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The Why Files: Operation Podcast
The Basement: Jeffrey Mishlove | Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness. It Filters It
03:02:32
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Star wars is back on the big screen with the Mandalorian and Grogu.
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Gangsters, war criminals. I'll take out every bad guy in
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your deck of cards on May 22. Feel the force on the biggest screen possible. The old protect the young and the young protect the old. This is the way. Buck a Lob.
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Always wear your seatbelt.
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The Mandalorian and Grogu, rated PG 13.
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May be inappropriate for children under 13.
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In theaters May 22nd. Get tickets now.
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Now at McDonald's. A McDouble is $2.50, so you can get your gym gains on or just
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get lunch for only $2.50.
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Get more value on the under $3 menu. Limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery. Today we're sitting down with Jeffrey Mishlove. On Christmas Eve 1985, Jeffrey got a phone call from a man named Ted Owens. Owens was a former assistant to JB Ryan at Duke University. He claimed to control the weather and. And summon UFOs on command. Summon UFOs on command, eh? Must be nice. I'm still waiting for an Uber Eats I ordered last Tuesday. He told Jeffrey to call the US Government and warn them not to send up the next space shuttle. His UFOs were going to bring it down. And a month later, Challenger exploded. Now that's the kind of story you're going to hear today. And Jeffrey spent 50 years as the most important interviewer in parapsychology. UC Berkeley gave him the only PhD in parapsychology ever awarded by an accredited American University. In 2021, he won first prize and $500,000 from the Bigelow Institute for the best scientific case that consciousness survives death. He's gonna find out the IRS also survives death.
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Taxes are theft.
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This one got emotional. Let's go down to the basement. Jeffrey, welcome to the basement.
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Thank you.
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I'm excited to have you here.
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A
It's a pleasure to be here.
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It's weird for me because there's so much research goes into my episodes on my stupid show, and you constantly come up as a primary source. So thank you for your contributions. This is like sitting in front of the encyclopedia. I don't even know where to start.
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Well, let me just say it's very gratifying to me to know that I'm having that kind of an impact.
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Did you not realize that?
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No.
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Oh, my goodness, I did not. When I told my audience you were coming in, they're blown away by it. No, you're. It's weird to be a living Legend and not know it, I guess.
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Well, I know that there's a reputation, but I think you've built up fabulous business here with a huge audience. And I had no idea that you even knew I existed.
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Oh, of course I did. My show is. I don't want to say silly and dismiss it because the topics are important, but your work is actually important. I'm trying to entertain people. Your work is really important in educating people. But I want to get to the bottom of some of that stuff. So before we get too deep, I want to know your favorite, not the most famous, not the most well reviewed, your favorite character that your mother ever played on stage.
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Blanche dubois.
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Streetcar.
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Yeah.
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Oh, my goodness.
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Yeah. But it changed her life completely. My mother was an actress in local community theater. And. And good. I imagine she could have had a career on Broadway if she hadn't married my father and moved from the east coast to Wisconsin. So she was very active in local community theater. And Blanche dubois, the female character in Streetcar Named Desire, possessed her. It was as if she was a different person after that. She became Blanche dubois. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
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That's right. Was she like that with all of her roles? Would she just inhabit that character or that particular character?
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It's as if the spirit of Blanche dubois entered into my mother.
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What do you think that is? Because that's. There's kind of a darkness to that, to that story a little bit.
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Well, you could say that, but it probably reveals a lot about the human psyche. And in general, we're so much larger than we think we are, and we're so much more interconnected than we think we are. And I think our consciousness just bubbles up with possibilities. And Blanche dubois was in my mother all along. It just sort of bubbled up.
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Right. I hadn't considered that. That we're all connected. That could be a way that actors, good actors, are channeling characters is our connection.
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I think there is an element of channeling that goes into theater. Yeah.
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So dad was in the army, mom was an actress. What was life like for little Jeffrey? Did you travel around?
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Well, no. My father was out of the army. I was born in 1946. The war was over. My dad had came home. I was part of the baby boom generation right after the war. And I grew up in the 1950s, and it was sort of like Norman Rockwell America. Everything seemed good and healthy and normal. And for example, in that era, you didn't ever see a man wearing a beard. All the men were clean shaven everywhere. If Someone had a beard, you'd say, oh, that's from the last century. And all the boys, young boys, had crew cuts.
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So no beard, hats?
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No, none of that. No drugs. I never heard of marijuana or cannabis until I was in college. It was a time of absolute innocence. And I grew up in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, which later became designated as the safest city in America.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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People who grew up during that time, like my parents, all say the same thing. Norman Rockwell. Do you think it was really like that everywhere?
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No.
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So what? Because I feel like there was an undercurrent during the 50s that wasn't quite so public.
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Well, for example, in Fond du Lac, where I grew up, a town of 30,000 people, I think there were no black families at all. It was all white, 100%. And maybe occasionally there, after I left, there might be one or two black families coming into town. So I didn't even know black people existed right. Until I went to watch the Milwaukee Braves play.
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Well, I'm glad you said that, because it really wasn't Norman Rockwell for everybody. No, but that's. But that's the history that I think we like to remember.
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What? Fond du Lac was completely a Norman Rockwell kind of town.
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So going into sociology, everyone knows you as the parapsychology guy, but.
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Yeah.
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So sociology and then criminology.
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That's right.
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What attracted you to criminology?
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Well, the truth is, I wanted to get admitted to Berkeley.
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Just Berkeley. It didn't matter why.
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As soon as I graduated from college in Madison, Wisconsin, with a BA in psychology, I got a job in Rockford, Illinois, at a mental health program, the Singer Mental Health Zone center, which prided itself on being 10 years ahead of the times, which for me, wasn't enough. I quit after six weeks and got in my car and made a beeline to San Francisco.
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Why did you. What was going on at the mental health facility that made you quit so quickly?
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Behaviorism.
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Behaviorism from the doctors.
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That was the philosophy of the time. The behaviorist model of human behavior and psychology was dominated by B.F. skinner and behaviorism. And they had, for example, a big computer in the basement of this facility. And every time I interacted with a patient, I had to fill out a computer form and they were going to keep track of it. And I thought to myself, they're missing everything here. For example, when I was with some of the patients, I did some simple experiments. I had read about the Esalen Institute and a guy named Bernie Guenther who talked about awakening the senses. And I had people Like I just say, tap your head, you know, use your fingers. Experience the feeling of what it's like. And there was a woman who hadn't spoken in 20 years and started talking after that. And I realized that the facility where I was had no concept of human depth.
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Did the other professionals there think you were straight because you mentioned tapping? That's a real thing now. Did they think, like, why is this guy making them hit themselves on the head? What does he do? Were they.
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I don't think I fit in there very well. For whatever reason, I was destined to do something different with my life.
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I think we're gonna see that as a thread is when you land into an institution, it doesn't work for you. I think we're gonna see that.
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You know, it's really true. In fact, every time I was at a university, University of Wisconsin or even Berkeley, which was much more attuned with my way of thinking, my favorite professors would get fired or would leave because
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they were just too outside the mainstream.
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And I'll give you another example. After years of struggle, as you mentioned, I achieved a doctoral degree. A unique, individual, interdisciplinary doctoral degree in parapsychology. The only one ever awarded to this day, 40 years later.
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And what's the quick definition of parapsychology?
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Parapsychology is the scientific study of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis and the possibility of human survival after death.
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Mainstream doesn't like this.
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No, but the point is that I want to make just in the context of this conversation. I got the degree and I went to see my mentor. At the time. I was so proud. My committee had just finalized everything, so I went to visit Arthur Young, who was a 70 year old man at the time, or in his 70s, the Bell helicopter.
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Arthur was your mentor?
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Yes.
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Okay, this is going to get interesting.
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Yeah. Arthur was an amazing guy and I have talk about him forever. He pulled out an astrology ephemeris and started looking at my chart. And he said to me, how long did you work on this degree? And I said it was about six years, little over six years since I entered the doctoral program that I created for myself and parapsychology. And he looked at me and he said, well, it's going to take you six years more to undo all the damage the university has done to you.
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Wow. So he saw that in you, not just me. Well, how do you create a PhD? Because it's accredited. And you had to fight for that, didn't you?
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Well, there was a program at Berkeley whereby if you're Already a graduate student in good standing. You want to do a dissertation on a topic where you can't find three professors in your department who will sponsor you, but you can find three professors in a variety of different departments who will sponsor you. You can create your own program. And I took advantage of that very obscure rule after I graduated from Berkeley. They canceled the whole thing.
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Oh, you can't do that anymore.
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They just reinstated it a few years ago, finally.
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What was your dissertation about?
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Training ESP Abilities.
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Wow. And so you got sponsors for that Faculty. Faculty sponsored.
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Yes.
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That's amazing. And I think it's interesting that there was. There was. Didn't they try to take that away from you? And you fought.
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Well, there were organized skeptics. There still are.
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Oh, yes.
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Organized skeptics who were offended by the very idea that a major school. Berkeley's one of the best in the world. Would grant a degree in parapsychology. This horrified them because they see it as the rising tide of superstition. And. And so they put pressure on the university to cancel the degree after it had already been awarded. And the pressure was quite significant. University tried to do that. I had to pull some strings. Fortunately, I had some support from people who believed in what I was doing. And those people failed in their effort to get the university to undo my degree. But it put me through hell at the time, of course.
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And your doctorate stands.
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Yeah.
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So criminology. Take us back. What attracts you to criminals? You go from mental health to now criminals. I mean, are we talking.
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Well, as I say, I moved to California, to the Bay Area, and I wanted to enroll at Berkeley. And I had studied when I was at Wisconsin with Seymour Halleck, who was a psychiatrist who specialized in criminology. And I knew, frankly, that I could get in to criminology. There were openings in the School of Criminology at Berkeley, Psychology. They accepted, I think, 20 students every year. And they had, like, thousands of applicants. And even though I had a good grade point and so on, it was. I didn't know that I would get admitted, but I knew I could be admitted in criminology. So I went for that because they had a psychology track. I was interested in clinical work, and I could do that in the school of criminology. And so if you had known me in 1972, for example, you would have seen me doing volunteer work at San Quentin Prison in the psychiatric unit, conducting group therapy sessions with murderers and rapists.
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What were they like as people?
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You know, that's the interesting thing. I thought they were Pretty much just like you and me.
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That's very interesting.
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Yeah.
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That makes me think that everyone maybe has a certain trigger or there's something in everybody.
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We all have a little larceny in our hearts, you might say. Because I'm pretty convinced that the whole human population shares a collective consciousness.
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I agree.
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There's nothing that any criminal has ever done that hasn't affected me and isn't in some way part of me.
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Sure.
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But I can tell you that the staff in the prison didn't see it that way.
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I bet not. Did you also have a unique approach to therapy, but when you were speaking with the.
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Well, I was a young kid at the time. I. I can't say I was experienced. Although I will tell you that young, inexperienced college students are very good therapists.
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I bet they are. Because you're not. You're not so hardwired yet. You're still kind of exploring new things.
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You're willing to listen.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Did you make a difference in any of those people's lives, those criminals?
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I can't say for sure. None of them. I didn't do any follow up with them, and so, I don't know.
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Did you feel like.
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I think they made a difference in my life.
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That's interesting. What do they contribute to that?
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They contributed a sense of humanity, of understanding what it meant to be human. Something about myself, ultimately.
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Did that surprise you?
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It felt natural. I can't say it surprised me because
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a lot of people would be frightened to be in that situation with those people. Mm. But you feel like that experience enriched your life?
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In a way, Yeah. I would say the guards were more frightening than the inmates.
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Okay, fair enough. They probably weren't as empathetic as you were.
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And you would. You know, they were always hovering around to make sure I was safe.
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Sure.
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But they kept a sort of a menacing demeanor on their. If you look at them, there would be. They'd be scowling and. Perhaps things have changed since then, but the general attitude was that these inmates aren't quite human.
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So those guards didn't feel like we shared a consciousness at all or anything with these people.
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Not only the guards, but, you know, my supervisors in the psychiatric unit. You'd hear expressions like, they're a different kind of cat. They're just not like us.
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That's a casual way of dehumanizing somebody. Yeah, that really is. Is that what made you leave criminology?
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No, no. I would have stuck it out but for the fact that I had the most powerful, mystical, psychic, paranormal event of my life at that time.
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Were you a believer in parapsychology?
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Yes.
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You were
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as an undergraduate even I did a senior honors thesis, the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate, on the psychology of religious mysticism. And I went into it, to be honest, as a skeptic. I thought these people who claim to be religious mystics, whatever that is, it's undoubtedly a form of psychopathology. And I'm going tothat's what I'll write about. I'll talk about the psychopathologies that make people believe they're having psychic and mystical experiences. And I started digging into the literature. And the more I dug into the literature, the more I became more convinced that it was just the opposite, that these people were some of the most creative, successful people on the planet. And at that point, and I became aware of the research of J.B. rhine and parapsychology and the studies of life after death going back to the 18th 1980s. And at the same time, in my senior year as an undergraduate, I was exposed to LSD and the whole psychedelic scene that was burgeoning at that time on college campuses. And it all fit together for me very naturally that LSD was a tool for exploring your own mind and that these mystical experiences were quite real and you could have a taste of it, you know, from drugs. But then in 1972, I had a full blown experience.
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B
Before we get to that, academia seems very comfortable with religious studies, but uncomfortable with parapsychology. But there seems to be a lot of overlap in those fields.
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There is an enormous overlap also with what is now called transpersonal psychology, which pretty much didn't exist back when I was studying as an undergraduate. But
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B
Kraft Mac and cheese is better than 90s hip hop. We'll remind you of your childhood without making you feel incredibly old. Kraft Mac and Cheese. Best thing ever.
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A
Most scholars in the field of religious studies, I'm told, are really atheists and skeptics.
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B
Really?
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Yeah, there are a handful who take it seriously. And I got to know Houston Smith very well, the author of the World's religions, who was deeply involved in the mystical core of all religions. But for the most part, the scholars of religion were, and I think even today we're under the influence of what was in those days called, you know, Marxist materialism. Later on became known as deconstructionism and postmodernism. But they were, they saw religions basically as power trips, as a way to manipulate people and to control society.
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B
That is an interesting take that I hadn't considered, but religion is A tool to do that.
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Yes, it is.
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It is not to dismiss any religious people, but it certainly has that.
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There's that side of it.
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There certainly is. So your experience, it was your first paranormal experience, was life changing?
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I don't know if it was my first paranormal experience, but it was life changing, there's no question.
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B
So this is the dream?
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It's a dream.
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B
But you had an experience before the dream? Possibly.
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Well, I was doing ESP experiments and things like that. Where as an undergraduate in Wisconsin in my experimental psychology class, as a matter of fact.
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B
On what? On like undergrads come in.
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Well, it was informal. You know, I take a deck of playing cards and hold it up and I'd have my girlfriend try to guess what the cards were. And, you know, the results were interesting. But you did.
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B
They based Dr. Peter Venkman and Ghostbusters on you. When you saw that, you must have been like, right.
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Well, when I first saw Ghostbusters, I did think, my goodness, they made the movie. Movie about me.
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B
Right. That's what it seems like with the cards. They all. They were all doctors.
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A
Yeah, that was a funny movie when it first came out. It was hilarious.
