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Sept. 5, 2004 - Art Bell
02:53:04
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Rupert Sheldrake - Unusual Perceptions
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So, what's up, guys? It's me, Zach. And I'm here with my friend, Zach. And we're going to be talking about the new
Android Auto. And we're going to be talking about the new Android Auto. So, let's get started.
So, let's get started.
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever the case may be, in all 25 time zones and possibly more, encircling our globe and all covered ever so well by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
It's going to be a lot of fun tonight.
It really is.
Rupert Sheldrake is going to be here.
And we're going to learn about Well, you're going to learn a lot of things that you didn't know about the animal kingdom and about consciousness, and it's going to be a totally, totally fascinating program.
In the meantime, you might want to take a trip to our website for a couple of reasons that I'm about to explain.
Number one, there was a dust devil in Japan to... I'm telling you, this baby It was the king of all dust devils.
It came along while some kids were playing a game and you'll see it.
It's incredible and there's moving video of it up there.
And number two, I would have you take a quick look at my webcam, which is in the upper left hand corner of the website.
It says Arts Webcam.
Just click on that and there you're going to see a little game that we're going to demonstrate for you in a while.
As you know, my wife Ramona is a big fan of reality TV and she was watching Big Brother on the net and they gave the people at Big Brother this little toy question mark to play with called lightning reaction and what it is is well you can see in the photograph there it's got four little handles that four people can grab with a button on on the handle and
It provides an electric shock that is quite spectacular, actually.
It goes right up into the arm if you don't win the game.
You know, it's probably a party game or something.
Nothing for anybody with a pacemaker, of course, but we will, well, my wife will demonstrate this for you.
This is why we have wives.
A little bit further down in the program here.
Let's look at the world.
Depressing as that usually is.
Hurricane Francis, wind and water whacked swaths of Florida with fire hose force on Sunday, submerging entire roadways, tearing off rooftops, before finally weakening to a tropical storm crawling inland with heavy rain.
Listen to this.
More than five million people without power.
Five million people.
Two people were killed, 13 inches of rain fell along Florida's central east coast, flooding some areas in four foot deep water.
As a week in France is edged across the state toward Tampa, and of course the Gulf of Mexico, where you never know, it might reawaken as a hurricane in its wake so far.
Trees, power lines, all down, leveled.
Broken traffic lights, dangled and beachfront roads were littered with coconuts, avocados, and tree limbs.
And the worst news is that there's another one out there.
This one's really weird.
This one's called Hurricane Ivan.
Somebody said, hey, it just made Cat 4, Category 4.
I don't know about that.
Perhaps so.
But here's, you can go to these pages where the National Weather Service sort of has an internal discussion, even though they make it public.
It's kind of their own talk about what they think is going on with the weather, with the various models they have and all that sort of thing.
And this one starts out pretty interestingly.
It says, latest satellite imagery indicates that Ivan has intensified And maximum winds are estimated to be near 110 knots.
Now, I guess that's more now.
As noted earlier, here's the interesting language.
As noted earlier, it is unprecedented to have a hurricane this strong at such a low latitude in the Atlantic Basin.
It's never happened before.
It goes on, the eye is embedded In such a low latitude in the Atlantic Basin that cloud tops are colder than minus 70 degrees centigrade.
Baby, that's cold!
And the upper level outflow is quite symmetric and strong.
Now, where this one is going, we don't know, but they suggest lower on that it's rather unrealistic to think it will go South.
So it may follow, it could follow, right in the footsteps of Francis.
We'll have to wait and see.
Mothers wailed over the coffins of their children Sunday and dozens of townsmen dug graves in a football field-sized piece of scrubland right next to the cemetery.
Funeral processions snaked through the streets of this grief-stricken town as Russians began to bury victims.
of the terror attack there.
You've heard about that, right?
It was at a school.
It left more than 350 people dead.
Frantic relatives also are searching now for 180 people that are still missing from that attack.
Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service seem to be missing From the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973.
There were a couple of earthquakes.
One predicted for this part of the world did not occur, but they sure did in Japan.
A magnitude 6.9.
And the second, a 7.3.
We had one of those in the desert a few years ago.
A 7.3 is real serious.
All of this hit western Japan within hours of each other.
Sunday night, injuring 14, shaking buildings in Tokyo.
Fortunately, it was in an area called Wakayama, about 280 miles west of Tokyo, or it could have been considerably worse.
Former President Bill Clinton's heart bypass, expected Monday, likely is going to be an ordinary re-plumbing of his ailing heart and not some new whiz-bang robotic or heel surgery.
According to the surgeons, a source close to the former president, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Clinton has told him the surgery was scheduled for Monday morning.
Clinton has been hospitalized since Friday after suffering chest pains and shortness of breath.
In a moment.
No, why don't we do it now?
So, Ramona.
Come on in here and we'll demonstrate this insidious evil toy.
It is an insidious evil toy, too.
It really is.
Yeah, let's get this over with.
This is why we have wives.
It's her own doing now.
She saw this on her favorite show, Big Brother, and they put the toy in there.
These people proceeded to shock each other.
I like crazy.
Anyway, she will explain to you, I guess, what it looks like, and you will hear the evil doings of this little machine.
Here we go.
The basic object of the game is to not be the last person to push the button when the light goes green and it starts off flashing red and makes this really weird sound and it does put out a shock.
Pardon me when I... You're going to have to push the button.
You push the button.
But you then get the mic down there so they can hear the evil song.
I will get the mic down.
Okay.
Push it.
Not that button!
You're pushing the... Okay.
Here we go.
Oh boy.
Ouch!
Okay, we'll see you then.
Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
That's enough.
So there you have it.
Yes, this is why we have lives.
uh... will be right back you
and Um...
I want to read this story to you in its totality.
It is a Reuters story, and I don't know where it now stands, but it sure made my hair stand on end when I read it.
Reference, last night, a caller.
The story is from Reuters.
And the headline is, could space signal be alien contact?
London.
An unexplained radio signal from deep space just could be contact from an alien civilization, according to the new scientist.
New scientist, right?
This is a report on Thursday.
The signal coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations has been picked up now three times, three times by the telescope in Puerto Rico.
The new scientist said the signal could be generated by perhaps a previously unknown astronomical phenomena or a byproduct of the telescope itself, but the mystery beam has excited astronomers across the world.
If they can see it four, five, or six times, it really starts to get exciting, said Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath in Western England.
It was broadcast on the main frequency at which the universe's most common element, hydrogen, absorbs and then emits energy, and which astronomers say is the most likely means by which aliens would advertise their presence.
That's, uh, their presence, rather.
That's 1.4 1420 actually, 1.420 gigahertz.
Anyway, the potentially extraterrestrial signals were picked up through the SETI at Home project.
Congratulations, SETI at Home people!
Which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through the huge amounts of data Picked up by the telescope.
Now, it referred in an earlier story to February of 2003.
And you may remember we had a kind of an excitement ourselves.
I had picked up a signal on 1420.
A number of other amateur radio operators had picked up a signal on 1420.
And there was a buzz and some email that went back and forth, you know, insetty about that.
And I called Seth Shostak at that time.
And I said, hey, Seth, what's up with this?
And he called the next day and said, well, I don't know.
We don't have anything.
But now we're getting a story that in February said he was also hearing something.
Now, I'm not sure if the timelines exactly mesh, but they're pretty close.
And so I don't know.
Interesting stuff.
One never knows.
They have certainly become legendary in UFO circles.
Huge, silent, running, flying triangles have been seen by ground observers creeping through the sky, low and slow, near cities and quietly cruising highways.
The National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, has catalogued triangle sightings uh... sifting through and combining databases to take a very hard look at the mystery craft based in las vegas nids as you know is a privately funded science institute with a strong research focusing on aerial phenomena the results of their study have just been released and lead to some unnerving puzzling conclusions and it's a rather long story but it is
Basically what you heard with Colm Callagher on this program.
He gave us the breaking news.
Now it's on MSNBC and elsewhere.
And they go through the whole thing with flying triangles.
You know, that was my big, close sighting.
I should say our.
As in Man and Wife, we both saw it.
And now so many people have seen Triangles that we're getting tons, just tons of stories.
And nids really got quite a good run in the mass media on their release.
They're being seen everywhere.
They at times are seen to cloak.
Or conversely, they're open and they're brazen.
And they go shooting right down Maine interstates, that kind of thing, right over people's head.
They're generally quiet, don't make a sound, and generally have lights.
Now, it could be theirs, it could be ours, but whatever it is, it's new, and if it's ours, we're not talking about it, are we?
A crop circle Shaped like a bullseye, has been returning to a field in Tennessee for the past three years.
And extensive testing is being done on crop circles in Wisconsin.
In the Maryville, Tennessee Daily Times, Patricia Grahams Pollock quotes Jack Ledbetter as saying, quote, to me, it's strange, and I'd sure like to have an answer, end quote.
Circles about 20 feet wide, and there's a 10-inch hole in the center, so it's a bullseye.
It appears in grass rather than in a field of crops.
Now that's something that I have for many years wondered about.
If this is a phenomena, then why would it happen only in wheat fields?
And the answer is, it doesn't.
This one is occurring in grass.
Most crop circles appear suddenly over the space of just a few hours, which is why it's so hard to identify who created them at all.
Ledbetter said his wife Mary, he and his wife have lived on the four acre property for about 38 years and it's been in their family for generations.
It's sort of a family joke that it could be from aliens.
Some think it might be a sinkhole or even Indian burial ground.
I just call it a mystery, but this thing sticks around and it just keeps coming back again and again and again.
I don't know if that would be good.
I mean, think about it for a moment.
You have what is apparently a bullseye, which refuses to go away, and would be seen where?
Well, from the air, for one, right?
And this bullseye is on your four acres.
That might not be so good.
Here's a headline for you.
Exploded Brazil UFO fragment to be analyzed.
The Technical Scientific Department of the, and I'm going to have to spell it for you, P-I-A-U-I Police, collected a chunk of an unidentified flying object that fell in that region after an explosion in the sky.
The material shall be forwarded to the INPE or National Institute of Space Exploration down in Brazil for a more thorough analysis.
The Secretary of Safety Matters, Manolo Pedro de la Cruz, has said that he himself verified the material collected and that it was some kind of piece of iron plate measuring about a meter.
Shows signs of heating, maybe as something that came into the Earth's atmosphere.
He said that he was unable to say if there were any signs of radiation on the object
but reported the material as being sent to INPE and soon we will know more.
A kindergarten class.
Bye.
had a homework assignment to find out something exciting and related to that class the next day.
When the time came to present what they had found, the first little boy, the teacher called on, walked up to the front of the class with a piece of chalk, made a small white dot on the blackboard and sat back down.
Puzzled, the teacher, of course, asked him what it was and he said, it's period.
Well, I see that, said the teacher.
What's so exciting about a period?
Well, darn if I know, kid said, but this morning my sister was missing on, mom fainted, daddy had a heart attack, and the boy next door joined the army!
I couldn't resist that.
And I've got some headlines from the year 2029, which somebody created.
A few of these are kind of cute.
Ozone created electric cars now killing millions in the... Ozone created by electric cars now killing millions in the seventh largest country in the world, MEXIFORNIA!
Formerly known as California.
While minorities still trying to have English recognized as MEXIFORNIA's third language.
Spotted owl plague threatens northwestern US crops and livestock.
They be conceived naturally!
Scientists stumped!
Couple petitions court to reinstate heterosexual marriage.
Last remaining fundamental Muslim dies in the American territory of the Middle East, formerly known as Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Iraq still closed off, scientists eliminate it'll take 10 more years before radioactivity decreases to safe levels.
France pleads for global help after being overtaken by Jamaica.
Castro finally dies at the age of 112.
Cuban scars can now be imported legally, but President Chelsea Clinton has banned all smoking.
President George Z, as in Zebra, Bush says he'll run for president in 2036.
Postal Service raises the price of first-class stamps to $17.89 and reduces mail delivery to Wednesdays only.
85 years, $75.8 billion study.
Diet and exercise is the key to weight loss.
Average weight of Americans drops to 250 pounds.
Japanese scientists have created a camera with such a fast shutter speed they can now photograph a woman with her mouth shut.
Massachusetts executes last remaining conservative.
Supreme Court rules punishment of criminals violates their civil rights.
average height of an nba player now nine feet seven inches you think it could be by then
New federal law requires that all nail clippers, screwdrivers, fly swatters, and rolled-up newspapers must be registered by January of 2036.
Congress authorizes direct deposit of formerly illegal political contributions to campaign accounts.
Capitol Hill intern indicted for refusing to have sex with congressmen.
The heart of the city street is beating.
Oh, oh, oh.
Light from the neon's turned the dark to day.
Oh, oh, oh.
We're too hot to be sleeping.
Good morning, you're going, you're going home.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
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International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access
number, pressing Option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is indeed.
Good morning, everybody.
We're about to go into open lines, so if you have something that is absolutely riveting, fascinating, and has to be told, Those are the numbers.
In a moment, we're coming your way.
And...
Actually, I don't need one of those insidious toys to get shocked.
My big antenna does that for me, and whenever I'm not working on it, you know, you're splicing wires or whatever, and you go, YO!
It really gives you a jolt.
A really good jolt.
I was inside one time, and I had a few guys out there making changes, as a matter of fact.
I know it's perhaps not nice to laugh at other people, but it's irresistible when they get shocked.
That's why I had Ramona shock herself here a little while ago.
