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March 30, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:18
Edition 532 - Jeffrey Mishlove

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove has spent decades know - and researching the work of - Ted Owens a.k.a. "The PK Man" who, it's claimed, used his mind to make big and sometimes scary things happen...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much.
Got to say this first for all of the lovely messages that I've had, both on the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, but also emails that I've been receiving for days now, people just telling me that they appreciate the show and wishing me well and helping me to mark the fifth anniversary of the radio show and the 15th anniversary of the podcast.
15 years of sitting on this seat, which is still managing to hold up.
I put some new screws in it.
I've put a couple of leather patches on it.
It's my dad's old TV watching chair.
But I've sat here in exactly this position for 15 years now doing the podcast and also now doing the radio show.
And it's nice to know that you appreciate it because you tell me you do.
And thank you so much for helping me to get through what has been a very difficult year and an absolutely terrible, awful, dreadful winter.
Now I can say that because today the weather seems to have broken for a while.
I'm looking at a clear blue sky, beautiful greenery, some trees, birds in the sky, just one single plane flying out of Heathrow Airport.
But that's, you know, who knows, the planes may start again.
But a beautiful day, and I give thanks for that because it's boosted my spirits after this terrible winter.
You know, I hope that things are improving slowly for you.
They're beginning to release lockdown.
Of course, nobody knows what's going to happen, the new COVID variants and all the other stuff they talk about.
But for the moment, in the UK, we're on a roadmap to opening things up.
And all I can say is thank God for that after this awful, awful period that all of us have been through.
I don't think, and you may well share what I'm about to say, I ever want to know another period like that in my life.
You know, it's a completely new experience.
Lord knows what the generation that went through wartime endured.
If this is a little taste of some of that, then I don't think I ever appreciated it till now.
Thank you very much for all of your emails anyway.
Please keep those coming.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can send me a message there.
If you want to make a donation to the online show, you can also do that through the website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
And if you've done that recently, thank you very, very much.
The guest on this edition, well, this item is going to be taken from my radio show.
It's a slightly longer version of my conversation with Jeffrey Mish Love about a character I'd never heard about.
Real-life story of a man who seemingly could cause big and scary events to happen simply by using the power of his mind and psychokinesis.
His name Ted Owens.
They called him the PK man, and I know very little or knew very little about him until I had the conversation.
It is a fascinating story.
This man came to the United Kingdom during a long, hot summer, 1976, and declared that he'd stopped the drought because as he got off the plane at Heathrow Airport, or roughly around that time apparently, it started raining.
And he said, I did that.
He also claimed to do a lot more things.
So we'll be speaking with Jeffrey Mishlov about his research into the PK man, Ted Owens, coming next.
You're on the unexplained with myself, Howard Hughes.
Before we do that, though, I want to do a shout out.
This is to Megan.
It's either Megan or Megan.
I'm not sure.
It's M-A-G-E-N.
I think it's Megan in Bathurst, Australia.
First time I heard a communication from Bathurst, Australia.
Alex wrote to me and said, my partner Megan and I listen to you every night as we're going to sleep without fail.
We enjoy listening.
It makes for some great conversations the next day.
We have you on all night and we ask each other, did you hear what that person said?
That's fantastic.
Hopefully one of these days I might see Bathurst.
But Megan Proctor, from Alex and me, very best wishes and it's great to know that you're both there.
All the way away from here in Bathurst, in Australia.
Got to go back to Australia before I turn my toes up.
I know I keep saying that.
Teresa in Milwaukee sent me a story.
It's a ghost story of a sort and I'm going to read all of it.
It's reasonably long, but before we get to Jeffrey Mishlov, I'm going to do that.
So this is from Teresa in Milwaukee who says, Howard, I'm a big fan of your podcast and love the big range of fascinating topics.
Thank you.
Thank you for keeping me sane during the pandemic.
Thank you to listeners like you, Teresa, for keeping me sane.
Believe me.
I want to share a personal story about a ghost experience I had a few years ago.
It involves another person who was a total skeptic before these events unfolded.
Ghosts are no strangers to me, says Teresa.
I've had experience since I was a small girl growing up across the street from a very old cemetery.
My partner, Joe, however, never was a believer until we moved into the house on Beaumont Street in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin.
The house is a late 1920s Tudor-style house that sits a block from the high bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.
The area was once dotted with hundreds of Indian mounds along the lakeshore.
Unfortunately, the mounds were destroyed to make way for the housing development in the neighborhood a long time ago.
I do believe the unsettled energy contributed to the haunting.
Many things happened in the course of the three years we lived there.
It started with white sparkly lights coming out of the living room fireplace when the fire was not lit.