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B
So the dream. Tell me about the day leading up to the dream. What was going on in your life that. Because when people have these experiences, often they're primed for it and maybe don't realize until after the fact.
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Well, yes, I was primed for it. I. In fact, as an undergraduate, I. In what they called the Free University in Wisconsin, I offered a course on religious mysticism. I was teaching it as an undergraduate. But by the time I was a graduate student in criminology, I kind of put all that behind me. And I can't say that I was primed at all at that moment. I didn't know. But 2,000 miles away, I'm in Berkeley, California, waking up from the most powerful dream of my life at 7:30 in the morning in Wisconsin at 9:30 in the morning. My great uncle Harry, who was about 85 years old, had died at that moment. And as best I can piece it together, he came to me. He visited me and took me along partway for the ride.
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B
Well, what was the dream about? Take us through that. Because this is not a unique story.
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A
I cannot put it into words very well. It's beyond description. It's what they say, it's ineffable. The classic mystical experiences. What I can tell you is that Uncle Harry came to me in the dream and we had a deep conversation. He disagreed with some of the Ways I was living my life.
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B
What was some of the dialogue in that dream with Harry?
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A
Well, the dialogue in retrospect is trivial. Dialogue was, he's telling me that you treat your girlfriends like they're your equal.
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B
Was Harry like that in real life?
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A
Well, all I can say is he had four wives. Not at the same time. He wasn't a Mormon, And I don't think he treated women as an equal. He was a very religious man, highly Orthodox Jew, the president of the local Orthodox Jewish congregation in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And so that was part of it. And I'm saying, no, women are equal. And we discussed the yin yang symbol, which has become my logo and comes
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B
out of that dream.
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A
Yes, in part.
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B
Okay.
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A
But the thing is, when I awoke from that dream, I was sobbing tears of joy, of joy, of joy.
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B
Did you know he had died?
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A
No, I had no idea he had died.
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B
What was so joyous about that message?
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Not only was I. I can't put it into words. It's as if he took me into heaven.
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B
That's what it was.
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A
And also, I was singing.
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B
You woke up singing?
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I woke up singing and crying. And the song I was singing, for any of your viewers who were Jewish, was Avinu Malkeinu, which is a song that is only sung in the Jewish liturgy in what we call the High Holy Holidays at some of the most poignant spiritual moments of the religious service. And they sing, Ovinu Malkeinu, Our Father, our King. It's a prayer to God to forgive us.
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B
I was going to ask you about that, what that song is about and when it's sung. Yeah, it's about forgiveness.
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It's about forgiveness. It's about asking God to forgive us for our sins.
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B
Why that song, do you think?
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I don't know.
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B
When you woke up, you don't know why you were singing that song?
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No, I don't. But it was like coming out of my heart. And I'd been so deeply touched. And I didn't know that Uncle Harry had died. I didn't know where I had been. I didn't know why I woke up from a dream singing and crying like that. But I can never forget the experience. And even though I can't put it into words and make it intelligible, it was at that moment that I realized, or shortly thereafter, as I'm digesting all of this, that I can no longer pursue a career studying the negative side of human deviance, that I had to move away from psychopathology and crime and start focusing on the Positive side of human deviance.
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B
It's interesting that you were working with criminals and woke up singing about forgiveness. Yeah, that's very interesting to me. Who was your first phone call?
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Well, I wrote home immediately to my parents and said, how's Uncle Harry? I had a dream about him. And my mother called as soon as she got the letter and said, how did you know that Uncle Harry had just died? And so I. I said, well, I didn't know. And could they arrange for me to have an object that Uncle Harry owned so I can keep it to remember him by? They sent me a book, a little book, and they told me, this is Uncle Harry's favorite book.
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B
What was.
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A
Took me a while to figure it out because it was written in Hebrew. And I later learned, actually, it was in Yiddish, which is a German Jewish slang language.
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B
I'm from New York City. I know you. I know what it is.
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A
So Yiddish, I had to get it translated. And it's the tales of the BAAL Shem Tov, who was a mystical teacher of the Jewish Hasidic sect going back to the 18th century.
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B
Did your mother know you were into mysticism, that she chose that book? These are a lot of synchronicities.
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No, I had no idea that my Uncle Harry was into mysticism or that anybody that I knew, any Jewish person, had anything to do with mysticism. Because in that era, Jewish people wanted to fit in. They wanted to be, like, considered normal Americans, not some kind of weird cult. Like people now, they don't mind so much.
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B
But again, that's very strange to hear because I'm from New York, so Jewish is very much part of our local culture, and my family. So it's very part of our culture. It's always strange to hear, like, friends talk about. I never met a Jewish person, thought I was 30 years old. Strange to me.
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Yeah.
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B
It's a very different country.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So you decided after the dream you had to make a change or after the book?
- [31:53]
A
After the dream. Well, around that time, it all happened, you know, within a few weeks. And it took me months to figure out how to make this shift because I assumed, well, I could shift into a graduate program on creativity or intuition or mysticism, but they didn't exist. So I agonized about it for many, many months.
- [32:20]
B
Still working in criminology?
- [32:23]
A
Yes.
- [32:24]
B
You had to be completely distracted by then?
- [32:26]
A
No, I suppose. I suppose I was, but I was, you know, still showing up at the psychiatric unit in San Quentin Prison and taking my courses and doing well. I got a master's degree in criminology. And eventually what happened was kind of interesting. Agony and agony and agony. I was a stressed out, unhappy person after that beautiful mystical experience because I knew I had to change my life. And I think that happens a lot for people who have near death experiences. And what I had today we would call a shared death experience.
- [33:11]
B
Yes, we would. I just did an episode on that. It's a very real phenomenon.
- [33:15]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:16]
B
And you had a remote shared death experience, which I believe is the most common kind. 60% of people who have those experiences are far, far away from that person because it was.
- [33:27]
A
You could also call it a visitation.
- [33:29]
B
Yes.
- [33:29]
A
Uncle Harry came to me. I didn't go to him. I didn't know he was dying.
- [33:34]
B
No, but he knew that you needed him. Did he visit anyone else? I'm touched by this story.
- [33:41]
A
Yeah.
- [33:41]
B
Did he. Did he visit anyone else?
- [33:44]
A
You know? I think so. I. I'm pretty sure there were. There were some cousins who had some experiences along those lines.
- [33:53]
B
I wonder if he was telling everyone to make some changes. Is that how Harry was opinionated?
- [33:59]
A
No, I don't remember him that way. Here's what I remember about uncle is he ran a corner grocery store in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And I'd be a young kid, 8, 9, 10 years old, and my father was very fond of him. And we'd often visit. And when we came to visit him, he lived in an apartment behind the grocery store. He'd go into the freezer where they had Eskimo Pies and he'd pull out Eskimo Pies and hand them to all the kids. And I thought to myself, look, he's got a whole freezer full of Eskimo Pies. To a young child, that's wealth. Yes. And so I told this story once to a rabbi I was friendly with, Zalman Schechter, a mystical rabbi. And he said to me, well, your Uncle Harry had one more Eskimo Pie for you.
- [34:58]
B
Oh, that's lovely. He did. That sounds like it must have been very difficult those months.
- [35:08]
A
They were. They were very difficult. But one morning I woke up and I knew beyond a doubt that I was going to have a dream that evening. And the answer to this whole search of how to reorient my life was going to come in a dream.
- [35:29]
B
So everything is chaotic then and then. And you felt like tonight is the night.
- [35:33]
A
I. Tonight is the night the dream is going to come and the answer will be there. And it was just a knowing.
- [35:40]
B
And it happened and it happened. What was that dream About?
- [35:44]
A
In that dream, I was visiting.
- [35:47]
B
I didn't expect to cry this soon, Jeffrey. But that's. It's a good story.
- [35:51]
A
I had good friends in Berkeley who I used to live with, who were in married student housing at the time. And in the dream, I was visiting Peter and Marcy Hartman in married student housing. I knocked on the door of their apartment and there was no answer. And in the dream, I found a key, let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room, and found the. In the middle of the living room floor, a magazine called I E Y E. I picked up the magazine, began paging through it, and then I woke up with this feeling of exhilaration, like I have the answer.
- [36:37]
B
What was in the magazine?
- [36:38]
A
Well, I didn't know.
- [36:40]
B
You didn't know.
- [36:42]
A
So I acted out the dream. I figured, I've got to find that magazine.
- [36:47]
B
Yeah.
- [36:48]
A
So I put on my tennis shoes, ran across town. Five miles from where I live to is married student housing in Albany, California, and knocked on the door of the apartment.
- [37:02]
B
What are you thinking during that run? Is it elation? Is it relief or.
- [37:06]
A
It was elation.
- [37:08]
B
It was. You knew.
- [37:09]
A
I just knew. I'm going to find the answer. I have to go to this apartment. And they weren't home as I had dreamt. It turned out I did know exactly where they hid a key. They were good friends. So I took it and I let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room, and smack dab in the middle of the living room floor, exactly as I had dreamt, there was this magazine sitting sprawled, you know, pages, Open Eye magazine. It was called Focus.
- [37:45]
B
Oh.
- [37:47]
A
And Focus was the magazine of kqed, which was listener sponsored radio and television in the San Francisco Bay area. And as I'm paging through this magazine, it dawned on me for the first time in my life I could pursue my interests by getting involved in the nonprofit segment of the media.
- [38:12]
B
When you got into that apartment, did you know that magazine was going to be there?
- [38:15]
A
No.
- [38:16]
B
You weren't confident. You. You weren't. Because everything was lining up.
- [38:20]
A
Well, everything was lining up, but I hadn't. I had no way of knowing.
- [38:24]
B
Well, then when you saw it, you had to go, oh, my goodness.
- [38:27]
A
Yeah.
- [38:30]
B
So you have to follow where this leads.
- [38:32]
A
Yeah.
- [38:33]
B
Okay. So the magazine Focus is there, right? It's.
- [38:37]
A
It brought focus into my life.
- [38:38]
B
Yes. It's all very clear.
- [38:40]
A
But because I lived in Berkeley, I didn't have a car in those days, I don't think. No, I did not have a car. I went to kpfa. Which is a Pacifica radio station in Berkeley, actually very well known nonprofit radio. And at the time I had my master's degree. And I said to them, I'd like to volunteer. And they said, sure, sit at this desk and when you hear the doorbell ring, push this button and let people in the front door. That's how it started. And I was glad to do it.
- [39:21]
B
Yes. Because I mean, this is a mission. Now you're on a mission.
- [39:26]
A
So within two, three weeks, I had learned how to produce a radio program. And I produced my first program, which was interviewing local friends of mine in Berkeley who were psychic. And the theme was you don't have to be from out of town to be psychic.
- [39:48]
B
Did they let you create your own show?
- [39:51]
A
Yeah, they let me. They showed me how and they broadcast it. And after it was released, the program director came to me and said I was only at the station for three weeks. And he said, we have an opening every Tuesday and Thursday at noon for a program, a regular program. We call it the Mind's Ear. And it's an interview program. And you'll sit just as you and I are now, across the table from each other with world class experts in all the topics that interested me the most.
- [40:26]
B
How long from that dream of the magazine to that show. How much time passes?
- [40:32]
A
Maybe six weeks at the most.
- [40:34]
B
Six weeks.
- [40:35]
A
Well, let me think. The dream of the magazine you tell
- [40:39]
B
yourself no one wants your college era band tees.
- [40:42]
A
But on Depop, people are searching for
- [40:45]
B
exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now a teenager who calls them vintage will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Depop, Just snap
- [40:57]
A
a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste would
- [41:01]
B
be a money making machine. Your style can make you cash start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.
- [41:10]
A
No. Maybe even three weeks somewhere. Just a few weeks.
- [41:15]
B
You must be just coasting now on this feeling of this is meant to be because you're just. I come from radio.
- [41:22]
A
Yeah.
- [41:22]
B
I didn't get my own show in three weeks. No, it took a little longer than that.
- [41:26]
A
Well, of course KPFA was staffed by all volunteers.
- [41:29]
B
Sure.
- [41:30]
A
So there I was, a volunteer who seemed to know something about psychology. I was a kid. I was 25 years old right at the time. And that gave me the confidence to go back to the university where they offered no courses or programs in the topics that I was interested in. But I did come to meet some professors who were Supportive. And I said, I want to create this interdisciplinary program. Would you sponsor it and be on my academic committee? And I already had access to people like Robert Monroe, who writing his first book on out of body experiences. And you know, everyone on a book tour coming through the San Francisco Bay Area would want to stop at KPFA.
- [42:24]
B
What year was that?
- [42:25]
A
1972.
- [42:27]
B
So Robert Monroe, I mean, there's a lot of great characters coming through San Francisco Bay Area during that time, the
- [42:33]
A
1970s in San Francisco Bay Area. I think of it as the psychic 70s. Yes, it was an amazing time.
- [42:42]
B
So Robert Munro, I've covered him quite a bit Hemisync. And was he able to achieve out of Body on Command using hemisync?
- [42:53]
A
I can't say that for sure. I did go through the program. I didn't have an out of body experience myself. Same.
- [43:01]
B
I didn't either. What about the Gateway project at Monroe Institute? That was, I think, one of his last projects.
- [43:08]
A
Yes. Well, I certainly know Monroe trainers and people who have been through the program, and I think it's fair to say that a significant percentage of people found it worked very well for them.
- [43:22]
B
So Monroe trainers is an interesting segue because quite a few of those Monroe trainers come from sri. And Project Stargate was happening about the same time. Yes.
- [43:35]
A
Yeah. After Stargate closed down.
- [43:39]
B
Right. I'm talking like Skip Atwater went over to Monroe, but Sri in 72. Weren't Targon put off.
- [43:48]
A
Yes.
- [43:48]
B
Jacques Fillet was there.
- [43:50]
A
Yes.
- [43:50]
B
Did you spend any time with them?
- [43:52]
A
Yes. Oh, sure.
- [43:54]
B
Well, what, what, what? No one's been on the inside. Except we hear from the. We hear from Target put off all the time.
- [44:01]
A
But yeah.
- [44:02]
B
I haven't heard you talk much about what was going on sri, what was going on behind.
- [44:05]
A
Well, let me step back a little bit. When even as a criminology student, there were graduate students that I knew, friends of mine who were all interested in consciousness, and we would meet. And at the same time, people like Jacques Follet and Stanton Friedman were occasionally coming on campus and lecturing on UFOs. And once I got started at KPFA, I was sponsoring big symposiums on these topics as well, taking advantage of the access that was available to me as a graduate student. I could, for example, reserve Zellerbach auditorium, that held 2,000 people. And we brought Uri Geller onto campus and the like. And one of the visiting speakers was Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell helicopter.
- [45:08]
B
Is that how you met him through there?
- [45:10]
A
Yeah. We'd have a small seminar and you know, there would be 30 graduate students and Arthur Young would come and talk about his cosmologies and his theories. And he was actually funding some of the research at SRI at the time. And he decided to set up a branch of his Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley. He bought a house, 2924 Benvenu Ave. In Berkeley. And he had an apartment in the back of this large house. And he invited me to move in.
- [45:44]
B
Could you give everyone, just the back of the baseball card, a biography of Arthur Young? Because it's very interesting.
