Book three in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is UFOs and UAP. Are We Really Alone? Now available on Amazon. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here, we are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal.
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Visit their website at cihs.edu. You can now download a free PDF copy of issue number eight of the New Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring psychokinesis. With me is Lloyd Auerbach, who is a board member of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of some nine books on parapsychology, ghost hunting, psychokinesis, reincarnation, poltergeist, and other topics. He's also an experiencer of psychokinetic phenomena.
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Once again, this is an internet interview and now I'll switch over to the internet video.
Welcome, Lloyd. It's a pleasure to be with you once again.
Thank you, Jeff. Great to be here.
We're going to focus today on psychokinesis, or mind over matter. I know you've approached the subject both as a researcher and as, I guess the best way to put it, as a person endeavoring to learn how to produce psychokinetic effects.
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With the intention of trying to understand from an experiential perspective, yes.
And because there are many different approaches to psychokinesis. Some people do it for healing, other people use it in the martial arts. I think they have very different mindsets. Well, you know, they probably do have different mindsets, but you know, there's such a range.
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When we talk about psychokinesis, my book, Mind Over Matter, one of the things that came out of a lot of my discussions with Martin Caton, who is mentioned prominently in my book. Martin, just kind of to mention this to the viewers, was the author of a book called Cyborg, which became the $6 million man. In fact, he was a consultant on that show and helped create the Bionic Woman. But more importantly, he was a consultant to NASA for many years.
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He was an aviation expert, wrote tons of science fiction, wrote a lot of nonfiction, and convinced me that he could do psychokinesis. It's kind of an odd story. But as we talked about PK, because he'd done actually research on bionics to actually write that book, Cyborg. He did research on some very interesting areas scientifically. He felt, and I completely agreed, that our minds affect our own body.
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That is psychokinesis, whereas many of our colleagues will not consider that PK. They'll say it's got to be outside the body for that effect. I think from a research point of view, people do say it has to be out of the body. But I seem to recall even J.B. Ryan suggesting that, you know, if I ask you to raise your arm when you want to, like so, that seems to be mind over matter, if ever there was.
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Absolutely. And which is why my book actually starts with that perspective, and then it kind of moves forward to where we get to points where you're affecting things outside your body. And one of the things that I wanted to do in the book, I mean, very honestly, when I wrote the book, initially, I was planning on doing lots of interviews with some sports figures, professional athletes.
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My dad was a producer, sports producer. He had worked for NBC Sports for many years, was doing the Rose Bowl internationally. And I had met a number of professional athletes through him, and he still was good friends with some of them. Unfortunately, the publisher didn't see fit to give me enough money to do that. So I based it on my previous encounters with athletes and other research I did and talking to the few that I was able to talk to.
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There's a really interesting thing about psychokinesis when you look at it, and that is it fits in with what sports psychologists talk about. It's all human performance. And to me, the key element of an illustration of how this works on us, on our bodies, there's two. One is the placebo effect, which absolutely has a positive, or the nocebo effect has the negative effect.
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And then the other is Roger Bannister running the four-minute mile in 1954, after everyone said that was not physically possible.
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And then people did it. Once they saw he did it, many people did it. So it's this idea that we set limitations on ourselves that I really wanted to talk about in that book.
In terms of the four-minute mile, I think it's fair to say they trained harder.
Yeah, they probably did. But, you know, you have physiologists who were surprised, and other people were surprised that somebody could actually do it.
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It's that idea of what's impossible. I mean, that's the problem, is that we set these limits physically and also mentally on ourselves psychologically. And that is a good part of what human performance psychology is about, getting past that. Well, but in athletic performance, it's fair to say that records are broken every year when it comes to running.
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They are, although one of the things I learned from my dad and from some of the athletes I talked to before my dad passed away is that there was a slowdown in professional athletics. And the slowdown, even in amateur athletics, is because of an immediate suspicion of performance-enhancing drugs being involved. I mean, that's gotten so way out of line over the last 25 or 30 years that someone who breaks a record may immediately be suspect. Given all of that, it would seem to me, in spite of the enormous lore amongst athletes, that sometimes they do things that would normally seem impossible, like basketball players who leap up in the air and seem to hover in midair longer than they should.