The lights would come out and fly around the room.
Joe had this work desk in the living room and witnessed the lights often.
They were seen in other parts of the house as well and even noticed by neighbors coming out of an upstairs bedroom window.
Two of the upstairs bedrooms were especially haunted.
The one we slept in had creepy happenings on a regular basis.
Our heavy king-sized bed would shake in the middle of the night when nobody was moving.
Once, when I was lying alone in the bed, I felt someone lay down next to me.
I felt the weight of the person in the bed and thought it was Joe, but when I rolled over to look, Joe was not there.
On a regular basis, around 3 a.m., papers would rustle in the corner of the room as if someone was sifting through a pile of paperwork.
Candles would blow out on their own after being lit.
Doors would open by themselves.
We always felt like somebody else was standing in the shower beside us, which is extra creepy.
There was a small bedroom at the top of the stairs that nobody felt comfortable in.
Joe's kids didn't want to sleep in there.
I've done psychic work, so I thought I'd try sitting in the room alone to try and connect with any spirits that may be there.
So one day I sat in the room and went into a meditation and immediately saw two people.
One was a tall man wearing a long black overcoat.
He was walking away from the house, but kept stopping to look back.
The message I got from him was that he wasn't ready to leave the house just yet.
The other was the spirit of a young girl who had polio.
She was mad that she couldn't enjoy a normal childhood and took out her anger on whoever slept in that bedroom.
If we went downstairs to the kitchen at night, we had the distinct feeling that the lower level was full of unseen people.
We just got what we needed quickly and we ran back upstairs.
Joe became a believer, and we feel that the house was a portal for many spirits to come and hang out.
There's a water source called Silver Spring that runs underground and underneath the homes in the neighborhood.
Spirits are attracted to water and combined with the Native American energy in the area could explain why the house had so much activity.
Since we lived there, the house has had many owners and renters.
Nobody stays for long and it often sits empty for months at a time.
We now live in a totally uneventful house and we're grateful for it.
Says Teresa Blair in Milwaukee.
Thank you for writing that so well and for sharing that story, Teresa.
If you have a story, then I'm always pleased to hear it.
Sometimes we'll read them here on the podcast.
Thank you very much.
Thank you to Haley for booking the online guests, by the way.
I'm going to be talking to Carla Willis Brandon quite soon about deathbed visions.
But for right now, let's hear my radio conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove about the very strange case of the PK man, Ted Owens.
He's in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He's online to us now here at The Unexplained.
Jeffrey, thank you for taking time and listening to me say those words.
How are you?
I'm very good, Howard.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
May I call you, Jeff?
You may.
Right.
Okay.
So, Jeff, I think we need to do a little bit of backgrounding here first.
We're going to be talking about the kinds of things that the Stanford Research Institute, I believe, got involved heavily in in the 1960s and 1970s, aren't we?
Mental abilities, I think.
That's right.
Okay.
And this is psychokinesis.
Right up at the front, before we tell the story of Ted Owens, the man we're going to speak about.
I think that we have to define the term.
Psychokinesis is a fancy word for mind over matter, the ability of the human mind to influence the external world, but not through the mediation of the muscles or the body, but direct mind-to-matter contact.
People have been claiming in various ways that they can do that for decades.
As far as I'm aware, nobody has conclusively, to the delight and the joy of scientists, actually proved that that is possible.
Well, I think I would disagree with you there.
There's been research in psychokinesis actually going back 150 years or more.
In fact, the Society for Psychical Research in England, where you are, did a lot of studies with mediums back in the day.
And they produced table levitations and rapping noises and sometimes spirit materializations, which could be viewed as examples of psychokinesis.
So there's a long history of scientific investigation.
And in more recent decades, J.B. Rine at Duke University in North Carolina in the United States did experiments having people concentrate on dice.
And then at Princeton University, there's been a whole series of studies on what you could call micro-psychokinesis, people able to influence quantum mechanical random event generators.
So at the level of quantum tunneling, it seems as if people have psychokinetic abilities, not to mention many other studies having to do with magnetometers, having to do with changing the temperature.
Now, the PK man who I worked with was kind of unique in that he liked to focus on large-scale phenomenon, particularly the weather, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, heat spells, cold spells, things of that sort.
Right.
And I think I owe you an apology.
When I said what I said, of course, what I really meant was that, of course, there's been a lot of scientific research, a lot of which I have found pretty convincing and very interesting to read about and watch about on television.
But I guess what I'm saying is that, and you could say this for anything that is in the sort of psychic realm, I guess, anything from remote viewing to ghosts or whatever it might be, you know, nothing has been proved to the, you know, the absolute satisfaction of naysayers, of people who will say, no, that can't possibly be so.