- [45:51]
A
He invented the Bell helicopter, which was the first commercially licensed helicopter in the United States. We think of it as the whirly bird, the little helicopter with the glass bubble dome and the skids. And it was used, for example, in Korea. What was that movie? Mash? Sure to do all the evacuations. It was. I remember as a young child, four years old, so seeing a helicopter, and people would point, look at that. Nobody had ever seen such a thing before. It was 1947. It was invented.
- [46:28]
B
That's right. And you have to correct me, but he did. He wasn't like an aviation nut, Right. He just saw a problem to solve.
- [46:39]
A
Here's this story. He went to Princeton. He studied general relativity in the 1920s at Princeton University as an undergraduate.
- [46:49]
B
That's an interesting time to be there.
- [46:51]
A
Yeah.
- [46:52]
B
So Einstein's around at that time, right?
- [46:55]
A
Institute for Advanced Studies. Yeah. He became familiar with Einstein's work as an undergraduate in the 1920s, at a time when very few people understood Einstein at all.
- [47:11]
B
Right.
- [47:11]
A
And he decided he was influenced, I think, by Alfred North Whitehead, amongst others, who had what he called process philosophy. He believed. He saw that what was going on wasn't about things, it was about process. And he wanted to develop his own process philosophy. But he said to himself, look what's going on in the world. It's all about technology. And philosophers seem to have missed the boat. They don't understand technology, they don't talk about technology. He said to himself, in order to be worthy of doing real philosophy, of being a real process philosopher, I have to prove to myself that I can master a technological problem. So he went to the patent office in Washington, D.C. in 1926 to find an unsolved technical problem that he could solve. What do you got?
- [48:14]
B
Just what do you got?
- [48:16]
A
And he learned that there had been, I don't know, something like 30 attempts, unsuccessful, to develop a vehicle that could hover in midair.
- [48:26]
B
They were trying to do it since da Vinci made that sketch, and they couldn't figure it out.
- [48:30]
A
Right. And so he set himself to solve that problem in 1926. His father was a landscape painter, pretty well known, and he owned a farm in Pennsylvania with a big barn, and he used the barn as his laboratory, and he began building toy models. And it took him decades. He worked for years and years on problems, on solutions that didn't work, like propellers at the ends of the rotor blades and things like that. But by the 1940s, he had a toy model, something you could maybe 2ft wide, and it would hover in midair. He had solved the problem, and he took it to the Bell Aircraft Company and he said, look what I got. Well, we could make big ones.
- [49:25]
B
We can make big ones.
- [49:26]
A
And they said, okay, let's do it. And the 19 model 47 was the very first helicopter that the government licensed for commercial purposes.
- [49:39]
B
That's right. I think Operation High Jump down in Antarctica was the first time they were deployed on that famous mission in 40. So he made a bag of money.
- [49:48]
A
He did.
- [49:48]
B
And then no more in that industry.
- [49:51]
A
Then I said, now it's time to get serious about philosophy.
- [49:55]
B
Right.
- [49:55]
A
The whole point of the helicopter was just to show that I was worthy to do philosophy.
- [50:00]
B
What an amazing man.
- [50:01]
A
Yeah.
- [50:03]
B
He's someone. Everyone should know his name. He was so incredible.
- [50:06]
A
He was. A gift. A gift to me.
- [50:17]
B
You've had many gifts, Jeffrey. I mean, you really have. Talk about him. Well, I mean, what was he really like?
- [50:25]
A
He was the sweetest person, and he loved young people. This was, of course, during the Vietnam War era. And he would tell all of his older friends, listen to the young people. And of course, the young people, such as myself at the time, were, you know, anti war and into things like mysticism and also drugs.
- [50:55]
B
How did he feel about his invention being used so heavily in that war?
- [50:58]
A
It made him unhappy. I bet it did. He didn't like it. And he also felt personal pain every time a pilot crashed. Because sometimes I think, at least on one occasion, they lost a test pilot.
- [51:15]
B
Sure.
- [51:15]
A
And it affected him deeply. His wife, Ruth Forbes Young, who came from a famous Forbes family, very wealthy New England family, created what was called the International Peace Academy. And they were training diplomats. They offered seminars to young diplomats from all countries how to negotiate for peace instead of for personal or advantage.
- [51:51]
B
Only for your country have we learned nothing. Did Arthur ever talk to you about that famous seance in 1952 with Forbes and the Astors and Allen Dulles and the Council of Nine and Puarich.
- [52:09]
A
Puharich, yes. Well, not specifically that Seance. I had many conversations with him. I lived at the institute with him for about six or maybe nine months. Until you lived with Arthur Young. He invited me to move into the house where he and his wife were living, along with my best friend at the time, Saul Paul Sirag.
- [52:36]
B
Wow. I can't. You were too young to realize how important that was.
- [52:41]
A
Yeah. I had no real appreciation for many of the people I knew at that time in terms of their depth and who they were. I was young and naive, but, you know, I was a good learner. And he had obviously noticed in the various seminars that Saul Paul and I were the ones who asked the most questions and got really engaged in his work. So he wanted us to be part of his institute, and we were more than happy to do it.
- [53:17]
B
What did he tell you about that seance and Puharich? Really very little, because it's become mythology at this point.
- [53:26]
A
It has been. As I look back on what I now know about it all, I'm not sure what to make of it. Arthur, he did a lot of things. He was one of the early Dianetics clears. He and his wife.
- [53:41]
B
That's right.
- [53:42]
A
Both were.
- [53:44]
B
There was a lot of that at sri.
- [53:47]
A
Well, there was, yeah.
- [53:49]
B
What is it about Dianetics and Scientology that speaks to.
- [53:52]
A
Well, they. In Dianetics and Scientology, they're very open to the paranormal.
- [53:58]
B
Sure.
- [53:59]
A
And I don't think that I can say much else of a positive nature about it.
- [54:09]
B
There's a dark side to every religion. But there's certainly something maybe more so in Dianetics that's appealing. I mean, one of the most famous psychics who's my personal favorite, is Pat Pry Price. I believe he was a Scientologist. Hal put off Ingo Swann, Scientologist.
- [54:26]
A
That's all true. But Russell Targ, who was right in the middle of all of it, was not right. And so it hard to say what influence Scientology actually had. I think Ed May, who took over the program after Hal Puthoff left, was also.
- [54:44]
B
That's right.
- [54:46]
A
So there is that. But I don't think any of those people maintained, except for Pat Price, maintained their connection with Scientology. It's something they went through. They got what they could out of it, and they moved on.
- [55:00]
B
Right. They got clear, and that was enough. We'll take a quick break, but this is a good time to transition to sri, and maybe we can talk a little bit about Ted Owens.
- [55:10]
A
Sure.
- [55:10]
B
Okay. We'll be right back. So how I heard it was, you're a researcher, you're around sri, you're in the scene, Russell and Hal hand you a file and say, we can't do anything with it. What can you do with this?
- [55:23]
A
Right.
- [55:24]
B
Was that the Ted Owens file?
- [55:25]
A
That was the Ted Owens file.
- [55:27]
B
Why couldn't they do anything with that?
- [55:31]
A
Well, they were receiving funding from the CIA.
- [55:35]
B
Yes.
- [55:36]
A
They had already gone public and with their research on Uri Geller, it was published in Nature magazine, one of the world's premier scientific magazines.
- [55:49]
B
When is that?
- [55:49]
A
Around 75, 74 is what I recall. And they didn't want to have a flamboyant psychic. They didn't want to be in the news. Uri Geller at the time was incredibly controversial.
- [56:07]
B
Why?
- [56:08]
A
Well, because he was being attacked by the skeptics because he was a public performer, a stage magician, and you had people like the Amazing Randy writing books about what a fraud he was and in fact, going to scientific conferences and claiming that in public. The people I knew who were in no way confederates with Lurie Geller, were helping him cheat. And so what people at SRI wanted, who were is largely a military industrial think tank, they wanted to be low key. They didn't want to have any kind of public prominence of that sort. And Ted Owens was doing everything he could to attract publicity to himself.
- [56:59]
B
More so than Ingo Swann?
- [57:01]
A
Oh, I think so. Although Ingo was probably much smarter about it.
- [57:06]
B
But Ted Owens was much kinder too, I would guess.
- [57:11]
A
Well, Owens had his kind side. He did, sure.
- [57:14]
B
Okay.
- [57:15]
A
Yeah. I mean, he was kind to me. I had a good relationship with him for many years. But if you. If you crossed him, that was another matter. I was. I had learned by that point, because of my experience in San Quentin, to treat everybody with respect, regardless of what they may have done or what other people think of them and so on. I believe every human being deserves respect just for being human.
- [57:46]
B
Sure. You were the perfect person for that because he has this sort of infamous reputation for being a little bit cagey, feisty, feisty.
- [57:55]
A
For sure.
- [57:56]
B
Feisty.
- [57:56]
A
He was feisty. He was, you know, a sailor. He had been a sailor in the Second World War, and then he went to Duke University while he was in the Navy, he was doing psychic stuff right and left. And he wrote a letter to JV Ryan at Duke University in said, you know, here's what I'm doing. I want to do experiments. And Rhine was writing back and giving him pointers. And after he got out of the Navy, Rhine said, come to Duke and I'll. We'll get you enrolled at Duke University. And he did. He became J.B. rhine's assistant.
- [58:36]
B
Wow, I didn't know that.
- [58:37]
A
Yeah.
- [58:38]
B
So what was special about Ted? What could he do?
- [58:40]
A
Well, he claimed he could do psychokinesis.
- [58:44]
B
Okay. So moving things.
- [58:46]
A
Moving things. He. He told many stories he had about things disappearing in his presence. And he. He said he did seances for the Rhines and things of this sort. And apparently when he was around girls, their earrings would disappear. And JB Rhine actually tried to investigate this, according to Ted, but he eloped with another woman from Duke and left and tried to set himself up as a healer. He knew hypnosis, and he was quite successful as a healer until, I think, in 1954, the AMA shut him down because they thought at the time hypnosis was not acceptable. And they thought he, you know, he's practicing medicine, he's a quack, and so on, and he became very bitter.
- [59:47]
B
AMA has been like that since its founding, very against herbalists and natural remedies. I'm not surprised.
- [59:54]
A
I think it's changing, I hope so slowly. But in any case, he began to think that he was working with nature and then working with a poltergeist. He thought it was a poltergeist he called Big Lorna. And finally it dawned on him that it could be extraterrestrials. And he remembered having had some weird experiences that appeared to be an extraterrestrial nature. And finally he felt, wait, I'm in telepathic contact. They're talking to me, and they're giving me instructions how to interact with. With them and teaching me their language. And he held many different jobs. He was a bullwhip artist at a circus, and he had a knife throwing routine, and he was a jazz musician and a high speed typist. And he worked at one time as what he called an idea man for a railroad company. And he said that the aliens, he called them the space intelligences, had guided him since his childhood to have many different careers so that his mind would be flexible enough to understand their very complicated symbolic system. And also he claimed that they had been searching since the days of Moses for somebody with a nervous system strong enough to handle all the energy that they were going to run through him. And he thought of himself as, you know, the first person since Moses to be able to do these kinds of things.
- [61:36]
B
Messianic figure, he was. I think he's the first person to bring the insectoid aliens, too. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know, those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips that's the energy State Farm Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs so you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online@state farm.com like a good neighbor, State Farm is there to the public. Where. That was his contacts, right?
- [62:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, that was it. He said they tweeter and Twitter.
- [62:16]
B
That's right. That's right. Who.
- [62:18]
A
He called them that because they had high pitch squeaky voices. They communicate with him telepathically and he learned how to send them telepathic images of what he wished them to accomplish. And then they would sit at their invisible UFO high above the planet in front of a big screen and push buttons and whatever and make these things happen.
- [62:44]
B
What was your research like with him?
- [62:47]
A
It was mostly about collecting information because he was a force of nature. He wasn't a wealthy man, but he spent almost all of his time and energy making these, doing these demonstrations. He would send. He had a list of scientists. He would mail to each of these people a statement, I'm about to do this or that. And it were unusual things you would not expect to happen. For example, right before I visited Puthoff and Targ at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, he had written to them. He had been pestering them for a couple of years saying, you know, stop wasting your time with Uri Geller. I'm the world's greatest psychic. And finally he wrote to them, he said, I'm going to prove it to you for good. He said, I'm going to give you weather like you have never seen before. In Palo Alto, I'm going to make. It was a drought at the time, and in the San Francisco Bay area, it almost never snows. There's no snow.
- [64:02]
B
No.
- [64:02]
A
There. And he said, you're going to have every kind of weather. There will be sleet and hail and snow and there will be power blackouts and UFO sightings. And it's all going to happen in a couple of days. And your local newspaper is going to write a story saying that the drought is over because of all of this. At the time, the papers were saying no end in sight to the drought. And all of this happened in a few days.
- [64:30]
B
It happened.
- [64:31]
A
It did happen.
- [64:32]
B
Were you working with him during this?
- [64:33]
A
No, not yet. This is right before I show up at srp. So not only do they have the files and do they want to get rid of the files, but they are now convinced this guy is for real.
- [64:45]
B
The CIA probably didn't know about him because they would have liked to have that guy handy.
- [64:50]
A
He tried everything he could to interest the CIA.
- [64:53]
B
He did.
- [64:54]
A
Yes, he did.
- [64:55]
B
I don't know why they didn't take him on. He can create snow in California.
- [65:00]
A
Well, they had nothing. They never, to my knowledge, expressed an interest. He claimed that he was in contact with some agent from the CIA he called George Clark. But at one time, he thought I was a CIA agent.
- [65:21]
B
Do you think he did that? Do you think he made that happen?
- [65:25]
A
Well, it's always a question of whether he predicted it or whether he caused it. Now, Russell Targ sent him a letter after that event and saying that was a great prediction. And he wrote back and said, basically, hell, no, it was no prediction. I caused it. And he was always a little ambiguous as to whether he caused it through his own powerful mind or whether it was the space intelligences who did it. And it had nothing to do with him.
- [65:58]
B
And I think Ed May was of the same school of thought that that's just precognition. You didn't do that. You just saw something.
- [66:04]
A
Ed May doesn't believe in psychokinesis.
- [66:07]
B
He just believes it's precognition.
- [66:09]
A
Yes.
- [66:10]
B
It's very interesting, the arguments that happen within parapsychology. You forget the skeptics within. There's all these different opinions.
- [66:17]
A
That's true, yeah.
- [66:20]
B
So you take Ted's file. What type of work did you do with him?
- [66:26]
A
Well, the first thing I wanted to do after reading it over carefully and seeing, you know, by that time I first Met Ted in 1976, in the summer of 76. And I was in England at the time. We met in London, and he had ended yet another drought.
- [66:48]
B
He went on, he ended another drought.
- [66:50]
A
Well, what happened was at sri, they leaked a little story about the drought ending. The drought in Menlo park in California. It was a big drought, and there was a drought going on in London. A very serious drought in all of England in that summer. And when I arrived for a parapsychology conference, my friends there said, if you want to have your picture taken on the front page of the London Times, all you have to do is show up in Piccadilly Circus with an umbrella and people will think you're crazy and they'll take your picture and it'll be in the newspaper. It was that serious. They were bringing water by truck.
- [67:34]
B
Wow.
- [67:34]
A
To cities outside of London where water had already run dry. But when Ted Owens arrived, all of a sudden it rained and poured and.
