InPresence 0214: Reflections on The PK Man (Jeff interviews himself)

InPresence 0214: Reflections on The PK Man (Jeff interviews himself)

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[Music] New Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I’m Jeffrey Mishlove. Once again I'm going to be interviewing myself. That's me. And I should say by way of introduction that today is the 27th of January 2021. And the occasion for this particular open-ended discussion is the fact that in a few hours I will be giving a Zoom presentation to the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina about my research with the PK Man,


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Ted Owens. So, I'm actually using this as an opportunity to help myself prepare for it. I wonder by way of introduction if you'd like to say anything else? Thanks for asking me because I know there's a lot of depth both to the question of the Rhine Research Center founded by J.B. Rhine himself, the father of modern parapsychology. The story of Ted Owens which is certainly one of the most amazing things not only that I have ever encountered in my life personally but I can say that the person who was the co-author of the


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original manuscript upon which my book The PK Man was written was D. Scott Rogo. Scott was a distant cousin of mine, a good friend. He was also a parapsychologist himself and in fact very well read in the history of parapsychology. Amongst his many other books was Parapsychology: A Century of Progress [Inquiry] and it was his opinion that the Ted Owens case is unique in the history of parapsychology itself, that perhaps no one else has ever demonstrated so many examples of large-scale psychokinesis. So it's quite an unusual case


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and the fact that Owens interacted with J.B. Rhine is especially significant. In fact, J.B. Rhine was very instrumental in bringing out Ted Owens’s talents. This is a fact however that I think J.B. and his wife Louisa — Ted Owens called her Louis — were embarrassed about. Because at one point when I was researching the case and while she was still alive I talked to Louisa Rhine about Ted Owens and, yes, she confirmed that she knew him, that she worked with him but she said, “Please don't mention


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our institute in connection with this man.” She saw him as a terrible embarrassment. Now, I also want to add that there's a deeper level yet to be described here and I'm going to say that it has to do with Kabbalah, with Jewish mysticism. Not just Jewish mysticism, mysticism in general because I think at some level, yes, there are unique cultural variations on mystical traditions and Kabbalah is quite unique. But the principles apply universally. And the principle is what I would call stories within stories within


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stories. Now, this is very self-evident in Kabbalistic mysticism where every word is made out of letters and every letter is a word and each of those words are made out of letters and each of those letters are additional words. So it's an infinite regress. You can never get to the bottom of all of the stories involved. When I'm talking about Ted Owens and J.B. Rhine and my own research and parapsychology and the intertwined connections, the fact for example that Ted Owens was in the Navy in the Second World War.


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He's really of my father's generation who was in the Army in the Second World War. That opens up vast panoramas for understanding our place in the universe, which is what this is all about.This may be about our place in the universe but let's not get too far afield. Let's talk really about parapsychology. For one thing, I think it's important to address this question for our viewers. Why bother to pay attention to parapsychology at all? You're putting out, or perhaps I should say, we're putting out


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videos almost on a daily basis now and I should just give our viewers a little warning that that's probably going to slow down. I don't think that this is a pace that I want to continue permanently. In any case though, we're asking our viewers to watch parapsychology videos every day, at least we've been doing that now for many weeks and we'll probably continue to put several videos up a week. Why? Why should viewers do this? What an interesting question. It does get at in some ways the heart of why I am sitting here


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in front of these cameras right now having this conversation with myself. What's in it for you? I think a good place to begin is with Ted Owens. He had a lot of native psychic talent. I don't think there's any question about that. It ran through his childhood. It ran in his family. When he was in the Navy he was stationed in the Pacific in New Caledonia. He began doing telepathy experiments with the officers with whom he was stationed. He also had some very mild, I think, examples of potential psychokinesis. He wrote


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to J.B. Rhine from New Caledonia while he was in the Navy and J.B. Rhine wrote back to him. He had set up some experiments that he was doing with the naval officers. He believed he could read their minds. Here's what he reports. It's quite fascinating. He would visualize rays of light coming out of their forehead reaching up to a big light in the sky, as I recall, or somewhere above them in the room. Then he would look above their head in between the two rays of light and he said he could see their thoughts.