There's something in the human psyche.
that definitely enjoys hearing somebody else's shock.
Don't ask me what it is about us, but it's something.
And so they were out there working and splicing away, and you could hear these dull coming through the wall.
Yow!
Yow!
You know, that's how it is working on this antenna.
That's just the way it is.
A lot of voltage there.
All right, here we go.
As promised, first time caller line, you have arrived.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
I don't have any strong views on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I did hear Pat Buchanan
express some real solid, common sense views on the war
this morning on Meet the Press.
Meet the Press is a pretty good show, and other similar talking-head shows just like it do a pretty good job of spreading some information.
I don't see them as any hard-hitting purveyors of propaganda or right-wing extremism, but I was thinking of how you Some people think of Mr. Buchanan as that right-wing extremism you were talking about.
Yeah, that's true on some issues, but I don't think he was like that on this issue.
What was the common sense that he spouted?
For one thing, the causes of the war aren't that the Muslim fundamentalists resent the high standard of living or the form of government we have.
What they resent are the policies of the U.S.
government in the Middle East, and it's what puts into motion some of these things like 9-1-1.
I know I've heard him criticized for being right-wing, but he didn't have right-wing views today.
He just had some common-sense views.
But I did want to talk about propaganda in this country, because it goes on, as you said.
There's spinmeisters, naysayers, propagandists.
Extremists.
And I'm not talking about a person who is a conservative.
Yeah, but one thing that can be said for America, sir, is that we do have them all.
You see, that's the difference.
Every country has propaganda, and America propagandizes its own citizens like every other country in the world.
The difference, though, and there is a difference, is that here you can have those points of view, those wicked Hey Orrin, how you doing today?
points of view, radical as they may be, you live in a country where you're still
entitled, for the most part, to express them without fear.
Right? I mean that is the difference in a lot of other countries. If you say
something they don't like at a national level, why? Who knows what digit
or piece of yourself you could lose, if not your entire being. Wildcard Line,
you're on the air.
You're doing okay, sir.
This is Stephen Cullen.
I listen to you on WDAK News Talk 540.
Yes, sir.
Here in Columbus, Georgia.
We're sitting here just waiting on the rain to come.
It's headed your way, is what I hear.
Oh, it sure is.
And I think Florida really got a reprieve on this one.
You think so?
Well, yes, sir.
You know, first of the month, last month, it looked like it was a monster hit it and hit it in there.
Look here, if it was a Category 4 hit in Miami, Yeah, well it did certainly weaken, but the downside of it was it lingered so damn long.
Oh man, it put so much rain on them.
But if it had hit Miami, it would have been another Andrew all over again.
But I believe it's in the Gulf now, and I believe it's headed right up through Panama City and right up through Georgia and into Atlanta and whatever.
Yeah, now look out for Ivan.
You know, you mentioned something a while ago about it being low down in the tropics.
It's never been one that low.
You know that?
Yes, I know.
We have a terrible echo.
This is an absolute record.
We have never had a hurricane of this strength form up that far south.
You know about me and the weather, right?
I have the view that our weather situation is going to deteriorate in the sense that the change is well underway.
The hurricanes are going to get more powerful and more frequent.
But we've been saying that now for some time, haven't we?
It's just that now it is.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi Art, this is Zane from WCCF in Punta Gorda, Florida.
Yes, hi!
Hi, well I've been, I've worked here about ten years.
I'm a board operator for about five stations in our chain.
And I wanted to tell you a story about Charlie, but I just thought I'd let you know that we've had the heavy rain bands from this storm, from Hurricane Francis have already moved through Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte.
I'm looking at the radar now.
Looks like Tampa and Sarasota are getting pummeled pretty good with the showers.
I appreciate the update, and I'm glad that it's beginning to sort of poop out a little bit anyway.
Yeah, thank goodness it's been downgraded to a tropical storm.
With Hurricane Charlie, I had some station stories that I wanted to share with you.
Essentially, what happened, the big thing that happened here at the station, is the entire roof was ripped off the station from Charlie.
So we had all of our equipment exposed.
After the storm.
That's incredible.
I mean, even in the studios?
Yeah, we have four studios here, production, and then we have two FM's and an AM in this building.
Oh my God.
This building is the most unusual building I've ever seen.
I'll have to send you a picture.
It's on stilts.
Be sure and take some pictures without the roof.
That would be something to see.
I think we have some.
I really do.
We've since had a new roof put on.
A crew came and put it on in one day.
That's good.
But the general manager of our station, right after the storm, made it from the Emergency Operations Center, which was quite the harrowing journey, as he related to us, with all the debris from the mobile homes littering the roads getting here.
What would have taken about 20 minutes ended up taking close to an hour just to get to the station.
They got us on the air and then proceeded to stay here about 18 hours straight with our news director.
Because none of the other staff could make it in at that time.
Well, running a radio station is indeed, thank you, a very demanding, demanding would be the right word, thing to do, and running it without a roof would be a worrisome thing to do.
Can you imagine all that electronics suddenly exposed to the weather and the hurricane?
Yikes!
I have kind of an interesting story for you.
Our main automation computer at KNYE here in Pahrump, we lost the disk drive Friday night at five o'clock.
That was this last Friday night at five o'clock.
And for those who know about such things, this drive was like on its last legs.
I guess a bearing had gone, or something, you know?
The drive was dead, blue screen, the whole thing.
I thought, ugh, heart attack.
And so, what we did was, we managed to ghost the, um, what was on the one drive, nursed it out of there, and got it onto a new drive in, I don't know, about ten hours.
You know, from start to finish.
But, oh my God, what a job.
And of course, had we not made it, that would have been an excruciating three to four days of reprogramming.
So, that's what I was doing Friday night, all the night long.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Oh, my God.
Hello.
Is this Art?
It is.
All right, Art.
I got a, uh, Charlie story for you.
Where are you?
Well, uh, right now I'm on my way to feed some, uh... You hear that?
Yes.
Okay.
It was a cellularized version of your horn, I presume.
Yes, it was.
Ha!
We have a very cell-like sounding connection.
Okay, I'm sorry about that.
That's all right.
I got a buddy of mine who lives down there in Punta Gorda.
And he lived in one of the mobile home courts down there.
And a lady there told him, well, Pat, you can come stay with us during the storm.
Because they had a block house and everything else.
And in her house, she had a shrine to Blessed Virgin.
And while they were there during the storm, she went over and helped uh... well-dressed or quite frankly
it's a great back to you so that my buddy pat says uh... at the worry
uh... you're going to be okay on and we're going to be this very short visit connection
is just terrible it is the other night
okay thanks are all right we'll take care of them uh... though this
scene uh... you know i just i'll tell you something i did
That was digital communications.
What you just heard was a very poorly... I almost asked him, you know, I should start asking what companies, what kind of cell phones they're using.
And then you can judge for yourself the quality of audio.
That these various companies are dispensing.
You know, that's what I ought to do.
I ought to start asking.
In my opinion, cell phones have been a step into reverse for mankind.
Yes, they're portable.
Yes, they may save lives.
So is an upside to them.
You know, you can report terrible things.
But aside from that, in terms of replacement for the average phone, they're total caca.
And the digital world has not yet reached prime time.
Digital voice has not yet reached prime time.
I just did an interview for what's called Ham Radio Newsline, Amateur Radio Newsline.
You can go to Google and you can listen to it, but it involves a Federal Communications Commission proposal with reference to the concept of, let's say, Setting up a new set of rules for ham radio based on bandwidth.
And the whole concept is to push ham radio toward the digital world.
And if that's what it's going to sound like, like that last call, then it's just not yet ready for prime time.
So in that interview, you can hear my comments on The proposal that has been put up, it's called Ham Radio Newsline, or Amateur Radio Newsline.
If you go to Google and put that in, Ham Radio Newsline, you will find it, and you will then find the interview.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yes, good evening there, Arthur.
This is Ben from Oregon.
Hey.
Long time since I've talked to you.
Welcome back.
What's up?
Got a question.
Yes.
Are you still working out with that 40 Glock of yours?
Um, of course, yes.
One who owns guns has to keep proficient with them, doesn't one?
Yes, well, you know, if that veteran from Vietnam got in there, he probably wouldn't get to keep it.
He's pretty anti in that respect.
Yeah?
You think so, huh?
Have you heard him make statements indicating that he would confiscate weapons?
Well, he's voted on There's not a gun control bill that he hasn't backed and voted on.
I think that, to some degree, the gun lobby is a little too paranoid, because I don't think in America, certainly not in the West, sir, if you came out West and you talked to people, you would realize the last thing in the world they would give up would be their guns, so I don't think you're going to see really draconian legislation no matter who's in.
Well, you know, you've always been a strong backer of the Second Amendment.
You're darn right.
I haven't heard you talk about it lately.
Well, that's because I haven't seen anything that threatens it lately, not significantly.
And I don't know that I've heard Kerry make any definitive remarks about that.
But yes, I'm a very strong advocate of the Second Amendment.
Of course, it's in there for a reason.
You know, they don't just toss things.
They didn't just toss things into the Bill of Rights.
They didn't write amendments, just to hear themselves talk.
It's everything that we believe in, and the Second Amendment, as well as all the rest of them, have very deep, important meaning, and I just don't see any success in an effort to try to really change that basic right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air, hello.
Hello, this is Kurt in San Diego.
Yes, Kurt.
I wanted to tell you about a dream I had two nights ago.
Why?
Do you think it's prophetic or something?
I don't know.
I just know that it was vivid.
I rarely have vivid dreams and this one was really, really vivid and I had to even wake myself up because it was so bad.
And what do you think, well okay, what was it about?
It was an earthquake.
It was an earthquake in, of all places, Phoenix and as well San Diego.
I was in the middle of, I don't know how, but dreams do that, but I was in the middle of Phoenix and it was the worst earthquake that I've ever seen in my life and I was right in the middle of it and as well, San Diego flashed.
I flashed into San Diego somehow and it was just as bad, if not worse.
Jumped out of my dream because it was so bad.
I was like, I yelled and woke up, and then I called my dad and told him about it, because he said, oh, don't worry about nothing.
It's probably just whatever, but it wasn't anything to worry about.
But I'm telling you that I've never seen nothing so bad.
I pray nothing happens like that, because... Well, I hope you're wrong, too.
It's always worth asking people like this.
Did your dream identify when?
Well, it was... I saw when I called my dad, it was 612 p.m.
when I woke up on 9-2.
But it didn't say when, it just... That's what I wanted to know.
Alright, well listen, thank you very much for the call and the ominous possibility.
And now you have managed to register it for all time in case it should occur.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hello.
Going once.
Going twice.
Go on.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Well, hey, how are you doing?
Quite well.
I'm sorry, this is Paul from Bakersfield, California.
Yes, Paul.
Wouldn't it be great if you, you know, all the talk shows and everything, and you actually discovered this thing that besetting people, you know, are hearing.
You discovered it and you told them about it.
I guess there has been some denial now about it being You know, an alien signal, but I don't know that it's a locked deal that it's not.
So, yeah, I mean, we did hear it, and I don't know.
You're a long enough listener.
Do you remember when I played, I actually played it on the air?
You know what?
I do remember that, and I remember you commenting and saying all about it, and you were also talking about the ham operators.
You said, well, you know what?
We came across this and that.
Yes.
Besides that, you must have tapes and stuff, so you'd be registered.
But gee, maybe you keyed them in, and then they thought, well, we'll check it out.
And then they did.
So then you'd have your movie, and then it turned out to actually be contact.
You know what?
That'd be so cool.
You might get the actual credit.
Hey, buddy, thanks a lot.
Have a good one.
Yeah, I'll take care.
Wouldn't that be something?
Anyway, what they did discover was discovered by the city at home.
Uh, project.
And so it was confirmed through more than one source.
And, uh, again, there's, I guess, some doubt, uh, that it was alien at this point, but you never know.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm Richard.
I'm calling from beautiful Phoenix, Arizona.
And you're in a vehicle or something, right?
I'm in a cell phone.
I got a little bit of industrial noise in the background right now, and I want to use the company phone at work.
Uh-huh.
Okay, uh, well, I'm just, hey, I just want to tell you about the contrails.
Uh, you're bloody right about those contrails that you talked about in the past.
Yes.
Uh, yes, about, uh, November 17th or around there last year, um, there were several aircraft, uh, flying overhead around Phoenix and Tempe area.
You could tell they're flying directly overhead over Metro Phoenix and then they went east over Tempe And what did they do?
And were they producing dirty little chemtrails behind them?
Yeah, that's what it looked like.
It's kind of not like a deep, real high contrail like you find about 30,000 feet.
just look really funny and they're following each other and twisting around each other.
And were they producing dirty little chemtrails behind them?
Yeah, that's what it looked like. It was kind of not like a deep, real high contrail like
you find about 30,000 feet. You're talking about 20,000, 25,000 feet.
And then did the sky begin to mist up a little bit and did the, did clouds form from this,
these patterns?
Yes, they did, in a way.
But they did it with serious clouds overhead.
I know a little bit about meteorology.
And it kind of blended in with them after a while.
But what I noticed, they did it for about two hours, in the same area, and then off to the northwest they flew away, Um, just running about between 2 and 5 p.m.
that day, and you could see it was 2 B.C.
20.
Yup, alright, well the big questions about all this are... If it is something on the dark side, what are they doing?
Are they trying to control the weather?
Are they trying to modify the weather?
Are they trying to modify us?