Nothing has been that conclusively proved.
Well, there are people who won't accept the evidence no matter what.
In fact, I think one famous British scientist or German scientist, Helmholtz, back in the 19th century said, I'm not going to believe this, even if it is true.
Yeah, and I think that's, you know, we have to, I think if we're investigating these things, we have to cut the investigators Some slack.
These are areas, and this is only a personal thought.
Maybe you will agree, but these are areas that it is impossible to quantify in terms of, well, in the sort of terms that you would quantify, I have built an engine, it generates this much horsepower.
I suspect that these things, because they are connected with the psychic, they're connected with consciousness, they're connected with in some ways another realm, it's not possible to measure and quantify quite in the way that some might desire.
So a lot of this, or some of this, will come down to the realm of belief, what you believe.
Well, let me give you another analogy.
You're right.
It doesn't work as efficiently as a gasoline engine that starts up almost every time you turn the key.
However, a better analogy would be baseball or cricket.
In the United States, Babe Ruth was one of the greatest baseball players in history.
But his ability to hit home runs was statistical.
In fact, he struck out more often than he hit home runs.
But statistically, you know, we can look back 100 years and say Babe Ruth was a great baseball player.
So when we look at these things that we're going to be talking about, we really need to look historically and we need to see the big picture.
I would agree.
Before we talk about Ted Owens, the PK man so-called, I want to talk about you and, you know, your, up to this date, your interest in these matters.
I got a doctoral degree in parapsychology from the University of California at Berkeley.
It was awarded in 1980.
And to my knowledge, to this day, it's the only doctoral diploma that says parapsychology on it that's ever been awarded anywhere in the world.
So that gives you a sense of the enormous stigma that this field has.
And it is a taboo field.
And there's enormous social pressure on scientific institutions and on universities not to acknowledge this field.
In fact, after I received my doctoral degree in 1980, over 40 years ago, there was a huge effort launched by the debunkers, the skeptics, the scoffers to try and pressure the university to revoke my degree.
And in fact, I'll tell you what else happened.
I got libeled.
The major magazine published an article saying basically he probably didn't get the degree, but if he did get it, he certainly didn't deserve it.
I fought a libel suit for six years, and actually I won that suit.
I got a favorable settlement, and today I'm comfortable financially, largely in part due to the compensation I received from that lawsuit.
So some good did come of that, but I'm glad that you did take them on about that, because if you have the certificate saying that such an august institution gave you that qualification, I'm speaking here as a journalist.
I don't know how anybody could question that, because not only are they questioning you, they're also questioning the institution.
Well, since we're talking about parapsychology, you should know this.
In August of 2018, the American Psychologist, which is the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, published an article written by my friend Etsel Cardenia,
former editor of the Journal of Parapsychology, summarizing meta-analyses that covered about 1,400 experiments in parapsychology, showing that they were overwhelmingly significant at a statistical level, and that as the research over the decades got more and more rigorous, the results did not decline.
So there you have one of the major scientific organizations in effect endorsing the findings of parapsychology.
I think it's a landmark paper.
It's not that well known, but certainly your listeners would, I think, want to know about this.
They would.
I didn't know about it.
That's interesting.
I know, you know, I don't think you have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to know that this is a difficult field to go in if you're a scientific person.
Because even in 2021, when we like to think of ourselves as very broad-minded, there will always be people who throw brick bats at you and always people who will shake their head.
But nevertheless, this is a legitimate area of scientific research.
And there are people doing very valid work.
One of the people that you might be aware of, who we have on this show from time to time, is Professor Caroline Watts, who holds the Kursler Chair at Edinburgh University.
And they intensively and extensively investigate these matters.
So there is research being done all over the world, but it's no more common, let's put it that way, than it was in 1980.
We don't appear to have, and that's a broad brush statement.
You tell me if I'm completely wrong.
We don't appear to have moved too far forward.
Well, there's more activity, I think, in the colleges and universities in the United Kingdom than there is here in the United States.
Why is that?
Well, I think a large part of it is due to the Kessler chair there at Edinburgh and the fact that so many people have graduated.
I have a unique doctoral degree, but to be honest, I'm not the only person who has done doctoral research in parapsychology.
I believe at Edinburgh, they've probably awarded several dozen doctoral diplomas.
I don't believe they actually say parapsychology.
I think they're awarded and they say psychology.
But they've done very good work there.
Although I have to say, to my knowledge, people like Carolyn Watt and Richard Wiseman have Prevailed within academia in the United Kingdom because they take to a large degree a very skeptical perspective.
Well, I guess maybe.
I mean, arguably we could, I'm sure there'll be people who have different views, but maybe you have to start from that perspective in order to be credible.