- [67:46]
B
And he Predicted that.
- [67:48]
A
He claimed he caused it.
- [67:49]
B
Claimed he caused it.
- [67:50]
A
So that's the circumstance of my meeting him. And it was a parapsychology conference, and he was a speaker. But you have to imagine this guy sort of. I think of him like Paul Bunyan, larger than life, a big folk hero, and he had a big, booming voice. He was a large man at the time with a big beard, and he smoked a cigar. And he walked onto the stage of this parapsychology conference where he had been invited because the people in London brought him there for the purpose of ending the drought, because they learned about what had happened in California.
- [68:33]
B
Unbelievable. It worked.
- [68:35]
A
It worked. And he's on stage, and he's about. He carried a little red toy wagon behind him onto the stage, piled high with papers. And he said, these papers are all the documentation of the many demonstrations I've done, because I'm the world's greatest psychic, and I can control the weather and I can make UFOs appear. Well, the British people are not accustomed to or fond of that kind of American braggadocio behavior. And the strangest thing happened at that time, which was one of the speakers at the conference didn't show up. So Ted Owens was scheduled to follow him. And so they said, you go on. So he's halfway through his presentation, and the guy shows up. And so they tell him, okay, Ted, you've got to leave the stage.
- [69:37]
B
Uh. Oh.
- [69:38]
A
And so before he left the stage, people, the audience was already practically booing him.
- [69:46]
B
Really?
- [69:46]
A
Yes.
- [69:47]
B
Well, just because of his attitude.
- [69:48]
A
Yes.
- [69:48]
B
Okay.
- [69:49]
A
Yeah. He. He didn't sit well with the British public.
- [69:52]
B
Yeah.
- [69:53]
A
And I got up and said, well, I happen to know about what happened in California firsthand. And. And I just mentioned that it was a way to kind of ameliorate things.
- [70:05]
B
Sure. A calming presence, which you are.
- [70:08]
A
So we bonded over that, and I began looking at the files. And the thing that appealed to me was that he claimed he could produce UFOs on demand. And there were examples in the files where he'd go to police officers and he'd say, I'll make a ufo and you will see it, and it'll be in the newspapers, and you can tell them that I. I said it would happen and then there would be.
- [70:38]
B
So those files were real?
- [70:39]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [70:41]
B
Did you see him produce UFOs or anything like this?
- [70:43]
A
I set up an experiment. I said, let's do it again.
- [70:47]
B
Yeah.
- [70:48]
A
And before I had any opportunity to really set up the experiment, he was on it. He said, I'm going to do this. He said, there won't be one. There are going to be three.
- [70:59]
B
And he called the number. Okay.
- [71:01]
A
He said, there'll be three big UFO sightings within 100 miles of the San Francisco Bay area.
- [71:09]
B
How skeptical are you?
- [71:11]
A
Well, skeptical enough to realize that this wasn't the way you should be done.
- [71:15]
B
Right, Right.
- [71:17]
A
So I scrambled. I said, we need a control group. I have friends in San Diego, California, west coast city, about the same population as San Francisco. I wrote to them and said, we'll use San Diego as a control group. I sent letters out to every law enforcement agency within 100 miles of both cities. Said, let me know if you get any UFO sightings in your area, and waited to see what would happen. And sure enough, there was a fellow near San Francisco, a little town called Concord, California, was out walking at 4 in the morning and claimed that he'd been abducted by aliens at 4 in the morning. Perfectly sober person at the time with no background in UFOs. We interviewed him and it actually, from all accounts, seemed like he had reported it to the police, was in the newspapers, and it seemed like, yeah, this appeared to be the first legitimate sighting.
- [72:23]
B
And were there three of them?
- [72:25]
A
Well, after that, Owens called me up on the phone. He, at the time, as I recall, was living in Oregon. He moved around a lot. And he said to me, I can tell the next one is going to be really big. He said, I feel it coming. He said, there is going to be a ufo. It's going to be one of the best sightings ever. He said it's going to be seen by hundreds of people, it's going to be photographed, and the photograph will be published on the front page of one of your local newspapers, which is what happened four days later.
- [73:06]
B
Four days later it happened.
- [73:07]
A
Yes.
- [73:09]
B
At some point. Are you starting to really believe this guy?
- [73:12]
A
Yeah.
- [73:13]
B
Yes. And I'd be hoping. Don't predict anything bad.
- [73:19]
A
Well, there were.
- [73:20]
B
I know. Before we get to that. I know we both know Chris Bledsoe.
- [73:25]
A
Yes.
- [73:25]
B
I think we both agree he's a lovely man.
- [73:27]
A
Yes.
- [73:29]
B
He can summon something.
- [73:31]
A
Yes.
- [73:32]
B
I don't think that's a debate. He's studied by the government, CIA. He believes that he's summoning spiritual entities. What do you think?
- [73:45]
A
Yes. You could call them orbs.
- [73:47]
B
Sure.
- [73:47]
A
And he believes, and people, I think other people would agree that these orbs, they are either conscious themselves or they are inhabited by conscious beings. He calls the Lady.
- [74:02]
B
Yes.
- [74:02]
A
It does indeed appear to be something not so different from angelic apparitions that occur in the Bible.
- [74:12]
B
He made predictions on this very show a few months ago that are coming true. Was Ted summoning those same type of entities?
- [74:21]
A
I don't think so.
- [74:24]
B
It doesn't sound like. It sounds like craft.
- [74:28]
A
Yes, it does seem like craft. The one that occurred that I just mentioned was seen both from the air and the ground. California University, what's now called Sonoma State University at the time it was. Had a different name. Sonoma State College or something. And near San Francisco, in Rohnert Park, California, the art department was sponsoring an artist named Stephen Poleski, who had an airplane. He was a pilot. And he had smoke trailing out the back of his airplane. Colored smoke. He make designs in the sky.
- [75:09]
B
That was his art.
- [75:10]
A
That was his art.
- [75:11]
B
What a cool job.
- [75:13]
A
He was an artist. And so the art department sponsored him. And he's flying over the campus, 3,000ft altitude. Hundreds of students are outside with their cameras watching the whole thing, including video. And a UFO shows up right in his airspace. And so it's seen from the air and by hundreds of people on the ground, simultaneously photographed and videotaped. It got a lot of pr. The Berkeley Gazette ran a photo on the front page, as Ted Owens had said would happen. And the video was shown on the Channel 9 KQED evening news.
- [75:53]
B
Did your phone ring with an I told you so? Yeah, of course.
- [75:56]
A
Yeah. And I made a big mistake.
- [76:00]
B
What was that?
- [76:01]
A
I said, ted, that's only two sightings. Oh, no, you promised me three.
- [76:09]
B
So what did he do?
- [76:10]
A
He slammed the phone down.
- [76:11]
B
Oh, okay.
- [76:12]
A
He slammed the phone down. And I began to feel sick. You know how you get a little scratchy feeling in your throat and you think, oh, this is going to be a bad sore throat?
- [76:28]
B
Yes.
- [76:28]
A
And you can tell it's starting.
- [76:30]
B
Yes.
- [76:31]
A
That's what was happening.
- [76:32]
B
As soon as you.
- [76:33]
A
Yeah. Right away it happened. And then 45 minutes later, he called me back, and without saying anything about what had happened, he simply said, jeffrey, I will never do that to you again.
- [76:49]
B
Oh, my goodness.
- [76:50]
A
Yeah. And the sore throat went away.
- [76:56]
B
You're well known for being very balanced. I've never seen you really fully commit without hearing all sides. You've got to be a full believer at that point. He. He can. He can hurt people.
- [77:10]
A
Yeah. I would say by then I was definitely convinced. But it got worse after that.
- [77:18]
B
He. Your relationship with him.
- [77:20]
A
Well, yeah, because he was, as I say, trying to get the attention of the CIA and the US Government. He was living on the edge of poverty. He was spending all of his money on xeroxing all of the magazine articles and newspaper articles, validating the different demonstrations that he was doing and mailing it off to scientists who were trying. Some of them were seriously following his work, but none of them had the resources. And he wanted the US government to set him up as an institution and he would use his powers for the benefit of humanity and for the United States. And of course they wanted to have nothing to do with him.
- [78:07]
B
I wonder why that is. Did they ever approach you? I mean, just to ask about him?
- [78:12]
A
No, no, I was never approached, but I was, you know, at the time I was pretty well known, I suppose, as a long haired hippie psychedelic drug user. And the CIA would have no interest in a person like me.
- [78:27]
B
Right. The CIA doesn't want anything to do
- [78:29]
A
with drugs or psychedelics except if it's Puharich researching. But they weren't particularly interested in the type of person I was at the time. But Owens was desperate for their help and attention. And he finally said, I'm gonna declare war against the US government until they give me what I want.
- [78:54]
B
He told you that?
- [78:55]
A
Oh, yes.
- [78:55]
B
And this is after the sore throat?
- [78:57]
A
Yes.
- [78:57]
B
So, you know, I know he can do this.
- [79:00]
A
Well, he declared war. He said, there are going to be poltergeist attacks on US naval ships. And then he'd show me newspaper articles about mysterious fires and things that happened aboard naval vessels. And then he said, I'm going to attack power plants. And they would send me newspaper clippings about uncanny accidents at nuclear power sites.
- [79:23]
B
But why would the CIA not bring this guy in? He sounds like exactly what they wanted is just unstable.
- [79:31]
A
Well, first of all, I think it was too. Unbelievable.
- [79:35]
B
It's unbelievable.
- [79:37]
A
Unbelievable.
- [79:38]
B
But you've confirmed what about two thirds of his.
- [79:42]
A
I have, but that was me. Right. I convened a meeting of scientists. My wife Janelle went. J. Allen Hynek was in town in San Francisco and she went and fetched him from his hotel room and brought him to the meeting. And we had about a dozen scientists there. I said, look, we've got to research this man.
- [80:04]
B
Yes.
- [80:05]
A
And J. Allen Hynek said, I wouldn't touch him with a 10 foot pole because the phenomena that he produces come from the unconscious. And I don't want to have anything to do with that.
- [80:17]
B
I think he had a point. I think Heineck had a point about Ted. There's something that scares me about him.
- [80:24]
A
Yeah.
- [80:25]
B
After that sore throat and you hang up the phone, you've got to be thinking, I can't cross this guy again.
- [80:32]
A
No, I wasn't. I was naive. Really well. And I also trusted him. He said he wouldn't be do it again.
- [80:39]
B
Oh boy.
- [80:40]
A
And I had no intention to cross. I didn't cross him. Just to say, you know, you promised me three and we only got two.
- [80:48]
B
Why did you say that? Were you teasing him?
- [80:50]
A
I wanted the third gun.
- [80:54]
B
Oh my goodness.
- [80:56]
A
And it never came. There were only two. And I can tell you in San Diego there were zero. Right, but. So he didn't fulfill his promise exactly as he said he would. And it never works out exactly quite the same way. There's always some differences. And these are large scale phenomenon. They're hard to assess statistically in any way. And people figure, well, he's just fooling you somehow. You don't know how, but maybe he knows or he's predicting or he's in cahoots with the newspapers. Who knows?
- [81:39]
B
There's always going to be that.
- [81:40]
A
Yeah.
- [81:41]
B
So you continued to work with him for a number of years.
- [81:44]
A
But I began to lose interest.
- [81:47]
B
Why?
- [81:48]
A
Because his war against the US government wasn't going too well. And at some point he. He made a big prediction. They weren't paying attention to the poltergeist attacks and the nuclear power plant problems. And he said, okay, this is going to be a massive earthquake. I'm going to really show them. And it didn't happen.
- [82:11]
B
It didn't happen.
- [82:12]
A
No, thank goodness it didn't happen. And at that point I was moving on in my life. I wasn't thinking about Ted Owens until
- [82:23]
B
Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in original and cherry vanilla that Pepsi taste you love. With no artificial sweeteners and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola. Unbelievably Pepsi.
- [82:38]
A
It would have been Christmas Eve 1985. And he called me up. Big booming voice. I hadn't had much. I was keeping the files. I still have all the files.
- [82:54]
B
You still have those research files?
- [82:55]
A
We are putting them online. They will eventually become searchable online. We're making them all machine readable and even the handwritten ones. And he said, jeffrey, this is the most important phone call you will ever receive. He obviously wanted to get my attention.
- [83:21]
B
You've got mine.
- [83:22]
A
Yeah. He said, it's up to you. You've got to contact the US government and tell them not to send up the next space shuttle.
- [83:32]
B
Oh no.
- [83:32]
A
Because if they do, my UFOs are going to knock it out of the sky.
- [83:38]
B
Oh no.
- [83:38]
A
That's what he said. And I first of all had no leverage whatsoever with the US government. And I wasn't about to. I didn't know who to call. And I wouldn't have known what to say. And they wouldn't have believed me in any case. So I did nothing. And then it was about a month later when the Challenger exploded.
- [84:03]
B
That's one of those moments that I don't know if it is for you. Where everyone says where they were when jfk, they found out JFK was killed. For me, it's. It's Challenger. I remember what the weather was. I know what I was wearing. I remember watching it on tv. I was home from school. Do you remember that day?
- [84:20]
A
Not particularly. I remember reading and learning about it, of course. But I don't remember the moment the way I do remember the assassination of Kennedy.
- [84:31]
B
Right. Did you make the connection when Challenger exploded?
- [84:35]
A
Oh, it shook me to my bones.
- [84:37]
B
I would think so.
- [84:39]
A
I felt like, horrified.
- [84:41]
B
What about guilt? Like you should have done something.
- [84:44]
A
No, I don't think there was anything I could have done.
- [84:46]
B
I don't think there was. But guilt is an easy emotion to feel.
- [84:50]
A
But I felt I should stop ignoring him.
- [84:53]
B
Yes.
- [84:54]
A
And what I arranged to do at that point was to take his training program
- [85:02]
B
to try to learn to do what he does.
- [85:04]
A
He had a training program? And I felt I better learn about it.
- [85:09]
B
This sounds like what you're training to defend yourself. What would you.
- [85:13]
A
Well, you could do whatever you want with it. That's the thing.
- [85:19]
B
This is scary.
- [85:20]
A
He said to me, what do you want to do with these powers? Arranged for him to come to San Francisco. I had some friends who had some money so we could afford to bring them out.
- [85:34]
B
So you called him. Please stop crashing shuttles. Come on down.
- [85:37]
A
Well, he claimed it wasn't he who crashed the shuttle. It was the UFOs in his behalf.
- [85:46]
B
But he asked them to do it.
- [85:49]
A
No, he didn't say that.
- [85:51]
B
Okay. Because that would be evil to me.
- [85:53]
A
He didn't say. He never told me he asked them to do it. But he said that they did it.
- [86:00]
B
He did ask you to warn them.
- [86:01]
A
So maybe he asked me to warn.
- [86:02]
B
Maybe he was trying to save them. I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. But it's. But I. There's such a darkness to this.
- [86:08]
A
There is a darkness to it. And. And. And of course, there's the other story. It was the O ring. There were warnings. NASA should have known better. There was all of that.
- [86:18]
B
Sure.
- [86:19]
A
And not only that. There were other people making predictions.
- [86:23]
B
Yes, there were.