Is there some sort of inoculation process that we're not aware of underway?
What might be going on in the skies above us?
Answer is, we don't know.
A lot of things we don't know.
Rupert Sheldrake coming up in a moment.
And oh my, what we're going to cover, you're not going to want to miss it.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
That would be us, all right.
Coming up all the way from Great Britain is Rupert Sheldrake.
Rupert Sheldrake studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, Philosophy at Harvard, received his PhD in Biochemistry at Cambridge, and was a Fellow of Clara Clark College, Cambridge, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society.
Robert is the author of more than 60 scientific papers and several books, based on the results of over 4,000 case histories, 2,000 questionnaires, 1,500 telephone interviews, and a decade of experiments into unusual and unexplained perceptiveness in humans.
Sheldrake makes a compelling case that intuition, precognition, and telepathy are not paranormal, But in fact, normal human functions drawn from our biological past.
He uses experiments with the sense of being stared at to advance his theory that the mind extends beyond the brain and actually connects with the images and beings that we perceive.
For Sheldrake, once the influence of the mind is admitted to extend beyond the head, many puzzling phenomena, including telepathy, mind over matter, Phantom limbs and much more all begin to make sense.
In a moment, Rupert Sheldrake.
Well his books are the presence of the past
Dogs that know when their owners are coming home.
We should have talked about that one, huh?
And the sense of being stared at.
An entire book about the sense of being stared at.
And I think that's where I want to begin.
Rupert, welcome to the program.
Hello.
Hi there.
Where are you?
I'm in London right now.
In London.
And I'm getting a better connection with you all the way in London, Rupert, than I had with somebody on a cell phone a little while ago.
That's amazing.
All right, listen.
You wrote a book about the sense of being stared at, which, you know, for a minute it sounds silly, until you stop and think about it a little bit.
It's not so silly at all.
Somehow, when we're in a room, We do know when somebody is staring at us there is some sixth sense, and I wonder if that's what you call it, a sixth sense, that allows us to know when we're being stared at.
What's that all about?
Well, the book actually is about that and a range of other phenomena of the extended mind, and I think what's important about the sense of being stared at is, first of all, that it's very common.
Secondly, it happens in animals as well.
I think it's a basic biological thing.
Thirdly, I think it has an evolutionary background.
I think it's to do with predator-prey relationships.
A prey animal that can tell when a predator is looking at it would escape better.
But, above all, it has huge implications for the way we understand the nature of the mind.
So, what I've been doing is partly Checking out just how common is this feeling the sense of
being stared at and it turns out to be extremely common I mean over 90% of people have had this yes, it's a very
very widespread all around the world and
Then I've done lots of experiments. I've got some very simple experiments to test for it
These experiments are ones that can be done at home by people working in pairs
They can be done in schools. In fact thousands of them have been done in schools in the US and in Britain and in
Germany So there's no I think overwhelming evidence that this is
for real. This sense is It's not just a coincidence, an illusion, just remembering when you're right, forgetting when you're wrong.
I absolutely agree with you, Rupert, but I have a question.
While we know about the sense of being stared at, imagine a scenario where a bad guy is standing behind a door with a baseball bat, waiting for you to walk through the door to bash you over the head with a baseball bat.
The man's intention, who's waiting, is to be hidden.
The man's intention, who's waiting, is to not allow you to know that he's waiting to kill you.
And could it be that in the cases where it's successful and the person doesn't know, they walk through the door and get killed, the reason the person didn't know this was coming, or even sense it, or have the hairs on the back of their neck stand up, was because the intent of the person that was waiting for them was to remain hidden.
Well, I think there's a difference between people who remain hidden and people who have practiced special techniques to be sort of psychically invisible.
Regular hiding.
Usually if people are hiding, they're usually peeping or looking because they want to see if someone's coming.
Yes.
And there's a very interesting case that I report in my book.
A woman in the United States who had a very similar situation to this.
She was getting out of her car park, her car, at night in a parking lot.
Heading towards the door of her apartment block.
And she just felt really uneasy.
She felt something bad was going to happen.
She looked around and she couldn't see anyone.
She looked everywhere and she felt someone was looking at her.
She felt someone had some intention, but she couldn't see them.
So she went to the door of the apartment block and she just was there getting her keys when this guy appeared out of the dark.
So it can work either way.
very offensive way and she sort of because she was prepared for something
happening she very quickly ran off got inside closed the door and ran upstairs
but she had this feeling from someone who was hidden and she'd looked around
to try and see where it was coming from so I think it can give a warning in
cases like that as well so it can work either way so we don't really then yet
understand what kind of communication is going on here apparently Rupert or if
there's any communication or if there's any transmission or if this is just two
atoms doing the same thing at the same time in this great non locality that the
remote viewers talk about Well, I think that's going too far.
That's taking a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.
Going right over to quantum non-locality, I think, because what this thing is First of all, it's quite local in the sense that usually if someone's staring at you, you can tell the direction.
Usually when people swing around because they've been watched, they swing around and usually meet the eyes pretty well straight away.
Right.
They feel the direction, so it's directional.
It's not just a kind of nebulous feeling you're being looked at.
It has a directional component.
I once was convinced, the first time I was really convinced of this, I was On the seventh floor of a hotel, and I was gazing out of the window, there were a couple of women walking down below, and I was just watching them.
And then they stopped, and one of them swung round and looked straight up at the seventh floor window where I was watching from, and they couldn't possibly have known that there was somebody watching from there.
But they not only picked up, this woman picked up the direction, she picked up she was being watched, Not just the direction that it was up, as well as behind.
All right, well that's extremely interesting and simple on the face of it, but when you get down to trying to explain what actually might be happening here, then it gets very complicated, doesn't it?
Well, it gets sort of complicated, but the interesting thing about it is that it ties in with normal vision, you know, the way we just see things on a regular basis.
Right now I've got my eyes open.
It's daylight here in London, looking out of the window at a tree.
Now, the normal theory of vision is that when you look at things, light comes in your eye, inverted images on the retina, changes in the optic nerve and in the brain, and then somehow the visual world we all experience is supposed to spring into being inside our heads.
It's all meant to be a kind of virtual reality display inside the brain.
Right.
But what I'm suggesting is that idea that it's so simple it's rather hard to understand,
which is that vision is a two-way process. Light comes in, all these
changes happen in the brain as described, but then the visual world you see is actually projected out
to where it seems to be. So my image of the tree I'm looking at isn't in my brain. It's outside me where the
tree is.
So, excuse me,
so the projection out of visual images is I think the way our
normal vision works. That means that it works through a field, what I call a perceptual field,
which is a kind of morphic field, which I could come back to later.
But it's a field phenomenon, so I'm projecting the image out in a field.
The image normally overlaps with what I'm looking at, and therefore my field of attention is touching what I'm looking at.
And I think it's precisely because when you look at somebody, your field of attention touches them, it reaches out beyond the brain and touches them.
That people can detect that, and I think that's why we get the sense of being stared at.
Okay, well, you're quite correct.
I understand, certainly, the visual, the way the visual aspect of it works, but I don't understand how that becomes extended to, obviously, beyond what you can visually see.
That's the part I'm not grasping.
Well, the sense of being stared at only works with what you can visually see.
We're not talking here about telepathy, which goes beyond what you can see, but the sense of being stared at, I think, is a distinct phenomenon from telepathy.
It's based on what you can actually see.
If you're staring at somebody and they turn around, you've got to be able to see them for this particular phenomenon to happen.
So, it is based on what you can see and what you're looking at.
Okay, but I'm still stumbling over this.
In other words, the person who has the sense, there's nothing visually cluing them in that somebody's staring at them.
Nothing in their visual range telling them that.
Oh, you mean if you're looking from behind?
Yes.
Well, oh yes.
I didn't explain that very well.
What I think is happening is that if I'm looking at you, which of course I can't because we're thousands of miles apart, but if we were in the same room and I was looking at your back, Yes.
My visual field would be projecting out and touching you.
It would be sort of overlapping with you.
I'd be projecting my image of you onto where you are.
Now, I think the reason you can detect that is because you also have a field around you.
We have a field of awareness, not just of what we can see in front of us, but we're aware of what's going on behind us, too, through the sense of hearing and through other senses.
So we have a kind of field around us of awareness.
And I think that my field interacts with your field, and the two, you then pick up with the field around your body that there's a field of someone's attention directed at you.
Yes, that's a very interesting theory, that there's a field there, and I can almost buy it, but, you know, is there any way to quantify it, to measure it, to understand what actual forces are at work that create these fields?
Well, I think there could be in the long run.
I mean, what we're talking about here is, first of all, there's evidence the sense of being stared at really happens.
Huge amount of evidence.
Something's really happening.
I agree.
Oh.
Secondly, it's not something you can explain in terms of the regular senses, because this works even through plate glass windows, one-way mirrors.
Right.
You can rule out all the normal sensory clues.
Right.
Thirdly, the only way we can explain a kind of action at a distance in science is through some kind of field phenomenon.
So it's more or less got to be some kind of field.
The only question is, what kind?
Now, it's not one of the known kinds of fields, like the electromagnetic, gravitational, or quantum fields.
Well, it could be a quantum field, but if so, it's working in a different way from the way quantum physicists usually think of them.
I think it's this other kind of field, a morphic field.
But the key thing is that there's a field phenomenon here going on.
There's evidence that it's really happening.
Exactly how it happens, we don't know.
I mean, this isn't... You know, when people first started working on magnetic and electrical fields, when Faraday was trying to work out what fields were in the 1840s, He didn't know what they were made of, how they worked, what the maths of them was, or anything like that.
That's right.
Right.
He had to start off with a theory of fields, which wasn't yet worked out mathematically.
Maxwell worked out the maths of electromagnetic fields 20 years later.
Then Einstein showed Maxwell's theory based on the aether, was, you know, you didn't need the aether.
So he changed it all about another 40 or 50 years later.
Then we got quantum theory as well.
So it took a long time for our existing understanding of fields to build up, and I think that we're dealing here with a field concept that's in a much earlier stage of development, so we don't yet have all the mathematics, all the details that we might have.
Do you know if there is any serious scientific work being done to try and detect and measure or quantify in some way these fields?
Is there any hard science being done in that kind of area?
Well, it depends what you call hard science.
I mean, there's a lot of work being done on detecting the fields.
I do it myself.
You know, the way you detect these fields is through their effects.
The way you detect any field is through its effects.
You never see it directly.
You know, the way you detect a gravitational field is through its effects on pulling things.
Correct.
The way you detect an electromagnetic field is through electrical or magnetic effects.
You can't detect it through gravitational effects.
The way you detect quantum fields is through quantum effects.
The way you detect perceptual fields is through perceptual effects.
All fields are detected through their effects, and there's no reason to suppose that you should be able to detect any field with an electrical meter.
You detect electrical fields with electrical meters.
You don't detect gravitational fields with electrical meters.
You detect them with pendulums and weights and that kind of thing.
But you don't think this is quantum-related, you know?
Well, I think it's quantum-related, but this is... I mean, you're going right to the heart of this, I must say.
You know, you're asking all those difficult questions.
Well, I guess that's what I do.
I mean, that's fine.
I mean, that's fair enough.
But I mean, we're plunging straight in here.
I think it is related to quantum theory, but exactly how isn't clear, because quantum theory works fine if you're dealing with small systems like hydrogen atoms, but even by the time you get to big molecules like proteins or crystals, quantum theory is much too complicated.
You have to deal with a whole lot of approximations, and no one really knows how much quantum theory is involved in the functioning of a living cell or a brain.
I mean, there are theories about it, but they're mostly speculative, and it goes way beyond the kind of rigorous physics of quantum theory.
Except right now, it's the only thing that we really know a little bit about that would begin to explain it, it seems like.
Well, yes, but what I prefer to do is to investigate these fields and how they work, and leave open the question of how they're related to quantum theory.
saying it's related to quantum theory doesn't really help us that much.
There are so many books out there, you know, quantum medicine, quantum physics,
quantum cello playing, quantum beauty care and stuff.
I mean, there's quantum everything and it's become a kind of rather empty catch word.
All right.
Is there any way to measure the size of these fields?
Do they vary in size?
Are they endless?
Certainly I'm not aware of somebody staring at me from some incredible distance, so there has to be a... I guess the field must be measurable, almost.
Oh, I think it's measurable.
The fact that people can tell when they're being looked at is the way you detect it.
Can someone tell?
You know, we have simple tests for this, and it's a frequency thing.
You know, some people are better at it than others, but yes, you can measure them.
But then the question of distance.
If somebody's so far away you can't see them, then it's not going to work.
Right.
But then you can look at them through a telescope or through binoculars.
That's been done, and there's already evidence that they work.
through devices from extending your vision, like telescopes or binoculars.
And so, they certainly work at a distance, but that's still within the range of extended vision through visual aids, like telescopes.
A really fascinating question arises is, does this work through television?
And there's been a series of experiments by a number of parapsychologists, and it's a kind of parallel strand of research to my own, which is all on direct looking.
But by parapsychologists, there's been these experiments where people are looked at through closed circuit television.
Yes.
You're sitting in one room, there's a TV camera pointing at you.
Yes.
And then somebody in another room is looking at you on a TV monitor.
And what has that proven?
And what that's proved, interestingly enough, is that people can tell when someone's looking at their image on the TV screen in another room.
And in those experiments, in my experiments, people just guess.
It's very simple to do.
These are more complicated and sophisticated, the closed-circuit television experiments.