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He would ask them to concentrate on a thought and then he'd write down what he saw. For example, in one occasion he saw a streetcar and he drew a little picture of a streetcar. Then he asked the officer, what were you thinking about? The officer said, “Well, I'm from San Francisco. I'm thinking about the cable cars.” San Francisco is famous for its cable cars which are little street cars that run up and down the hills of San Francisco being pulled by cables that are under the street. So it was pretty much a direct hit.


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Ted Owens wrote to J.B. Rhine — this is in the 1940s — and J.B. Rhine answered him and gave him some pointers as to how he could develop better controls for this research. So when Owens got out of the Navy, I think it would have been about ‘44, ‘45 or so he had no work. He described to me, I questioned him in depth about his history, and he said, “Yeah, I was out of the Navy. I didn't know what I was going to do. I went home to Bedford, Indiana and my aunt came to visit from New York City. I was telling her I


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had had this conversation or this correspondence with J.B. Rhine, the famous parapsychologist.” Rhine achieved a measure of fame in the 1930s when he first wrote his book about extrasensory perception and all the card guessing experiments he had done. And the aunt said, “Oh my goodness, you should get him on the phone right now. Call long distance.” And he did and Rhine said to him, “Funny you should call. I just lost my secretary. I'm working on a book right now called The Reach of the Mind and I need secretarial help


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and you are a high-speed typist, you've worked as a stenographer in the Navy. Can you come right now to Durham, North Carolina? I'll hire you.” His aunt gave him the money for a bus ticket and he headed right over there. Now, the point that I really want to make here is that Ted Owens didn't really know... He had native talent but it wasn't developed. But when he began working closely with J.B. Rhine and his family at Duke University and his students and the other researchers there, he developed an appreciation for the


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science behind parapsychology, an appreciation for understanding how to cultivate and explain and test his own talents. That's how it happened in that environment. So to answer the initial question, one of the reasons anybody would want to study parapsychology is ultimately to understand themselves, to understand the latent capabilities of their own consciousness. Now, not everybody is going to be a Ted Owens. It's like not everybody is going to be Babe Ruth who plays baseball. But everybody can exhibit


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some ability and that ability can be honed, it can be cultivated, it can be useful and helpful. And it surely is an example of our god-given human potential. That's why it should be studied. You know, I went into psychology for that same reason. I remember when I was an undergraduate — here comes another story within a story — when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in psychology in 1968 and ‘69, my senior year, there was a big student strike on campus. First the black students


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went out on strike because they said we need to have Black Studies here at this university. And they were right, they did. Well, at the same time other student groups said we'll go on strike as well and so did the psychology students go out on strike in support of the black students actually and because they had their own demands. That was when the undergraduate Psychology Student Association was formed. I attended the organizational meeting and at that meeting I stood up and I said, “I've entered the field of psychology


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because Iwant to understand myself. Self-knowledge, that's what it's about for me.” I was very disappointed that the behavioral program there at the university, like many big midwestern universities, focused a lot on running rats through mazes, not on self-knowledge as much as I would have liked. As a result of that little speech I was elected to be the first vice president of the Psychology Student Association. But for the same reason one would want to and for the same reason I wanted to study parapsychology, it's


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really about self-knowledge. So what you're saying is that for our viewers watching the New Thinking Allowed interviews on a regular basis is a way of enhancing their own self-knowledge. That's a pretty big promise. Well, every viewer is going to need to decide for themselves what they're getting out of it. And of course nobody's forcing anybody to watch these videos and nobody's even asking anybody to pay a nickel for them. They're free, although contributions are accepted if you log on to the website of the New Thinking Allowed


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Foundation. Well, back to your presentation later today at the Rhine Research Center. What are your thoughts there? What do you think they want to know with regard to the Ted Owens situation? Well, I don't think it's well understood that Ted Owens had quite a deep relationship with J.B. and Louisa Rhine. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. I believe it is “Louisa” not “Louisa.” In any case, he describes how they held seances in their home when he first moved to Durham, North Carolina and that he himself was the center of


