The Case of the "PK Man" with Stephen E. Braude (4K Reboot)

The Case of the "PK Man" with Stephen E. Braude (4K Reboot)

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new thinking alloud is presented by the California Institute for human science Mind Body Spirit University a leader in fully accredited in-person and online us college degree programs in the topics we cover here visit their website at cs.edu [Music] [Applause] thinking aloud conversations on the Leading Edge of knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey [Music] mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey Mish love this will be an unusual interview today we'll be talking about the PK man which is a book I wrote uh in


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regard to a 10-year study I did with an unusual individual who had psychokinetic abilities with me is Professor Steven Browdy whom I've had the pleasure of interviewing many times in the past Dr Browdy is the author of course of the limits of influence psychokinesis and the philosophy of science he's a specialist in macro psychokinesis in fact I've interviewed him about about that uh for a series of three interviews we did another interview on the thoughtography of Ted serios and another interview on poltergeist so Steve and I


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have quite a history of discussing psychokinesis together and I'm going to turn the floor over to him soon and he'll be interviewing me about the PK man today welcome Steve thanks Jeff good to be here again it's a pleasure to be with you and uh you have a question for me I do I mean the case of the PK man is so remarkable it covers so many of the topics that you and I have discussed privately and also in the series uh the limits of psychic functioning the Dark Side of Sai the fear of sa and many others so why don't


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you at least Begin by introducing the case of the PK man well Ted Owens is a a person whom I met back in 1976 at the time I was attending the a Convention of the uh parapsychological Association and another Convention of the parascience foundation at the University of London that summer and he had been invited to give a presentation to that organization because a a little news clip about his work had appeared in psychic magazine that he had ended a drought in California and there was a drought in London at the time the rout


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was so bad that my friends with whom I was saying said you could get your picture on the front page of the London times if you just walk down Picadilly circus carrying an umbrella it'll seem so strange nobody will believe it they'll take your picture and put it in the newspaper they were bringing trucks uh of water to some of the cities around London that was their only access to water and when Ted Owens arrived in London on that occasion it began to rain and poor there there were power blackouts and and the drought was


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declared over almost immediately and suddenly in a surprising way well this was characteristic of of Ted Owens he had a a penchant for um causing he believed he could cause through some combination of psychokinetic abilities and his contacts with entities associated with other dimensions or with UFOs uh he would cause or produce these kinds of large scale phenomenon he had been a research associate with JB Ry at the Duke Paras pychology laboratory in the 1940s so he knew about psychokinesis and he felt that his unique contribution


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was that it was just as easy to control largescale phenomenon like the weather as it was to control the fall of dice which was the sort of uh thing Ryan was studying at the time well now there are several things going on here one has to do with who is actually making the phenomena occur assuming that there was really some causal connection between uh Ted and the phenomena that he reported or predicted or whatever was going on um on one hand he often said it was he who was doing these things on the other hand


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he said it was space intelligences who was doing I mean what's your take on that it's interesting that at that very conference the Paris conference at the University of London one of the speakers was Suzanne padfield who was the wife of the well-known physicist Ted Baston who had an interest in psychokinesis and she herself produced PK in the laboratory working with John hasted another physicist researcher at the University of London at the time and her presentation was on what she called psychic support figures she said that oh


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orig orally she thought the PK that she produced was uh the result of her Spirit guides and um then she said eventually she learned to take responsibility for it herself she felt that these psychic support Figures were something of a psychological crutch and and that she no longer needed that um Ted Owens uh believed in the early days of his PK work that this was uh nature that he was somehow in touch with nature with a capital N and um I'm inclined to like Suzanne padfields analysis I like the idea to


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that maybe it really was all coming out of his mind but I will say this some of the things that he did included the production of UFO phenomenon after I started working with him in 1976 because he had a reputation for producing UFO sightings I said well could you do that for me and he said yes I will produce a sighting for you within 100 mile radius of San Francisco it will be seen by in fact he said I'll produce three sightings within a 90day window 100 mile radius of San Francisco and uh as the experiment progressed there there


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were a couple of sightings and then he said I feel a big one coming it's going to happen any day now he said it will be photographed it will be witnessed by multiple people and a picture of it will be published on the front page of one of your local newspapers 3 days later that actually happened picture was published on the front page of the Berkeley Gazette this particular UFO was videotaped and the video was broadcast on Channel 9 television the big PBS station in San Francisco it was witnessed by hundreds


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of people both from the air and the ground because at the time at Sonoma State College as it was then called it's now Sonoma State University in roner Park California about 50 miles north of San Francisco the the art Department was sponsoring an event with a an artist who flew an airplane and had smoke trailing out the back of his airplane and he was creating designs in the sky flying about 300 or 3,000 ft above the college campus hundreds of people were outside watching with their cameras the whole art