Oh, they certainly are.
Hold on, we're here at the bottom of the hour, Rupert, so just hold tight for a moment.
So it even works over a closed-circuit...
What does that tell us?
That you don't have to be there.
us about the field and the whole thing. What does that tell us? That you don't have to
be there if it isn't fascinating.
It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating.
It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating.
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Oh Rupert Sheldrake is my guest.
We're talking about things that, well, it's kind of an extension of last night's program and the whole mass consciousness thing that we've been on to now for so long.
That may account for why I went so directly to the center of all of this.
this group of children right back and
cambridge uh... phd in biochemistry at the cambridge fellows quick
You know, it's really Dr. or Professor Rupert Sheltrigg, actually.
So, Professor, welcome back to the program.
Professor, you know, this program that I do on the weekends and then is done during the week by George Every night we talk about things very much like this and what I've noted is with what's going on at Princeton University and people like Stephen Schwartz, people like yourself and so many others now, there is a shift in science that's beginning to occur
And it looks like it's going to be a big shift, and it looks like it's going to be to the kinds of areas that you're investigating right now.
It hasn't happened yet, but I bet it's like next, or maybe the thing after that, but it's about to be a really big thing, isn't it?
I think so, yes.
I mean, there's been a taboo against inquiry into these kinds of things within the scientific world for a long time.
A kind of dogmatic attitude that basically everything, all the minds inside
the brain, none of these other things are possible and so on.
That's getting much weaker. There are still militant skeptics who dogmatically defend the standard point of view, but
they're getting less and less credible. And this was shown up clearly in London in a debate I took part in earlier
this year with one of Britain's leading skeptics.
And it turned out he was completely ignorant of almost all the recent evidence for these things, even the older
evidence.
And it was really just a position of prejudice. I think as people realize it's a prejudice that these areas that are
opening up are really exciting and really important.
And leading us to a completely different understanding of ourselves and of our brains.
Yes, well, skeptics are a very strange group, indeed.
And if you present them with new evidence, and I know you're in the business of evidence because of the experiments you've done, they generally say, well, you know, I haven't heard about that, and you're going to have to prove that to me.
I'll take that under advisement.
They don't really want to hear about it.
No, they don't.
And that was very, very clear in my debate with the skeptic Professor Lewis Wolpert, When I actually showed evidence in my debate, I showed videos of experiments, he was sitting on the platform and quite ostentatiously turned his eyes away from the screen and tapped the pencil on the table looking bored.
But that was in front of a huge hall full of people and so everybody could see and of course that didn't go over well, this deliberate avoidance of the evidence.
Yes, well, Professor, on American television, and I can't remember the name of the program, but it was one of the magazine shows, the big ones, like 20-20 or something like that, and they had, they showed the experiments with these dogs, and they would, they'd not, they'd put a camera on the dog in the house, and the owner would be away at work, and they would start the owner coming home early, at an unexpected time, And I'll be damned, but every time the owner would start home, the dog would start agitating, jumping at the door.
That dog knew the owner was coming home.
Now, those are some of your experiments, aren't they?
They are, yes.
Yes, I've done a lot of work with animals.
And one reason I've worked with animals a lot is because I think, in terms of things like telepathy, they're much better than people.
They're more sensitive. They haven't been educated to believe it doesn't happen. And also you get quite repeatable
results When it comes to things like telepathy a lot of the human
research has been With rather boring tasks the classic ones were guessing
Meaningless cards that someone else was looking at and people get bored with those and the schools scores fall off
But when it's question of a dog knowing when its owners coming home luckily dogs never get bored with their owners
coming home So they go on anticipating it over and over again.
So you can do really repeatable experiments that give extremely clear-cut, positive results.
Well, Professor, how do they know?
Well, I think that how the dogs know is an example of telepathy.
The reason I say that is because we've tested all the ordinary things, like routines, Um, is it just a routine time?
No, because we've had people come home at non-routine times, at randomly chosen times.
Yes.
I page them on a pager.
Yes.
At randomly chosen times to go home.
Is it hearing or smelling the person?
Well, no, because we have them at least five miles away.
Sure.
And is it the car?
No, because we've had people come home in taxis and unfamiliar cars.
It still works.
Is it the people at home?
No, because they don't know when the person's coming in.
In some experiments, we have no one at home.
There's nobody there, just a camera filming the dog.
All right, these are obviously very well-constructed random experiments, and with random nature built into them of the coming home.
And so you can't deny it.
In what percentage, Professor, of the experiments is there proof that the dog is aware the owner's on the way home?
Well, with the dog I work with most, which is a British dog called JT, we've done about 300 tests with JT.
We film them so that we know exactly when the dog starts waiting.
On about 85% of the occasions, the dog goes and waits uh... doesn't just start at any old time it starts when the
owner decides to come home so it's responding to her intention even before she's
got in the car or taxi wow now about fifteen percent of cases the dog didn't
respond and most of those were cases when there was a a bitch on
heat in the next apartment
uh... there were some when it was sick some when it was very tired so
you know this is not a machine it's a dog and it can be distracted
I mean, bitches on heat capture its attention.
So, um, but in, in fifth, so only 15% did it fail.
If you add in all the results together, including the ones where it failed, you still get a hugely significant overall positive effect.
And that's, and you believe that is telepathy.
Well, that's the only possible explanation.
I mean, it seems to be the dogs responding to the owner's intentions from a distance of at least 5 miles, and in some cases 40 or 50.
There's no other possible explanation.
Skeptics tested this dog at my invitation and got the same results.
I mean, it's a robust, repeatable effect.
Yes, and what was the skeptic's reaction?
Oh, well, they didn't believe their own results, and they tried to say that the dog couldn't do it.
But when you plot their results on a graph, they show exactly the same pattern as my own.
But, um... But how can they possibly deny evidence of this magnitude?
Well, that's a puzzle to me.
If you've got people who think they know the truth, and, you know, completely dogmatic in their... how they actually did it in this case.
And anyone who's interested in the details of the controversy can read all the papers on my website.
How they did it was, they said that the dog, when the owner's out, sometimes the dog goes to the window to look out of the window when it's not waiting.
And we monitor all that, and the dog's usually at the window about one or two percent of the time when she's not coming home.
When you see the videos, it's obvious it's just looking, it's not waiting.
Um, in their experiments too, uh, you know, it was at the window 2 or 3% of the time when she wasn't coming home, and in their experiments it was at the window 78% of the time when she was coming home, so it was a huge difference.
Yes.
But what they said is, the dog went to the window before she was coming home, therefore it was a false alarm, and therefore all the rest of the data after that false alarm could be discarded, um, and were irrelevant, because the dogs already failed the test.
Well, you said you were involved in the experiments in that you would page the person who was to be then instructed to make their way home.
Is there any way that you could rule out, and did rule out, your intention as part of the experiment, and rule out the fact that it was not your intention that began the dog's routine?
Well, I think... Well, there's several ways that one could... I mean, that's an ingenious suggestion.
I was 200 miles away.
I picked the time at random to page her.
Yes.
It's possible you could say the dog was telepathically responding to my intention to call her to tell her to go home.
Yes.
It's pretty implausible when you consider the dogs on a daily basis responding to his owner and not to me.
The other thing is that when she went out We did.
We also monitored the kind of real-life situations where she'd go out for the day.
She wouldn't know when she was coming home.
She'd visit friends.
She'd go shopping.
She didn't have any clear plan.
There was no one paging her then, but when she decided to go home, she noted down the time, and we were monitoring the dog all the time.
The dog was responding when it was just her intention, when I wasn't involved at all, on a regular daily basis.
Okay.
I think it would be very unlikely that on the occasions I was involved through paging her, it was responding to me rather than her.
Dogs, after all, normally respond only to one or two people, the people they're closest to, and although I know the dog, it's not particularly close to me.
The reason that I asked the question was because of the Princeton experiments and the graph four hours prior to 9-11.
There was this gigantic spike four hours before 9-11.
Are you aware, I'm sure you are, of the work going on at Princeton?
And that would seem to indicate there is some element of time involved.
I mean, how can an intention be recognized prior to an event, unless, say, it was looking at the intent of the people who were going to destroy those buildings?
I doubt if it was the intent in that case.
I don't think that you get a mass consciousness response to someone's intent.
My own view is that these effects are more precognitive.
I think precognition and premonitions really happen, and the reason I say that is because I've studied them in quite some detail in people and in animals.
With animals, I'm convinced this can happen in relation to earthquakes.
There's innumerable cases of Dogs, cats, and other animals getting anxious or excited hours, even days, before major earthquakes.
I've tracked all the major earthquakes in the last 20 years, and this has been the case in practically all of them.
Oh, well, a very interesting man in California, Jim Berkland, uses the lost dog and cat columns in the newspaper as one of the predictive elements for his great success in predicting earthquakes.
Well, I know.
We checked up.
I and David Brown, who works with me in California, we talked to Jim Backlund, and we tried to see how general his case was, and David went through the archives of the San Jose Mercury, which is one of the papers that Jim Backlund works with.
We found that for one earthquake, Um, this seemed to work, but it didn't seem to be a very good correlation for other ones.
We couldn't confirm it, you know, over a series of earthquakes.
I see.
So, I'm not sure that it's that reliable a method, partly because it's such a blunt way of measuring things, lost dogs and cats.
Yes.
I mean, it's an ingenious idea.
I wanted Birkeland's theory to be true and to be generally applicable, but we couldn't really confirm it.
I think in one case it worked, but it's not a very reliable method.
A much more reliable method for California would be to have a free phone number, say a 1-800 number, 1-800-PET-QUAKE, and have people ring in if they notice unusual behavior in their pets.
You could do it with an internet site as well.
So it would be quite possible, by involving large numbers of people, to get a very good tracking of animal behavior.
On an ongoing basis, it wouldn't cost much, and I think it could be really effective.
What a very interesting idea.
Very interesting idea.
1-800-MY-PETS-NERVOUS or something.
PetQuake, yeah.
PetQuake, there you go.
I think it would, if it worked in California, then people could do it in Greece and Turkey and Japan, all sorts of earthquake-prone areas.
But the reason I got onto this is because I think premonitions, precognitions, or however the earthquake thing works, it's paralleled in animals with avalanche warnings and the Alps, it's paralleled by dogs and cats anticipating air raids during the Second World War in both Britain and Germany.
It's not just physical things that could possibly have a physical explanation.
And I think that when you have major catastrophes like 9-11, the Possibility of there being precognition is definitely there.
In fact, soon after the 9-11 disaster, I ran a series of ads in New York, in Union Square, and in the Village Voice newspaper, to find out if people had had precognitive dreams about it, because it's such a dramatic event.
If precognition is going to work for anything, it should work for that.
And I've got dozens and dozens of these.
I summarized them in my book, The Sense of Being Stared At.
And you don't feel that they're somewhat suspect?
I mean, people love to make claims about things that happen that they claim afterwards they knew was going to happen without documentation thereof, so...
Well, the ones that I take most seriously are ones where there were independent witnesses, where people told their dreams to somebody else first.
That would be good, yes.
A lot of people who had these dreams, they were so dramatic, so unusual.
One I quote in my book was a forensic scientist who was a skeptic, and he said he was very reluctant to write to me about it, but he just couldn't get it out of his mind.
He had this dramatic dream of flying low into New York in a plane, That was heading over southern Manhattan, and he knew it wasn't on a normal flight path.
He got an increasing sense of dread and foreboding, and then he could see it going towards buildings, in fact, where the World Trade Center is.
And he woke up with such a shock, and so disturbed, he told his wife, and for several days afterwards was really perturbed by this, and then 9-11 happened.
He worked just a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
So, here was a guy who had something very unusual, didn't normally have these things, told somebody else, was a scientist and a skeptic, had no reason to claim this.
He was very uncomfortable with the whole thing happening, because it went against his worldview.
And has his worldview changed?
Well, I don't know.
I haven't asked him since.
But, you know, usually what happens to people when this happens is they say, well, that's a funny thing.
And then, you know, a few weeks later, It's more or less business as usual.
I don't know in his case whether this has... what's happened.
But I think that these cases of precognitions or precognitive dreams, some of them were so vivid and some of them were independently witnessed, I think it's not just people making it up.
But, you know, the best way to monitor this kind of thing Would be through phenomena like earthquakes, and that's why I think that using animals, which are more sensitive than people, and documenting people's calls would be an excellent way of doing this kind of research.
Well, Professor, we now have this wonderful tool called the Internet.
And it seems to me the Internet would be an opportunity for people to record these traumatic events and then have some sort of proof that they were absolutely correct.
And I'm sure there are places on the Internet where these things can be recorded, are there not?
Well, I think for years there's been a precognition registry where people can record their precognitions.
It's not a very well-known site.
In fact, I don't know what it is myself.
But unless you have something that lots of people know about, you're not going to get a very good readout.
And that's why I think earthquakes would be such a good thing, because they're of such immediate concern in earthquake-prone areas like California.
And they're so dramatic when they happen.
I'm talking, of course, of big earthquakes, not the little ones that happen all the time.
I think that would be a really, really good way to do this, and because it's of practical importance and could save lives, it would be an excellent research project for testing out premonition on a large scale.
And would complement your experiments now, so you would be a logical person to perhaps organize something like that.
Have you given it some thought?
I have, but since I live in London, England, It's not something that I can easily do, you know, from a huge distance.