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those seances. He said he didn't go into trance but he was able to create raps or noises. He said it was perhaps the heating system, the radiators. Then he would say, “Okay, two raps for yes, one rap for no.” And they were getting these raps or these clanging sounds. This happened on a number of occasions. I don't think this sort of thing has ever been reported. He also claimed that while he was working for J.B. Rhine they had a conflict, a minor conflict really because Ted Owens was acting as a typist


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and a part-time researcher, really a research assistant type of stenographer. He was taking dictation, he was typing, he was preparing the book. He was upset that Rhine wouldn't give him any credit in the book itself. Of course, that was Rhine's decision. And he asked for a raise to boot because he said he was working like twelve hours a day and being paid for eight hours and he didn't get a raise. So, a conflict developed there. But overall he found Rhine to be a wonderful loving man. Both J.B. and Louisa Rhine he


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described as sort of substitute parents to him. They invited him to dinner at their house often. He would eat with the family. He said when he went on dates there in Durham he actually... well, I'm tripping over my words because there's so much to the story. He went on dates and Louisa said to him, “Look, I know most of the students at Duke here,” which was a rather expensive university. They have their own cars. They take their dates out in their cars. She said, “We know you don't. If you'd like to you can bring


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your dates over to our house. You can sit in our parlor with your dates.” And he would do that. Now, at one point after he had been working I think for a couple of years for J.B. Rhine, Rhine asked him, “Why don't you enroll at Duke?” And Owen said, “It's such an expensive school. I don't have the resources to do that.” And Rhine said, “Don't wor ry. You can get the GI Bill. I'm gonna help you.” And Rhine arranged for him to enroll as a student at Duke. That's when the dating, I think, really picked up.


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Owens pointed out that because the parapsychology lab was on what he called the East Campus, it was the girls campus apparently, at those years of the 1940s they had a men’s and a women's campus. He got to eat at the cafeteria with the co-eds and got to know many of them. He was dating them and he said strange things began to happen on these dates. The earrings would disappear, pens would disappear. He said he went on a date with one woman who was wearing gloves. She never took off her gloves but the


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gloves disappeared. The Rhines began wondering, what's going on with Ted Owens? Is he stealing these things? Is he subconsciously taking them? Why are they always disappearing? They had other students follow him while he was on his dates and watch him to see what was happening. Now, this is all in effect folklore because none of it has ever been published. But he claims that even while he was being watched these disappearances kept happening. On one occasion he told me that he made a scissors levitate.


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Nobody has been able to acknowledge that that happened. You know, when I talked to them of course it was decades after the fact. People there remembered Ted but it was in this context, this ambiance where Rhine was always playing around thinking of new ways to explore psychic functioning that Ted began to unfold his own abilities. So in effect what you're saying is that when people become more and more familiar with the language, with the methods and approaches used in parapsychology it creates a cognitive structure


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that enables people to feel more comfortable allowing their own abilities to unfold. That's a very good way to put it. A cognitive structure is very important for people because people feel afraid of this ability. For one thing, it's not socially approved of. In many, many contexts you don't want to talk about it. I can tell you this. Every single parapsychologist I know has stories that when they give a talk or a lecture people will come up and say, “Can I tell you about my experience?” and then they typically will say, “I've


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never told anybody else before.” People don't feel safe talking about these things. So simply by putting this material out… I get it. What you're saying is that by putting this material out you're creating a social structure, a cognitive conversation in the community that gives people permission to open up a little bit. You got it. Well, we could go on and on about Ted Owens but let's talk about the people today at the Rhine Research Center where you're going to be talking about him. Surely there'll be


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more to talk about than simply Ted's history with J.B. and Louisa Rhine, as important as that is. Well, you're right. The big mystery around Ted Owens actually concerns what happened after he left Duke University and his association with J.B. and Louisa Rhine in the parapsychology laboratory there. That has to do with what he called the Space Intelligences. I've shown in a previous dialogue, if I may call it that, the image I'm gonna show it again of the praying mantis. Ted Owens described these mantis-like creatures Tweeter and