I don't know.
I think you can probably start from either end.
You can start from somebody who is kind of believing, but the evidence may somewhat dissuade, or somebody who is skeptical and is persuaded by the evidence.
And, you know, maybe that's the way to go.
Well, there's a lot of politics one has to put up with if you're working in a big institutional setting.
And in my case, because I got a unique degree, it was impossible for me to really follow a conventional academic career.
And as I look back now over 40 years, I think I benefited from the fact that I was able to work independently.
Absolutely.
So, you know, how would you describe yourself today?
Well, mostly what I'm doing these days is running the New Thinking Aloud channel on YouTube where I, like you, I interview people.
And I have posted, I think at this point, over a thousand videotapes interviewing leading researchers in parapsychology, spirituality, and consciousness.
Like a lot of us who investigate these things, certainly I've seldom seen, apart from seeing a ghost once and having had a life full of strange coincidence, I haven't seen the reality of things like psychokinesis.
I haven't really experienced that.
But I've spoken to many people, both people investigating these things and random people who've just had those experiences.
And I don't doubt the tales that they tell.
Have you personally experienced any of these things?
Well, I would say the most dramatic things that I experienced did have to do with the research project in which I was engaged.
It was a 10-year field study with Ted Owens, the PK man.
So let's bring in the man then.
Ted Owens, who was he?
What was he all about?
Well, I think of Ted Owens as being a larger-than-life figure, almost a folk hero like Paul Bunyan in the United States.
You must have folk heroes like that in the UK.
I'm not sure offhand who they would be, but I met him in London now that I think about it.
He was invited to attend a conference in 1976 at the University of London, sponsored by an organization, as I remember, called the Pariscience Foundation.
And the reason is this.
There was a drought at the time.
And my friends in England said, Jeffrey, if you want to get your picture on the front page of the London Times, all you have to do is go into Piccadilly Circus carrying an umbrella.
Everybody will think you're crazy, and they'll take your picture, and it'll be on the front page of the paper.
We'll have to explain to my listener here that I think from memory, that year was the longest, hottest, driest summer, certainly in Europe, in living memory.
It was very serious.
And Ted Owens had been invited by, no, his name's on the tip of my tongue.
Is it John King?
He was a researcher.
And the reason is because he had already established a reputation for ending droughts.
It had happened in California.
I was well aware of him before I came to London because he had done something like that in California.
In fact, you mentioned SRI International, the Stanford Research Institute.
And before I got to London, which was in the summer of 76 and February of 76, there was a huge drought in California.
And I was visiting my friends, Hal Putoff and Russell Targ at SRI International.
And they were famous for doing research with Uri Geller, and they were pioneering remote viewing research.
And they got a letter from this fellow, Ted Owens.
He basically said, you're wasting your time with Uri Geller because I'm the world's greatest psychic.
And I'll prove it to you because I'm going to end the drought that you are experiencing right now in California.
He said, and you'll know I did it because there's going to be rain and sleet and hail and snow and UFO sightings.
And your local newspaper is going to, and also power blackouts, your local newspaper will run a story saying the drought is over and this is going to happen in just a few days.
So, I mean, this man not only had remarkable chutzpah by the sounds of it, but also, if what he claimed is correct, the ability to create things or the ability to foresee things or maybe a combination of the two.
Maybe a combination.
And it happened just that way.
Russell Targ, my friend, wrote back to him and said it was a good prediction.
Thank you.
And Ted Owens wrote back and basically said, hell no, it wasn't a prediction.
I caused it.
And at that point, I showed up at their laboratory, and these guys were getting funding from military intelligence, from the CIA, to do their parapsychology research.
They already felt very embarrassed because Uri Geller, who they were researching, who now lives in England.
Well, in fact, I've known Uri for 25 years or more.
He's now living back in Israel, but he did live, as you say, for many years in England.
And I sponsored Uri's first major public appearance in the United States back in 1973.
So we have a long history together.
But at that point, Hal Putoff and Russell Targ didn't want to have a flamboyant psychic Messing up the relationship that they had with the CIA.
So they asked me if I would please take this research project on and take the files out of their office so they would have nothing to do with it anymore.
Right.
So they kind of employed you as a freelancer to do some research that they wanted to do, but for a whole mess of reasons they couldn't.
But they still wanted the research done, so they brought in somebody from outside you.
Well, employ isn't really the right word.
I did all of this as a volunteer graduate student at the time.
Deploy.
But I took it on.
And then I met Ted Owens in London because people, there was a little news story about what he had done and ending the drought in California.
So people brought him over to London to see if he could end the drought there.
And as soon as he arrived in England, it began to rain and pour.