I think it's better for someone who lives in California to do it, and this is something which my colleague David Brown is thinking of taking up and maybe doing in the next few months, getting something of this kind launched.
All right.
I'm hoping he does, because I think this would be such an interesting project.
Sure would.
All right, Professor, hold on.
Perhaps somebody in California will take up this challenge, a sort of Central point where precognitive dreams of earthquakes are registered.
Heaven knows, I get emails and phone calls all the time about instances of precognition.
And I don't know a lot about precognition.
Except that I had one unquestionable, shocking, absolutely real piece of precognition in my life.
Only one, and I've never been able to repeat it.
We'll be right back.
How Irish is the Blarney Stoner?
Well, let's just sit.
What the hell is going on?
I don't know.
I'm just gonna sit here.
I'm just gonna sit and wait.
Nothing matters, it's the night.
Time doesn't matter, in the night.
No control, through the wall.
Something's breaking, wearing white.
As you're walking, down the street.
Hope not so good.
You take myself, you take my self-control.
You're gonna live and only for the night.
Before the morning comes, the story's told.
You take myself, you take my self-control.
Another night, another day goes by.
I never stop myself to wonder why.
I never forget to play my role.
You take myself, you take my self-control.
I, I live among the creatures of the night.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code.
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Living on the edge of a dream.
Indeed, that would be us in the nighttime, but you know, so many times what we talk about here on the air, Today's fantasy or almost science fiction absolutely
becomes tomorrow's reality and tonight With Rupert Sheldrake, this is one of those things
Would you A character named vassal writing from Carbondale, Colorado
says they are Military soldiers are taught that when you're taking out
That's in quotes taking out a sentry as you sneak up on him You must direct your attention away from the sentry
Like on your feet or turn your head to the side or the enemy will sense you
Soldiers know about this.
Rupert?
Oh, yes, they definitely do.
The British military, too, have similar guidelines.
And, you know, if you're creeping up in our Special Armed Services, the SAS, they tell them just the same.
And I've interviewed a whole lot of security guards, detectives, surveillance personnel, people whose job it is to watch others.
They all know about this.
And of course it's big in the Japanese and the Chinese martial arts.
They have training procedures where you can train yourself to become more sensitive to being looked at from behind.
All of this, and certainly precognition, professors, seem to be exclusive of time and space.
They really do.
In other words, they seem instant.
The communication seems to occur I don't know.
Right away, and sometimes there's time involved, as in with precognition.
So this, you know, it clearly indicates that something is operating independently of linear time, as we're measuring it here on Earth.
Right?
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say independently, because most precognitions refer to things that are going to happen in the fairly near future.
Right.
A few days ahead.
Right.
We're getting flashes from... Well, we may be getting flashes from centuries or millennia ahead.
We just wouldn't know, because we wouldn't live long enough to find out.
But, generally speaking, these precognitions are fairly short-term.
There are a few examples of longer-term ones.
The earthquake things with... You see, if it was independent of time and space, dogs would be getting excited about possible earthquakes all the time, and actually they only do it just before one.
Quite a good point.
I think there's a kind of blur where, in the immediate future, where these things, you know, where things, probabilities, where these things come from.
But it's not, it doesn't sort of stretch out uniformly in all directions.
So I think also that these experiments, some of the best things in modern parapsychology, I think, are these experiments on short-term pre-sentiment, picking up what's about to happen just a few seconds ahead.
And those are definitely limited in time.
They're over a fairly short time scale, but still, do you know about those, Art?
Not only do I know about them, Professor, but I had one happen to me, and just only once in my whole life, but it was shocking.
I mean, Professor, it affected my whole life.
I'll never forget it for as long as I live, and God, I hate telling a story again, because It's boring to the people that have heard it, but I lived in a little garden apartment in Santa Barbara, California, and I came home from work.
I work in radio.
I came home from work one night, sat down, watched the evening news with Dan Rather or whatever.
And in the middle of the news, I suddenly, you know, I parked my car on the sidewalk, right out in front of this sliding glass door in the apartment, and I had the curtains closed.
And here I am watching the evening news, because, you know, I've got to know the news for my job, and I have this, like, ocean waves coming over me, saying, someone's going to hit your car, someone's going to hit your car.
Finally, I got mad at myself and I went over and I opened the curtains, I looked, my car was fine.
I said, what a bunch of, you know what?
And I went back and sat down and resumed watching the news.
And immediately, it came washing over me again, just like it was so strong, professor, that I could not ignore it.
And I said a few bad words, got up from the couch, went over, opened the curtains, there's my car fine, but I see this guy walking down the sidewalk, He goes down, he gets in his car, which is right in front of mine, starts the engine, puts it in reverse, and hits my car!
And I sank down on my knees!
It freaked me out so much, I sank down on my knees, but I got up real quick, slid open the door, and I said, hey, I saw that, I got your license number, and he said, I'm stopping, I'm stopping, you know, and it was fine, no big deal, but Professor?
There's no way.
I knew that was going to happen.
It was being forced on me.
It wasn't like some little vague feeling.
This was like, ta-da!
Hitting me with a hammer.
That's a really interesting case, yes.
Well, but it's never graced me with its presence since.
It's never happened since.
I couldn't make it happen if I wanted to.
Well, it may be happening more than you think, you see, because You know, in these parapsychology experiments, I don't know if you've talked about them on your show before, but they're fascinating things.
They've been going on in California and elsewhere with Dean Radin and in Europe with Dick Biermann at the University of Amsterdam.
Oh, I've been interviewing the heck out of Dean Radin.
I'm so in the middle of this, you wouldn't believe it.
But which experiments are you talking about?
I'm talking about the ones where you sit in front of a computer You're wired up to measure your skin resistance, you know, which measures emotional arousal.
Oh, yes.
Galvanic skin response, like in a lie detector.
Yes.
And then, um, after you're, when you're relaxed, you press a button, um, and ten seconds later, a picture appears on the screen of the computer.
And the computer selects the picture at random, so no one knows what's going to appear.
Most of these pictures are just fairly bland, normal scenes.
But some of them are scenes of emotionally shocking violence or their hardcore pornography.
Now, of course, when people see violent or pornographic pictures, their skin resistance changes, the adrenaline pulses, you know, you get an emotional response.
That's not surprising, it's well known.
But the key thing, what's so fascinating about these experiments, is that that emotional response, the change in skin resistance, begins about five seconds before The picture appears on the screen, and the pictures are only selected a millisecond before by the computer, so you're responding to something that's going to happen.
And it's not conscious either.
What's so interesting is that I've done these experiments as a subject.
I did them in Amsterdam with Dick Bierman, and I scored, you know, a highly significant effect.
I was responding in advance, but I didn't know it.
The machine measured it from my skin resistance.
I had no conscious awareness.
that my body was preparing me for an emotionally shocking moment.
And I think this kind of short-term preparation of the body, the preparation of the emotional response,
could play an important part in... a lot of people have this thing, they're driving along,
they suddenly feel that they've got to take care, and then a car ahead spins out of control a few
seconds later. You know, I...
I think it also works in fast sports like tennis and ping pong and cricket and things where people are responding too quickly for the normal senses to explain it.
And I think we may have this kind of information coming in about what's about to happen in the short term future over a few seconds ahead.
On a regular basis in our normal life.
And I think what's revealed by these experiments is that this is really common.
This happens to all of us without our knowing it.
So I think it's a fascinating discovery that they've made and I think it's some of the most interesting stuff to come out of laboratory parapsychology for years.
But again, that implies A little trip through time, because you're anticipating an event that has not yet occurred.
That's a little trip through time.
It is a little trip through time, but the question is, what kind of trip?
And the most interesting thing about this kind of research, parapsychological research on precognition, which I review in my book, The Sense of Being Stared At, Is that what you're getting a precognition of is not so much what's actually going to happen as what's going to happen in your own mind.
If you don't know, if you never see what's going to happen, you don't respond to it.
You're responding to the future of your state of your own mind.
So it's not so much that you're getting a readout of the external world, you're getting a readout across time of your reaction to something.
Well, no matter what, it's across time.
Oh, it's across time.
But it's across time, as it were, within the mind, and our minds already work across time through the phenomenon of memory.
So our minds are embedded in time in a different way from... Yes, but memory is a thing of the past, and granted, that's a different kind of a trip through time, but for an event that has not yet occurred... I agree.
It's really hard to conceive of how this can happen.
I think that the discovery that it's to do with a connection with our own mind in the future narrows down the field of inquiry a bit.
It's not like we're getting a kind of readout from the external world.
We're getting a readout from our own minds in the future.
So the connection is with our own mind in the future, just as we have a connection with our own mind in the past through memory.
Of course it's different from memory and it poses far more theoretical problems.
Now, how much difference do you notice in the testing you do, Professor, between individuals?
In other words, do you stumble into the occasional absolute P.S.I.
genius?
I mean, somebody who will score far, far beyond others in precognitive skills and so forth.
Yes.
Yes, there's certainly quite a big difference.
I've been doing a lot of work recently on telephone telepathy and email telepathy.
That's the phenomenon whereby somebody, you think of someone and then they call.
Yes.
You must know that phenomenon.
I, of course, do, yes.
Yeah.
Well, I've got a very simple experiment to test for that.
Again, I describe it in my book and I've got ongoing online telepathy experiments which anyone can take part in on my website.
Or you think of somebody and they email you.
Same thing, I guess.
That's the same thing.
I've just written a paper on that based on hundreds of tests.
How the tests work in brief is that we have four potential telephoners or emailers.
So if you were the subject, you'd name four people it might happen with.
You'd sit at home with a landline telephone, no caller ID system.
You'd be videotaped continuously.
I'd pick one of the four callers at random.
by throwing a dial from a random number generator, tell them to call you.
The phone would ring.
You'd know the phone was ringing from one of these four people.
Before you pick it up, you have to guess which one it is.
So you're right or you're wrong.
If you were just guessing, by chance, you'd have a one in four or 25% success rate.
However.
In fact, people are way above that.
It's closer to 50%.
In these tests, which are a very simple, straightforward measure of telepathic ability, some people
are definitely stars.
You know, they do really well.
Other people are at chance levels.
And even the people who do really well, they often do really well, better with some callers than others.
We know telepathy works best with people you know well, and I've proved that in these experiments.
With strangers, people whose names they know but they've never met, the results are at chance levels.
With people they know well, the results are way, way above chance.
With some callers, with whom they have a specially strong bond, they're right almost 100% of the time.
So we can actually measure these individual differences quite easily in these telepathy tests, which I think are some of the most successful telepathy tests around.
Now, Professor, are you convinced that these things that you're revealing and proving with the testing you're doing, are you convinced that Human beings have always, always had these abilities, perhaps at one time utilize them to a far greater extent than we do today, and that we're just sort of rediscovering, reinventing the wheel here?
Yes, that's what I think.
And the reason I think that is, first of all, these telepathic abilities are very common among many species of animals.
So it's not just humans.
Secondly, they're often better developed in children than they are in adults.
So they're not things that are required through long education.
In fact, education probably does a lot to get rid of these things,
because our educational system is rather hostile to them.
Indeed.
And thirdly, they're much more common in third world countries,
where people are less educated in the modern way.
I lived in India for years, and these kinds of things are common there.
They're taken for granted.
So they are in Africa.
And so they are among traditional peoples all over the world.
So I think they're not necessarily things that humans have lost.
There are a lot of humans who I think still have them very strongly.
I think they're things that modern educated Westerners have lost,
to varying degrees.
But even though there's every discouragement, and the skeptics telling you these things are impossible,
and there's whole militant skeptical organizations campaigning against belief in them, and so on, the fact
is that about 80% of people in America and in Britain have had telepathic experiences with telephones.
So the phenomena haven't gone away despite every discouragement.
All right, here's another angle that I'd like to ask you about, and this is from last night too, our discussion with Mr. Schwartz, and that is, Professor, is there any indication that in general society, perhaps in Britain and America, where such things could perhaps be measured, that The most successful people, which might equate to the richest people, or the most famous, or the, I don't know, the CEOs of large companies that have been enormously successful, that these people would have a higher, would test with a higher quotient for the sorts of things we've been talking about tonight than the average person?
Oh, I think so, yes.
I mean, no one's done a systematic study as far as I know, but I know from my own experience that when I'm talking about these things to groups of business people, there are a lot of people in the business world who this makes a lot of sense to.
In the business world where you have to make decisions with incomplete information, you have to hire people, fire them, you have to guess with the way the markets are going to go, you have to have a feeling of whether something's going to work out or not.
People who are intuitive do much better than people who are not.
I think in the academic world it's a different thing.
Academics play it safe.
They can spend years waiting for evidence and stuff, and they quibble over details and so on.
It's much less pronounced there, but in the business world, especially among people who are entrepreneurial, who have a flair, an intuitive flair for knowing what's going to happen, for feeling things, I think that these are some of the people who are using their intuition most effectively, and their success depends on it.
We don't have these abilities just for amusement or entertainment.
We have them because they're useful, and I think animals have them because they're useful and important for survival.
Well, life is nothing but a long series of decisions.
Do this or do that.
Do this or do that.
Go in this direction or that direction, and the more intuitive, Go in these directions just based on how they feel and so you would think the very successful ones would be extremely intuitive.
Now another question, for those who don't have the natural ability, is there a way to, if you've got one who's thick as a brick intuitively, is it possible to nurture that inherent talent and develop it in later years?
Well, yes it is.
