Nowadays there is a huge sub-culture in America that has experienced what are called occult phenomena. People in this group have practiced skills or activities that have brought them into contact with mental and physical phenomena unknown, and sometimes unthinkable, to those who have not done the practices.

They have practiced such skills as Hatha Yoga, Oriental martial arts, astrology, self-hypnosis, meditation, Reiki, Cranio-sacral therapy, acupuncture, meditation and other things. They are different from those people who have not done such things, and can often recognize other people who have done them by subtle clues imperceptible to those who haven’t.

Many are well-educated, rational, and literate, and they are not going to be easily silenced or dismayed by the always-present chorus of skeptics, who think they are being scientific when they are merely being ignorant. No amount of words or body language or scornful intonations from someone who hasn’t been there can affect someone who has had the experience considered impossible by another, except in the case of a young child.

It seems to be human nature to oppose anything that may cause a change in one’s specialty or comfort zone, unless immediate gain can be demonstrated.

The Parapsychological Association tried three times without success to be accepted into the American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS). They presented a whole body of evidence to the screening committee under the illusion that truth was important to all scientists. The material was not even examined by the committee who considered it beneath their notice. This attitude has been consistent among medical men and physical scientists for several hundred years.

However, by political type maneuvers, Professor Dean of the Newark College of Engineering managed on the FOURTH attempt to get the papers read, and the application finally got right through to the voting procedure.

When the AAAS screening committee announced that their examination of the methods of the PA showed that all its procedures were in fact scientific, and therefore it could be regarded as a scientific association, there was a minor uproar. The sort of thing you would imagine happening if someone at a Jesuit conference suggested that Southern Baptists actually had the true faith.

Scientists in the audience began jumping up in outrage to make speeches about the impossibility of psychic phenomena. None of them had ever investigated such matters. They were just incensed that their dogma had been questioned.

Then Margaret Mead, the world famous anthropologist, who had written the introduction to Gardner’s History of Witchcraft, pointed out what the objecting scientists had forgotten, or more likely didn’t know.

She said: “The whole history of science is full of scientists investigating phenomena that the establishment did not believe were there.” Obvious examples are hypnotism, wireless, radioactivity, atoms, the circulation of the blood, square roots of negative numbers, moons of other planets, evolution of species, flying machines, trains with metal wheels running on metal tracks, the screw propeller in ships, vitamins, radioactivity etc. There are thousands and thousands of examples.

All of these were scoffed at by the then-current experts, and those advocating them were pilloried and marginalized. After further speech by her, the PA was voted into the AAAS by 170 votes to 30.

We still have to contend with this pseudo-scientific attitude, held by many scientists and wannabees, apparently without their knowledge, that if something can’t happen according to known scientific laws, or scientific laws known by them, then it can’t happen at all. The error in this arrogant attitude is the unexamined assumption that all laws are now known. The comfort zone of very intellectual people is often very fragile. Absolutely nothing can be allowed in that may conflict with an accepted, and unexamined dogma of science.

If a course in the history of science and medicine was required in those two disciplines in order to graduate it would do a lot of good.

A very competent and informed scientist was once arguing with me about telepathy. He said it was impossible because of the inverse square law that governs the strength of radiation and gravity as they move out into space. The further out you go, the weaker the effect.

My response was, that as a scientist myself, I had to say that since telepathy was a demonstrated and thoroughly documented fact, that the inverse square law was obviously incomplete; because in science it is the OBSERVATION that is primary, not the hypothesis. Facts first, guesses later. If the laws do not explain a phenomenon, so much the worse for the laws. You modify the law as a scientist. You do not IGNORE the fact, just because it doesn’t fit the current systems.

Further, I had to point out that the answer to some questions is an experience, not a sentence, or an equation. He could not prove to me using the scientific method, that he loved his wife, and did the inverse square law modify his affection depending on how far apart they were.

Psychic events have been studied extensively by unusually brave scientists for a very long time. Probably the most well known investigation that could be called scientific was held at the time of the Great Depression when everyone was yearning for some way to foretell a future that did not involve a dictatorship.

In 1933 Dr. Rhine and his team at Duke University in North Carolina decided to actually experiment about the possibility of telepathy and its companion, pre-cognition, knowing something before it happens. They used packs (decks) of cards that had five symbols on them. You can get them easily now. They are called Zener cards. The symbols were chosen so that they cannot easily be mistaken for each other: an equal armed cross, a circle, a square, three wavy lines and a five pointed star.

There are 25 cards in a Zener pack so ‘guessing’ which card the guy in the next room was looking at when the light went on in your room would give a ‘guesstimate’ of one in five correct if chance only was involved.