- [86:24]
A
So all I could say for myself was I better pay more attention to Ted Owens. So I arranged to take his training program, which was three days, and it was mostly hypnosis. We got a hotel room for him in San Francisco and I had a couple of friends with me. And for three days he hypnotized us.
- [86:53]
B
What kind of hypnosis is this? I mean, he's not waggling a watch in front of your eyes, right? He's speaking.
- [86:59]
A
He does a normal hypnotic induction, and then he give you suggestions. And I wrote a book called the PK man, in which I. Because I recorded the entire thing, I still have the audio tapes. You have those of the entire training?
- [87:15]
B
I mean, I've read the transcripts in PK Man. I didn't know I used to have the tapes.
- [87:19]
A
I have the tapes.
- [87:20]
B
You need to make those available?
- [87:21]
A
Well, maybe. Yeah, I. I could. He warned me. He said, you shouldn't really share this with people without getting the permission of the space intelligences.
- [87:33]
B
Oh, so. So the whole training is around the space intelligences.
- [87:39]
A
He said that. I asked him, is this just hypnosis? Is that what you're doing? He said, no, the hypnosis is only part of it. He said, it's psychokinesis. And we're working on you, on your brain. The space intelligences will work on your brain. He says, what do you want to do with this power? And I said to him, I don't want to do what you're doing. No. I have no interest in controlling the weather and calling down UFOs. What I really want to do is become a spokesperson to the world at large, to mainstream public about the realities of the psychic world. And that was my goal. And it was six months, I think. I took the training and it must have been February, and by June I had set up the original thinking allowed TV series. We started out on cable, local cable, public access TV in Marin County. And within a year or two, we were out on the satellite to public TV stations all over North America.
- [88:57]
B
That show, I think, ran 16 years,
- [89:00]
A
from 1986 to 2002.
- [89:04]
B
Yeah. Do you credit that training and the intelligences or.
- [89:08]
A
I don't know how I could have done it myself.
- [89:12]
B
What did they do that you couldn't? You were already in media. No.
- [89:16]
A
Well, I kind of gave up my radio show.
- [89:21]
B
Why?
- [89:22]
A
Because I wanted to complete my dissertation and get a doctoral degree. So I, you know, I became a full time graduate student and wrote a dissertation and wrote a couple of books. And it was only 1986, six years. And then I was fighting this lawsuit, right, because the skeptics were trying to take my degree away, away from me and I was being libeled by them. And so I fought a libel suit for six years, which I won.
- [89:54]
B
Which you won.
- [89:55]
A
Yeah. And then I set up this program and before we knew, you know, we started on a public access cable and not even in any of the mainstream San Francisco stations, but in a, in a suburban station. And two years later we're out on the satellite covered by 120 TV stations. It just happened.
- [90:24]
B
And you think that it was that training and this. Why couldn't you have done it?
- [90:29]
A
Well, maybe I could have, who knows? I can't say for sure. But I can say that it seemed to happen without any effort because it
- [90:39]
B
seems like you forgot that you went from intern as a receptionist as radio station to a hit radio show in three weeks. So clearly you know how to reach the power.
- [90:49]
A
I was a good interviewer. I understood that.
- [90:51]
B
Yes.
- [90:52]
A
Yeah. But you know, this material hadn't gone mainstream and PBS stations were very hesitant and even in the early days we didn't cover a lot of parapsychology the way I'm more inclined to do now on YouTube, where I don't have, you know, in PBS they're very conservative, actually.
- [91:15]
B
Yeah.
- [91:16]
A
And for example, when our program went out on the satellite, we had some sponsors. The Institute of Noetic Science sponsored us. Well, in, I think it was Nashville, Tennessee. The local PBS station went to a local psychologist and asked them, what's your opinion? Should we carry this program? And he said to them, the people of Tennessee are not ready for this.
- [91:45]
B
They really were. They were ready for it. Ted owens died in 1987. How did that relationship wrap up for the two of you?
- [91:55]
A
Well, at that point, obviously we were in touch. This was like a year after I had done the training with him and our TV show was launched. I was getting what I had asked for and I heard from him. He wrote to me from a farmhouse in Fort Ann, New York where he had moved. And his letter was quite strange. He said, the UFOs told me to come here or they're, they're going to come for me. And then he sent me clippings of newspaper articles about UFO sightings in the area. And he said, they're actually, they're hovering right over this farmhouse where I'm living and. And he died there.
- [92:45]
B
Did you keep those clippings?
- [92:46]
A
Yeah, oh yeah, I have them all.
- [92:49]
B
I had heard you say at one point that you almost warned him or told him that not that he was evil, but he was dangerous to Be careful.
- [93:00]
A
I did. I was very unhappy with the threats that he was making, and I asked him to stop doing it. I've always felt that he's his own worst enemy.
- [93:10]
B
It's what it sounds like.
- [93:12]
A
Yeah. I tried as much as I could to interest the scientific community. We're still trying to do that, but it's like, for most people, it's a step too far. Although things are changing.
- [93:27]
B
Yes, they are.
- [93:28]
A
Chris Bledsoe, as you mentioned.
- [93:30]
B
And I asked Chris, I said, do you think people should learn how to do this? He said, no. He said, this is a gift and a curse. And he said, I wouldn't mess with it. I think he's probably right. Could Ted Owens consciousness have existed past his death and contacted you?
- [93:50]
A
Well, in fact, it was, I think, 2023, as I recall, 2022, I heard from a viewer of my YouTube show. Some fellow in Germany wrote to me, and he said, I was meditating. I'm a deep meditator. And while I was in meditation, I experienced a presence. And the presence became more solid to me in my meditation. And I recognized it as Ted Owens, because I am a fan of your program and I've seen some pictures of Ted Owens that you've shown, and it was him. And he said to me, reach out to Jeffrey and tell him that if he wants to contact me, I'm available.
- [94:42]
B
Wow.
- [94:43]
A
And this is 35 years after his death. Something like that. I guess that would have been 2022. And so I endeavored.
- [94:55]
B
You did, because at this point, you're well known, you won the Bigelow Prize, so you're working in death, afterlife experiences, all consciousness.
- [95:06]
A
And it was quite clear to me at that point that there's a relationship between the afterlife and UFOs.
- [95:13]
B
Oh, yes. So how did you try to contact Ted?
- [95:15]
A
Well, what happened was I would try to meditate. Nothing happened. But one night I was asleep. And, you know, you're kind of half awake, half asleep in a hypnagogic state. And I felt his presence. And I said to him, we had a conversation. I said to him, this is the early phases of the Ukraine war. At the time, it would have been, I think, around December of 2022. And at the time, the Soviets. Not the Soviets, the Russians were bombing the power plants in Ukraine, trying to freeze them in the winter. I felt for the people of Ukraine, I said, and I thought Ted would be sympathetic to that. And I said to him, and this just popped into my head in this altered state of consciousness. Can we make it warm? For the winter in Ukraine, so the people don't suffer. That was my concern. And I knew, of course, that he had done this sort of thing while he was alive. Exactly. This sort of thing. Heat waves in the middle of winter. There were examples of. So he said to me, if the space intelligences agree, then we can do it. And so I. I created, I think, a monologue. I put it out on the video. This is what he says is going to happen again. It was just a few days Later, I'm thinking January 1st, if I recall correctly, 2023, there were a thousand temperature records broken all across Europe.
- [97:18]
B
Unbelievable.
- [97:19]
A
It was. And it was totally characteristic of the kinds of things he had done in the past. And I recall because I was now the Internet was very active, and there were meteorologists who specialize in rare weather patterns, absurd things. And they were posting on. They had blogs and things and saying, this is insane. We've never seen anything like this, this before. It came out of nowhere. It was unanticipated. And I endeavored to set up an experiment to see could we measure statistically. And I failed. Failed. Well, the reason is simply that a thousand records are all correlated with each other. So in effect, it's one record. And you can't get good statistics out of a single example. And yes, it was a warm summer in Ukraine, and they survived the Russian onslaught. In fact, they were exporting electricity at the time. But it wasn't something I could say here, statistical proof. I couldn't do that. But in every other regard, it would have been a success.
- [98:37]
B
Did you go back and talk to Ted again, thank him?
- [98:42]
A
No, I never entered into that state again. And I've been reluctant since then, too. Excuse me. I felt some. Maybe some of the same trepidation you spoke to. Like, I shouldn't be playing around with this. It works too well. And somebody wrote to me, a viewer wrote to me and said, do you realize that because of that heat wave, some people died from the heat?
- [99:12]
B
I didn't consider that.
- [99:13]
A
Yeah. And I thought, well, maybe there are unintended consequences. And I don't know entirely what I'm doing. But it wasn't as if I had ongoing communication with him. And I haven't felt that kind of contact, and I haven't tried to cultivate it either.
- [99:34]
B
And you initiated that. So it's not like he invaded your consciousness.
- [99:38]
A
Right. I was, you know, at that time, hoping to have it. And when it happened and when it worked, I began to think, well, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the one doing it. And I don't know, but I just felt like it's. It's better left to other people or that my role is still as an educator and a communicator, and I don't need to try to win the war.
- [100:10]
B
I totally agree. Even if it was you, you probably don't want that responsibility.
- [100:14]
A
Yeah.
- [100:18]
B
You've been in this space for a long time, and how do you handle. I know you handle criticism very well now because you've been doing it a long time. Were you ever angry? Sure you were. I'm surprised to hear you say that so quickly.
- [100:32]
A
Well, I don't get angry easily.
- [100:34]
B
No, you don't. I mean, nowadays critics attack you and it just rolls off. But there was a time where you were frustrated with academia or mainstream.
- [100:44]
A
Well, it made me sick, literally. They were trying to. I had spent 10 years at Berkeley. I was a graduate student from 1970. 1970 to 1980, when I got my doctoral degree, and they were trying to take it away from me. I was very angry, and it affected my health as well. It never occurred to me to try to punish those people. I was just struggling to protect my reputation because even parapsychologists in the parapsychology community, they wanted. I was being attacked so heavily, they didn't want to have anything to do with me at the time. My application for membership in the Parapsychological association was rejected initially.
- [101:36]
B
On what grounds?
- [101:37]
A
Because of the controversy that I got a doctoral degree at Berkeley, and people were saying, he's incompetent. He shouldn't have gotten the degree. The whole thing, you know, it was. Became a major point of focus. I filed a libel suit.
- [101:54]
B
So you have no. Do you have any allies at that point?
- [101:57]
A
Yes, of course. I had some allies, like my professors.
- [102:02]
B
Oh, right. What about personal. Were there personal costs or their personal support?
- [102:08]
A
Well, you know, it affects you inwardly when that happens. I felt mortified.
- [102:15]
B
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- [102:38]
A
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- [102:39]
B
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- [102:44]
A
And I felt a little bit embarrassed to show myself in public. And, you know, Arthur Young had predicted it will take you six Years to undo all the damage.
- [102:56]
B
And he was right.
- [102:57]
A
It was six years later when I launched the Thinking Allowed television series.
- [103:03]
B
Arthur was right again.
- [103:05]
A
Yeah.
- [103:06]
B
It's interesting that your mom was an actress. It's very outward, then becomes a yoga instructor and very inward. And you kind of had a similar path with criminology and sociology is very outward, and then parapsychology is very inward.
- [103:22]
A
Yeah.
- [103:22]
B
Did you get that from her?
- [103:24]
A
Well, now that you mention it, I think that balance was very important. My mother always used to say to me, moderation in all things, including moderation.
- [103:41]
B
I just thought it was very interesting. So you wrote a 95 page essay. Can you tell us what the Bigelow prize is? I mean, in Vegas, everybody knows the name Bigelow. Can you tell us about that? And why did you enter that contest?
- [104:00]
A
It was very strange.
- [104:02]
B
Okay, I'm ready. I love strange.
- [104:04]
A
Well, I got the news. Robert Bigelow is sponsoring a contest, Life After Death. And I thought to myself, well, there are a lot of smart people who will enter that competition. People in the universities who are studying or like University of Virginia, where they do a lot of work in that area. Surely one of those people is bound to win. And I knew Leslie Kane.
- [104:33]
B
You did?
- [104:33]
A
Yeah, I'd interviewed him.
- [104:35]
B
Oh, I guess you would have. Yeah. Because it's 2021.
- [104:38]
A
Well, this would have been 2020.
- [104:40]
B
2020.
- [104:40]
A
But I launched the YouTube channel in 2015 and Leslie had been on as a guest. And so I reached out to her, I said, leslie, it's perfect for you. You can should enter this contest. And she wrote back and said, well, I happen to be one of the judges.
- [104:57]
B
Oh.
- [104:58]
A
And she said, furthermore, you should listen to this interview that Robert Bigelow did. I think it was with George Knapp on radio or tv. She gave me a link and I listened to it. And she said, he's already predicting that you should enter the contest. And I listened. And George Knapp, I think it was George Knapp was saying who should enter your contest? And he said, well, people like Jeffrey Mishlove should enter. People who have been studying this their whole lives. And I thought to myself, gosh, you know, that's. How can I enter? Because there's so many people who would be much better at it than me.
- [105:48]
B
Not true.
- [105:49]
A
But how can I not?
- [105:53]
B
How can you not?
- [105:55]
A
So I did. And I struggled with it. It wasn't an easy essay to write. I had help.
- [106:04]
B
Why was Bigelow so interested in after death?
- [106:07]
A
His wife had died and he'd been through a lot he had set up this aerospace business and then in aids, not aids, Covid. Covid came along and the governor of Nevada had basically ruled that he had a non essential business. He had to let all of his employees go. And the business, the aerospace company, to my knowledge, has never recovered.
- [106:36]
B
I used to drive by every day on the way to work and there's a ghost town. It was just a big yellow building. No one's there.
- [106:43]
A
He still maintains a skeleton staff.
- [106:47]
B
But he had personal tragedy and then
- [106:49]
A
he had personal tragedies. I think a grandchild had committed suicide and his son, his wife had died. And he had earlier in his career, launched the National Institute of Discovery Science. And they were big into UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. But then at this point, he said he wanted to shift. He wanted to. He couldn't do both UFOs and life after death, so he wanted to study life after death. And launching the competition would be his entry into that arena.
- [107:27]
B
And he asked for your help?
- [107:31]
A
Well, indirectly. I didn't know him at that point.
- [107:35]
B
But he knew you.
- [107:36]
A
So now he knew of me. Yeah.
- [107:39]
B
You were the name, though.
- [107:40]
A
Yeah.
- [107:42]
B
So you got to work.
- [107:44]
A
Yeah, I think maybe we had spoken once or twice by that time.
- [107:50]
B
When did you make the decision to say, okay, I have to enter this?
- [107:53]
A
Well, I talked it over with my wife and she said, of course you have to.
- [107:59]
B
Of course you have to.
- [108:01]
A
I was reluctant at first.
- [108:03]
B
Why?
- [108:04]
A
Because I felt there were other people who were far more qualified.
- [108:09]
B
You don't give yourself enough credit. You've talked to every legend in this field.
- [108:15]
A
It's true, I have.
- [108:17]
B
In that regard, who has interviewed more people than you?
- [108:20]
A
Well, maybe you have.
- [108:21]
B
For all I know, this is episode 11. You've done 1500.
- [108:26]
A
Well, there are people who have done more. But in any case, doing interviews isn't the same as researching doing experiments, publishing in scientific journals. I was more of a popularizer than an original researcher. It's not as if I have hundreds of scientific publications to my name. I don't.