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department and the pilot himself uh was uh in the air and he saw a UFO I interviewed him it was in his airspace and it was photographed and videotaped From Below now there are some problems of interpretation here of course I mean one of the things we've also talked about is how to understand precognition do you understand it as a retrocausal process where some future event produces an earlier precognitive experience or do you adopt what eisenbud called the active analysis and interpret evidence


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for ensle precognition as um a kind of s mediated inference where you're just drawing inferences from states of Affairs that exist already or possibly is it due to telepathic influence or psychokinesis do you have any views on that well it's a conundrum and uh I think as as you know our mutual friend Ed May who will be here in this studio in a few months has published a paper recently in which he thinks he can explain almost all ostensible parapsychological phenomenon as precognition he thinks that's the sort


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of the Paradigm and I'm inclined to think that your view is almost the opposite that psychokinesis might be the the main Paradigm or the active analysis in one of its forms whether it's a mediated inference by sigh or whether it's uh telepathic influence or PK if you think there's a problem with the very idea of retrocausation then you would naturally be inclined to the AC of analysis yeah we don't need to settle that one I I honestly have never been able to make up my mind about it I nor whether there is


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an actual external agent the space intelligences as Owens would call them uh you know I think it's feasible that it could all be Owen's own psychokinesis I I think that's feasible well one of the things that interest me so much about the case you correctly point out that it's very difficult to know exactly where the causal lines are here and sometimes there's more or less of a delay between Owen's prediction or a threat as the case may be and the actual occurrence that he threatened or predicted um but you point out correctly


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that there's a kind of cumulative Force to these particular cases even if no one of them is a slam dunk uh Case by itself together they seem to be a little bit more convincing if you look at the whole body of evidence and I have the files still from uh that research done he died nearly 30 years ago and 1987 uh and I make those files available to researchers there are about 168 different demonstrations in which he said I'm going to cause something uh and with the help of my space intelligence friends and it's is going to be a


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demonstration of something typically unusual I think it would be fair to say that by chance alone none of these events would occur more than one time in a 100 and probably much more rare than that but uh if I analyze them overall using my own subjective impression did it more or less occur as he said it would because it's almost impossible to do clear-cut statistical analyses on these cases I would say two thirds of them uh occurred in a way that would impress a uh an intelligent objective Observer well


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let's put some meat on the bones here I mean uh viewers who don't know the case might like to know something more about the kinds of threats or predictions that Owens Made I mean it had to do with the weather it had to do with lightning strikes it had to do with sporting events for example one of the most dramatic cases was a volcano in Italy um I believe it was Mount Etna I'm not 100% sure off off hand but the lava was heading toward a village and uh the villagers were being evacuated and Owens


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said uh I am going to Pro vent that Village from being destroyed by the lava and sure enough within a matter of weeks the lava stopped flowing just short of that Village well there also some less Savory predictions or threats that Owens Made do you want to address that well he tried to do good he always wanted to be there as the Savior the person who would end the drought the person who who would save the Village from uh the lava the person who would be uh the the voodoo man who would assist the basketball team


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but people often laughed at him and treated him with ridicule and when that occurred he got mad at them frankly um and he said I think these people need to be taught a lesson and the lessons uh were harsh there were suicides involved there were uh storms there were lives were lost there were airplanes that crashed but let me just say that with regard to the airplane crashes according to Owens this was an accident he didn't mean to do it um but not with a space shuttle Challenger with the space shuttle


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Challenger in December near Christmas of 1985 he called me up very very angry and he said Jeffrey this is the most important phone call you will ever receive my space intelligences really mean business this time they are going to knock that space shuttle out of the sky it's up to you you've got to call NASA and warn them not to launch that shuttle he said there's nothing more I can do and of course that's a lot to uh lay on a graduate student at the time as if NASA was going to listen to me and and frankly at that


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time he his predictions hadn't been going so well for years I had not paying much attention to him because uh he he had made some very big predictions about nuclear explosions and major earthquakes that didn't occur so when he called me up about the space shuttle the Challenger I I paid little attention to him and it was only about two weeks later when when it did in fact explode and of course according to the researchers the explosion occurred for well-known reasons concern concerning an O-ring and and improper quality control


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and and so on but um that event really happened and and it caused me to think to myself I've got to take him more seriously I can't just ignore this man he's an incredible research opportunity he might represent the most significant parapsychological find in history well you and I have often talked about the implications of their being any PK in the world at all and because that raises the question just how far can this go how extensive can the effects be and we know that no force can be used exclusively for the good and Ted seems