Rhine varied the experiments so that sometimes the receiver had to predict what card the sender would pick from his machine shuffled deck before he did so. Every possible and impossible precaution was taken, and some people did better than chance by odds of millions to one.

Now Rhine had a problem. His experiments on precognition, foretelling what card would be picked next, were too simple and too effective. He knew the skepticism with which his results would be met, and held back on publishing them until the concept of such experiments became better known.

Around the same time in Britain, a British mathematician named S.G. Soal heard about Rhine’s experiment and decided to check it out himself using cards with animals on them instead of Zener symbols. He did experiments from 1934 to 1939 and found absolutely no such evidence that some minds could predict events. With the religious fervour that often happens in such cases in science he decided that Rhine must be a fraud or at least deluded, and began to attack the Rhine results, based on his own experiments.

Meanwhile, at Cambridge University another investigator named Carington had been doing his own eccentric British experiments. Every evening for a month he opened his big dictionary at random and made a drawing of the first noun on the page that could be drawn as a picture. He left the drawing in his locked up study overnight and 250 people throughout Britain, on that night, guessed what it was, did their own drawings, dated them, and sent them by mail to Carington.

He too found no direct correlations but noticed a very interesting pattern of guesses that were correct a couple of days ahead or behind his own selection. He would draw a cat for example on a Wednesday and some of his experimenters would send in a cat two days before or two days after his own selection. Remember that this was in the days before computers. The drawings were sent by post.

He suggested that Soal should look for delayed or accelerated results in his own collection. Soal refused several times even to consider the matter. He had already made his mind up about the whole thing. But eventually Carington’s continuous persistence wore him down and he did check his results for what Carington called time displacements.

And to his great astonishment he found them. A photographer named Shackleton had done no better than chance on the one to one basis, but had scored four out of five on some 800 trials on time displacement.

When the Rhine and Soal experiments became well known it caused quite a stir in Britain because London and Cambridge universities were concerned. And there were twenty three mathematicians and scientists who were involved as witnesses in the Soal experiments. But the skeptics could give no scientific explanation for the results and therefore dismissed them as card tricks.

I had personal experience of this astonishing attitude among people who were supposed to be scientific. In the 1950’s I was a semi professional card magician belonging by audition to the London Society of Magicians, the Ace of Clubs we called it. And believe me, there is no audience like an audience of professional magicians when you are showing them card tricks, and trying for effects they do not know, or can’t see through.

On one occasion I was with a group of people who belonged to the British Society for Psychical Research, of which I was also a member. Knowing that my hobby was card magic one of the group produced a pack of Zener cards and asked if I could show them something. So I did a straightforward mental magic card trick that depended entirely on sleight of hand and misdirection, and apparently predicted the whole deck of 25 cards with 100% accuracy.

Immediately some of the people there jumped on the demonstration and said that the housewife they had such unusual results from must been getting them by trickery. In vain I pointed out that I had spent some years learning how to manipulate cards, and many times my fingers were bleeding from the sharp edges of using the best cards in the world, Bicycles, for my practice.

Their relief at being taken off the hook, of having an explanation that allowed them to ignore the possibility of a predictive capacity in their subject, overwhelmed any common sense approach to the matter. Because a skilled magician could produce what looked like the same result, every housewife and plumber who produced the same result must have been using the same manipulative skills.

The Great Randy is a magnificent magician, stage and illusion variety. And he has found a trick way to bend spoons like Uri Geller the Israeli magician. Therefore in his view, those who bend spoons and claim that they do it using psychic powers are fakes.

But my class of ten year olds bent spoons watching Geller on their TV, and dozens of children in Manchester University experiments bent spoons, and twisted forks embedded in plastic under strict experimental conditions. But now there are many scientists who have sighed with relief at Randy’s ability and say, “It’s only a trick.” Even when the person who does it obviously isn’t a trained magician and doesn’t know the trick.

And we always now encounter the skeptics who are absolutely so certain of their scientific religious dogma that there are no psychic phenomena, that there is no way whatever of producing phenomena that they would agree must be paranormal.

We even have the U.S. Army teaching people to do what is called ‘far viewing.’ Anybody can be taught to do that, but the skeptics will still chalk it all up to coincidences.

But maybe pre-cognitive dreams will finally stump the skeptics. They won’t ever admit that maybe they actually did foretell the future because their dogma says that is impossible. But they just might have to admit that it happened, but they can’t explain it.

The famous example of Lincoln having a dream about his own assassination that is in so many Lincoln histories doesn't count because it's anecdotal and non repeatable. John Donne's famous dream of a train crash which made him write a book about Time, doesn't count. It's a single incident. Therefore anecdotal. It just doesn't occur to such people that most of what happens to them only happens once. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. But how about about repeated experiments about pre-cognitive dreams?