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People watch that sort of thing on TV probably all the time. It's still probably the case that athletic performance doesn't lend itself very well to parapsychological investigation. No, I would agree with that. I think it's more the mindset and getting out of your own way that lends itself to our work with psychokinesis. But I will say this, since we're talking about athletic performance, Ted Owens, the PK man whom I researched for some 10 years, used to like to use psychokinesis to hurt athletic teams. He would sit on a Sunday afternoon and drink a bottle of scotch and have three TV sets in his living room with three different football games on.
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He would pick the team that's favored to win and cause them to fumble the ball. A test of this ability was done by Max Vogel, who was a researcher working with Mensa. Ted Owens was a member of Mensa. Max Vogel reported that one season he watched Ted Owens for the whole football season and claimed that he had a 75 percent accuracy rate using psychokinesis to cause the underdog team to win.
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You know, I have no problem accepting that. You know, I think that sometimes the crowd may actually be influencing things that are going on on the field.
Mm-hmm. Ted Owens said he could have done even better, but just causing fumbles isn't necessarily enough if the losing team doesn't take advantage and score.
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That's right. Yeah, if the losing team's really bad, then that's not going to help at all.
But it's interesting that athletes might use psychokinesis to improve their performance, but a fellow like Ted Owens, a shaman type of magician type of person, might use psychokinesis to cause fumbles.
Well, and the question becomes then, if athletes become aware of that, do they hire their own shaman to counteract that kind of thing?
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Ted Owens tried to sell his services to various athletic team owners and that never worked well, even though I think occasionally several of them would test him.
The problem was that he came out well, that he was successful in those tests.
Then he demanded that they hire him on a full-time basis, which they were not ready to do.
So it caused conflicts with those people, to put it mildly.
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I can only imagine, had they hired him and he had shown to be active, the NFL would have come out with a rule against hiring people, because it's cheating.
I guess you'd have to say it is cheating.
Well, I do remember another test. I don't know if you knew about this one, but back, I believe it was in the 1940s, at Duke University, J.B. Rhine decided that he would test in basketball games, rim shots.
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How many of the rim shots went in, as opposed to bounce back out of the basket, for the home team against the opposing team?
He felt that the crowd would use psychokinesis on the rim shots, so that more of them would go through the basket.
But I don't think he ever published that study.
Yeah, I haven't heard that one.
I'll have to ask my friends at the Rhine Center if they have any information about that.
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That's kind of interesting.
The various ways in which psychokinesis manifests can include, amongst other things, the martial arts. And I know you had a martial artist give you some training in psychokinesis.
There was a martial artist, he's still around in Ohio, by the name of Guy Civelli, who did kung fu and other martial arts.
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He had presented himself to some researchers. In fact, I had spoken to Bill Roll, our late colleague about Civelli, because he had tested Civelli, as apparently had other people at one point. And he ended up at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, where Carlos Osis and Donna McCormick did some work with him.
And among the things he claimed he could do was the ability to affect or influence someone, kind of like a force push at a distance.
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So one of the tests that we actually did was for him to try to influence, based on random movements, a subject while watching them on a video camera from an isolation room. He was given random movements to get the subject to move forward, backward, side to side. I was that subject. I had no idea what these things... one could say that perhaps I was clairvoyantly tuning in to the... or telepathically to what he was supposed to do.
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But at one point, apparently he had several pushes in a row to push me backward. And I almost fell over because it felt like somebody was shoving me at that point. Very impressive. We also had him try to break an infrared photoelectric beam, like you would use for home security. There was a candle on the other side of that, a couple of feet away.
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And he had claimed that he could actually influence or knock out the candle flame. So he did his thing. The candle flame flickered. It didn't actually go out, but the infrared beam did break. It did stop. Something had interrupted it.
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And then he taught me and Donna how to do this. For me, it was interesting. I was at the time having some conflict with the board of directors of the ASPR, and I was not able to get anything happening. And then Donna said, think about the board and what they're doing right now. And just, boom, it just immediately broke.
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In other words, he was trying to use anger or frustration, negative energy to power the psychokinesis in effect. He was trying to get an emotional rise out of me to do it. Yeah, that was it. Andrei Apuharich, in his book Beyond Telepathy, claimed that both telepathic sending and psychokinesis involved emotional arousal.
I think he called it an adrenergic state. The adrenal glands get activated.
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And that's kind of interesting, except that if we flip that around, there's a lot of activity that I dealt with that had very little to do with emotional activity. And actually Pamela Ray Heath's book, Mind Matter Interaction, in her previous study, which was her doctoral dissertation, The PK Zone, looked at the experience of doing psychokinesis from a number of people who could claim to be able to do it.
