NOW THEY TOLERATE PARAPSYCHOLOGY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010070-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 9, 2014
• Sequence Number: 70
• Publication Date: August 11, 1974
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010070-8
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Now They Tolerate Parapsychology
By Francine du Plessix Gray
Every few days, as a spiritual exercise,
former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, lunar
module commander of Apollo 14, the sixth
human being to walk on the moon, medi-
tates with the aid of his portable biofeed-
back machine.
Roughly the size of my Smith-Corona
typewriter, Mitchell's custom-made instru-
ment connects to his scalp with small elec-
trodes to register the four basic rhythms of
the human brain ? alpha, beta, theta and
delta. Between beta, the routine wakeful
state of everyday consciousness, and
delta, the rhythm of deep unconscious
sleep, lie alpha and theta, the slower
cycles registered in the state of medita-
tion.
Mitchell's contemplations are based on a
variety of Eastern doctrines that he
studied after the spiritual conversion he
underwent on his lunar journey. He
strains, for half an hour or so at a time, to
get down from the busy level of beta into
the more contemplative terrains of alpha
and theta.
I BEGIN WITH Mitchell because few
Americans offer a more striking symbol of
the newest high in our culture ? our shift
from outer to inner space, our avidity to
explore the mythic and mystic areas of
consciousness.
Shortly after his sudden retirement from
NASA, Mitchell founded a center for
parapsychology, which is the scientific
study of various psychic phenomena ? in
part known as extra-sensory perception ?
still unexplained by Western science.
As I ventured deeper into parapsychol-
ogy, I was startled by the rigor of its re-
cent research, and by the growing toler-
ance it has been receiving from the scien-
tific community.
I discovered, for instance, that parapsy-
chology is being taught in some 100 educa-
tional institutions in the United States, in-
cluding Yale University, that it had enjoy-
Francine du Plessix Gray writes on (Hs-
serit and divergent viewpoints in religion,
politics and other fields.
This article was distributed by Special
Features, the New York Times Syndicate.
c 1974, Francine du Plessix Gray.
ed increased respectability since it was
voted into the National Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1969, and that
in research centers throughout the United
States, Ph.D.'s from varied disciplines are
studying the occurrence of ESP with the
most refined technological tools ?
psychiatrists are documenting telepathic
dreams with the aid of electro-encephalo-
graph machines, biologists are studying
radioactive generators, physicists are test-
ing clairvoyance with the help of comput-
ers.
HOWEVER, SURROUNDING this hard
new core of scientific probity, there contin-
ues to flourish an exotic lunatic fringe that
has haunted psychic research ever since
its spiritualist origins in Victorian parlors.
And so, throughout my journey in parapsy-
chology, I was obsessed by the enormity of
its contradictions: Would we ever be able
to separate the wheat from the chaff in a
field plagued by more deceit, kookiness,
showmanship, gullibility and Messianism
than any other discipline claiming to scien-
tific rigor?
In my attempt to probe this question, I
met with Uri Geller, a charming Israeli
who is the most flamboyant psychic of our
myth-starved 1970s.
The 6-foot-3 former paratrooper sits with
me in his airy apartment in Manhattan
ebulliently alternating tales of his prowess
with his plans to redeem the world. For
some three years, Uri Geller says, he has
been performing innumerable feats of
psychokinesis, which is the influence of
mind over external objects or processes.
He has broken keys, spoons, metal pipes
and Werner Von Braun's wedding ring by
simply staring at them, erased tapes and
stopped cable cars by sheer concentration,
and managed equally splendid exploits of
telepathy and clairvoyance.
Uri is flashy, mercurial, shrewd, and al-
most lovable for the candor of his unabash-
ed egomania. "In Israel I am a household
word ... in Europe there isn't a person who
doesn't know me ... the only reason I'm not
famous in the United States is that it's
such a big country ..." He is most candid
about the fact that his powers are not
always with him. "Unlike magicians, it
doesn't always work for me," he says,
Those ancient opposites, mind and matter, seem to gain
a new synthesis as technology enables new and impres-
sive research to bolster the credibility of parapsychology.
waving his arms about. "But so what, so it
doesn't work? It proves I'm real."
WHEN URI GELLER arrived in the
United States, his feats caused a great
flurry of excitement among American
parapsychologists, who are always on the
lookout for the new medium who will bring
about the psychic millenium.