And within days, the drought had ended.
In fact, the subway tubes in London were flooded.
There was so much rain.
Oh, I well recall that, you know, I was just a kid, but I can remember when it ended.
And it seemed that it would never end because it went on through the entire summer.
I mean, all the way from the beginning of summer right the way to the end, virtually without a break.
And the water authorities up and down the length and breadth of the land were so concerned about this.
I was probably too young, but I have no recollection of Ted Owens at all.
But you are saying then, and I've got listeners probably right now screaming coincidence at the radio, but you are saying that the fact that the drought ended quite violently, Ted Owens claimed that as being his work.
It happened the day he arrived in London, and it wasn't expected.
The newspapers were saying no end to the drought in sight, which is his trademark.
That's the way it worked in California as well.
And then when he arrived, all of a sudden, all of this rain came and the drought ended within a matter of days while I was there.
Well, he was the kind of person that the British audiences didn't appreciate.
When he came to speak at the Pariscience Symposium at the University of London, he walked onto the stage carrying a little red toy wagon piled high with papers.
And he announced that all of these papers were documents of his powers, that he was the world's greatest psychic.
And my sense is that the British people don't like that kind of bragging.
And he was not well received.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, we loved Muhammad Ali over here because he, you know, he would tease people.
He had a glint in his eye.
I don't know Ted Owens.
I know that, you know, he died, I think, in 1987, but it sounds like maybe he didn't quite have that glint in his eye.
He was more serious.
No, he, you know, Muhammad Ali was a poet, and Ted Owens didn't have that.
He was angry.
He was an angry man.
One of my friends once described him as being like a grizzly bear with a burr up his ass.
Gee, I've worked for a few people like that.
Let me tell you, Jeff.
So he gets here in 1976.
He thinks, he tells the world that, you know, you think this is random and your weather forecasters didn't predict this.
That wasn't just one of those things.
I did that.
I can imagine somebody who feels that they have the power to do that would be as mad as hell if they did not get the kudos for it.
Well, what happened was one of the speakers at the symposium didn't show up.
So they told Ted Owens he could take that person's slot.
And Ted Owens got up.
He started to give his talk.
In the middle of his talk, the other speaker showed up and they told him he had to get off the stage right in the middle of his presentation.
That's how he was treated.
Well, that sounds, I mean, in, you know, we are renowned for our fairness here in the United Kingdom.
That sounds rather unfair.
And I befriended him.
When he got up to speak, they put him back on his regular slot.
And I stood up and told the audience at the time that I had been a witness to what had happened in California.
And that even though he seemed like a rather bizarre person, he ought to be taken seriously.
But the British audience really didn't take to him at all.
But I began researching him at the time.
And I had this huge file of things that he said he had done.
And in fact, documents of things he had done in the past.
One of those was to produce UFO sightings.
Well, to actually engineer them to make them happen.
To make them happen.
He would say, I'm going to, there will be a UFO sighting within a particular time and place window.
Of course, there are people today like Dr. Stephen Greer who say that by using a particular protocol, they can make UFOs appear.
So, you know, Ted Owens was not unique in that, I suspect.
Well, he was ahead of his time, you could say.
And I'll explain to you what happened because to my knowledge, what Ted Owens did with working with me exceeds anything that Dr. Greer or his followers have yet accomplished.
Okay.
Before we get into that, I'm sorry to jump in here, but I think it's important for my listener's sake to just give a thumbnail sketch before we go in detail into the makeup of Ted Owens and what he did.
Who this man was?
Where did he emerge from?
He was born in Indiana.
He was in the Navy in the Second World War.
When he got out of the war, he thought he had a lot of psychic abilities, and he wrote to J.B. Rine at Duke University, and Rine hired him as a typist.
He worked as a typist on Rine's book, The Reach of the Mind.
So he was a research associate at the Parapsychology Laboratory in Durham.
And Rine arranged for him to enroll as a student at Duke University.
And then he left and he went out on his own as a healer.
He got in a lot of trouble with the American Medical Association because he was practicing hypnosis and doing healing.
And they tried to shut him down.
In fact, they did shut him down.
And he developed a lot of bitterness over that.
But along the way, he discovered that he seemed to have this contact.
He felt that what he called the space intelligences, hyperdimensional, invisible beings, alien beings were working with him, that they had actually, he said, watched him his whole life and worked with him to make sure that he had a wide variety of different careers,
everything from parapsychology to being a high-speed typist, a jazz drummer, a bullwhip artist in a circus, where he also had a knife-throwing act.
A knife-thrower and a bullwhip artist.
And he worked in a law office, and he said that these aliens wanted him to have all of these professions because that meant his mind would be sufficiently flexible that he could communicate with them using their telepathic language.