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And one of the key elements that came out was this sense of non-emotion when you experience it yourself. Now, granted, I had that one emotional burst that broke the photoelectric beam, but subsequent to that, when I had other experiences, and actually what Martin Caden pointed me to in my own situation was when I was bowling, I got this sense of incredible calm sometimes, of non-emotionality, and I knew if I just simply tossed the ball, it would just knock the pins down.
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And we actually went bowling in Florida when I was working with him. So it really, for me, having had these experiences, it was more almost watching things happen with dispassion. I'm a Star Trek fan, so I felt like it was my Vulcan state.
I see. And of course, when it comes to athletic performance, many athletes talk about the flow state, being in the zone, which is a state of total self-confidence, but serenity, calmness at the same time, and superhuman performance.
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Yeah, and if you look at the book actually, In the Zone, by Ray White and Michael Murphy, it takes a look at golf and other sports, specifically looking at that concept, and you compare that to what Pam found in her study of who did PK, and it's pretty much the same. So it may well be that the emotional arousal doesn't really supply the energy for the psychokinesis, but to the extent that it works, it may be a question of focused intention.
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Intention, I think, in certain instances, is probably a trigger. We know that in many poltergeist cases, the living agent is undergoing some form of stress, high emotional stress, and it's that stress that triggers things happening. And yet, with people who practice PK and do it, even martial artists, there's a sense of calm. There's that real zone-like feeling. You're one with the force in some respects.
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And certainly in the literature on psychic healing, to the extent that psychic healing involves psychokinesis, which to me is the most natural way to think about it, psychic healers also talk about entering into a state of serenity, of love, and sending lots of positive feelings. You know, in the Rhein Center, Rhein Research Center, John Kruth and a couple of other researchers are actually doing research with biophotons, which are basically photons of particles of light that are given off by our brains through our skulls.
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Normally not much, I mean, it can be sensed or detected in a specific physical condition. They have this completely blacked out room and a photomultiplier set up that will detect as little as one photon per second. And they've been working with martial artists in a couple of instances and healers. And when these folks get into that state of energy or healing or whatever they are doing or whatever they call it, one of the healers was able to actually generate close to a million biophotons per second.
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Now, that's not visible. First of all, it was ultraviolet biophotons, so they wouldn't be visible anyway. It sounds like a lot. It is an incredible lot compared to the fact that normally we're only doing one or two every second. But what they found is that healers and martial artists, either with their qi or their healing state, are producing something that's physically detectable.
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There is a whole question of the capacities of the human body. We don't know everything that the human body can do. And as I recall reading in your book about Nina Kolagina, the great Russian psychic who was noted for psychokinesis, and how researchers discovered that she was emitting certain electrostatic enzymes from her hands. Histamines, her sweat. She would sweat a lot. And the Russian scientists found that the sweat contained an enormous amount of histamines.
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That's what we take allergy pills for, antihistamines. And the histamines would react to electrostatic force. And she would touch things that were not magnetic or metallic or anything like that. And they really didn't test for how much electrostatic field she was putting out at that point. But researchers have pointed out that human beings can generate a pretty hefty electrostatic field.
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Maybe not consciously, but we can do it. Our bodies can generate that. So that's what was going on with her case. To me, you know, when I talked to one of our colleagues about that, he said, well, there you go. There's your explanation. I said, well, can you do that?
That's still definitionally mind over matter.
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Her intention was to move the object. Her body produced something that could do that, something that most people could not possibly do, even unconsciously, let alone consciously. Well, that raises a question about the nature of psychokinesis itself. You're suggesting in this example that it's goal oriented, that it's not the mechanism or process that's so important, but the final outcome.
And that seems to be the case from a lot of research with macro PK and micro PK, looking at how human beings can affect computers and other devices.
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You know, it's hard to imagine that your phone not working is a goal in any way, shape, form, you know, as it's not working because of psychokinesis or your computer getting disrupted or crashing, but it's a stress related reaction. You know, when it comes down to a poltergeist phenomena is kind of like a telekinetic temper tantrum. Who amongst us, when we're upset, frustrated, stressed out, wouldn't want to throw something against the wall and break it?
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But let's face it, that's not what you do societally or otherwise. Your family would be very upset with you if you did things that way. So our unconscious apparently takes advantage of that. The goal is to blow off steam and it does it by moving, breaking, doing things.
So that's still a goal. It may not be a goal you might like, but it's still a goal.
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And of course, these sorts of poltergeist cases come up frequently for parapsychologists.