I know from even just from my own experiments that if we give people feedback on whether they're right or wrong, and they just do, for example, the staring tests, you do the same test over and over again, people get better because they're getting feedback.
It's like biofeedback.
With feedback, you can improve.
And in the martial arts, they train people to develop these skills.
And I'm working on ways of trying to improve these skills in a workshop-type format.
Because I think that you can train them.
These are abilities.
Some people are better naturally than others, of course.
But it can be.
It can be inculcated.
All right, Professor, hold on.
We're at the bottom of yet another hour.
Professor Rupert Sheldrake is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
this is Coast to Coast AM in the nighttime of the day.
I'm going to be driving on a Saturday night.
I'm going to drive on a Saturday night.
I'm going to drive on a Saturday night.
I I don't want your lonely mansion With a tear in every room All I want's the love you promised Beneath the hallowed moon But you think I should be happy With your money and your name And hide myself in sorrow While you play your tune
Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine.
sorrow in the world otherwise.
But you think I should be happy with your money and your name
and hide myself in sorrow while you play your cheatin' game.
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International callers may reach Art Bell by calling In a moment, I think we'll ask the professor about remote viewing.
accessing option 5 and dialing toll free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is indeed. In a moment I think we'll ask the professor about remote viewing.
Last night's subject, and actually the subject of many nights on this program,
remote viewing is incredible stuff.
We'll ask the professor what he thinks about it in a moment.
Coast to Coast Coast to Coast
Coast to Coast I think all of this is tied in together.
I think the most reasonable people would conclude it is, too.
All of these abilities we've been discussing, and remote viewing, as presented last night, most recently by Stephen Schwartz, is right squarely in that category.
Remote viewers claim an amazing, just amazing, Consistent, repeatable ability.
And so I wonder, obviously you've looked at the remote viewing phenomena, Professor.
Do you think it lives up to its claims?
Well, I do.
Actually, I took part in an experiment with Stefan Schwartz in Spain recently.
We were at a conference together.
And it worked very well.
I mean, I got the target myself in a way that really impressed me.
My only doubt about remote viewing is exactly what's going on and I'm pretty sure there's, you know, the data from the experiments are very impressive.
Something's happening.
Yes.
I think in some cases it's very close to telepathy because in most remote viewing experiments, but not all, you have a beacon person who goes to a place and then people pick up Uh, what they're seeing or experiencing.
That's right.
That's what happened in the one I took part in.
Um, and the, um, then the question is, well, is it remote viewing?
Are you directly seeing the other place, or are you simply picking up telepathically what the other person is seeing?
In which case, it's a kind of telepathy.
Not unlike those telepathy experiments where people look at videos in one room and someone else Works out what they're seeing in another.
Yes, and so you believe it to be telepathy.
Well, there are some cases in the psychic spying program where it wasn't.
They had people looking at targets based on map references with nobody there.
So in that case it was genuine clairvoyance or remote viewing.
I think most of the experiments that Stefan does and that other people do on remote viewing are ones where telepathy and remote viewing are mixed up together and I think it's My own feeling is it's largely telepathic.
That doesn't make it any less mysterious, of course, but it's not a clear case where this is totally separate from telepathy, that you are going on together.
Yes, but the remote viewers claim an unusually Oh, I think so.
Yes, I think the experiments were successful.
they attribute that to the very stiff protocols that they have for doing what they do.
So you do buy into the fact that they are generally as successful as they claim for the most part.
Oh, I think so, yes. I think the experiments are successful.
But one of the things about the remote viewing programs that were funded by the U.S. government
until relatively recently was that they did quite a strong pre-selection of candidates.
The people who were involved in those programs, they tested lots of people
and they selected only the top 2 or 3 percent for their remote viewing programs.
So they weren't just taking anyone off the street.
They would...
Checking out who had a natural ability in this.
Well, I don't mean to be skeptic-like, however, if it really worked so well, I know my government pretty well, and I assume that you know your government pretty well, and if it really worked, wouldn't it be absolutely irresistible For the government, particularly with the dangerous times we live in today, to be using these gifted people in a world full of terrorism?
Well, I think that governments have ambiguous attitudes.
I mean, some people in government are standard skeptics who think it's impossible and a waste of money.
There are others who think it works, but who tend to keep it quiet.
Well, their business is wasting money, so...
Well, yes, but there are some people who are just terribly opposed to anything like this, you know, the sort of knee-jerk, sceptic types, and they exist in government too.
I think what happens is that I know here in Britain that the police forces often use psychics of various kinds, but they don't do it in public, they do it behind the scenes, because they know it would create controversy if it was in public view.
We just don't know how much is going on behind the scenes in governments and in police forces.
Well, Stefan, as you put it, who was on last night, said to be sure and ask you this night about the parrot experiments.
What did he mean?
Well, he's referring to some experiments I've been doing with a psychic parrot.
A lot of parrots are psychic, as it turns out, especially African greys.
There's one I've been working with in particular that lives in New York.
It belongs to someone called Amy Morgana.
And the parrot's called Nkisi.
N-K-I-S-I.
And this parrot is currently the animal with the largest vocabulary in the world of any animal.
It has a vocabulary of over a thousand words now.
And the parrot uses, I mean, the phenomenal thing about this parrot is it has this incredible linguistic ability.
It speaks in sentences and it has sort of conversations with it.
It understands what she's saying.
It knows what words mean.
Now, wait a moment.
I thought that parrots only parroted, that parrots only repeated sounds that they had learned randomly or might associate with a cracker maybe or something like that, but they didn't actually think.
You're telling me they Speak sentences.
Oh, yes.
This is not just the work I've been doing with Amy.
This has actually been established by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, who worked at MIT for years with a parrot called Alex.
And Pepperberg had a lot of opposition within the academic world because what she proved effectively, which is why we don't need to prove it all over again, is that Alex was using language meaningfully.
and used it in an abstract way. For example, the word yellow.
She could show him a tray of objects, one of which was yellow,
objects he'd never seen before, and said, give me the yellow one.
He'd bend over and pick it up with his beak and give it to her,
showing that he could use the word yellow or other words for other colors
in an abstract way, applying to objects that he'd never seen before.
What might that parrot have said that implied a thinking process?
Well, what I think about, in Cayce, what implies a thinking process
is that he comments appropriately on things that are actually happening.
And it either happens, you know, if somebody comes in the room with a necklace on, for example, he says, that's a pretty necklace.
I mean, in an appropriate way, not just to anyone, but only if they're wearing a necklace.
That's the kind of thing.
I mean, it's sort of remarks that are relevant and appropriate.
That would be very unnerving.
It is unnerving, but what's even more unnerving is that Aimee noticed that not only does he use language, has this incredible linguistic ability, but he started picking up her thoughts and saying what she was thinking.
She had many examples, hundreds, literally hundreds, that she's recorded in a log.
of how he knows what she's thinking.
And when she first told me about this, which was in the year 2000, I went over to meet her in New York when she emailed me about all this, I was just astonished that this really seemed to happen.
And we set up a series of controlled experiments to test whether the parrot really was telepathic with her as it seemed to be on a daily basis.
Yes, and how did you test that in an experiment?
How we did it, we got a series of pictures corresponding to words the parrot knew.
First, Amy made a list of words the parrot knew that you could get pictures for, things like water, telephone, flowers, common words like that.
We then got a third party, somebody otherwise uninvolved with the experiment, to put photos corresponding to those images in a series of thick brown paper envelopes and seal them.
And then shuffle them and number them in a random order.
So no one knew what was in any envelope.
Right.
Then in the tests, Amy was in a room on a different floor of the house from the parrot.
She was filmed continuously.
All the doors were shut.
There was no sound transmission.
Yes.
In any case, she didn't say anything.
And the parrot was in a different room with nobody else there.
Filmed continuously on video.
So the whole of this is from both her and the parrot completely recorded on video.
Got it.
And Amy then opened an envelope and looked at the picture in it for two minutes.
So say it was a picture of a couple on a beach.
This was corresponding to a word that the parrot knew, naked body.
So the question was, would the parrot then say naked body?
Or would it say other words that were totally irrelevant?
And if it said the word that corresponded to the target, then it was a hit, and if it said other ones, it was a miss.
Well, there were twenty different words, and we did seventy-two trials in which the parrot said one of these key words.
The success rate was about thirty-five percent.
Yikes!
I mean, it was way, way above chance.
Oh, yes.
It was hugely significant.
Well, we had all the videotapes independently transcribed.
We had a professor of statistics independently do the statistics.
It's hugely significant.
This was published recently in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
So, it's also described in my book, The Sense of Being Stared At.
So, these experiments worked in the sense they gave dramatically good evidence for telepathy.
This parrot was much better than most human subjects in telepathy tests.
And, you know, the whole thing's on film, so we've got the entire experiment objectively recorded.
So I think that the evidence for this parrot being telepathic is overwhelmingly strong, and it's probably the most remarkable case of animal telepathy I've ever come across.
And then, of course, there would be dolphins, for example.
I'm sure experiments could be done there.
I've got this email that I'd like to read.
Dear Art, please?
Ask Dr. Sheldrake about his other works.
He has fascinating stuff on reaching critical mass in the mass consciousness of any species.
For example, they showed monkeys how to wash their fruit at a beach on one island, and soon they were all doing it.
But then it spread to other islands through, apparently, mass consciousness once critical mass had been reached.
Pretty incredible.
Is that true, Professor?
Well, this is the 100th monkey story, it's often called.
It's a story that illustrates the principle I'm talking about, which I call morphic resonance, a kind of collective memory, mass consciousness.
Yes.
But although it's a good story, it's not particularly accurate.
It's one of those things that's improved in the telling.
What really happened was something a bit like that, but The story was embellished by Lyle Watson in his book Lifetide, and he made it clear he was actually improving the story.
He said, let us imagine that on a particular day, an extra monkey, let us say the hundredth one, starts washing these sweet potatoes, then suddenly they're all doing it everywhere.
Well, there was evidence that monkeys picked it up on other islands, but it wasn't Nobody ever documented this critical mass phenomenon.
That was something Lao Watson made up.
And in the retellings of the story, the details have got more and more embellished.
But there was a nugget of truth to it.
There's a nugget of truth in it, but the thing is that the usual versions of the story are so far away from what happened that it's easy prey for skeptics to debunk.
They say, this never happened, it's not true, it's just a myth.
Yes.
But I prefer the Thousandth Rat story in my In my book, The Presence of the Past, I discuss experiments done with rats learning tricks in laboratories, which showed that, quite unexpectedly, rats all over the world started learning these tricks quicker after rats had been trained in one laboratory, in fact, at Harvard, to do this trick.
It got easier all over the world, and this improvement was documented over many years.
So there is good evidence for this kind of phenomenon.
But the 100th monkey story isn't the best evidence because it's just not very well documented and these improved versions of the story have drifted further and further away from what actually happened.
Professor, what about the transplant stories?
There are so many amazing transplant stories where apparently memory is transferred to the uh... the recipient of you know some
organ i mean they begin to have memories of the person
who donated the organ uh...
that would imply some sort of cellular memory or something or and i don't know
what it implies well i agree that they're interesting cases and i get a
workshop and few months ago in boulder colorado where one of the people
in the workshop was a woman with a hand transplant who did have these memories.
I actually met and had the chance to discuss this with somebody who had first-hand experience.
Well, I think, you see, my theory of memory, morphic resonance, is a theory that through similarity things tune in to what's happened in the past, that each species has a collective memory.
When a transplant happens, I wouldn't say that the memory is embedded in the cells or in the heart itself, but that the heart of the person resonates with the person it's come from and acts as something that tunes into the memories.
You see, I don't think memories are embedded in material systems.
I think they're accessed by tuning, a kind of tuning process.
That's what morphic resonance is.
So, I don't think we have to suppose that memories are sort of etched into the cells or In DNA or RNA or proteins inside the heart, I think the heart simply resonates by being part of the body of the person who's now dead.
That heart resonates in the past with the complete body it came from, picking up memories from that person in the past, which then come into the mind of the person who's had the transplant.
So I think there is a memory transfer, but I don't think it's actually materially embodied in the heart.
That's my own interpretation.
Well, these are absolutely and they're all somehow Somehow connected whether it be remote viewing or the things we're talking about.
I have this sense That they're all there's some commonality to it all and it must it must be some sort of Mass consciousness or something that we truly don't understand.
I mean, a reach out across a dimension perhaps where time and space don't exist.
I have no idea, but certainly we're on to something.
When are we going to all find out what we're on to?
Well, you know, I think that it's not quite as obscure as you might suggest.
I mean, I spent years thinking about this, and I think that one can see the outlines of explanations, and we need... First of all, it has to be a kind of field theory.
Secondly, it has to be one where you can have influences traveling through or across time.
But there's a lot of problems in regular biology which I think require these field theories.
I mean, we've been talking about things that most people would consider You know, beyond the fringe of the normal sort of accepted common sense view, the sixth sense, paranormal, psychic, etc.
But I think that these field phenomena are involved in perfectly normal things, too.
And I started off my interest in these not through thinking about psychic phenomena, but by thinking about the way plants grow.
I started as a developmental biologist, which is what I did at Cambridge for many years, I came to the conclusion that just to understand the growth of a regular plant in the garden, we need to have a field theory, and also a kind of collective memory theory, to understand things that are right at the core of normal, mainstream, regular biology.
So, when you see it that way, these other phenomena are a kind of spin-off from field theories we need just in ordinary biology anyway.