Of course, a man with a gift and a flair and a penchant for showmanship, which you have to have if you're a bullwhip artist or you're a knife-thrower, would also have, I would have thought, a certain flair for faking stuff.
You might think so, but I don't believe anything he did was fake.
As far as I know, I looked at the records.
I've studied the man for 10 years.
I haven't found a single instance in which it seemed like he faked anything.
Were you there when he actually made something happen?
Well, these are large-scale events.
He would send me letters.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do that.
And then he would show me the newspaper clippings.
These events would be reported in the papers.
So actually, on location, no, I didn't witness it with my eyes.
I witnessed it in terms of being there to hear about it in the news when these things occurred.
And you got to know him pretty well.
I got to know him over 10 years.
Well, that's a long time to know somebody.
You must have got a handle on how he achieved these things.
Look, look, I was watching a movie last night.
I'm sure you're aware of this movie because it's kind of similar and kind of not.
The Medusa Touch, starring Richard Burton, which was about a man who felt that he was able to make things happen.
Some of those things not pleasant, like bringing airliners down out of the sky.
And I knew I was having this conversation with you.
About as close to Ted Owens as any movie I know.
Really?
Well, that's an astonishing thing.
I mean, the character that Burton portrays in The Beducer Touch, and I'm talking to my listener now.
If you haven't seen it, you should, because it's doing the rounds on digital TV at the moment, was a deeply intense man who seemed to be able to, in fact, had to be stopped in the end, who seemed to be able to achieve all sorts of things just with the power of his mind.
In fact, there were airplane crashes associated with Ted Owens.
And people, unfortunately, people would laugh at him.
He'd come into, for example, he came into the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle when I was in Berkeley, and he said, we were having another drought the following year in 77.
He said, I'm here, the great PK man.
I will end the drought.
And the guards in the lobby of the office of the major newspaper in San Francisco booted him right out.
And so he said, I guess I'm going to have to teach these people a lesson.
Oh, my God.
And that has happened many, many times because people treated him with disrespect and he felt he needed to teach people a lesson.
So you're saying seriously that just like Richard Burton's character in that movie, he could give things or people the evil eye.
I mean, if that's the case, that makes him a very, made him a very dangerous man.
Well, what he said in 1977 is instead of ending the drought, he was going to cause forest fires all over the state of California.
And within a few weeks, there were some 600 fires, 300,000 acres were burned.
And the fires were largely caused by lightning, which was another one of his trademarks.
He was known to be able to point his finger and cause bolts of lightning to come out of the sky where he pointed.
And you're sure these stories are not just apocryphal?
I have interviewed eyewitnesses, one of whom was an attorney, Sidney Margulies, when Owens worked in a law office in the city of Philadelphia.
He was standing in the stairwell one day taking a break, and this attorney walked into the stairwell in a skyscraper in Philadelphia.
And Owens said to him, I can make lightning strike.
You want to see?
And the attorney said, sure, make lightning strike right over there.
And he pointed toward the Camden Bridge between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Owens pointed his finger.
Within one minute, a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, struck that.
Well, it didn't strike the bridge.
It was near the bridge.
Sidney Margulies signed an affidavit testifying to that.
I've interviewed him twice about it, 10 years apart.
He remembered it very vividly.
He said he'd never seen anything like it in his life.
And yet, the way That he told it, it seems that aliens or some kind of external intelligence actually gave him license to do those things.
Possibly.
I mean, that was his story, but his story varied from time to time.
And sometimes he said it was his own psychokinesis.
Sometimes he said it was the aliens who were causing these things.
When we were in London, there was a speaker there, a British woman named Suzanne Padfield.
She was the wife of a well-known physicist named Ted Baston.
And she was also what they called a poltergeist agent.
She had psychokinetic abilities herself.
And she gave a talk on what she called psychic support figures.
And her thesis was that people with psychokinetic abilities often attribute it to spirits or aliens or demons or whatever, because they don't want to take responsibility.
They don't want to admit that they can do it themselves.
Did he show signs of this when he was young?
Were there stories of him, you know, making kids in the schoolyard fall off their bikes and things?
Well, not at that age.
No, I think the earliest stories he talked about were when he was in the Navy.
And in fact, he wrote to J.B. Ryan about it.
It's one of the reasons that Ryan invited him to come to Durham, North Carolina, and work with him at Duke University.
He talked about being able to, for example, hover in mid-air.
One day he said he was on the diving board in a swimming pool where all the sailors were gathered.
And he jumped up off the diving board and he just hovered in mid-air for the longest time before he landed in the water.
So Ted Owens claimed that he could do a remarkable number of things.