Yeah, not as frequently as we'd like. Today, the fact is that because of all the ghost hunting groups and because of misinformation on television and on the web, people think poltergeist activity is caused by ghosts rather than by living agents. And the ghost hunting groups have no clue, unfortunately, for the most part.
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They really because they don't know anything about parapsychology research in this area or the Society for Psychical Research at all, covering these aspects of things. So they approach these cases differently and they rarely ever get to us, partly because they burn out. I mean, poltergeist cases don't last terribly long anyway, because whatever's going on in that person's mind, body, brain, it just stops. It burns through the energy, it burns through the process.
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And in fact, I just got an email from a woman, I'm guessing from her spelling, she's either in Canada or the UK, she didn't say where she was, having experiences with her family, psychokinetic experiences. It's a really interesting one. I'm going to look into it certainly as I can. These things happen to people. They happen to people under certain circumstances. Probably more frequent are our stresses in modern society, causing us to have these problems with our technology.
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Well, there was a study done many years ago, I think Robert Morris was involved looking at certain people who have a propensity when they get near equipment, the equipment breaks down. Yeah, actually, it's the mood. He laid certain people function-linked, because there were some people who actually could make devices work better.
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They had just some connection. And then there was a lot of people who are malfunction-linked, who cause things to break down. In fact, a famous example is the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel laureate physicist who people used to tell this story. They'd say, you know, great theoretical physicists are poor experimenters. And Pauli was such a great theoretician that whenever he walked into a laboratory, the equipment would break.
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Right, right. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting how there are certain people.
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One of the things I've loved to do over the years is, in college, I met some folks who claimed that they couldn't wear watches. You know, they put the watch on, it would stop.
It didn't matter what kind of watch it was, whether it was wind-up, whether it was electronic, you know, battery-driven, they couldn't wear watches. And mainly because somebody I dated was late all the time and couldn't wear a watch. I mean, I saw the thing stop all the time.
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I thought, maybe the people who can't wear watches have an issue about time. It's not as important to them to be on time or to have that. And I've just, you know, anecdotally have asked people this question, and the people who can't wear watches do have a problem with time.
Well, that's very interesting.
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So, you're suggesting it might have to do with the psychological dynamics. Yes, there's a goal. The goal is, if I don't have a watch, I can't be on time. I don't have to be on time. Nobody can blame me for not being on time. Jule Eisenbud, in his book Parapsychology and the Unconscious, looks at that from a Freudian perspective. His concern is that people who have self-destructive psychological complexes, if they also develop psychokinetic or extrasensory skills, those abilities might end up working in the service of a self-destructive complex to the detriment of the person involved.
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I would say that that would be the case. I've occasionally run into people who have had horrific experiences of a psychic nature. I mean, for example, psychic attacks. One of the cases that I had, a poltergeist case that I had at JFK in the 80s, was a woman who claimed to be physically attacked by some well, she claimed it was this big shadowy thing, humanoid, but not really human, that would grab her by the throat and just really squeeze, you know, never killed her, but would do that.
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And when she came into JFK to meet with myself and Sharon Frankmont, formerly Sharon Salfon, she showed us the marks on her throat. She also had a witness who saw the marks appearing. And when Sharon and I actually went to her mother's apartment where she was living, she had an attack in front of us.
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And I saw her throat bulge out and basically depressions on one side of her throat go in and one on the other. I yelled at it, it stopped, which in itself is a little unique when you think about it, if it was an outside force. Sharon, who was also an amazing intuitive and psychic, detected nothing, which is by the way, the case from psychics in poltergeist cases.
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And then we come to find out in further interviewing, a couple things came up that turned out to give us the psychological key to what was actually going on. And so it all boiled down to there was a very good psychological reason that she was shutting herself up.
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Because at the time she was starting to see a therapist about recovered memories of her father molesting her as a child, and she was embarrassed and guilty about it. And the attacks and bad nightmares started around the same time. We even found the trigger of the whole thing.
So what we see with psychic attacks, when there are physical effects, is that they're psychosomatic in the sense that the psychology of the person is causing them typically, even though they can be physical effects, and I would say psychokinetic effects.
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So in this instance, where you saw the depressions on the throat, that would seem to be a physical effect caused by her mind.
Yes. Yeah, you know, and hypnotherapists and hypnotists talk about very suggestible people.
And I've seen this happen once, by the way, where the person is under hypnosis, and the hypnotherapist says, this pencil is a red hot iron poker, touches the skin, and then they get a blister immediately.
