(Part 1)

People I’ve met, and those I’ve read about, who claim that psychic abilities (such as telepathy, clairvoyance or telekinesis) or paranormal phenomena (such as ghostly apparitions) do not exist because there is no scientific basis or proof for such things, do so out of sheer ignorance.

Both the British and the American Societies for Psychical Research, established in the late 1800s, have tons of research data pointing to the existence of psychic and paranormal phenomena. The problem is that skeptics and critics never really bothered to look at the evidence.

They sound like that character in a cartoon who growled at his subordinates: “I have made up my mind! Don’t bother me with facts!”

Probably the first to scientifically study psychic ability (which he called Extra Sensory Perception or simply ESP) under strict and controlled laboratory conditions for more than 40 years beginning the early 1940s was professor JB Rhine of Duke University in North Carolina.

Using Zener cards, he proved that there are people who could read the mind of another through telepathy beyond statistical coincidence or chance. When he died in the 1980s, his wife, Martha, continued his scientific work, which left little doubt as to the existence of telepathy (mind-to-mind communication) and clairvoyance (the ability to see things ordinary people cannot see).

In the early 1970s, at the behest of the US government, a highly confidential and top secret research program was initiated at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, to determine “if a psychic ability exists that could remotely and accurately pinpoint nuclear warheads and others secret military conditions without having been there.”

The ESP project was secretly funded by four government agencies, namely, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Armed Forces and NASA.

The process was later known as remote viewing, or the ability to project one’s consciousness or awareness to a distant place which one has never been to before, and to describe it accurately. The task of finding out whether such an ability did in fact exist, and whether it can be proven under strict scientifically controlled conditions, fell in the hands of two physicists, Dr Russell Targ and Dr. Harold Puthoff.

Skeptical physicists

With the help initially of psychics Patrick Price and Ingo Swann, the two skeptical physicists, after two decades of experimentation, came up with the conclusion that remote viewing is real. Now, according to a declassified report, the CIA has included remote viewing as part of an agent’s training.

At Princeton University’s Anomalous Phenomena department, Dr. Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne have established beyond scientific doubt and under the strictest controls that certain people have the incredible ability to influence the fall of dice in a roulette machine. This ability is known as telekinesis, which can simply be defined as “mind over matter.”

The proof of their meticulous research, conducted over a period of more than 25 years, is contained in their pioneering book entitled “Margins of Reality.” Those who love to pore over statistics and calculate probability ratios repeatedly will love this book. I don’t. I read only a few pages before I put it down. I do not have to read such massive data to believe that telekinesis exists. I have proven this over the past 20 years that I have been conducting my basic ESP and Intuition seminar.

In 1976, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the American astronaut who was the sixth man to walk on the moon and who holds a doctorate degree in science, edited a pioneering book entitled “Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science,” containing a rich collection of cutting-edge research and experiments in the various aspects of psychic phenomena written by leading researchers and experts in the field.

The book shows in no unmistakable terms how conventional science has deliberately ignored a great part of extraordinary phenomena that millions of people around the world have experienced, simply because they cannot be explained by currently accepted scientific principles.

Extraordinary psychic abilities repeatedly demonstrated by such world-renowned psychics and clairvoyants as Uri Geller of Israel, Olof Jonsson of Sweden, Gerard Croiset of the Netherlands, and Barbara Ivanova of Russia and many others have not convinced die-hard skeptics because their psychic feats were considered merely anecdotal, and were not performed under strict, scientifically controlled conditions.

And yet when such abilities are demonstrated in the scientific laboratory, they claim the experimental methods used were faulty or that the investigators were biased in favor of the psychics.

With such a tautologous (or circular) reasoning, no psychic investigator will win the argument. As the Dutch philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wisely said: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”