Well, I'm quite pleased that you mentioned plants because there's a story to be, of course, told there.
You know, the thing about the lettuce or the plants or whatever it was.
Professor, hold on.
We'll do that and go to the phones after the break.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake from London, England is my guest.
in the middle of the night my usual place i'm art bell and this is coast to coast am
no time to sleep how irish is the blarney stone
Well, let's... Don't you love her badly?
Don't you need her badly?
Don't you love her ways?
Tell me what you say.
Don't you love her, Maddy?
Wanna be her daddy?
Don't you love her face?
Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
Like she did one thousand times before?
Don't you love her ways?
Tell me what you say Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
All your love All your love
All your love All your love
All your love is gone The single loneliest
This song of a deep blue dream, seven horses sing to be on the moon.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code...
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-8253.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
You know how sometimes people will Say not nice things about other people like they've got, you know, he's got the IQ of a houseplant.
Well, you know what?
Maybe we're not giving houseplants enough credit.
tell you what I mean in a moment.
Now I'm sure many many of you have heard of the experiments or seen them
because they were actually filmed of scientists in white coats
who would come into a room, one scientist would come in and he'd take a big ol' butcher knife
and boy he'd slaughter a plant or lettuce or whatever it was I forget and then
on Another scientist would come in and they were monitoring these plants, I think, somehow or another.
Anyway, the plants recognized the plant assassin every single time or something like that.
That's the way the story goes.
Can you fill us in?
Professor, on that experimentation, I mean, I can understand the human mind and its mysterious powers, and maybe even a dog or a cat, but, jeez, plants!
They seem to have something going that's very similar, don't they?
These experiments suggest that.
The problem with these experiments is they were done in the 70s by Cleve Baxter, who's He worked for the CIA.
He's a polygraph expert.
And they attracted a huge amount of attention, these experiments, but they haven't really been widely replicated.
I tried replicating them myself once, and the problem is that what they do is they depend on measuring electrical currents in plants.
Plants do have electrical currents, a bit like nerve impulses.
The thing is, they have an awful lot going on all the time, and so it's rather hard to separate out what might be a signal from the background noise.
It's not like an animal, where you can see its behavior, like a dog going to wait at the window when its owner's on the way home.
Here, what you're doing is interpreting electrical signals that you're measuring with instruments in plants.
And there's ones going on all the time.
I just, you know, I'm intrigued by this research.
If I had more time, I'd sort of try doing More on it myself, to try and find out just what's going on.
Well, do you think that the experiments have been overblown?
That the word of them as it's been passed down is more dramatic than what actually occurred?
I do, actually, yes.
And I don't think that some of the experiments make very good sense.
I mean, there's one of them where the plants are supposed to react to brine shrimps being Dunked in boiling water in another room.
I can't see the slightest reason why an office rubber plant or philodendron should respond to a brine shrimp that it's never met.
You know, why aren't they reacting to cows in abattoirs and slaughterhouses all over the world?
There's animals being killed everywhere.
There's germs being killed by disinfectants and stuff.
I just can't see.
It doesn't make biological sense to me.
I'm a bit skeptical about some of these experiments, and I'd like to see them repeated.
I mean, I'm open-minded because, and I'd love them to be true, really.
It's just that I find myself a bit dubious, because they're a bit like the 100th monkey story.
They're stories that improve in the telling, and when I've looked at the original scientific reports, I haven't found them terribly convincing.
All right, but your own research, you stand by?
Oh, heavens yes.
I mean, my own experiments are ones that I've done lots of times.
They're properly statistically evaluated.
They've been through the fire of skeptical scrutiny and criticism and so forth, and they're published in scientific journals.
I think the things I'm talking about, the sense of being stared at, telepathy, etc., I think they're pretty well-based scientific facts.
Okay, but after all is said and done, you don't think you're going down, or you do agree, that ultimately you're going down a quantum road?
I think what these things are related to is, ultimately, quantum theory is the weirdest thing on the market in terms of established science.
And what I'm talking about is as weird, if not weirder, than a lot of things in quantum theory, from the point of view of conventional science.
It's not clear how it's related, though.
I think that's a discussion that would take place over many years, as to exactly how you could build bridges between the fields I'm talking about and quantum theory.
Alright, I want to get phone calls, but also Eric in Columbia, Maryland writes, fast blast actually, Has written a great deal about birds and magnetic fields and sunspot activity on migration patterns.
He does not think magnetic fields explain bird migration.
And you may wish to ask him.
about this in light of recent stories of birds getting lost and there have been some intriguing kind of scary stories about migratory birds seemingly losing track, Professor, of where they're going.
I don't know if you've been in touch with those stories but... Yeah, I've followed some of them and also ones of pigeons on pigeon races getting lost.
Oh yes indeed, yes.
Anna, I wonder how you considered them when you heard them?
Well, you see, I think that the evidence is that migratory birds can use a compass sense.
They can use a magnetic sense.
And quite a number of animals do have a magnetic sense that enables them to tell where north is.
You know, they're measuring the Earth's magnetic field.
I don't think that that's the main sense they're using when they're navigating though.
Um, first of all, it won't explain it even in principle.
If you were taken to a remote place and parachuted in and given a compass, the compass would tell you where north was, but it wouldn't tell you where home was.
Um, you'd have to know where home was by some other means.
You could help use... the compass could help you keep your bearings when you're navigating.
And I think the evidence is that birds, like pigeons and migrating birds, can use a compass since to keep them on track once they know where to go.
If you disrupt the magnetic field, you can confuse them.
But it's not the primary means by which they know where home is.
There are some who are concerned that the bird's confusion may mean that the magnetic field is shifting,
and there is some scientific evidence indicating the shift of our magnetic field, possibly even its flipping.
and that process has begun Hmm.
Bye.
I don't think it's shifting that much.
I mean, it's measured every year.
It's currently wandering around in Queen Elizabeth Island, Canada, at the North Magnetic Pole.
I mean, it always wanders a bit anyway.
I don't think that this is because of that.
I think that these disruptions that we're seeing now, insofar as they're due to electromagnetic disturbances, I probably caused much more by the huge increase in the number of phone masts and radio and TV transmissions and satellite transmissions.
We've created a huge electromagnetic smog around the Earth.
And, you know, especially when you get very powerful radio transmitter masts, those are known to affect birds.
And so I think we're seeing there's also an effect of sunspots and solar storms.
Yes.
On the sun.
And maybe somebody's out there testing some sort of electromagnetic weapon.
That could be possible.
That's a possibility as well.
But I think just regular increase in electromagnetic fields caused by phone and radio transmissions can go a long way to explaining the increase in birds getting lost in recent years.
So, your voice may be modulating them out of the sky right now.
Yes, it might indeed.
The fact is, though, that most migratory birds are still finding their way, in spite of all this.
I mean, here in England we've still got swallows and swifts that migrate here from across the Sahara from Africa every year, and they're still arriving.
Although there have been some cases where they've gone astray, the vast majority of migrations are still going on perfectly normally, and the majority of homing pigeons are still finding their way home.
All right, I wish now to allow the audience to ask a couple of questions, so I'm going to pause for a second, and I'm going to remind all of you who are going to be calling to ask the professor a question, hopefully, in the next moments.
That he's in Great Britain, and we are here.
There is a natural satellite delay, so it's best when you get online, if you ask your question, and then just stop, pause, and wait for an answer.
Otherwise, people tend to over-talk each other.
So with that in mind, let's take a couple of calls here and see what we've got.
On the first time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Rupert Sheldrake.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
Where are you, sir?
Oh, I'm calling under the clear desert sky of Ogden, Utah.
Ogden, Utah.
All right.
Welcome to the program.
And if you have a question for the professor, let her rip.
All right.
Thanks, Art.
First of all, when we talk about the human psychic responses and things like that, I can't help but think about the human aura in general.
And what my question was for your guest was, Bill, at the beginning of the program he was speaking about, I was wondering if these might just be like your aura interacting with someone else's aura who you are observing from across the room.
And in a sense, that's how you feel them stirring you.
All right, all right.
All right, sir, hold on.
That's a very, very, very good question.
Professor, there are a lot of people who claim to be able to see an aura.
Something Surrounding Living Things has been currently in photography of auras.
Auras, it seems like they are something, or in your research, do you think they are nothing?
Well, I think they're a name for something.
That one could call, which I would call a field.
You see, I think that organisms have fields around them.
I think we have fields around us.
And most people don't see them.
I don't see auras myself.
There are some people who say they do see them.
And I think what's happening is that they're somehow picking up on the fields around people or animals.
I think that the way what people see when they're seeing an aura is interpreting the field in their own way.
I've done experiments on this.
I did some in Cambridge, oddly enough, with John Cleese, the British actor and comedian.
We got some psychics there who said they could see auras.
There was a group of people there.
and we sent them out of the room and then we asked them in one by one to describe my aura and John Cleese's aura
and they gave, each one of them gave a description of our auras and we sent them to another room
the next one came in, their descriptions were quite different, they were different colours, different sizes,
different shapes so I think that some of what people are seeing in the aura
is what they're adding subjectively to something that may well be theirs
It's their interpretation.
Interesting.
All right.
What about the Kirlian photography of auras?
Do you believe what's being seen there actually is a depiction of the field we're talking about right now?
Or do you think that's baloney?
I just don't know is the answer.
The Kirlian photographs are based on a high voltage electric discharge.
They're very sensitive to moisture.
If you put a piece of damp blotting paper, you'll get an aura around it, because the water vapor from the edge of the blotting paper will show up on the Caleon photo.
If you put your hand on a cold plane of glass, you'll get a kind of aura of steam or condensation around it.
If you photograph that, you'd say, that's the aura.
How much of this is really an aura?
Uh, or a field that's being photographed, and how much is simply due to moisture given off by the thing that's being photographed.
Well, it rather sounds like you've concluded that that is, in fact, what is being photographed.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I'd love to believe that Caleon Photography really was picking up what I call morphic fields.
I mean, I'd be excited if that were the case, but the evidence I've seen hasn't impressed me that That it really is picking up the field.
I think it might be just an artifact from the moisture.
It's just a doubt in my mind, you know.
My sort of standard scientific thinking kicks in when I'm confronted with this kind of evidence.
No, that's why I asked.
I wanted a straight-on answer, and you gave it.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Sheldrake.
Hi.
Good evening.
This is Jeffrey calling from Alto Loma, listening to the radio smog from Hawaii.
And I have a brief premonition story that I'd like the professor to comment on how he would classify the story.
Alright.
In December of 1996, January of 1997, I was busily driving my commute and going to work every day, and I had this feeling that I was going to get hit on the left side of my car.
And I actually had a couple dreams along that line.
And sure enough, about the Well, I mean, that does sound like a possible case of precognition.
stop sign and BLAM! It hit me on the left side of my car and it all just fell into place.
So I was wondering how he might classify that experience.
Professor?
Well, I mean that does sound like a possible case of precognition.
It's a bit like Art's story of knowing someone was going to slam into his car
outside his house. Yeah, I mean I think that, I mean I think it's certainly possible and I
think quite a number of these stories do concern cars and car accidents.
That's because we care a lot about cars here in America, and I know in Britain you share a similar love for these machines.
Well, I don't have one myself, oddly enough.
You don't?
Yes, I know a lot of people are passionate about them, yes.
They are.
They become attached to them, like family members.
So, I think, yes, I think, certainly I think it's possible.
I think the best thing really with precognitions and a lot of these phenomena is to keep a log.
You know, what the skeptics say is, well, you forget all the times you're wrong and you remember the times you're right.
The best way to deal with that particular point, which is a reasonable point, is to keep a log of premonitions or precognitions or of possible psychic phenomena.
and then you can see how many times you're right and wrong.
And if there's hundreds of times when you're wrong and only a few you're right,
it could be a chance thing.
My own feeling is that, and in fact, when people have kept logs,
that the success rate is in fact quite impressive.
But, you know, for anyone who has precognitions on a regular basis,
keeping a log is just a simple diary or notebook is the best way to deal with it.
Professor, have you noticed that skeptics seem to have some of the worst personalities in the world?
I mean, they're the nastiest, most... people who are just... they will annoy you just within minutes.
Well, there are certainly skeptics like that.
I mean, I know non-skeptics who are annoying, too.
But I mean, it's a religious experience for them.
Yes, some of them.
There are some people, you know, among my scientific colleagues, there are a lot of people who I'd consider reasonable skeptics, who raise reasonable points.
But there's a kind of Bigot.
There's a kind of zealous bigot.
You know, the kind of people who would have belonged to the Inquisition in the Middle Ages.
Yes!
That kind of person is attracted to these militant, sceptic movements.
And they're completely irrational.
They think they're completely right.
They have a crusading zeal.
And they're, in fact, completely irrational, even though they claim to be in favor of science and reason.
But in my experience, that's a vociferous minority.
Most, within the scientific community, most people are not like that.
It's just they're so memorable.
They're so memorable, they make a lot of noise, and they're self-publicists, they like getting in the media.
But I often give talks in scientific institutions or science departments in universities, and I would say that people like that are probably only one or two percent within the science community.
A lot of the prominent media skeptics are conjurers, magicians, People who've got actually no scientific qualifications at all.
So you sometimes meet with these people on television shows and have challenges and that sort of thing?
Yes.
I challenge them to debates, actually, and one of them accepted.
I mentioned earlier with one of Britain's leading skeptics, I had a public debate with him with a High Court judge in the chair.
Well, I want to hear about that, so hold it right there.