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And there's actually nothing hot about that pencil at all. It's just that the mind causes a reaction in the body.
Of course, this is an example that would lead some people to cultivate more of a skeptical attitude towards psychokinesis. And I know your writing partner, Ed May, is such a person, a very prominent parapsychologist who doesn't believe that we have yet obtained good evidence for psychokinesis. In fact, I think it'd probably be fair to characterize Ed May's position as saying that we probably never will obtain evidence for psychokinesis.
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I think that's probably characterized Ed correctly, but at least I've given him something to think about, because he was the one who actually found, through the Russian interaction, that Nina Kologina was exuding histamines. And we had the conversation, and I said, that's still psychokinesis. So it's a matter of definition. And actually, Ed has mentioned that he's taken a look, and the human body can produce enough electrostatic force to move an object.
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But if that's intentional, or even unconsciously intentional, that's psychokinesis. We now know, for that specific instance, that's the motive force that did it, but it doesn't mean that psychokinesis doesn't exist. As a mystical force, it probably doesn't, but as a real thing, that's a different story. I mean, the most impressive instances of psychokinesis are those that occur at a distance, so that there's no possibility of any kind of physiological, electrostatic, or electromagnetic interference.
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Yeah, and actually working with Martin Kaden, before I started working with him, he had worked with some guys from NASA and some other researchers, non-parapsychology. I mean, he had actually communicated with Bill Roll and a couple of others who had worked with him for a little bit, but he had buddies at NASA who were interested in this, and in one instance, and I spoke to the guy who was involved in this, they had Marty three miles away from a chamber in which his target was placed with a video camera.
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He was watching it, and he got it to move from three miles away. So there's that kind of effect. He also was able to sit outside an atmosphere chamber. He had a friend at an archery company. The company actually produced arrows and other types of things that had to be aerodynamic. They had a testing chamber with different levels of atmospheric pressure.
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They put one of these targets, which spins if you blow on it, granted, in this chamber, reduced the atmosphere to one one-hundredth, as I recall, of an atmosphere, of one atmosphere. They had a fan inside, which they turned on by remote control, which was spinning but could not turn the object. And Marty sat outside, and when they asked him to move, to make it move, it moved.
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That's very impressive. It is. And again, in this case, I don't know if the electrostatic force could actually move through the walls of the chamber to actually cause that item to move, not without causing some other disruption.
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No, it doesn't. It doesn't seem like electrostatic force at all. So, I understand that there are many people, groups of people around the world, who train people to perform psychokinetic tasks by doing just that, taking a little paper pinwheel on a pin and maybe putting it inside a glass jar to remove wind effects and then having people concentrate on it. Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
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Remember seeing that for the first time in a movie from 1968 called The Power, with George Hamilton and Michael Rennie and Suzanne Plachette. It's a great movie, great psychic movie. And then I was taking a series of mini course classes with John Bissaha and Brenda Dunn at Mundelein College while I was at Northwestern. And we had a woman, they had taken the bottom off of a huge glass water jug and put one of these targets under, you know, in it. And we all were trying to move it. It was a class, one class on psychokinesis.
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And one woman, this older woman said, I can do that. And she sat there and caused it to spin with no problem. So that was really interesting introductions. So when I met Martin Caden, he said he could do this. I found out his story is that he was challenged to do this by another writer by the name of G. Harry Stein, who had written a book called Mind Machines You Can Build about the psychic pinwheel and about things like similar types of things.
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And I have Marty's, in fact, parts of Marty's journal as the learning process are actually in one of my chapters in my Mind Over Matter book. Marty gave me permission to excerpt that. It was a fascinating read. I have the actual original journal. And just what he went through mentally until he kind of got it was the gyrations he went through were pretty interesting in themselves.
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But Marty and I taught other people. I continue to teach people to do that. And we also run spoon bending parties because those are kind of part and parcel of the whole process. Well, thousands of people have at this point in time gone through spoon bending parties and believe that in those completely uncontrolled contexts, of course, it's a party, but that they have psychokinetically bent silverware.
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And I often hear them say they talk about something called warm forming, that it doesn't get hot, but it gets molten in effect. Yeah, it gets molten. Well, in the sense that it's plasticized, I think you might say. The phrase warm forming comes from aerospace engineer Jack Houck, who kind of pioneered the spoon bending parties based to some extent on the work of Kenneth Batcheldor, who looked at the psychology of psychokinesis and what we need to get past to be able to do it.
