Parapsychology, Spirituality, and the Battle Against Scientific Materialism — Part 2
This follows on from an introduction, where I outlined the reasons why I think an acceptance of parapsychology is so important in modern times, and part 1 where I described my personal experiences of ESP. I’ll now give a brief history of parapsychological research, picking out some of the significant episodes. I hope that by the end of this, if currently you have any doubts, you will be convinced of the reality of ESP and parapsychology.
The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, and was the first scientific organisation ever to examine claims of psychic and paranormal phenomena. The first president was Henry Sidgwick, who was a professor of moral philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. His chief associates were Frederic Myers, a professor of classics at Cambridge, and Edmund Gurney. Past presidents have included the distinguished psychologist and philosopher William James, philosopher Henri Bergson, prominent scientists, and British prime minister Arthur Balfour.
Parapsychologist and psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud says that “the impressive body of facts amassed over several decades by this group of dedicated investigators, as well as by colleagues in Europe and America, made it plain that science could continue to ignore this extraordinary side of man only by not living up to its professed objectives”.
Parapsychologist Arthur Ellison, himself twice the President of the SPR, writes: “Psychical research… has attracted some of the finest intellects in the sciences and the arts over the years since the founding of the SPR. What is more, many of these men and women, though starting off sceptically, became convinced — through direct experience — of the reality of paranormal phenomena… The SPR has had 12 Nobel Prize winners as members, and many Fellows of the Royal Society… The charge that psychical research only attracts the foolish and gullible could not be further from the truth”.
The most famous early ESP pioneer was J.B. Rhine, who in 1930 established the first ever parapsychology laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina under the influence of William MacDougall. He was responsible for creating almost single-handedly the whole new science of parapsychology. Together with his wife Louisa, he amassed evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. She examined 14,000 reports of spontaneous psi experiences, more than any other parapsychologist.
Rhine’s work impressed Carl Jung who referred to it extensively in his book Synchronicity. Jules Eisenbud says that “these techniques utilized the highest standards of scientific procedure”, and Arthur Ellison that “several independent witnesses were arranged to be present so that there was no doubt that all the precautions had been correctly taken”. There were “enormous odds against chance”.
Following on from the Rhines, other laboratories in Europe and the USA, produced results supporting the existence of parapsychological abilities.
In 1957 the Parapsychological Association (PA) was formed to serve as the international organisation of professional researchers investigating psi phenomena. In 1969 it was granted affiliation with the august American Association for the Advancement of Science. This was an important milestone in parapsychology’s struggle for scientific acceptance. The Association is conservative and not known for allowing flaky, new-Agey, pseudoscientific organisations into its ranks. The respected anthropologist and author Margaret Mead argued that “The PA uses statistics and blinds, placebos, double blinds and other standard devices. The whole history of scientific advance is full of scientists investigating phenomena that the establishment did not believe were there. I submit we vote in favour of this Association’s work”.
The Association was duly admitted. It was interesting therefore that ten years later, the distinguished physicist John Archibald Wheeler discovered to his chagrin that he was a scheduled speaker at a conference of the Association discussing ‘Science and Consciousness’ that included the parapsychologists Harold Puthoff and Charles Honorton. He made it clear that if he had known this, he would have withdrawn from the panel. He complained that the AAAS had made an error in admitting the PA as affiliates, and that they had used that affiliation to lend an air of legitimacy to their claims. He launched a campaign, which failed, calling on the AAAS to oust the PA from its ranks.
All this was somewhat ironic, since during those ten years, presumably unknown to him, the US government’s successful remote-viewing programme was being developed.
Remote Viewing studies had begun in the 19th century, when in 1882 Myers and Gurney, founders of the SPR, reported the results of some experiments. Similar results were obtained nearly 100 years later by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute. The US government and military were impressed and funded a remote-viewing programme known as Stargate to the tune of 20 million dollars for more than 20 years.
They gave their account of this in their book Mind-Reach. Other relevant books are: Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: the Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, David Morehouse’s Psychic Warrior, and Joe McMoneagle’s Memoirs of a Psychic Spy.
According to parapsychologist Arthur Ellison, the project produced positive results in favour of paranormal abilities with odds against chance of a hundred billion billion to one. He says that “no psychic got all his perceptions accurate but the best, after a long training lasting several years, got about 60% right”. He himself went on a training course led by Morehouse, and says that two methods of achieving remote viewing were practised. The first was to visualise an internal screen on which one allowed images to appear. The more advanced method seemed to involve out-of-body travelling and observation. (Edit. Since writing this article, I’ve become aware that Morehouse has been criticised by Paul H. Smith in his book Reading the Enemy’s Mind. See this article by Ken Korczak.)