For example there is a centre named after a great Jewish mystic and rabbi, the Maimonedes Medical Centre in Brooklyn. There is a laboratory there in which dreaming has been studied for decades. It was there that researchers discovered that what are known as REM, rapid eye movements correlated with specific EEG patterns of brain waves, and they occurred when people were dreaming.

Some genius there made the cognitive jump that maybe here was a way of documenting beyond doubt the exact moment when a pre-cognitive dream occurred, a dream that foretold a future event.

They had a subject, Malcolm Bessent who had shown in previous testing that he had the capacity for pre-cognitive dreams. So they concocted what anyone, except a very scared skeptic would agree was a totally randomly selected set of events. Each night Malcolm would sleep at the lab and was asked to try to dream about what would happen to him the next day.

Each night he was awakened when the EEG patterns indicated that his REM showed that he was dreaming, and his dream was recorded and dated and timed. Next day, a scientist of the Centre, who knew nothing about the dreams of the previous night, selected a word at random from a book. That word would then be used to construct a happening that might involve Bessent’s dream.

When the eight sessions were completed an independent team of judges compared Bessent’s dreams with the randomly selected material. They could expect one hit under such circumstances. Instead there were five.

As an example… in one of Bessent’s dreams he reported being in a large concrete building, rather like a hospital. There was a white coated patient from upstairs escaping. The concrete wall was the same color as sand and was curved, with the escaping patient getting as far as an archway.

The scientist’s randomly selected word next day was ‘corridor.’ The scientist concerned selected a Van Gogh painting to show Bessent as his happening. You may know it as the “Hospital Corridor at St. Remy” with its lone figure in a concrete building that was amental institution. The corridor contained arches.

Not being able to explain such experiments, the skeptics did what they always do in such circumstances, they ignored them.

But now, in the days of atomic physics and electronics, the scientists who are expert in these matters and are investigating psychic phenomena are more difficult for the skeptics to dismiss as weirdos.

German scientists have always had a reputation for depth of learning and ability, particularly in chemistry and physics. A German trained scientist, Helmut Schmidt, was an electronics expert working for Boeing in Seattle, Washington.

He thought of a way of testing pre-cognition using the activity of sub atomic particles, and the quantum theory fact that anything that happens is a probability happening. It’s more likely than not that if you step out of an seventieth storey window of a skyscraper, that you will move downwards towards the street level according to generally accepted equations of motion.

But there is also the chance, that at that very instant, all the molecules in your body would move up instead of down. It’s only practically certain that you would fall down. It’s theoretically possible, with tremendous odds against it, that you would fall up.
The principle of uncertainty states that it is impossible to verify both the position and velocity of a sub atomic particle at the same time. If you do one thing you cannot do the other.

Schmidt decided to use the totally unpredictable randomity of emission of radioactive particles from strontium 90 as the basis of his experiment. There is no skeptic who would even theorize that someone could control the emissions of radioactive particles.

Instead of flipping coins Schmidt used a Geiger counter that showed exactly the moment when the unpredictable radioactive particle was being emitted. He connected this to an electronic switch that oscillated between his heads and tails positions at a million changes a second.

He connected four lights to the switch. When the particle was emitted the switch would switch on two of the lights. The right hand two represented heads and the left hand two were tails.

The task of the testee was to predict which would light up next, heads or tails. Like a coin spin the results of chance would predict heads and tails equally. Your hits would be balanced by your misses.

Schmidt tested 100 people and found that there were three who consistently scored above chance results. These were a spiritualist medium, a truck driver, and a housewife. He tested them with over 60,000 trials and found results against chance of over a billion to one.

His results were checked by another investigator, Harraldson, who duplicated Schmidt’s experiment with eleven people and got even better results when he told the testees when they were right or wrong. This has been true throught these kinds of experiments. People get better when they know about their accuracy.

Using mixed electronic and atomic methods it became clear that whatever was doing it was doing it at speeds amounting to instantaneous. The right brain was immediately suspected.

I could go on giving examples for hundreds of pages, but I’ll content myself with a couple more. In spite of the kinds of results I have mentioned the skeptics were unconvinced. Research scientists in the pre cognitive and remote viewing field called them the ‘loyal opposition.’ The only way to eliminate them is to outlive them, which is what happens generation after generation. New ideas can’t grab hold until the experts holding tenaciously to the old ones have died.

You may have heard of Targ. I’ve mentioned him before. He is a research scientist at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. He and his associates gave the skeptics a double whammy to deal with. They not only showed that precognition could occur, but that it was trainable. People could be taught to do it or to improve their skill.