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And the fun thing about the spoon bending parties, there are people who are bending spoons and forks. They are in a slight altered state. They are bending them with strength.
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There's no question. You can see that happening. But then you see things going on, like the spoons flopping over on their own, a spoon where the bowl is bent in half, which is literally from an engineering perspective. I have one because I did one. Ed May cannot explain that one. Dean also has one that he did.
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There's just no way to do it. In fact, as a psychic entertainer, a mentalist and former magician, I happen to know some of the best metal benders in the world who are faking it. And when I showed one of them, who was by far, I think, one of the best, he looked at it at that spoon and he said, oh, you had to have done that with PK. There's no way you can you can fake that.
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So you have things like that happening. You have things happening on their own because of the psychological set. And yes, again, people are sometimes bending them with strength. But when you see somebody bend a one inch thick aluminum rod and twist into a pretzel shape and then later on ask him how he did it and he said, oh, it must be the friction that caused it to melt. You know, at that point, you know that people are looking for excuses.
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But you yourself have caused the bowl of a spoon to invert.
I have.
During a spoon bending party.
I have that spoon here.
I want to show that spoon to our viewers. That would be great. But let's talk about what was your conscious experience at the time. The first spoon bending parties I went to were while I was a student at JFK. And then I came back after being in New York for two years, most of which I worked at the ASPR. And Jack was still around and we were bringing him up from Southern California and still doing the PK parties.
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It's the same experience I kind of have today. It's that sense of detachment that, yeah, I'm very excited and we're playing. We're having everybody yelling at the spoons. These things are kind of goofy. And I have to tell people that the goofier we are, the sillier we are, the more likely things are to happen. And that's pretty clear. In fact, one of the events I did two years ago, one of my students brought a woman who was a stand-up comic and she was making so much fun of it.
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We were all laughing throughout and we had a lot of stuff bending. And then she unbent things. People were giving her spoons and forks and she was literally straightening them out, just like that, with two fingers on either side. So my experience was, we're having fun, we're yelling at spoons to bend, we're watching other people do this.
And then you get this immediate, this temporary sense of, oh, isn't that interesting? Like, again, the emotional detachment.
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And holding a spoon in front of you, it just seems to want to bend a certain way. And that's the other thing is that everybody reports when it seems like these are bent by warm forming, in other words, by PK, that it's almost as if the spoon itself or the fork dictates which direction you bend it and how much.
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I've seen, for example, forks where all the tines of the fork are twisted into tiny little twists. Hard to imagine anybody could do that with normal muscle power.
Not with normal muscle power, no. And not with just your two hands. You would need tools to do that. I mean, there are some tools you can hide.
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I've certainly bent keys using other things that, you know, so I've also bent things from a magic perspective.
You know how to fake it.
Yeah, yeah. And there are fun ways to do that, too. But it's a really interesting phenomenon.
And every time I've run one, people just love it. I will say that you kind of need a group energy.
I think the smallest group I ever did was eight people, and that was a little tougher.
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Usually 10 or 12 people is the breaking point for doing this, because you need people being goofy.
Goofy is very important, and that brings up the thinking of Kenneth Batcheldor, to whom you referred earlier.
Yeah. So there's two things we have to get past. We have witness inhibition, thanks to our society and our education.
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We are taught that these things are not possible outside of the movies and TV, and those things are not real. Or if a magician does it, also not real.
So we have to get past even the reaction we have when we see someone do that.
And that's partly the activity that you're doing. The other piece of it that Batcheldor pointed out was ownership resistance.
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That, yeah, it's great for somebody else to do it, but if I do PK, that makes me one of the X-Men. It makes me weird. It makes me strange.
And people don't like to be weird and strange most of the time.
So we have to get past that witness inhibition and ownership resistance and that goofiness.
The setting where everybody's doing it, the setting where everybody's yelling at spoons and trying to bend things, it gets to a point where you don't care anymore.
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And that's where we have to be. You don't care if you can do this. I gather that Batcheldor developed his approach by studying some of the most successful seances from the 19th century. And what did they do?
Yeah, I believe he did that. And I'm guessing, I don't know enough about where that all came from directly, but I know he worked with physical mediums.
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He looked at people who could claim to be able to do PK. Of course, his work is also responsible in some respects for the Philip Circle and the Philip experiment. Yes, out of Toronto. Yes. When we talk about, I'm going to come back to spoon bending now because you may know I sponsored Uri Geller's first major public appearance in the United States back in 1973 at the Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley. At the time, I had a radio program on KPFA in Berkeley and brought Uri on the radio.