- [108:52]
B
You have a few peer reviewed papers out there?
- [108:54]
A
I have a few. And there are people who have hundreds and who know this field back and forth and some of them entered the competition and some of the people I thought were sure to win didn't even enter. I guess they felt maybe they were too old or something.
- [109:14]
B
So Janelle says, you got to do it.
- [109:17]
A
I got to do it.
- [109:18]
B
And what's your approach to the essay?
- [109:22]
A
Well, I decided if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to win.
- [109:26]
B
Attaboy.
- [109:28]
A
And so I cut back on my other projects, including the YouTube channel. We noticed and I focused myself nearly full time for six months to work on it. And I had some good friends who would read over my drafts. My first draft was terrible. I completely had to discard it and start over. But I finally got into the groove and I realized also that I wrote to the Bigelow Institute and said, can I include video segments in the interview? Because I had a big video library about it. They said, yes, you can. So I think I was the only person who did that. And of course, the ground rules for the competition fit me very well because they said what they wanted was an essay that would be as if you're taking a case to a jury in a courtroom. So I had my criminology background, right. And I could approach it that way as a criminologist. And they said, you know, firsthand testimony. And I had a big library of first hand testimony. And in particular I realized I had done an interview long ago. But I had the video with one of the world's great scientists, Francis Crick, the man who invented or discovered the helix property, DNA.
- [111:06]
B
Yes, we know who he is.
- [111:07]
A
He sort of interviewed him. Yeah.
- [111:09]
B
Okay.
- [111:10]
A
And he had written a book called the Astonishing Hypothesis in which he said, I'm going to set out to prove that consciousness is generated by the neurons of the brain. He said, it hasn't yet been proven. And I have him on tape saying, you know, the religious people might be correct. Consciousness might exist outside the brain completely and we might actually survive the death of the physical body. So I was able to include that video clip in the essay. I thought that was one of the strong points. Plus all the testimony that I had from many, many people who had had personal experiences, plus my own story.
- [111:58]
B
That's why those scientists didn't go in the contest. They saw you were going to be there with Francis Crick and they said, oh shit, we got nothing. We can't compete with that.
- [112:06]
A
They didn't know.
- [112:08]
B
Come on. So it's 95 pages, which I read. It's brilliant. Can you break down the thesis, the nine categories?
- [112:16]
A
Well, the basic idea is that there are many independent lines of evidence all pointing in the same direction. It could be out of body experiences, it could be near death experiences. It could be the reincarnation research. It could be mental mediumship or physical mediumship, which is really extraordinary. Trumpets flying around the room. It could be what is called instrumental trans communication or sometimes called electronic voice phenomena. People who communicate with their deceased relatives using a computer or a radio or they have these devices. What are they called now? Voices, spirit boxes and the like. Of course, there are lots of TV programs that feature these things, and some
- [113:12]
B
of it's legitimate, most is bunk, but some is legitimate. Edison and Tesla are both trying to build one of those.
- [113:18]
A
Yeah, that's right. Some, but not all.
- [113:20]
B
Some, but not all.
- [113:21]
A
Yeah. And so.
- [113:23]
B
But. But there's the White Crow theory, I think. Wasn't William James.
- [113:28]
A
William James White Crow, who is my intellectual hero, is he? Yeah.
- [113:33]
B
So do you remember his saying about the white crow?
- [113:35]
A
Oh, yes, please. Well, William James put it this way. He said, if you want to disprove the claim that all crows are black, you only need to find one white crow.
- [113:48]
B
That's right.
- [113:49]
A
And then he said, Mrs. Piper, the medium he was working with is my white crow. And he took a lot of heat for that too, because the scientific establishment was in no way interested in. And here he is, a Harvard professor, saying, this medium can really do it. She's talking to the dead and coming up with information that she couldn't possibly have known. And people were attacking him viciously for that. But he stuck to his guns.
- [114:22]
B
He did. I think I remember reading about him saying, you know, what about these other mediums? And he said, there's no stick big enough to knock them around with. He didn't like them in the space. But he liked his particular. His white crawl.
- [114:37]
A
Well, you know, I think if I remember the quote about no stick big enough, it was this that he was. This is in the pages of Science, the main American scientific publication where he's arguing about mediumship and the people are calling him a crank. Yes, and all sorts of insults. And he wrote, responded by saying, the quality of the criticism is so poor, their arguments are beneath the dignity of a scientist to argue the way they're arguing that any stick will do. This dog is such a vile creature that any stick you can find, you can beat the dog with. It doesn't matter. You hold mediumship in such contempt.
- [115:33]
B
I wouldn't want to debate William James on anything. He's one of the great thinkers of our time.
- [115:38]
A
Yeah, I would agree.
- [115:40]
B
So in your paper, we've got all these things pointing in the same direction. I'd like to know what happened when you found out you won.
- [115:51]
A
Well, I got a phone call from the Bigelow Institute and they said, robert Bigelow would like to speak with you. He will call you tomorrow morning at 9:30. So I'm sitting by the Phone.
- [116:08]
B
I'm sitting by the phone. 28.
- [116:13]
A
And it was 10 o' clock finally. I hadn't heard from him.
- [116:18]
B
That was a long half hour.
- [116:21]
A
So I called them.
- [116:22]
B
Oh, you did?
- [116:23]
A
I called them back. I said Robert Bigelow was going to call me at 9:30. What happened? And they said, oh, he hasn't come into the office yet. He'll call you when he gets in.
- [116:33]
B
This is killing you. So is your wife, is Janelle home?
- [116:39]
A
Janelle was at home.
- [116:40]
B
She's just telling you to calm down. It's going to calm down.
- [116:44]
A
Yeah. And so finally he calls and we're talking and he says, well, you won first prize. And Janelle is peeking her head in the door. She says, when? And so I hold my finger up like this. One finger. I held it up. And she goes to tell my stepson Lewis, who lives with us, she says, jeff won first prize. And Lewis says, well, how do you know? And she said, well, he held up one finger. And Lewis says, well, maybe that doesn't
- [117:16]
B
mean I know, but it was wives know.
- [117:20]
A
Yeah, she knew.
- [117:22]
B
So how did you feel, though? I mean, talk about validation.
- [117:26]
A
It was validating. But I can tell you this, I knew you did.
- [117:32]
B
I knew you were so humble going in.
- [117:35]
A
But by that time, it was the way I knew I was going to have a dream that night when I had the dream of the magazine that changed my life, I had absolute certainty at that point that I was going to win.
- [117:51]
B
I went and looked up how many judges voted for your paper. Do you remember how many?
- [117:56]
A
All of them.
- [117:57]
B
Unanimous.
- [117:57]
A
All six? Yeah.
- [117:58]
B
Yes. What did you do when you hung up the phone?
- [118:05]
A
Well, I was elated, obviously. I think the first thing I did was write to the people who had helped me and even to my professors back in, of course, and thanking them.
- [118:21]
B
This is five decades of work.
- [118:23]
A
Yeah. It was a validation for me for taking a huge risk.
- [118:32]
B
Yes, it was. And a lot of personal cost.
- [118:35]
A
Yeah.
- [118:35]
B
Health to your health. Litigation.
- [118:38]
A
Yeah.
- [118:39]
B
Is this one of those proudest moments? Is this a victory? Is this triumphant moment for you?
- [118:46]
A
Sure, yeah. And of course, the financial benefit was appreciated.
- [118:53]
B
How much did you win?
- [118:54]
A
It was half a million dollars.
- [118:55]
B
That's real. That's green money.
- [118:57]
A
Yeah. Yeah, it was.
- [119:00]
B
I think if there was no money, it would have felt just as good.
- [119:05]
A
Probably. It probably would have. Many people get awards with no money attached. Yes, they do, and they feel good.
- [119:15]
B
You were further attacked by mainstream when you won that prize.
- [119:22]
A
A little bit.
- [119:24]
B
I guess it didn't matter at that point, I mean, because I Followed it.
- [119:27]
A
Yeah. I'm not aware of really any serious attacks. The Bigelow Competition was seriously attacked.
- [119:36]
B
That's really what it was.
- [119:37]
A
It was about. But I noticed that the critics, for the most part, focused not on my essay, but on some of the others because there were 29 different prizes awarded. The judges said that there were so many good essays that were contributed that they urged him to award more prizes than he had originally agreed. And he did.
- [120:03]
B
Are those available to the public to read? Oh, that's. That's going to be.
- [120:07]
A
They're. They are all online.
- [120:13]
B
How comfortable were you with life after death going into that? You were convinced it's a real phenomenon.
- [120:21]
A
It gave me a chance to look back and remember how this all started for me. I had kind of almost forgotten about my dream of Uncle Harry. But as I look back on it, I could see from the benefit of decades that my whole life turned around after that dream. And I thought, that's the power of the afterlife. You can find it in examples of people who have been deeply touched by these experiences. They changed their life permanently. And there were many other examples. Bishop pike in California, who was the Episcopalian Bishop of California, resigned. That's right, As a result of his communications with his son who had died. Elizabeth Kubler Ross became one of the most influential people in America as a result of communications that she had had with a former patient of hers who had deceased at that point, that these things are life changing. And that, to me, was more proof than you would ever find in a scientific experiment. If you look at how it's touched the lives of people.
- [121:46]
B
You think Uncle Harry would have been proud of you for winning that prize?
- [121:50]
A
Well, he sure had a lot to do with it.
- [121:52]
B
He certainly did.
- [121:53]
A
Yeah. I can't say that I felt much contact with Uncle Harry since that dream. I think the important lesson for me is you don't have to have psychic experiences all the time. They come when they come. They're really not under our conscious control very much. A little bit. A little bit. But you only need one or two good ones in your life. And it can put you on a path where you can appreciate, you know, they're all around us. It's happening all the time to millions of people every day. But it's not that important for a human being. It's important to know that they're real. But, you know, we have other responsibilities in our life than to be psychic. When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for.
- [122:53]
B
For a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing.
- [123:09]
A
Discover what BetterHelp online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp.com today.
- [123:17]
B
But when those messages come, it's important to listen, I think.
- [123:20]
A
Yeah.
- [123:21]
B
Take a quick break and when we come back, talk about synchronicity and what's on the other side.
- [123:28]
A
Okay.
- [123:28]
B
All right. We'll be right back. Well, let's light the mood and talk about death. You spent a lot of time documenting and talking about other people's paranormal experiences, and then you had one of your own. That fascinates me, and I think it's the archetypal synchronistic resonance, which sounds like a mouthful, but those words are meaningful. What is that and what happened?
- [124:00]
A
Well, it wasn't a single event. It was a whole series of events. And it all started for me. As I recall, I was traveling. I was visiting Europe, and I was on my way to the city of Cordoba, Spain, which happened to be the city, a very unusual city because it was at one time Muslim. And there still is a huge 14th century mosque still there, in which after the Christian took over and expelled the Muslims and the Jews from Spain, they built a huge cathedral in the middle of the mosque.
- [124:49]
B
They did that.
- [124:52]
A
But it's this also. It was an ancient Roman city. There still exists a bridge from Roman times.
- [124:59]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay.
- [125:00]
A
And there is a statue in the city of the Roman philosopher, playwright Seneca and scholar Seneca. And I wanted to visit for that reason.
- [125:17]
B
Why? What is it about Seneca? I don't know if he's that well known. I mean, he is to me, because I love that part of history. Is the statue you're talking about of one man or two?
- [125:28]
A
One.
- [125:29]
B
Just Seneca.
- [125:30]
A
One man. And it doesn't look. There are other statues of Seneca that look very different.
- [125:34]
B
They do. And sometimes there's two men in those.
- [125:37]
A
Yeah, well, there was Seneca the Elder and Seneca the Younger.
- [125:42]
B
And some are Seneca and Nero. Some are Seneca and Nero and Nero.
- [125:47]
A
Yeah, well, he was Nero's tutor and Nero's advisor. And I knew nothing about Seneca back in my early days of the TV program when I did an interview with Dr. Marty Rossman, who was a hypnotherapist, medical doctor, hypnotherapist. And he was going to demonstrate the hypnotic technique at that Point. We did a half hour interview for broadcast and then we did another hour for the dvd, or not even dvd videotape. VHS market in those days. So in that session, he hypnotized me and he told me, you are going to experience your inner healing advisor.
- [126:45]
B
Inner healing advisor.
- [126:46]
A
That's what he said. He said it could be anything. It might be a chipmunk, it might be some figure will come to you. Just let it come, Whatever. And I'm already at that point I've been inducted. I'm in a light hypnotic trance and I experience this person walking toward me wearing a toga. And I thought to myself, oh, good, I want to improve my public speaking abilities. So I want you to be the famous orator, the Greek orator. It's not Democritus, but Demosthenes. Demosthenes, that's right. You be Demosthenes and help me with my public speaking. And he said to me, I'm not Demosthenes, I'm Seneca. And that took me.
- [127:44]
B
Did you say who?
- [127:46]
A
Well, I remembered when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, in the library building, they had emblazoned in the actual. In the concrete of the building the names of famous people from ancient times. And Seneca's name was up there. So I knew there was a famous person from the ancient world named Seneca. That much I knew. Very little else. I think I probably knew that. A few other minor details. And at that point in my hypnotic state, silently I said, well, since you're Seneca and since you're here, what do you want me to do? And he said, study my life.
- [128:36]
B
Oh, beautiful.
- [128:39]
A
And then I came out of the hypnotic state. I had this silly grin on my face. It's all captured on video.
- [128:47]
B
This is captured on video, the whole thing. Roman historians right now are very excited about what you just said.
- [128:54]
A
Well, I, you know, I reported to him. My experience was. And then I began studying the life of Seneca and realized what an amazing historical figure he was. He was not only a playwright and a philosopher and had scientific writings as well, but he literally ran the Roman Empire for five years.
- [129:24]
B
Yes, he did.
- [129:25]
A
And it was considered, I think they called it the Silver Age of Rome. He was considered a very good administrator.
- [129:34]
B
Yes. When he was tutoring Nero.
- [129:37]
A
Yeah. So here I am traveling to Seneca's birthplace and I get an email from a fellow named Engen. Now his first name is. He became the co author with me.
- [129:54]
B
Sure.
- [129:55]
A
And I'm stumbling over his first name, but it'll come. Brendan Engen.
- [130:01]
B
Yes.
- [130:01]
A
Brendan Engen wrote To me, out of the blue. I had no idea who he was. And he said, I'm writing to you because my girlfriend bought me a psychic reading for my birthday. And it happened to be with Kevin Ryerson, who was a good friend of mine, a trance channeler Featured by Shirley MacLaine in her book out on a Limb. Kevin and I were good buddies, and this psychic reader told me that in a past lifetime, I was a good friend of Seneca's, I think Lucretius. Seneca wrote his epistles to Lucretius, and he said that you were Seneca in a past life. And so I'm reaching out to you because maybe we were together in a past life. And I thought, how interesting. Here I am about to visit the birthplace of Seneca, and how could he know this?
- [131:04]
B
Could he know this?
- [131:05]
A
No, no, he just knew my email. He found my email.
- [131:09]
B
So you weren't public. You hadn't gone public about the Seneca vision yet?
- [131:13]
A
Well, now, let me think. No, I hadn't gone public, but Kevin Ryerson was the trans channel who gave him the psychic reading, had also done readings with me.