Targ invented a very clever teaching machine about the size of an elementary school kid’s lunch box. It had five buttons. These were linked to a slide collectionof four slides of the San Francisco area, randomly selected. Each of four of the switches were correlated with each of the four slides. The fifth switch was there in case the testee didn’t feel like predicting, a condition that many other experiments had not allowed for.

The electronic random number generator in the box would choose a slide before or after the testee hit the button to show which slide they thought would would be chosen. So two kinds of tests were possible. The testee then played a game with the box, trying to predict which slide would be shown. The machine indicated whether the testee was right or wrong.

When the machine made the selection before the testee the best performer was getting 40 hits out of 96 trials. Chance would be 24. There are 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 ways of putting four things in order.

When the machine made the selection after the testee the results at first were chance, but as the trials proceeded the testee reached about the previous level. She did what people do who practice anything. She got better at it.

Remote viewing is accepted by everybody now except the loyal opposition. But Targ and his associates produced the ultimate insult and showed that people who could remote view could predict where someone would be, and not just view them where they were.

Once again the best subject was a photographer, this time named Hella. Targ told Hella that he or his associate Puthoff was going somewhere in about half an hour. She was to visualize and tape record in advance her ideas of where they were going.

When they said that neither Targ nor his buddy had any idea where they would be going. Ten minutes before Hella began her prediction the tester would set out for a half hour drive in the local area. In the car was a random number generator and ten sealed envelopes, each containing the name of a different location. At the half hour mark, after Hella had done her predicting, the tester activated the random number generator, opened the envelope it indicated and drove off for about fifteen minutes to get the place. There he stayed for about fifteen minutes, drove back and gave the envelope to the security guard at the Stanford Research Institute.

In all four of the experiments using this method Hella gave an unmistakable description of where the tester was to be.

We now have hundreds of experiments performed by renowned scientists in dozens of locations over decades. But whatever the technology or the scientists involved they are simply unbelievable to those who, no matter how intelligent or talented, cannot change their minds. And these were not anecdotal incidents. They were repeatable experiments.

Nothing whatever is believed if it only happens once. It is immediately dismissed as mere anecdotal evidence. For example. I was at a party in London once and was introduced casually to a young woman as an up and coming young magician. Several weeks later she asked me to come to her apartment to help her deal with strange phenomena that were happening.

When I got there she made me a nice meal and showed me on her beautiful walnut table three deep marks that looked as if they had been made by red hot steel claws. That was one of the things that bothered her. She had smelled burning and rushed into the kitchen, but nothing was on the stove. When she got into the dining room the crystal ball that she had bought in King’s Road Chelsea that morning was on the table. Under it was the burnt wood.

She showed me the crystal ball. She said she had seen it in a shop window of an antique store and the price asked was so low that she thought it was a mistake. The shopkeeper told her that was the price, and she brought it home. Sounded like an occult story by a Victorian magician. But there were the marks.

At that moment a very large book shot out of her book case and landed several feet away. She was unperturbed and said that it often happened. Her very long windows were covered by very thick velvet curtains on the old fashioned bamboo rods with three or four inch rings on them. Suddenly the ten foot long, heavy curtains swung wide open and then closed again. She said that often happened also. She was totally unafraid of such poltergeist like behavior that would have scared many women into moving.

So we had a long talk and I finally figured out the connections. She had a sterling silver napkin ring that I suggested she used as a stand for the claw crystal, and I gave her a visualizing regimen connected with the Kabbalah Tree, she being Jewish.

Two months later she got in touch again. When I saw her this time it was with great difficulty that I recognized the same woman. Her sallow skin had become radiant. Her hair shone like polished silk and she was obviously in wonderful health.

She told me that the day after she began the Kabbalistic meditation she broke out in boils all over her body. She figured that this was a quick way to get rid of the stuff her body was trying to get rid of and persevered through it. Inside a week her body was transformed, the activities stopped and nothing unusual had happened since. The whole house seemed to have recovered from something, just as she had.

Now, to me and for her that happened, and there was no doubt in our minds that it happened. But it could not be repeated over and over for some skeptic who just couldn’t believe it. Some evidence is historical evidence. Nobody expects the Civil War to be re-fought just to prove ‘scientifically’ that it happened.

There is probably no way that you will ever be able to convince a skeptic of something psychic that you know for sure. Photographs are no longer evidence now that movies have such wonderful special effects. Corroborative witness are not effective. You could have hyptotized them all. Oh, you didn’t know that you were a skilled hypnotist? Tell that to the Marines. When you deal with invincible ignorance don’t try to fight it. Just wait.

Sooner or later there will be more who know than those who won’t know, whatever, and then things will change.