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And we began getting calls from the audience that just having him on the radio, people reported spoons bending spontaneously in their homes and watches that hadn't worked for years started running. We got dozens and dozens of reports of that sort. So, I think that you could say that's a group effect as well. It is a group effect. You know, Uri is a controversial figure.
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I know Uri a bit. He's always said he's an entertainer first more than anything else. I do believe he has real ability, but not all the time, because if you're going on stage, you have to produce. So, there has to be backup. I firmly believe, having taken a motivational workshop with Uri about 20 some odd years ago, Uri's superpower is getting other people to do PK. That's his superpower.
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He's not even doing it himself. He is so good at convincing people this is possible and real, and that you can do it, that he gets people past that witness inhibition and ownership resistance. And I think it's worthwhile pointing out that there have been metallurgical studies of bent spoons and other metals that have been bent that show anomalies that you wouldn't find if the metal had been bent using normal means.
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You know, when Jack Kalk was doing his sessions at JFK, he had a metallurgist with him. I believe some of the studies are up on his website at jackkalk.com. And he took specifically certain spoons and other metal. He actually had hacksaw blades and other brittle metals with him that the metallurgist had brought, which if you bend them quickly, they snap.
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So they specifically did that. And in fact, I'm proud to say that I'm one of his subjects who bent things quickly, and was able to tie a knot into a hacksaw blade. Whoa, which they promptly took. And apparently, that was one of the things they analyzed later on. I mean, they did this for a lot of people over time.
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And typically in metal, you see brain boundaries, you see fairly specific, often crystalline structure of the grains of metal, touching each other. And if you bend it, physically bend it, you have fractures and you have compression, and other similar effects.
(0:41:47)
What they saw and the ones that seem to be warm formed is melting of the grain boundaries, as if intense heat had been applied, even though intense heat had not been applied.
So there was definitely a difference in those particular items. Of course, you don't do that with every item, because that would take a long time.
(0:42:08)
And most people want to take their stuff home with them. Well, to me, those studies add evidential weight to psychokinesis. But I'm really impressed, Lloyd, though, with your personal experiences. I didn't realize that you had had that many personal experiences with psychokinesis. Yeah, I've had a lot. And you know, the weird thing is that, especially even the spoon bending parties, people also knew I was a magician. So, you know, Jack and I had talked about this in advance, you know, I was not about to fake anything. And there was no way to fake the hacksaw thing.
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And, you know, I'm there as a faculty member of JFK or as a student, I'm not going to fake something in general for that. But people accused me of faking it because they knew I was a magician, you know, and I just laughed it off and made it part of the goofiness of the event. Do you find that psychokinesis interferes or interacts with your daily life in other ways? It has on occasion.
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I remember back in the late 80s when I was heavily involved with our former California Society for Psychical Study. I don't recall, I think I had just taken over as president from you at that time. And I was doing a calendar on my Apple 2C computer, my simple Apple 2C, using a print program, the print master program.
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So I was printing it off, but I was in a hurry because I had to go someplace afterward. You know, I wasn't even going to the meeting, I had to go someplace and hand these calendars out to somebody. So I'm doing this and all of a sudden the program I'm looking on my monitor starts cycling through and won't stop.
(0:43:50)
So I pull it out, I rebooted the computer, did it again, did it again. The same thing happened. I called Broderbund Software Helpline, which at that time they were in Scotts Valley, I think. I don't know if any of these companies even have helplines here in the Bay Area anymore. But I got into a call. The guy tells me, it can't do that. The program can't do that. I said, well, I know it can't do that.
(0:44:12)
It is doing that. What do I do? So I go back and forth. He has me try a bunch of things. Then he says to me, how are you feeling right now? Pretty frustrated. I said, yes. He says, tell you what I want you to do. Here's my direct line. I want you to go take a walk around the block, breathe, come back when you've calmed down. Let's try it again. And I said, why are you telling me that?
(0:44:31)
And he said, he was very cagey and he finally said, well, we seem to find that mood does somehow affect the programs. And then I explained who I was and I ended up in an hour and a half phone call with this guy. Turns out that a lot of the guys in Silicon Valley, not just at Broderbund, but had noticed that mood of an operator doesn't influence the performance of certain devices and programs as well.