The US project began following an experience with Uri Geller. According to a BBC TV documentary, a CIA officer Kit Green, who was interviewed on camera, said that he had received a telephone call on a classified line from the intelligence agency of a very powerful ally, which we assume to be Israel. He was told that Geller was doing things for them which they could not understand. “Things appeared to have an electromagnetic aspect. He was capable of altering highly sophisticated electronics, including imaging electronics at will. And they didn’t know how he was doing it”.
So Geller was brought to the USA in 1972 to be interviewed at the Stanford Research Institute by Puthoff and Targ, who had involvement with the CIA because of their work as laser physicists. They were experimenting with lasers as listening devices from distant places.
Uri Geller claimed to them that he had remote viewing ability. So they telephoned Kit Green, who was sceptical, but nevertheless spoke to Geller. He said that he would put something on his desk, and see if Geller could get it remotely. He chose a book, which was a collection of medical illustrations of the nervous system. He opened it up to a page, which showed a cross-section of the human brain.
Geller scribbled a drawing of a pan of scrambled eggs (which looked reasonably similar to the illustration), but said at the same time that the word ‘architecture’ was coming in strong. Green was astonished because he had written “architecture of a viral infection” next to the diagram. He still had the book and showed the page on camera. There had been no cues over the telephone, and Puthoff said that it was a genuine result. It could not be published at the time, classified because of direct CIA involvement.
As a result of this experience Kit Green authorised sufficient funds to enlarge a CIA programme to include remote viewing. Puthoff says that over the years maybe 20 million dollars was spent on the project, and “we ended up having several dozen remote viewers”. The SRI “came up with an almost unanimous verdict that Geller was legitimate”. The programme continued for over 20 years until 1994. It sometimes provided useful, highly detailed information, obtained at virtually no expense, and with no threats to the lives of agents. Also, remote viewing was able to provide information otherwise blocked by shielding or hidden structures, even at great distances.
One target successfully described was a secret US underground facility whose very existence was highly classified, including the names of secret code words written on folders inside locked file cabinets.
The most successful remote viewer on the programme was Joe McMoneagle. Here is an account of one of his successful attempts at remote viewing for defence purposes. (This is based on the account in Dean Radin’s book The Conscious Universe.)
He was asked “to ‘see’ inside a large building somewhere in northern Russia. A spy satellite photo had shown some suspicious heavy-construction activity around the building which was about a hundred yards from a large body of water. But the National Security Council had no idea what was going on inside, and it wanted to know. Without showing him the photo, and giving him only the map coordinates of the building, the officers in charge of the test asked for his impressions. McMoneagle was roughly correct, so he was shown the spy photo and asked what was inside the building. He sensed that the interior was a very large, noisy, active working area, full of scaffolding, girders, and blue flashes reminiscent of arc welding lights. In a later session, he sensed that a huge submarine was apparently under construction in one part of the building. But it was too big, much larger than any submarine that either the Americans or the Russians had. He drew a sketch of what he ‘saw’: a long, flat deck; strangely angled missile tubes with room for eighteen or twenty missiles; a new type of drive mechanism; and a double hull.
When these results were described to members of the National Security Council, they figured that McMoneagle must be wrong, because he would be describing the largest, strangest submarine in existence, and it was supposedly being constructed in a building a hundred yards from the water. Furthermore, other intelligence sources knew absolutely nothing about it. Still, because McMoneagle had gained a reputation for accuracy in previous tasks, they asked him to view the future to find out when this supposed submarine would be launched. McMoneagle scanned the future month by month, ‘watching’ the future construction via remote viewing, and sensed that about four months later the Russians would blast a channel from the building to the water and launch the submarine.
Sure enough, about four months later, in January 1980, spy-satellite photos showed that the largest submarine ever observed was travelling through an artificial channel from the building to the body of water. The pictures showed that it had twenty missile tubes and a large, flat deck”.
The ability to remote view psychically, thus proof of clairvoyance, is not therefore seriously in doubt. In 1988, a report which analysed all the psi experiments conducted at Stanford Research Institute since 1973 concluded that the statistical results indicated odds against chance of more than a billion billion to one. One highly qualified reviewer of a separate programme concluded that remote-viewing had been demonstrated: “I believe that it would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date”.
1983 was another significant date. In that year distinguished intellectual Arthur Koestler, who had a lifelong interest in the paranormal, established by bequest in his will a chair in the psychology department at the University of Edinburgh. He wanted the subject to be given serious attention within a university setting, and this was the only endowed chair of parapsychology in the UK. In 1985 American parapsychologist Robert Morris was appointed as Edinburgh’s first Koestler Professor of Parapsychology.
Some other noteworthy names in the field of parapsychological research, not mentioned so far, are Dean Radin, who has been described by one fan as the Einstein of parapsychology, and Ed Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut who secretly conducted an ESP experiment while out in space. He went on to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
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In the next article I consider exactly who and what is capable of ESP.
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