of Science, the P.A. won membership in 1969—after a speech by Mead. Her argument: "The whole history of scientific advance is full of scientists investigating phenomena that the Establishment did not believe were there. I submit that we vote in favor of this association's work." The final vote: 6 to 1 in favor of admission. Immense Claims. As parapsychology gains new respectability, so do its terms gain wide currency: "psi" for any psychic phenomenon; "clairvoyance" for the awareness of events and objects that lie outside the perimeters of the five senses; "out-of-body" experience for seeming to journey to a place that may be miles from the body; "psychokinesis" for the mental ability to influence physical objects; "precognition" for the foreknowledge of events, from the fall of dice to the prediction of political assassinations; and the wide-ranging term ESP for extrasensory perception. For all its articulate spokesmen and scientific terminology, however, the new world of psi still has a serious credibility problem. One reason is that like any growth industry or pop phenomenon, it has attracted a fair share of hustlers. Indeed, the psychic-phenomena boom may contain more charlatans and conjurers, more naïfs and gullibles than can be found on the stage and in the audience of ten Ringling Brothers circuses. The situation is not helped at all by the "proofs" that fail to satisfy traditional canons of scientific investigations. Despite the published discoveries, despite the indefatigable explorations of the psychic researchers, no one has yet been able to document experiments sufficiently to convince the infidel. For many, doubt grows larger with each extravagant claim. To Science and Mathematics Analyst Martin Gardner (Relativity for the Million, Ambidextrous Universe), announcements of psychic phenomena belong not to the march of science but to the pageant of publicity. "Uri Geller, The Secret Life of Plants, telepathy, ESP, the incomplete conclusions of Koestler —all seem part of a new uncritical enthusiasm for pseudo science," says Gardner. "The claims are immense, the proof nonexistent. The researchers, almost without exception, are emotionally committed to finding phenomena. And few are aware of the controls necessary in a field in which deception, conscious or unconscious, is all too familiar." Daniel Cohen, former managing editor of Science Digest and author of the debunking volume Myths of the Space Age, remains unpersuaded by what he sees through the Koestlerian keyhole. "After decades of research and experiments," Cohen observes, "the parapsychologists are not one step closer to acceptable scientific proof of psychic phenomena. Examining the slipshod work of the modern researchers, one begins to wonder if any proof exists." The criticism that psychics find hardest to counter comes not from scientists but from conjurers. Theoretically, magicians have no place in serious science. But they are entertainers whose business it is to deceive; thus they feel that they are better qualified to spot chicanery than scientists, who can be woefully naive about the gimmicks and techniques that charlatans may use for mystical effects. James Randi, who appears on television as "the Amazing Randi," duplicates many of Uri Geller's achievements with a combination of sleight of hand, misdirected attention and patented paraphernalia, then calls them feats of clay. |
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