Rupert Sheldrake explores the 90% of people who feel stared at, backed by global experiments—dogs like JT anticipating owners’ returns with 85% accuracy, and Princeton’s 9/11 precognition spike. Skeptics dismissed his findings, yet controlled studies confirmed them. He links these to morphic fields, suggesting animals sense disasters (e.g., dogs howling when owners die) or navigate via collective memory, though plant reactions remain unproven. While mainstream science resists, Sheldrake’s work hints at deeper, field-based connections beyond conventional biology, urging a shift toward holistic inquiry despite taboos. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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...
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 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, we, not we.
My wife will demonstrate this for you.
This is why we have wives.
A little bit further down in the program here.
Now, 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 5 million people without power.
5 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 weakened France has 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 cloudtops 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 scrub land 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.
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 replumbing of his ailing heart and not some new whiz-bang robotic or keel 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 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.
unidentified
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'm going to have to push the button.
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, their presence rather, that's 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 in SETI 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, SETI 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 cataloged triangle sightings 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 Columb Cullagher 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 were getting 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 main 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 Merriville, Tennessee Daily Times, Patricia Graham's Pollock quotes Jack Ledbetter as saying, quote, to me, it's strange, and I'd sure like to have an answer, end quote, circle's 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, PIAUI 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, Manlano 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 is being sent to INPE, and soon we will know more.
A kindergarten class 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.
Oh, 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 one.
Mom fainted, daddy had a heart attack, and the boy next door had 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, Mexico, formerly known as California, while minorities still trying to have English recognized as Mexico's third language.
Spotted owl plague threatens northwestern U.S. crops and livestock.
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, it's 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 spoke about that.
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 right or left-wing 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.
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 bans from this storm from Hurricane Francis have already moved through Punagord to Port Charlotte.
I'm looking at the radar now.
Looks like Tampa and Sarasota are getting pummeled pretty good with the showers.
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?
And he 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 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 Prom, we lost the disk drive Friday night at 5 o'clock.
That was this last Friday night at 5 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, heart attack.
And so what we did was we managed to ghost what was on the one drive, nursed it out of there, and got it onto a new drive in, I don't know, about 10 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.
I've got a friend of mine who lives down there in Puna Gorda.
And he lived in one of the mobile home courts down there.
And the 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 out below the or by the shrine, did some praying, come back, and she said to my buddy Pat, she says, Pat, don't worry.
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 there's 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 kaka.
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 a 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.
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.
And I 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'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 the SETI people, you know, are hearing?
You discovered it, and then you told them about it.
And it kind of blended in with them after a while.
But what I noticed, they did it for about two hours, taken the same area, and then off to the northwest they flew away this morning about between 2 and 5 p.m. that day.
Coming up all the way from Great Britain is Rupert Sheldrake.
Rupert Sheldrake studied natural sciences at Cambridge, philosophy at Harvard, received his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge, and was a fellow of Clara Clark College, Cambridge and a research fellow of the Royal Society.
Rupert 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.
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 hiding 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.
Now, 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.
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 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, exposed himself in a 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'd 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 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, 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.
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.
Well, the sense of being stared at only works with what you can visually see.
I mean, 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 round, 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.
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.
What I think is happening is that if I'm looking at you, then I try, 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, 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 is there any way to quantify it, to measure it, to understand what actual forces are at work that create these fields?
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, where you can rule out all the normal sensory clues.
So 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.
And 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.
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 twenty years later.
Then Einstein showed Maxwell's theory based on the ether was, you know, you didn't need the ether.
So he changed it all about another forty or fifty 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 a much earlier stage of development.
So we don't yet have all the mathematics, all the details that we might have.
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 big molecules like proteins or crystals, quantum theory is much too complicated.
you have to deal with a whole lot of approximations.
And it's very no one really knows how much quantum theory is involved in the functioning of a s 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.
Well yes, but um 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 because saying it's related to quantum theory doesn't really help us that much.
There's 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 catchword I guess.
We're talking about things that 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.
Hey, and Cambridge, PhD in biochemistry at Cambridge, Fellow of Clerks.
You know, it's really Dr. or Professor Rupert Sheltrick, 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 mean, there's been a taboo against inquiry into these kind 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, 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.
And that was very, very clear in my debate with the skeptic Professor Lewis Walpert, who, 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 2020 or something like that.
And they showed the experiments with these dogs.
And they 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?
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 scores fall off.
But when it's a question of a dog knowing when its owner's 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.
If you've got people who think they know the truth and 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 1 or 2% 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.
In their experiments, too, 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.
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?
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 are going to destroy those buildings?
Oh, well, a very interesting man in California, Jim Birkeland, uses the lost dog and cat columns in the newspaper as one of the predictive elements for his great success in predicting earthquakes.
I am David Brown, who works with me in California.
We've talked to Jim Birkland, and we tried to see how general his case was.
And David went through the archives of the San Jose Mercury, which was one of the papers that Jim Birkland works with.
We found that for one earthquake, this seemed to work, but it didn't seem to be a very good correlation for other ones.
We couldn't confirm it over a series of earthquakes.
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.
I mean, it's an ingenious idea.
I wanted Berkeley'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.
But I think if it worked in California, then people could do it in Greece and Turkey and Japan and 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 in 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.
And 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 summarize them in my book, The Sense of Being Stared At.
A lot of people who had these dreams, they were so dramatic, so unusual.
I mean, one I quote in my book was from a forensic scientist who's a sceptic.
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 sceptic, had no reason to claim this.
He was very uncomfortable with the whole thing happening because it went against his worldview.
But usually what happens to people when this happens is they say, well, that's a funny thing.
And then 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 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.
I have, but since I live in London, England, it's not something that I can easily do 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 may be doing in the next few months, getting something of this kind launched.