- [131:28]
B
Okay.
- [131:29]
A
And I think that's the connection.
- [131:31]
B
That's it.
- [131:32]
A
But I've had many readings from Kevin because he was a friend and that was his thing.
- [131:38]
B
Nice to have access to that.
- [131:40]
A
Yeah. Well, as a parapsychologist, I've had a lot of psychic friends along the way, and they helped me from time to time. They've been very instrumental at crucial moments. But I didn't have any reason to think I had been Seneca in a past lifetime. And I wrote back to Brendan and said, well, it's quite an interesting synchronicity. You would write to me about Seneca right when I am about to visit the city where he was born. And it's an example. I said, this is all synchronistic.
- [132:15]
B
And are you talking about, like, Jungian synchronicity? Yes, just things that. Just. How would you describe it? He had the scarab story.
- [132:23]
A
Well, and there are some Jungians who have taken real issue with me over my use of the term synchronicity, because I was using it in a kind of vague, generic sense, like, I'm on my way to see Seneca and I get the email from you. And I had a Jungian who wrote back and said, no, it must be at the very precise second.
- [132:45]
B
I think that's debatable.
- [132:46]
A
I think so, too. But in any case, I suggested that there's something Jungian, something synchronistic, that Seneca is obviously a psychic influence on me. It doesn't mean, I was him, but I thought it was interesting. And Brendan and I stayed in touch. And eventually other synchronicities began to occur between Brendan and myself. For example, when I was doing radio interviews on KPFA long ago, I interviewed a fellow who had written a book called the Looking Glass God, all about Taoism, the yin Yang symbol. And he had this book, the Looking Glass God. And I owned it. And I must have sold it at one point or another, because Brendan told me he was in a bookstore in Walnut Creek, California, and this book, as he's walking along the aisles of the bookstore, fell on his head. And he opened it up and it's the Looking Glass God. And he saw my signature in it, that I had once owned that book.
- [134:03]
B
Your book?
- [134:04]
A
Yeah.
- [134:05]
B
And you were already in touch?
- [134:06]
A
Yeah.
- [134:07]
B
Does he see this as a sign or.
- [134:09]
A
Yes. Yeah. He said, this is significant. He said, we need to write an article or you need. He said, you need to write an article about what? You just told me about the synchronistic connections that occur and are related to possible past life influences of this sort. And I said, well, we could write it together. And we did. In I think, 2007 or so, we published a jointly written article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance, in which we talked about the idea that people who lived in the ancient past can influence us and we can have a whole series of synchronicities that support that influence. It doesn't necessarily mean it was a past life. It was an alternative to thinking about reincarnation.
- [135:09]
B
Actually, I thought it was a very interesting take, is that it's not necessarily reincarnation, it's just influence. Something about vibration in the universe, something deeper.
- [135:22]
A
And I've subsequently met other people who have felt the same way about different historical figures. Jean Houston, who was another mentor of mine, a person I greatly admired, who said, for her it was Proclus.
- [135:38]
B
Oh, that's amazing.
- [135:39]
A
Proclus, who was another Neoplatonic philosopher, the last of the Neoplatonic philosophers. And she said, I would be, as a child, just this phrase would come into my head, Hocus pocus. I am Proclus.
- [135:58]
B
I think if I have a few of those myself, I don't have really spoken about them, but I think we all do. We find ourselves sketching a name, writing a word, saying a phrase. I think it's coming from somewhere.
- [136:10]
A
Yeah. I think I have a similar relationship with William James.
- [136:15]
B
Do you?
- [136:16]
A
Well, Kevin Ryerson would maintain that I was William James. In the past life. And I've even had regressions to try and explore that. So far, nothing has convinced me that I was William James. But Walter Semkiw, who got a lot of his information from Kevin Ryerson and wrote the book Return of the Revolutionaries about people's past lives, that he had identified as a chapter in which he describes why he believes I was William James. And I gave him permission to do that, provided he state that I don't accept it.
- [136:55]
B
Why don't you accept it?
- [136:56]
A
Because I don't have any concrete memories of having been William James.
- [137:03]
B
Okay, but that doesn't mean you weren't.
- [137:05]
A
No, it doesn't mean I wasn't, and it just doesn't mean I was. That's all.
- [137:10]
B
What's his argument? What's his chapter about?
- [137:12]
A
Well, he talks about, you know, how my career follows William James from science
- [137:19]
B
to mysticism and so forth that, you know.
- [137:22]
A
And I can see there's a kind of logic there. I can see why I might have been. I'll go that far. And I'm curious, you know, because he's my hero. And that's why I think I couldn't have possibly been him, because he's my hero.
- [137:37]
B
I don't know. The establishment attacked him. He fought back and won. There's a lot of similarities.
- [137:44]
A
There are similarities.
- [137:45]
B
How do you think William James would think about you today?
- [137:51]
A
Well, if I asked myself about that, I would say. He'd probably say that he's definitely doing things that I would like to do. But he's a more shallow person.
- [138:07]
B
That you're a more shallow person.
- [138:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. William James was a deep thinker. I don't purport to be.
- [138:14]
B
I don't think you give yourself enough credit. William James famously said, there's a problem with the scientific method where a personal experience is just as valid as any type of science.
- [138:27]
A
Yes, he did.
- [138:28]
B
Any objective reality is fact is part of science.
- [138:33]
A
Right. I subscribe to that wholeheartedly.
- [138:37]
B
You're continuing his project?
- [138:39]
A
Yes, I would say say that I am. And I would say that he was a sickly man. His whole life, he was always visiting health spas because he had stomach problems and the like. And the one thing that I did experience under hypnotic regression, I began to have stomach pains. And so I would come out. I didn't want to go any further with the regressions. And one other little piece of information that came to me, I've never had it validated. If you can find anything that validates it, then I would regard that as evidential is that when he was younger, people called him Billiam instead of William.
- [139:24]
B
I didn't know that.
- [139:25]
A
Well, I don't know if it's true. It's just something that came to me.
- [139:29]
B
That would be interesting to find that out. Someone would know that.
- [139:33]
A
If there's any evidence that he was ever called Billiam instead of William, I would say that would count in favor of that. I might have been William James, or at least had access to that piece of information somehow.
- [139:48]
B
Have you had any regressions that convinced you you were someone?
- [139:52]
A
No.
- [139:52]
B
None.
- [139:53]
A
No.
- [139:54]
B
You had an interesting theory about soul energy, which I kind of agree with, is that maybe William James, maybe you are a little bit William James. And he's spread out across a few people.
- [140:07]
A
Yeah. There are many people who have said, including people today who say he speaks to them from the afterlife, even now. So I'm inclined to think that we all have access to what William James called the cosmic reservoir of consciousness, or the Akashic records. We all have access to all knowledge.
- [140:33]
B
So are we all one consciousness, and these bodies are just a small expression of the same field?
- [140:40]
A
I'm in favor of that perspective.
- [140:44]
B
So what happens when we die? And I don't mean the tunnel and all of that just yet. I mean, at that moment when the lights go out, what's going on inside?
- [140:56]
A
Well, consciousness persists, but I've experienced the total loss of consciousness in deep sleep. It could be like that. You might go into a deep unconscious state until at some point you're awakened, and maybe you're in another body or in another plane of existence, or maybe you're conscious all the way through. George Harrison made a point of saying he wanted to be conscious through the death process. And there's. You know, he really worked toward that. So there's. And his wife Olivia, at the time said if you had been in the room at the moment he died, there was such light, you could have photographed it.
- [141:42]
B
That's. I mean, that's another shared death experience that. There's a lot of documentation for that, Specifically the light, the room changing, seeing figures. I'm specifically thinking about Raymond Moody's work, who studied shared death experience for a while and then had one with his siblings when his mother passed away.
- [142:06]
A
I didn't know that.
- [142:07]
B
His father arrived, and they all saw him. They said, dad's here. They all saw it. They said the room changed shape. So I think there's something to that. You're not afraid?
- [142:19]
A
No, absolutely not. I'm totally comfortable with the idea that I'll die. And I'm going to be 80 this year, so it could happen soon for all I know. And I'm sure as I get closer there will be trepidations. I was in the hospital earlier this year and and was told I might have to undergo a very dangerous procedure. And I was nervous about it. It turned out they didn't need to do it at the end of the day. But I'm sure I'll approach actual death with a certain amount of trepidation. But at the moment I can say I look forward to it.
- [142:59]
B
When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want, like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha chings from every channel right in one spot and turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. I don't know if Janelle would be as optimistic, but when did that switch happen for you? We're all afraid of it.
- [143:37]
A
Yeah. It's sort of biological.
- [143:39]
B
It is.
- [143:40]
A
And survival instinct.
- [143:43]
B
I just wrote an episode where I called it a curse that we know that we're going to die. But it can also be a gift because you can seize the moment. When did you stop being afraid?
- [143:55]
A
At some point, as I began thinking about probably while I was writing my first book, the Roots of Consciousness, I began to appreciate the idea. It's called how does it Go? Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny.
- [144:17]
B
I'm stumped.
- [144:18]
A
Well, it means the development of the embryo recapitulates the entire evolutionary history of the species.
- [144:26]
B
It kind of does.
- [144:27]
A
Yeah. We start out as a single celled organism, an embryo. And then we gradually evolve the early stages of the embryo. We begin to look a little bit like a fish or a reptile until we become fully human. And it dawned on me, if I just think of my whole body, the entire history of evolution exists in effect. Even this body, even this physical form is the product of a billion years of evolution.
- [145:00]
B
Yes.
- [145:01]
A
And I began to perceive of myself as actually a being who has been around at least a billion years.
- [145:08]
B
You can feel that.
- [145:09]
A
Yeah.
- [145:13]
B
There's all these stories about famous people dying and seeing something saying, oh my God, or I can't believe it. My brother was with my father when he passed a few years ago, and he said, dad got up and saw something. And there are stories, another episode I'm working on, of people who are near death or close to brain death or dementia that suddenly sit up.
- [145:41]
A
Yes.
- [145:41]
B
And are perfectly Terminal lucidity.
- [145:43]
A
Terminal lucidity. It happened to my mother.
- [145:46]
B
It happened to your mother?
- [145:47]
A
Yes.
- [145:50]
B
I don't want to pry.
- [145:52]
A
Well, I wasn't there at the time. My wife Janelle was with her in the hospital very close to her death, maybe two weeks before. And my mother had Alzheimer's. She was out of it completely. You couldn't have an intelligible conversation. She was always very sweet, I will say that, and a pleasure to be around. But she sat up with Janelle. She was bright, she was lucid. She had a lengthy conversation with Janelle, talking about the family and many, many other detailed things.
- [146:31]
B
How long was the conversation?
- [146:33]
A
Maybe an hour or two.
- [146:34]
B
That's a long one.
- [146:35]
A
Yeah.
- [146:36]
B
Did she call you?
- [146:38]
A
Well, she told me afterwards. I don't know where I was at the time, but, you know, I got a complete rundown of it and two weeks later she was dead.
- [146:50]
B
What do you think is happening there? What are we seeing? Why are we lucid?
- [146:54]
A
Well, it seems to be a way of reinforcing it's evidence that I would say reinforces William James theory of consciousness, which is that the brain doesn't generate consciousness. The brain functions more like a radio or television receiver. The signal is coming from elsewhere. Consciousness, I would say, is actually everywhere.
- [147:24]
B
It's like a filter that we're filtered into these individual consciousnesses.
- [147:30]
A
And at some point when the brain starts breaking down just enough, the larger consciousness can kind of come through. The brain is no longer keeping it out. Because if we were in a state of cosmic consciousness where you have 360 degree vision and you know everything, everywhere, all the time, you couldn't survive, you couldn't pay the rent or pay the mortgage or feed the family. We have to filter it out.
- [148:02]
B
This answers the hard consciousness question. This makes sense.
- [148:05]
A
Yeah.
- [148:07]
B
Terminal lucidities happens to people where their brains are damaged beyond repair.
- [148:11]
A
Right.
- [148:11]
B
But there's tumors. There's no way it could work. Someone who's never spoken their whole life could get. Gets up and starts singing. Yeah, it's. I don't think there's an explanation for that just yet. It's the. William James is as close as.
- [148:26]
A
I think, as close as we can come. As to my knowledge.
- [148:30]
B
How do you. What is your take on soul groups, life between lives? I don't know if you've ever read Michael Newton's work.
- [148:41]
A
Michael Newton's work is quite interesting. I haven't really studied it in depth. I ought to, but what I can say is F. W. H. Myers. Frederick William Henry Myers, who wrote the classic book on life after death published in 1903 posthumously, called Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, is a classic, massive book incorporating all the findings developed by the Society for Psychical Research since it was founded in 1882. So 20 years worth of scientific investigation and brilliantly put together, he maintained that. Where did we start? What was your initial.
- [149:40]
B
Soul groups.
- [149:41]
A
Soul groups. Well, okay, thank you for getting me back on track. After he died, as I say, the book was published by posthumously, some 30 years after he died, he communicated entire books from the other side through a medium named Geraldine Cummins, who did automatic writing.
- [150:05]
B
Oh, I've got to look into this.
- [150:07]
A
And he wrote a book called. He Wrote Two Books through Her. And now the title is on the Tip of My Tongue. It'll come again. But in those books, he's describing what the afterlife is like.
- [150:24]
B
That's his.
- [150:25]
A
Yes.
- [150:26]
B
Okay.
- [150:28]
A
And I think of it as one of our best descriptions because he's the guy who spent his adult life pioneering the study of the afterlife. And even before he died, he wrote that, you know, things are going on in the other side. They are doing their experiments. Experiments. And then he came back and there was something called the Cross Correspondences that the Society for Psychical Research studied for decades, in which Myers and others, other deceased members of the Society for Psychical Research, were coming back and proving that it was them. Because what they would do is create very unique messages that were poetic. Myers was a poet and a Greek scholar, among other things. And so they create these complex messages, but they would deliver part of it through a medium, let's say, in North America, part of it through a different medium in Europe, and part of it through another medium in India. And all of the mediums were instructed, send your peculiar messages that make no sense whatsoever to. To the Society for Psychical Research. And they would put the messages together and see that they interlock with each other. And it's the same communicator coming through. So that was. Myers was doing this and then some. After 30 years in the afterlife dictating entire books.
- [152:02]
B
Well, what did he see over there? How did he describe it?
- [152:05]
A
Group souls. That's where we were going.
- [152:08]
B
Yes.
- [152:09]
A
He said, yes, there are group souls, and you get to different levels. He said, we all are part of larger soul groups. Some of them, he said, might have 20 members. Some of them might have a thousand or several thousand that we share soul
- [152:27]
B
groups with and soul communities that soul clicks.
- [152:31]
A
Yeah. And Walter Semkiw, who wrote Return of the Revolutionaries, maintained, and I think most parapsychologists reject his work out of hand because they don't like past life regressions and they don't like mediums. They like working with young children.
- [152:54]
B
Why young children? Because of the reincarnation stories.
- [152:57]
A
Yeah. The reincarnation story is not going to be contaminated if it's a young child who hasn't learned about these things because they don't know how to read yet or something of that sort. But an adult who comes up and remembers a past life. And psychotherapy and I once was a past life therapist. I know it's a very powerful form of therapy, but I think sometimes it's evidential of a real past life, but often it is not. In any case, once again, remind me where we're soul groups. Soul groups.