You have assembled a wide variety of accounts from people who say, yes, I saw this and I believed in what this man can do.
If somebody had those powers and he was around until 1987, I would imagine that Uncle Sam would have been interested in them.
Was the American government not interested in him?
He tried desperately to get the attention of the United States government, but they ignored him.
And in fact, he even at one point launched a war against, a poltergeist war against the U.S. government to get them to pay attention.
But it didn't do any good.
And I tried to interest other scientists as well.
For example, I called a gathering of scientists after I had accumulated quite a bit of research data.
One of the attendees was J. Alan Hynek, the famous UFO researcher.
And his attitude was, I wouldn't go near Ted Owens with a 10-foot pole, he said, because whatever he's doing, it's a manifestation of the subconscious mind, and I don't want to have anything to do with it.
Do you think that there were other people around at that time, maybe around now, who can also do this?
Of course.
I'm pretty sure it's true, but you have to appreciate how much stigma is associated with this, that people are very unwilling to risk their reputations and get behind something of this sort.
I have in my files, Howard, 168 examples of the demonstrations that Ted Owens produced.
I would say two-thirds of them worked out the way he said, roughly speaking.
And the events like the ending the drought in London were things that you wouldn't expect to happen more than one time in 100.
But he claimed also to be able to do bad things.
I mean, I'm not sure of the extent of that.
If that is the case, was he never questioned about some of the bad things?
Maybe you have examples.
Well, there are examples.
There are many examples of bad things.
Some deliberate.
Several of them were accidental.
But you have to appreciate that people were not willing to listen.
For example, I mentioned to you the fires in California, the 300,000 acres that burned down after he got thrown out of the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle.
At the time, I was working in a small laboratory in San Francisco.
The owner of the laboratory was good friends with a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle.
We had, at our laboratory, published a research report on the work with Ted Owens.
And so I arranged to meet with the reporter from the Chronicle to explain to him what we had discovered.
And we're having dinner together, a very pleasant evening.
And as I'm talking about what I personally witnessed, this reporter got so indignant, he just stood up.
He said, I don't believe a word of it.
And he walked away in the middle of dinner.
That's the kind of social pressure we were facing.
A remarkably controversial man.
And why was he not on the front page of every newspaper?
Why wasn't he in Time magazine?
There are plenty of examples right now I could tell you about that have been going on in your country.
I recently have been in touch with a fellow maybe you know, Roy Stemman.
He wrote a book called Surgeon from Another World.
He lives in Brighton.
And this is a book about probably the most impressive case of survival, afterlife survival that I'm aware of.
It went on for 60 years, from 1946 until the death of this spiritual medium, George Chapman, in 2006.
During that entire 60-year period, a spirit named William Lyon, who had died in 1937, a surgeon, came through George Chapman And performed healings.
Many of them were quite miraculous.
I'm not aware of that story, but I think what you're telling me is that I think we might be aware of this in other fields, that it is possible to go under the radar.
You're saying that to an extent Ted Owens went under the radar, he didn't get the kind of attention that perhaps he might have.
And, you know, if you leave aside the story of the drug.
The Committee for Psychical Research in England ignored the George Chapman case.
Okay, well, listen, I need to research that some more before we could talk about that in any detail.
But back to Ted Owens here.
What became of him then?
I mean, he died in 1987.
He talked about the UFO.
I haven't told you the best of it yet.
Please do.
I asked him to produce a UFO for me.
He said he would produce three of them within three UFOs, bona fide UFO sightings within 100 miles of San Francisco within a 90-day window.
I set up a control group using San Diego, a city of comparable size, as a control.
We sent letters out to all the law enforcement agencies in both of these cities to see if this would happen.
And we got one right away in the San Francisco area.
And then one day, Ted Owens called me up on the phone.
He said, Jeffrey, I feel this is big.
It's going to be amazing.
There's going to be the best UFO sighting ever.
It will be seen by hundreds of people.
He said, it will be photographed.
The photograph is going to be published on the front page of one of your local newspapers.
And that happened three days later.
Not only was it seen and photographed, and the photograph was shown on the front page of the Berkeley Gazette in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was videotaped, and the videotape was shown on the Channel 9 Evening News in San Francisco.
At that point in time, I have to say it was the best attested UFO sighting in history, even though with all that publicity, it was still under the radar.
But it occurred right over the campus of the Sonoma State College, 50 miles from San Francisco.
The art department was sponsoring an artist who flew an airplane with smoke trailing out the back of his airplane, an artist named Steven Poleski.
So the whole art department was outside with their cameras.
And a UFO came right into his airspace.
So it was seen by hundreds of people from the ground.
It was seen by the pilot in the air.