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.
A character named Vassil, writing from Carbondale, Colorado, says, hey, 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.
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, a few days ahead.
It's not like we're getting flashes from...
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 And actually, they only do it just before one.
So I think there's a kind of blur in the immediate future where these things, you know, where things are, probabilities, where these things come from.
But it doesn't sort of stretch out uniformly in all directions.
So I think also these experiments, some of the best things in modern parapsychology, I think, are these experiments on short-term presentiment, picking up what's about to happen just a few seconds ahead.
And those are definitely limited in time.
There's over a very short time scale, but it's still...
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 in Europe with Dick Bierman at the University of Amsterdam.
And then after you're, when you're relaxed, you press a button, 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 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 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.
I think it also works in fast sports like tennis and ping pong and cricket and things where you have 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 that'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.
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.
And in fact, people are way above that, is closer to 50%.
Now, 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 had these abilities, perhaps at one time utilized them to a far greater extent than we do today, and that we're just sort of rediscovering, reinventing the wheel here?
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 acquired 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 there's 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.
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?
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 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.
I mean, these things, 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?
And 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.
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's incredible stuff.
We'll ask the professor what he thinks about it in a moment.
I think all of this is tied in together.
I think 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 viewing, the remote viewers claim an amazing, just amazing, consistent, repeatable ability.
And so I wonder, obviously you've looked at the remote viewing phenomena, Professor.
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 that the data from the experiments are very impressive.
Something's happening.
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 what they're seeing or experiencing.
That's what happened in the one I took part in.
And 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.
Well, there are some cases in 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 clear voyance 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.
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% for their remote viewing programs.
So they weren't just taking anyone off the street.
They were checking out who had a natural ability in this.
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 governments, particularly with the dangerous times we live in today, to be using these gifted people in a world full of terrorism?
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.
This is not just the work I've been doing with AI.
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 colour, words for other colours, in an abstract way, applying to objects that he'd never seen before.
But what's even more unnerving is that Aime 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.
So she had many examples, hundreds, literally hundreds that she's recorded in the 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.
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.
Then in the tests, Aime 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.
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 from both her and the parrots completely recorded on video.
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.
But I prefer the thousandth rat story.
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 Hundredth 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.
And I gave a workshop a 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 into what's happened in the past, that each species has a collective memory.
And 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 had the transplant.
So I think there is a memory transfer, but I don't think it's actually materially embodied in the heart.
Well, you know, I think that it's not quite as obscure as you might suggest.
I mean, I think thinking about this, and I think that one can see the other time to explain we need a continued theory.
It has to be one way to continue traveling across time.
But there's a lot of problems in breaking the biology, which I think requires these field care.
I mean, we've been talking about things that most people would consider beyond the fringe of the normal common point of view, paranormal, psychic, etc.
But I think that these field phenomena are involved in parallel to normal things too.
When I started 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 kind of spin-off from theories, field theories we need just in ordinary biology anyway.
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, he'd take a big old butcher knife, and boy, he'd slaughter a plant or lettuce or whatever it was, I forget.
And then 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 geez, plants, they seem to have something going that's very similar, don't they?
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 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 these, you know, I think the things I'm talking about with the sense of being stared at, telepathy, et cetera, I think are pretty well-based scientific facts.
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.
I want to get to phone calls, but also Eric in Columbia, Maryland writes, FastBlast actually, Rupert 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.
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.
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.
You'd have to know where home was by some other means.
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 sense 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, that process has begun.
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, are 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 on the sun.
But I think just the 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.
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.
So 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.
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 overtalk 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 Cheldrake.
And if you have a question for the professor, let her rip.
unidentified
All right.
Thanks, Hart.
I just, 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 the fields 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 staring at the other side.
The Kirlion 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 round it because the water vapor from the edge of the blotting paper will show up on the Kirlion photo.
If you put your hand on a cold plane of glass, you'll get a kind of aura of steam or condensation round it.
If you photograph that, you'd say that's the aura.
How much of this is really an aura or a field that's being photographed, and how much is simply due to moisture given off by the thing that's being photographed?
And I have a brief premonition story, and I'd like the professor to comment on how he would classify this story.
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 second week of January in a rainstorm, somebody ran a stop sign and blam, hit me on the left side of my car, and it all just fell on the place.
So I was wondering how he might classify that experience.
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 don't 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.
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.
I challenge them to debates, actually, and one of them accepted.
I mentioned earlier with one of Britain's leading sceptics, I had a public debate with him with a High Court judge in the chair to ensure a level playing field.
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, after listening through the weekend and 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.
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.
Well, I've been tracking this literature with much interest.
I've never done any personal research on these prayer studies.
They're well-designed and well-constructed studies.
They follow kind of standard double-blind procedures.
Some people are prayed for, other people are not.
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, just this, I'm now 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 intentions reach out.
A person can pick up your intention to phone them on the telephone.
They start thinking about you.
And when you ring, they say, that's amazing.
I was just thinking about you.
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.
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 invoke the name of God.
Well, my own view would be that God has many names.
And, you know, 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.
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.
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who have these abilities, and 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 who become professional psychics.
And 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 get 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're right or you're wrong, and it works or it doesn't work.
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.
And I think that in traditional cultures, this has been a widespread thing.
I mean, go to Brazil or somewhere like that, and there's lots of people who think they've been cursed, and lots of people who hire people to do something about it to take it off.
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.
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 properly going into this kind of whole psychological background and so on.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Sheldrake.
unidentified
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, advanced that had happened.
And I wouldn't be surprised if animals sometimes even pick up on the earthquakes over in California.
But 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.
So 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.
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.
And yet it's not accepted quickly at all by either the mainstream press or people in general, is it?
Well, 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 worldview as well.
I mean, I think we need a different worldview 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.