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Twitter, is how he described them, who were responsible he felt for the enormous gifts that he exhibited in the 160 or more demonstrations of which I have records in my files. The mystery has always been, well, how did he do these things? We have good documentation that he would send letters to people, including me, but many other people in advance and saying, “I am going to cause a heat wave. I am going to cause a cold wave. I am going to keep this hurricane from protecting you…” not from protecting you, “I'm going to


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protect you from the hurricane. I am going to stop this volcano from destroying a village. I am going to cause a sudden storm because I'm angry at you. I am going to cause forest fires.” There were negative things. But many of these things happened including power blackouts, UFO sightings. People can... and I should say now I'm going to link… I'm going to link in the right hand portion of your screen to previous interviews where I've discussed many of these details. Thank you for that. I'm going to link to


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those because I don't want to discuss all the details. Now, the real question that comes up is, how did he do it? Was it because he had these invisible hyper spatial entities that he was working with? Was it because of his own native psychokinesis? Was it through precognition, as my good friend Ed May insists. These are still unanswered questions. I can explore it. I can tell you right now my best answer is that it's probably a combination. As tempting as it would be to rule out the idea of the Space Intelligences,


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to say that no this is all latent human ability and the Space Intelligences are some sort of a fiction that he developed in order to make himself feel comfortable wielding this kind of power. But it's the sort of power that is the birthright of all humans. Well, yes and no. I think there's a lot to be said for that but at the same time I don't think, even in the absence of any direct evidence, that we can totally dismiss the idea of invisible hyperspatial entities that he's working with. In fact,


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as I went over The PK Man, reviewing my book in preparation for the talk I came upon comments written by James Harder. Harder was one of my professors at Berkeley, a lovely man. He was a professor of hydraulic engineering and also he was the research director for a UFO research organization. I don't think it's active any longer but it was at one time one of the major organizations, APRO. A-P-R-O, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. His viewpoint was that it would be a mistake to think that Owens was able to do this


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based on his own native human ability. He said, no, he had to have had help from some other source that we might think of as extra dimensional or extraterrestrial. Many people would take that point of view. It certainly makes sense to think that us, our small egos, cannot do these things. Now, the problem is of course, we don't know the limits of what we can and can't do. And there's even a deeper problem. I'm glad you mentioned the deeper problem because I think it is time to get into it. The deeper problem


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is simply this. We don't know the boundaries of the self. In fact, there's good reason to believe that at the deepest level, the level of the ground of being, the level of pure consciousness, that there's one spirit, there's one self and there's one ground of being and that ground of being encompasses every physical thing, every imaginable thing, every thought. Every thought is all connected. Every particle, every vibration is all the great oneness of everything. I don't think that should ever be forgotten.


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Again it brings us once again to mysticism, to the Jewish Kabbalah, to the idea that there is one God, monotheism perhaps. Now, when I say one God I don't mean to say that there aren't... Elohim is the Hebrew word, the heavenly hosts, the many facets and aspects of God. So that the polytheistic religions are also correct in the sense that God has many faces. But underlying it all there is oneness. Even if you're a Buddhist then you think that the oneness is nirvana or pure nothingness. It's still there and it can be a very


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dynamic pure nothingness. So at that level when we talk about, is it Ted Owens doing it through himself? Or is it these hyper dimensional Space Intelligences? At one level they are separate, they are distinct or so it would seem. But at another level we are all one. The mystics of every culture have told us that. From my point of view, if you're going into the field of parapsychology in any respect whatsoever, even watching these videos, it's very, very helpful to be mindful of that. The great oneness. I don't know


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that we can go much further with this right now. I think this is good preparation for your talk. For our talk. Yes, for our talk. So in closing this video today I'd like to thank you for being with me. It's been my pleasure and I hope we have many more similar conversations. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you as well for being with us. [Music]