One of Uri's greatest fans, Edgar Mitch-
ell, arranged to have him tested under
rigorous laboratory conditions at the Stan-
ford Research Institute in Menlo Park,
Calif. Although initially enchanted by the
notion of being taken seriously by "such a
mind-blowing, fantastic organization," Uri
had stage fright when he first arrived in
California, and almost declined coopera-
tion. "I saw all these instruments and these
skeptics, and I said, 'Oh, my God, it's not
going to happen." However, the moody
showman-psychic was cajoled into cooper-
ating by the two young physicists assigned
to study him, Hal Puthoff and Russell
Targ, both of whom have a 10-year back-
ground in laser research and a long histo-
ry of interest in parapsychology. (Targ
was particularly well-equipped to deal
with a temperamental subject because
Bobby Fisher is his brother-in-law.)
Under their supervision, Uri performed
a variety of striking ESP feats ? accu-
rately predicting the upper face of a die
shaken and thrown in a closed box, picking
the one can that contained an object from
a group of 10 identical cans and making
reproductions of drawings "sent" to him
by Puthoff and Targ from a building a
quarter of a mile away.
Meanwhile, Uri's presence in Menlo
Park had piqued the curiosity of the De-
fense Department's Advance Research
Projects Agency ? ARPA ? which invests
several million dollars a year in behavior-
al science research that might have impli-
cations for national defense.
Could Uri Geller's metal-bending talents
be used to jam foreign computers? Such
could have been the Defense Department's
reason for sending a group of observers to
California to look in on the Geller experi-
ments. It included George Lawrence, the
head of ARPA, and Ray Hyman, a profes-
sor of psychology at the University of Ore-
gon. They spent part of one day at Stan-
ford Research Institute.
Although they saw Geller perform not in
controlled laboratory conditions, but in
informal living-room style, the Defense
Department observers left Palo Alto vocif-
erously critical of the SRI work, calling it
"incredibly sloppy."
Professor Hyman, who like Targ is a
skilled magician by avocation, refers to
Geller as a brilliant conjurer who simply
duped the SRI scientists by classical tricks
of mentalist magic. "They already believ-
ed in ESP and therefore their goal was to
make Geller as comfortable as possible in
order to make him produce it," says
Hyman, who is starting a foundation "to
stop the psychic movement."
DURING THE THREE HOURS we
spent together, Uri finally managed to
bend my household key a modest 10 de-
grees after a 20-minute session of stroking
it in my hand, and when that failed, on a
metal tray. Once the key was bent, he was
not satisfied with its angle and stroked it
for another few minutes under the running
water of his bathroom faucet, where the
bend increased to some 45 degrees.
Our telepathic drawings were consider-
ably more dramatic:
"I'll turn around and close my eyes and
you draw something, then say, 'Ready.'
Then I'll concentrate on it and try to dupli-
cate it." He turned his back to me. I drew
Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010070-8
a sailboat with a small flag at the stern
bobbing on a wavy sea.
"Ready," I said, folding my notebook on
my lap. He turned around and drew for
about a minute, and we lifted our doodles
up in the air to compare them. He had
drawn two pictures, one of a small tugboat
on a wavy sea and another of a flag rising
our of the water.
"Fantastic!" Uri 'yelled.
A FEW DAYS AFTER seeing Uri, I met
with the magician William Randi. Randi's,
career has been thriving lately on expos-
ing Uri's feats as classical tricks of
"mentalist" magic, and he is a partner of
Ray Hyman in the foundation to stem the
black tide of psychism. Randi's file on Gel-
ler is so extensive that he even possesses
translations of Der Spiegel articles pub-
lished in The Hong Kong Standard. He
readily bent my key 20 degrees while ap-
pearing to stroke it in my hand, explaining
that with enough conversational diversion
the key can be bent by a secorid's pressure
against any hard surface. He also ad-
vanced the hands of my wrist watch by six
hours and bent a teaspoon in the wink of
an eye without my ever noticing he had
touched them.
Randi was considerably less impressive
than Uri on thought transmission, how-
ever. When I tried to "send" him the geo-
metrical figure I had drawn ? a square
within a rectangle ? he drew a triangle
within a circle. And in "receiving" the
name of a world capital, one of Uri's most
popular performances, he guessed London
for my Budapest:
THE RECENT PROLIFERATION of
parapsychological research, whose tools
have enabled parapsychologists to work
with unprecedented precision, has still led
to new recognition of parapsychology as a
See PSYCHIC, G-4