- [153:37]
B
I think about it because sometimes you meet somebody and you just have a connection to them.
- [153:42]
A
Yeah. And Walter Semkew maintained that there are soul groups and that the people who were the founding fathers of the United States of America, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the like, were members of a. And they come back and they meet each other in the next lifetime. And he felt he was John Adams?
- [154:04]
B
He did, yes. Does he have a feud with whoever Jefferson is?
- [154:09]
A
Well, yes, as a matter of fact.
- [154:12]
B
Does he really?
- [154:13]
A
Well, there was another person he identified as Thomas Jefferson and they knew each other and had some debates and arguments about it all. Yes.
- [154:24]
B
It's interesting because those two men died on the same day.
- [154:26]
A
Yes. And as I recall, John Adams last words when he died were Jefferson still lives.
- [154:36]
B
That's true. That's what he said. Bitter to the end.
- [154:40]
A
Well, but it's unclear whether he was bitter about that he was dying because he didn't know Jefferson was dying on the same day or if he actually saw Jefferson in the afterlife still living.
- [154:56]
B
That's right. I hadn't considered that.
- [154:58]
A
That could be the other interpretation. It's not clear.
- [155:02]
B
Do you believe that our souls, when we go back, that we make a choice in that consciousness, like when we come back, we choose our body, we choose what we're going to try to learn to bring back.
- [155:15]
A
I think we have many options whether we're going to come back, maybe which planet we're going to come back to, or which realm of existence. I think there are other levels of reality apart from physical reality. And even within physical reality. Surely there are many other planets and life forms that we could inhabit.
- [155:39]
B
So that means there's a lot of souls. If you're Talking about. You're talking about the universe.
- [155:44]
A
Yes.
- [155:46]
B
Okay.
- [155:47]
A
And I think what we call the universe, meaning the three dimensional or four dimensional space time that we inhabit, is one possible level. I think there are many other levels of reality, but even within this level, many, many options. So I think there are lots of choices. Some people may never come. They'll just move on to higher levels or different levels.
- [156:13]
B
So you can choose to not come back.
- [156:16]
A
I think what happens is that the way people phrase it, you are going to be with your guides. Now, what that means could be just other parts of yourself or your larger self. And you're going to have a conversation about it and you'll make certain determinations. Like, it occurred to me, if I had been William James and I was going to come back, I might have said I'd like to be a bit healthier this time around and I might like to look better.
- [156:56]
B
Are you saying you're more handsome than William James?
- [156:58]
A
Well, maybe you are. I kind of, you know, I have my vanity and I suppose, I think that I was probably. And I think he felt. I don't think he felt good about how he looked. I could be wrong about that. But that's my impression, because his father selected his wife for him.
- [157:21]
B
Oh,
- [157:25]
A
like he needed his father to do it right. That I wasn't going to have that happen.
- [157:31]
B
No, no. I'm just thinking that.
- [157:33]
A
But I think possibly Janelle was Alice James. There's some reason to think so. Walter Semkiw and Kevin Ryerson thought so.
- [157:44]
B
What reason?
- [157:45]
A
Well, one of the things that Cemkiw felt is that very often people maintain the same basic facial structure, structure from lifetime to lifetime. And you see that, for example, in his work with birthmarks. People have birthmarks that might be the death wound of a previous lifetime. So some physical things carry from lifetime to lifetime. And I actually think, especially if you see photos of me in my early days when I had a beard, I kind of resembled William James, but better looking. And I kind of imagine, if I were to fantasize about it, that William James would have liked that. He might say, this time around I'll be a more shallow person, but healthier and better looking and still very interested in the things that interest me, intelligent enough to make some progress.
- [158:45]
B
And a lot of those personality traits can carry over as well. Yeah. So you do have that same. I mean, you're carrying. Continuing his project.
- [158:56]
A
I think intellectually I feel very compatible with William James, but really he's far deeper thinker than I am.
- [159:03]
B
Well, what do you think. Why do you think you chose this path? Why did you make this decision? Because you're very impactful. You've impacted millions of lives.
- [159:14]
A
I wonder about it myself because, you know, my father ran a furniture store in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and I imagined I'd probably grow up and run a furniture store.
- [159:27]
B
Sure.
- [159:28]
A
And then somehow, you know, what can I say? LSD must have had something to do with it, because I was. You do have kind of mystical experience under lsd. You begin to experience other realities, colors swirling around you. And you can look at another person and you begin to see their face change as if you're looking at their past lives. And all of these things made me very curious. What's going on here? After having had, in 1968, my first LSD experience, I was incredibly curious about all of this and began exploring mysticism. And my best friend, as I got into Berkeley was a guy who thought he could explain how LSD worked in the brain and how it imitated the serotonin molecule and took the place of serotonin in the nerve synapses of the brain, but didn't do what serotonin did. Did other things.
- [160:40]
B
That's right. Guess a lot of psychedelics or serotonin just kind of flipped.
- [160:45]
A
Yeah.
- [160:46]
B
So psychedelics could be allowing us to tap into the universal consciousness.
- [160:52]
A
I think, in. In a way, yes.
- [160:55]
B
What did Terrence McKenna think about that? My name is MacKenzie, and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care
- [161:11]
A
for this autistic child.
- [161:13]
B
So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme.com this podcast is supported by GoFundMe.
- [162:00]
A
I hate to speak for Terrence, I understand, because he was so eloquent and he could put things into such beautiful phrases that he could. That I can't do, but how do
- [162:11]
B
you how do you feel?
- [162:13]
A
I think he would be in agreement
- [162:15]
B
is that when I hear DMT stories, even across cultures, they're all seeing the same entities, Wood elves, all this stuff that sound kind of silly until you line up all the cases together and it's all pointing to one thing and that there's a field around us that we can tap into.
- [162:35]
A
And you know, David J. Brown wrote the book on DMT entities. I interviewed him and he had an experience reminiscent of Ted Owens. The mantis being appeared to him when he was under DMT and he says operated on his brain, which is the same claim Ted Owens made. And he told me, I have it on video. He said there isn't a day in his life when he doesn't think about that experience.
- [163:11]
B
You haven't been interested in a DMT experience?
- [163:15]
A
I haven't had one. I have had ayahuasca, so I suppose.
- [163:18]
B
Oh, you have?
- [163:19]
A
Yeah, I have had ayahuasca, but not these days. People inject dmt, pure dmt. I haven't done that.
- [163:26]
B
What did you see during your ayahuasca journey?
- [163:30]
A
Well, now that you mention it, I had a quite unusual experience. It was as if I was in ancient Egypt and I was singing praises to the God Horus, that Horus is the most beautiful of gods. And it was a very profound connection to Horus, who was an amazing deity. If you look at the history of all deities, Horus is, in many ways, you could say, the predecessor of Jesus Christ.
- [164:03]
B
You certainly could, yeah. So didn't you have a sort of a flashing image of ancient Rome?
- [164:13]
A
I have had that. I don't know if it was on that occasion of ayahuasca. I think it might have been just. I think maybe even in a normal state of consciousness for a split second, for just a split second, I felt like I was in Nero's palace.
- [164:33]
B
Did you see it or did you feel it?
- [164:35]
A
It was more of a feeling. And it was so fast that it's hard to capture it all, but it felt real. It felt like I was there.
- [164:45]
B
What was the emotional feeling? There's a reason I'm asking is because at the end of Seneca's life, he was bickering with Nero.
- [164:54]
A
Yeah.
- [164:55]
B
Because Nero was building the big palace then when Seneca had to kill himself. So I'm just wondering if you appeared there and you were annoyed. Like, look at all this opulence.
- [165:06]
A
It was so quick. It was only simply that I was there, I was really there. And then it ended.
- [165:14]
B
So lucky. So, ancient Egypt, were there entities or guides There during that journey, I can't
- [165:21]
A
say that there was. It was just a deep sense of connection with how magnificent Horus was as a deity. And subsequently I have felt that connection with Horus. In fact, I happen to own a sarcophagus, a tiny little sarcophagus about 2, 3ft. And it was used. It's from ancient Egypt. It goes back to the time of Moses. And it was a sarcophagus for a falcon.
- [165:59]
B
Wow. Where did you get that?
- [166:02]
A
In Israel. And my first trip to Israel in a little Arab shop. They, you know, was interested in the antiquities and they pulled it out of the back room and said, look at this. It was very expensive, but I bet I had to have it and subsequently had it looked at by archaeologists who have told me this is the real thing.
- [166:25]
B
Did you feel any energy, any emotion from that object?
- [166:29]
A
Well, something must have gotten me to pay many thousands of dollars for it,
- [166:36]
B
because I think there's something to that, to a residual energy with objects or locations. Did you visit Seneca's villa, his death place outside Rome?
- [166:45]
A
No, I have not. Is it still in existence?
- [166:49]
B
It is. It's about 3 mile marker 3 on the Appian Way outside Rome. It's pretty remarkable.
- [166:55]
A
Have you been there?
- [166:56]
B
I have.
- [166:57]
A
Wow.
- [166:58]
B
Yeah. That's where he was killed.
- [167:00]
A
Oh, my.
- [167:02]
B
There's so many. He's a great story.
- [167:03]
A
It never occurred to me to go there or to visit William James Grave, either.
- [167:09]
B
Oh, I bet you'd feel something at those places.
- [167:12]
A
I imagine I might, yeah. But I would always doubt myself. I think I would say you're making this up because of the history that you have and things that people have said.
- [167:26]
B
That's okay. Even if you are, that's okay to make it up.
- [167:31]
A
It would be. But on the other hand, I've thought, I'm here. I'm living this life. I don't have to revisit those lives.
- [167:39]
B
So what was your mission when you came back? Your soul sent you here to achieve something. Have you done it?
- [167:46]
A
I think so. What I expressed to Ted Owens when he said, what do you want to do with this power? And I said, I want to be a communicator to the public at large, the mainstream culture about the realities of esoteric, paranormal, mystical world. And that's been certainly for the last 10, 12 years, since I launched the YouTube channel, I've been doing it, and even long before that, and the radio and television work I did, that's been my career as an adult, with some
- [168:23]
B
detours along the way, some fun detours. We normally end with plugs, but we'll link to those. But this is too important for people listening who are having experiences or fear of death or things like that. Do you have any message for them? What should they do? How should they think about it?
- [168:41]
A
Well, normally when I tell people about my life, I think if there's a lesson in it that I can share with people, it's that if you decide that you want to become the best version of yourself, which would be being in touch with your purpose, your entelechy, the idea being that we are born each with a deep purpose, and it's going to be different for everybody. But if you want to get in touch with that part of yourself and live it, the universe wants you to do that. And the universe will help. The universe will open doors for you so that you can do that.
- [169:29]
B
So just be open to the messages and follow the signs.
- [169:33]
A
Yeah, that seems to be what happened for me. And I think it's largely true. Some, but not all will be able to do that.
- [169:45]
B
Anything else that you want to say or in part before we go?
- [169:50]
A
Well, I would like to say that if among your viewers, if there are people who think. Think they'd like to dedicate their lives to the study of the paranormal, that we've created a new program at the California Institute for Human Science where you can get. For the first time since the program at John F. Kennedy University shut down in the 1980s, for the first time in the United States, you can get a doctoral degree or a master's degree with a concentration or specialization in parapsychology. And I'm one of the directors of that program and I'm currently actually teaching.
- [170:33]
B
You are?
- [170:33]
A
I'm teaching a course right now on the practical applications of psi, which is the word parapsychologists use for ESP and psychokinesis.
- [170:46]
B
Well, we'll link to all of that. We'll put it all on screen so people can find you. Jeffrey Mishlove, thank you so much for coming in. This has been a joy.
- [170:52]
A
Thank you. It's been a joy for me, too.
- [170:54]
B
Bye, everybody. That was the Great Jeffrey Mishlove. 50 years of research and 1500 interviews in parapsychology. He's a legend. And here's what we know. Jeffrey's PhD in parapsychology from UC Berkeley is real. He earned it in 1980, the first and only parapsychology degree ever awarded by an American university. Skeptics try to revoke it. Jeffrey filed a lawsuit and won twice the Bigelow Institute Prize is also real. Robert Bigelow funded a $500,000 award for the best scientific essay arguing consciousness survives death. Jeffrey's six judges voted unanimously. Now for the bold stuff. Jeffrey told us he reached out in a hypnagogic state in late 202022 to the consciousness of Ted Owens, who died in 1987. He asked Ted to keep Ukraine warm so civilians could survive Russia's attacks on the power grid. He says a thousand temperature records broke across Europe in early January 2023. That is documented. And whether Ted Owens caused it from wherever Ted is now, that's a different question. The Challenger warning claim. Jeffrey's 2000 book, the P.K. mann, documents the Christmas Eve call in detail. The O ring failure that actually or allegedly caused the Challenger to crash is well documented. The call is something only Jeffrey knows. But if that call happened, and I believe it did, I think Jeffrey is still carrying some guilt about it, which is only natural. And here's what I keep coming back to. Terminal lucidity. People with completely destroyed brains from late stage Alzheimer's sit up hours before death and have a final, clear, fully present conversation. Jeffrey's mother did it as sharp as she'd ever been. She talked to his wife two weeks before she died for about two hours. This is a real phenomenon and nobody has a good explanation for it. William James argued in 1898 that the brain doesn't generate consciousness, it filters it. Like a radio receives a signal. It didn't produce terminal lucidity. Looks a lot like the filter breaking down just before it goes dark. Jeffrey Mishlove is the most credible living archivist of 50 years of paranormal research. Full stop. He knew the players. Targ, Puthoff, Valet, Owens, McKenna, Monroe, everyone. Whatever you make of his claims, he's a primary source for a part of science that the mainstream would like to ignore. And when the mainstream pushes back a something it's worth taking seriously. Jeffrey's full archive is at New Thinking Loud on YouTube. His book on Ted Owens is the PK man on Amazon, and the Bigelow essay is free. Search Bigelow Institute Consciousness Studies and you'll find it now on the channel. I've covered SRI and Project Stargate in a bunch of episodes, as well as the afterlife. In the episode about the skull experiments, links will be down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are are appreciated. I believe a secret code inside the Bible said I want word I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music so I'm singing like I should
- [174:25]
A
but then another conspiracy theory becomes
- [174:28]
B
the truth, my friends and it never ends no, it never end. I feel the crap cat I got stuck inside Mel's home with MK ultra of being only 2 aware did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set or were the shadow people there the rock well in the uncertainty his fault the smiling man I'm
- [175:07]
A
told and his name was cold I
- [175:11]
B
can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes Handle fish on Thursday nights Wednesday J2 and W. Through the night. The madman sightings and the solar stone still come to a gotha the secrets
- [175:55]
A
city underground
- [175:59]
B
Mysterious number stations planet circle to project Stargate and what the dark watchers found. Head to fish on Thursday nights with day J2 and the weapons are moving
- [176:26]
A
on to the night All I ever
- [176:32]
B
wanted was to just hear the troops of the weapons.
- [177:12]
A
Dance.
- [177:13]
B
Your K love to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is right.
- [177:23]
A
Always in time. I'll be honest, shopping for clothes is not my favorite thing.
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B
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A
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B
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- [178:02]
A
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