(0:44:59)
So that was something that definitely interfered. I had to call people I was getting the calendar to and tell them, you know, tell them the story and stop. I've also had other circumstances where I've been in a rush where devices just don't work.
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As you mentioned it, it seems to me that John Kruth at the Rhine Research Center reported, he did a study of exactly this and reported that the mood did play a role.
He had a case of an electronic poltergeist, which is kind of what we call it. Honestly, what's really interesting to me is over the years, the poltergeist cases I've gotten have not been major movement objects.
(0:45:37)
There's been many that have. And within those cases that we have a lot more electronic stuff happening, devices that are acting weird ways or breaking down. And I actually, you know, I have a day job. I've had a day job, but back in the 80s, when I was working for a company called, which I'm working for again, LexisNexis, at that point, it was Mead Data Central with an online service.
(0:45:59)
And I was doing training. I was training people how to search, full-text searching. That's way before Google. And we had these dumb terminals that did nothing more when you turn them on than dial in a modem for people who remember modems and connect with our service. And I had one class where an attorney came in with his secretary, which was unusual, typically.
(0:46:24)
He types in his ID, he hits enter, it crashes. And these devices were pretty, again, they didn't typically crash. And our tech told me how to fix it, which was to lift it up three inches and drop it. So I tried that, that didn't work. I moved him to another device that somebody had been using, fine. As soon as he touched the key, it crashed.
(0:46:42)
I moved him to another one. I ended up moving him to several different terminals. His secretary's laughing at this point. So I turned to her and I said, okay, what's so funny? She said, I will not let him near my PC. I have a tape line he cannot cross to talk to me or show me something.
He's not allowed to cross it because as soon as he touches my computer, it crashes.
(0:47:05)
And I turned to him and I said, he was an older guy. I said, what do you think of computers? And he says, I hate computers. I don't even know why I'm here. Yes. These stories suggest that psychokinesis is going on all the time around normal people. You don't need to be a famous psychic like Uri Geller or Ted Owens to produce these effects.
(0:47:25)
Over the years as I've done college lectures and I've done, I don't do them that much anymore, but for there were about 15 year period where I did a large number of college lectures. Well, sometimes with thousands and a couple of thousand students in the audience. And I love to ask them how many of them have this problem.
(0:47:43)
Like they're, it's an all-nighter, they're trying to finish their paper. They try to print it out and the device crashes on them. And of course, everybody has that story. And typically what the skeptics will say is, well, they're hitting the wrong keys. So, you know, yes, that is possible. It could be operator error.
(0:47:56)
It also could just be windows. We call no of those crashes.
But there's an awful lot that's, that's something that's not fitting either of those categories.
Another area, which is kind of relevant in terms of daily life, is related to psychokinesis would be teleportation. And how many people report objects of theirs that they know where they set them, and then they disappear only to show up in mysterious places sometimes years later.
(0:48:26)
Yeah. Somebody in Britain called that a case of JOTT, J-O-T-T, which stands for just one of those things. And there's actually a new, there's a book came out last year. I think it's early this year or last year called JOTT, which talks about those, those very experiences. I think somebody must've been watching Monty Python when they came up with that.
I think it was Mary Rose Barrington who wrote that book.
(0:48:46)
Right. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. But those are experiences people have all the time.
And I talked years ago, I talked to Harry Blackstone Jr. about that.
And he said that, because he was a bit of a skeptic, he said that at least some of the time, it's what we would call a negative hallucination. We're simply putting something down and our, our perception is preventing us from actually seeing it.
(0:49:12)
And I can buy that sometimes. But there are those times you have other people looking for it as well. And it appears clearly other people have seen you put it down and they turn, everybody turns away and it's gone.
And then it comes back later. I mean, occasionally with app boards, people actually see them fall out of the ceiling.
(0:49:32)
Yeah. I don't get too many reports of that, but there definitely are those kinds of experiences that we've seen.
Well, Lloyd Auerbach, this has been a fascinating discussion.
There's so many examples of psychokinesis, but I think the one point that's sticking with me now from talking to you is that it's very likely much more common than most people appreciate.
Yeah, I really do think it's common.
(0:49:59)
It's just related to our psychology or to, and to human performance psychology. So you may be right. We may never prove it, but I think that someday we'll be able to use it a little bit better.
Thank you so much for being with me, Lloyd. Thank you, Jeff. I look forward to future conversations.
You bet.
Book three in the new Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is UFOs and UAP. Are We Really Alone?
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Go to newthinkingallowed.org.
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