I've interviewed him about it, photographed and videotaped.
It was all over the news briefly.
And then everybody forgot about it.
But it had all been told to me in advance by Ted Owens, saying he was going to cause it.
I wonder what the media today would make of all of that.
I wonder.
I wonder if he'd get more coverage.
Look, one of the obvious questions that occurred to me, and I always think of the obvious ones, is if this man had such amazing powers, why did he not deploy them in the service of preventing accidents, reducing disease, changing the climate in places affected by droughts and hurricanes and tsunamis and whatever?
Why did he not deploy those gifts as he would have seen them to do that?
He did from time to time.
When people asked him to do that, he wanted nothing more than the U.S. government to set up an institute for him where he could do that full time.
But he was mostly laughed at.
And when he got laughed at, he struck out against people.
But for people who came to him and said, please come and help us.
We have this situation or that situation, he would.
And generally, he was successful two-thirds of the time.
But, you know, I'd say one-third of the time it didn't work out too well, which is typical.
In fact, in all of human behavior studies, we don't get 100%.
It's not like turning on the motor of your car.
He died in 1987.
I mean, I don't know from biographies that I've read how that happened, but could he not have used his powers to stay alive longer?
Well, he died of sclerosis of the liver, and he was a heavy drinker.
As a matter of he used to like to get drunk and have two or three TV sets going on a Sunday afternoon watching the football games, and he'd use his abilities to, he'd like to favor the underdog team by causing fumbles on the other side.
And so that was one of his pastimes.
And he worked at one time with a researcher from Mensa, the organization of people with high intelligence to which he belonged.
And they reported in one season he was 75% successful in predicting or causing the underdog teams to win football games.
Looked at then through the lens of, what, 20?
I'm trying to work out how many years ago, 34 years of history since this man died.
How should we regard him?
I think he was a larger than life figure, but I believe he represented a talent that is latent within humanity.
I'm sure there are other people out there who have similar abilities.
If they're smart, they won't try to show off.
You get into a lot of trouble showing off if you have these kind of abilities.
But I believe in the long run, maybe a thousand years from now, these kinds of abilities will be very widespread in the human population.
And although a lot of those researches that were done by agencies linked to the American military and the American government, a lot of that was discontinued, do you think that on some level some of this stuff is still going on?
Well, I think that there are people in government and in scientific institutions and in universities on an individual level who are very interested in this sort of thing.
But the problem to do it officially is that you get laughed at.
People make fun of you.
It's very easy to use a horse laugh if somebody says, Oh, I believe this is true.
So if it is going on, the people who are engaged in it will be very smart to keep it very, very secret.
That's depressing because we're not going to learn anything, are we?
Well, there are people like myself and other parapsychologists who are public about it.
And you have your radio program, and I have my YouTube channel.
And it's not as if this information is really hidden, but most people have a hard time digesting it.
You know, we're talking about phenomenon that are highly bizarre, a high strangeness factor.
And most people are busy making sure their families are safe and healthy and they have food on the table.
And they just don't have the wherewithal to integrate highly bizarre phenomena.
So a lot of this stuff eludes the radar.
Sadly, Jeff, we're out of time.
If people want to read about your work, do you have a portal online where they can go?
New Thinking Aloud, all one word, A-L-L-O-W-E-D is allowed.com.
An astonishing story.
I only knew the name.
I knew very little about it.
I know a lot more now.
Jeff, thank you so much for giving me your time.
My pleasure, Howard.
Jeffrey Mishlove, you can check out his work, Writings About Ted Owens, online.
Just put him into a search engine.
You're bound to find it.
What a fascinating story.
And as I said to him in the conversation, I think the question that it leaves me with is I wonder if there is anybody around now who exhibits the same kind of powers or thinks that they can exhibit the same kind of powers.
Now, Jeffrey Mishnov explained why it might be possible people might be around like that, but not coming forward, not making themselves known publicly.
Is that you?
If it is, let me know.
You can always email me through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you so much for all of your support, for all of your lovely messages on the fifth anniversary of the radio show, 15th anniversary of the podcast.
It means such a lot to me.
I'm going to have to make some changes, I think, quite soon in my life.
For a start off, I live in a place that is heavily in need of refurbishment.
I don't know how I'm going to do it.
You know, I'm not sure how I could move out, how I could afford to move out to have it done.
It's a logistical nightmare and a constant worry for me, but I'm hoping to be able to keep up the schedule of shows, even if I have to have that disruption, which I've been dreading for years in my life.
But that's just a little personal note here.
For the moment, I'm giving thanks for the sunshine out of my window right now.
I hope your life is okay and maybe improving right now.
Thank you very much for being part of it.
All more great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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