Get the courts in Great Britain involved, huh?
This should be worth hearing about.
Well, all right.
Professor Rupert Sheldrake is my guest.
It is a, well, it's an early Monday morning, actually, and I'm Art Bell.
In the night time, which is where we reside, you must be just like me.
We'll be right back.
Oh, yeah.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5 and dialing toll free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Indeed so.
Professor Sheldrake is in London.
That's a long ways away.
So, as I pointed out a little while ago, when you get on the line, get to ask your question, sort of ask it in its entirety, and then pause for the answer.
Otherwise, it gets kind of confusing.
it is nevertheless an excellent connection which will resume in a moment
a lot of people out there i think uh... after listening through the weekend and
too many uh... so many programs we've done like this really will want to follow up by reading some of the
professor's materials So, Professor, if you could recommend a book that people ought to jump on right now, of the ones you've written, what would you most want them to read?
The one most relevant to what we've been discussing on the sixth sense, telepathy, the sense of being stared at, premonitions, and the extended mind, is my most recent one, the sense of being stared at, and other aspects of the extended mind.
The one on morphic resonance, the best summary of that, and collective memory, morphic fields, is the presence of the past.
But the sense of being stared at, available now, Amazon.com, that sort of place?
Oh yes, yes.
It's in shops, it's on Amazon, it came out a few months ago in paperbacks, so I've forgotten the price, but it's quite reasonably priced.
All right.
Excellent.
I hope you sell many and I'm sure you will because a lot of people are beginning to have the light bulb go on over their brain.
Eric of Columbia, Maryland asks a really good question that we couldn't let you get away without answering.
There are a number of scientific studies now, quite scientific actually, of distant healing and of healing effects of prayer Of people completely unaware that they're being prayed for.
And so, what's your take on this?
Well, I've been tracking this literature with much interest.
I've never done any personal research on, you know, these prayer studies.
They're well-designed and well-constructed studies.
They follow kind of standard double-blind procedure.
Some people are prayed for, other people are not.
Right, right.
Some of them have shown very significant effects.
Well, I think it's very important that people have started studying prayer in this experimental way, because after all, millions of people pray on a regular basis, and the majority of Americans, the majority of British people pray.
And what's going on?
I think that one of the things that my own research shows, and telepathy research in general, is that If you form an intention, if you're thinking about a particular person, if you form an intention related to that person, your intention can reach out and affect them just telepathically without prayer.
I mean, I'm not talking about establishing a connection.
A dog can know when its owner is intending to come home from many miles away.
So we can measure this effect.
We can actually observe the dog responding.
So we know that our intention I think that in prayer one of the things that can happen is that when we focus our intention on another person, no matter how far away they are, that establishes a kind of link, which is normally the basis of telepathy.
I think prayer is more than just telepathy.
I think that in prayer, one of the things that can happen is that when we focus our
intention on another person, no matter how far away they are, that establishes a kind of link,
which is normally the basis of telepathy. I think prayer is more than just telepathy.
I think it involves an extra healing power that I don't pretend to understand, but I mean insofar
as people are invoking God, the Holy Spirit, the power of the saints, or whatever, in their prayers.
does.
They're adding something in to this mere telepathic connection, but I think that provides a channel through which the prayer can work.
Would you be disturbed, Professor, if you found out that one prayer group and its results were equal to another group, which did not pray to the name of God that something happened, but nevertheless concentrated on an event occurring, a healing specifically, and they had the same results as the people who invoked the name of God?
How would you treat that information?
Well, my own view would be that God has many names.
And, you know, we, in the Christian world, we think of God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
I mean, we have our own particular way of thinking about it.
Muslims have different names.
Hindus have different names.
And the Hindus have many names for different gods, or different aspects of the one God.
So I wouldn't get too hung up on what particular name is used, because I think that we're dealing
with powers and forces that are way beyond the human level of consciousness.
So from our point of view, then, it's God either way.
Well, from my point of view, I would say it's probably God either way.
If people are praying to a higher power that's basically benevolent and does good, it doesn't
seem to matter to me.
It doesn't, to me, matter a lot what they call it, because different religions call
Okay, that's a good answer.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Professor Sheldrake.
Hi.
Hi there.
Where are you?
San Diego.
San Diego, okay.
And so, what have you?
Well, I wanted to know how I would, well first of all, I'm a seer is what I call myself.
And I'm really good at finding things.
For other people, if they lose something, I can find it.
I mean, it's strange.
That is strange, but I've heard of it, even experienced it.
Yes.
Yeah, well, I've even found, like, an earring in a silverware drawer and strange stuff like that.
Okay.
Anyway, my question is, how would I get involved with a parapsychologist that does experiments?
I would like to be... Tested?
Yeah, because then it would help me also.
Alright, it's a good question.
If somebody thinks they have a very strong ability, like that young lady, Should she go be... Would it be a good thing to go and get tested, Professor?
Well, it depends on the kind of ability.
I mean, certainly finding things is a really interesting ability, and that's something that would be fairly easy to test.
If I lived in San Diego, I'd, you know, offer to run some tests myself.
I live in London, England, so I'm 6,000 miles away, so I can't really.
Well, I think it's, yes, I think it is a good idea to be tested.
The only thing is that scientific tests are often rather unimaginative and flat-footed and, you know, they may seem not true to the phenomenon, but I think finding lost objects is a clear, you know, we're dealing with a clear phenomenon.
You're right or you're wrong, the object is or is not where it is.
That's right.
And I would have thought it could be quite easy to test and be very fascinating to test.
So, yes, I don't know of any parapsychologists working in San Diego, but there are certainly some working in Northern California.
And yeah, I think it would be really interesting to test that.
Now here's an interesting question for you, Professor.
Do you think that there are people in the world With unique, way above average abilities in some of the areas that we've been talking about, who are well aware of their talent, but for obvious reasons, because they don't want to be locked up like a lab rat and tested or cut up or probed, they keep this ability to themselves.
Is that a logical conclusion?
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who have these abilities.
Usually they can't keep them totally to themselves, but they're often known within their families, for example.
There are a lot of people who, within the family, are known to be highly psychic, and who people would listen to their premonitions or their warnings, or their telepathic intuitions.
So I think this is quite common, actually.
And then there are people, of course, who do actually make a living doing it, and they become professional psychics.
I'm sure some of them are very good, and I'm sure some of them are not very good.
When people start charging money for it, then one begins to be a bit suspicious as to, is it all genuine?
Is it just a money-making thing?
I think the lady who's just rung is particularly interesting, though, finding things.
You know, you're right or you're wrong, and it works or it doesn't work.
I think that's a wonderful ability to have.
And certainly very testable.
And very testable.
Well, I'm not sure what's on that line, but we can't deal with it.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yes, hello.
Greetings to you.
Greetings.
Where are you?
I'm in southern Manitoba, Canada.
This is Margaret.
Okay, Margaret.
Welcome.
What's up?
Well, I had an experience with telepathy.
I met this person, actually, hiding in my house.
This was about seven years ago that I found him.
And it was a young person, and he was using, he started using telepathy to communicate with me.
And it was perfectly clear for a while, and then it was just after I started to realize this person was involved in crime and criminal activity, I was, you know, I was blocking it out and it was clear.
Wait a minute.
Hold on a sec.
I'm curious.
This person was living in your house for how long?
Well, I found out later that he's been hiding there since June of 1992.
And that was how long at that point?
A little over, close to five years.
Five years?
Somebody hid in your house and you didn't know it?
Well, actually I did.
I kind of suspected somebody had been around and I noticed little things.
Little things.
Yeah, actually quite a few things.
I got quite the story for you Art, if you want to get to me off the air.
Yes.
Anyway, the question is to the professor, and thank you of course for taking my call, this person is still trying to use telepathy to communicate with me and remote viewing and I don't want this and I want to block it out and you know like this person is involved in criminal activity and I'd like to Find a way to break the connection.
Correct.
Okay, that's very clear.
All right, so, Professor Sheldrake, there are people who believe that curses can be
put on people, that they can be spied upon psychically, they can be attacked psychically.
There are people who specialize in stopping these attacks.
And then, of course, like this young lady, there are people who feel they are being attacked
psychically.
Yeah.
You care to comment on all of that?
Pretty fringy stuff, but... Well, I think it's possible, and I think that in traditional cultures this has been a widespread thing.
I mean, you go to Brazil or somewhere like that in the Lots of people who think they've been cursed, and lots of people who hire people to do something about it.
That's very right, yes.
I mean, it's a world I don't know very much about, and I wouldn't presume to give advice on this particular one.
You know, I'd suggest consulting a counselor or an expert, because we get into an area where it's hard to disentangle what's really going on from what might be in one's own imagination and It's a really tricky area.
It is, but there are parts of it certainly that might bear investigation.
Oh, certainly.
I mean, I take seriously the possibility of these things happening, and I think they can be a real serious nuisance in people's lives.
I mean, it's a danger indeed.
Yes.
But it's hard to know in a given case, you know, what's really going on without The intuitions and all are a constant part of my life.
background and so on and so on. That's quite all right, but you don't...
I don't think there's an answer I could give right now. You don't dismiss it out of hand to be sure.
Oh no, no, don't dismiss it out of hand, no.
All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Sheldrake. Hi.
Hi. The intuitions and all are a constant part of my life.
I've had them forever.
And also, I deal a lot with animals, where I've dealt with rescued animals and special needs animals for years.
and I also run a lost and found and counseling line here in Arizona.
And we see the normal spikes where animals will get lost because of course fireworks or storms, that sort of thing.
But I had never really done anything checking, you know, events that had happened.
And I wouldn't be surprised if animals sometimes even pick up on the earthquakes over in California.
I have noticed, we've taken in special needs animals where someone was dying or something and all of a sudden I'll see the animal moping around some and realize that something's going on and I'll confirm that the owner is in the process of or has just passed away.
And we've had many, many situations like that.
This is fascinating tonight to link all this, but I was wondering if the professor had had any dealings like that, and I certainly am going to start tracking a lot more of the unexplained spikes in our lost and found also.
Alright, I very much appreciate the call.
And Professor, yes, animals, I too believe, have psychic ability, perhaps beyond that of human beings, and she was reporting animals that were in mourning.
For their owners in mourning.
I mean, that seems such a human emotion to be in mourning, but it's not just human, is it?
Oh, no, not at all.
I mean, there's hundreds of stories of dogs that pine away after their owners have died and so on, even commit suicide.
But the point I think she was making is one that sometimes animals know when their owner has had an accident or has died.
I have a huge database of cases of unexplained abilities of animals.
And one of the categories we have is of animals that know when the owners had an accident or died at a distance.
We have several hundred cases of this kind, well documented cases.
A typical example would be here in England.
There was a woman who went on holiday with her husband.
They left their dog with a neighbor.
And in the middle of the night, one day, when they were away, the dog started howling, and they couldn't find any reason why the dog was howling.
There was nothing wrong with it.
They couldn't stop it.
And the next morning, there was a call came from the woman saying that her husband had had a heart attack and died the night before in Ireland.
And the dog started howling at the time he died.
And, of course, the person looking after the dog couldn't possibly have known that.
No, of course not.
So this is...
The kind of thing that there are so many cases like this that I have no doubt this really happens.
Of course, there are people who pick up when a loved one has died.
They get a dream or they get an impression or a feeling.
But dogs and cats and other animals seem to be able to pick this up.
And I think if we think of telepathy as involving a bond, it normally happens between people who have a bond.
The bond can be thought of as a bit like an invisible elastic band.
And if one of the people dies or has a serious accident, then you can see that it would affect the other at a distance.
All of this is, if all of this is true, and it certainly seems to be, then it should affect all of our world views, the way we view everything, our relationship with each other, with animals, it should affect our entire world view.
this is such an important area of understanding uh... and and yet
it's it's it's not accepted quickly at all uh... by either the mainstream press
or people in general is it i think that most people in general do accept it because
they've experienced it especially things like telephone telepathy or the sense of
being stared at But they're usually shy to talk about it in public because there is a long-standing taboo against these topics in our society.
Which the mainstream so-called serious press enforces or certainly observes, and within the academic world these taboos are very strong.
But nevertheless, I think these things are quite common, even in modern America and modern Britain, and the whole modern world.
So I certainly think they lead to a different world view as well.
I mean, I think we need a different world view anyway.
Moving towards a more holistic worldview and a world in which we see things as much more interconnected.
And the existence of these phenomena fits very well with what I think is a paradigm shift that's happening anyway within science.
It is.
It is.
It is beginning to happen.
There's no question.
It is beginning to happen.
And the old certainties are definitely getting less certain and the old prestige of kind of dogmatic scientism This kind of science is a religion.
This is on the decline.
I think things are opening up in quite an exciting way.
Well, you certainly have opened them up in quite an exciting way for us this morning.
We're out of time.
It has been an absolute pleasure having you on.
What time is it there in London?
It's just before 10 o'clock in the morning.
Ah, mid-morning.
And the end of the morning for me.
Professor, thank you so very much.
A pleasure.
And goodnight from this side of the pond.
Well, there you have it.
That was one that I had been wanting to do for a long time.
Professor Rupert Sheldrake, Crystal Gale, has just the right words to say goodnight from the high desert.
Goodnight.
Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
This magical journey will take us on a ride Filled with a longing, searching for the truth Will we make it to tomorrow?
Will the sun shine on you?
Midnight in the desert, and we're listening How Irish is the Blarney Stone?
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