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to illustrate that yeah but when I think about his predictions regarding the weather whether he's going to cause a drought or stop a drought and so on um a natural question I think a lot of people would want to ask under those conditions is meteorology is not an exact science so how do we really know how to assess uh the likelihood of these things occurring on their own it's almost impossible I think uh your arguments about the um limitations of the experimental method in parapsychology are particularly applicable here and a


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journalistic approach or a crime investigator approach seems to make more sense uh to me in in these instances it does to me as well do you want to say something about Ted's relationship to sporting events well he liked to get drunk as a matter of fact he'd sit down and polish off a bottle of scotch and have two or three TVs on at one time and his goal was to cause football teams basketball teams typically to Fumble the ball he said he he was much better at doing that than in getting them to throw


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perfect passes or make perfect shots from from a distance so it was like he would cause Poltergeist type effects uh to go on and often the demonstrations that he produced were accompanied by mysterious Poltergeist likee effects not just with sporting teams but it it because he was being ignored by the US government and he wanted nothing more than to have scientists and government officials take him seriously so that he his abilities could be harness for the good but but when that didn't happen he


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he'd say well I'm going to attack I'm going to I'm going to demonstrate in a negative way to convince you and he tried to interfere with Naval exercises and there were reports of poltergeist likee events taking place on on uh warships during Naval exercises as well as NASA uh launches now you waited some time before you actually published the book the PK man the first draft of the book was written in 1979 my co-author at the time was D Scott rogo a very well-known writer right and parapsychology researcher and


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we had a publisher and the publisher went out of business and we submitted it to another publisher who looked at our manuscript and he said this is a terrible novel he couldn't believe it was non-fiction and at that point I said to myself people are not ready for this and I let that manuscript sit in my basement for 20 years until 1999 when I had the thought that maybe there there was enough sophistication and evolution and in cultural ideas about parapsychology that there would be a market for this


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book and and there was a small Market it's hasn't been a blockbuster most people are are still either unwilling to believe any of it could be true or for the people who do believe uh it's real they think this is scary and I want nothing to do with it in the 16 years since the book was published have your views evolved about the case I wish I could say they had Steve but but I it's still a conundrum whether it's to or the extent to which precognition psychokinesis and uh some kind of active external entity like the


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space intelligences are it just is all in my mind they're mixed together I suppose the the most evolved view I could State at this point is that these three approaches are somehow inextricably intertwined with each other but you do assign responsibility to Ted Owens for the phenomena moral responsibility do you not I tend to I mean for example with this Challenger explosion tried to maintain it he had nothing to do with it and I'm inclined to think that he probably didn't I don't believe he will


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uh an accident in that space shuttle uh I think that might have been more of a prec cognition but when he caused the drought in Florida after relieving Florida of a drought that was retributive wasn't it it yeah now that's a fascinating case because uh he was invited by a journalist Wayne Grover a freelancer uh who had an association with a national Inquirer to end a drought and he said he would and it ended right on schedule and the national inquir refused to run the story and he said well I'll have to bring the drought


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back and at the same time he said furthermore I'm going to punish Florida with a hurricane and out of nowhere comes this big storm Hurricane David it soon Rose to Category 5 status at C caused incredible uh damage in the aisle of Dominica in in the Caribbean and then it headed to Florida and Wayne Grover said to Ted Owens look you cannot allow this hurricane to hit Florida it's a category five hundreds of people will be killed and so Owen said okay uh I I will prevent it from uh hitting Florida at


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full force and mysteriously according to the newspaper accounts this category five hurricane which did hit Florida uh diminished in power it was only a category 2 by the time it hit uh landfall in Florida one of the interesting things you mentioned in the book has to do with the lingering effect of some of uh Ted's apparent influence do you want to mention that uh yes because parapsychologists particularly Graham Watkins uh doing healing studies with mice uh observe that once uh a talented PK subject attempted to


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influence the mice in a particular location the effects seemed to linger long after and I thought that that effect was occurring in an example where Ted Owens had a friend the Chesapeake Bay uh where there many naval uh installations there was a radar installation and he knew the radar operator and he got let in late at night unofficially and he said let me see if what I can do with his radar and there were many you know how the a radar screen uh goes and he began creating all kinds of mysterious blips on the radar


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screen the radar operator fellow named Richardson signed an affidavit saying yes Ted Owens came and he said he could influence the radar and we saw many strange things on the radar screen well within several weeks of that event uh at least two airplanes crashed in the Chesapeake Bay and there's more to the story because at that time back in the 1970s Owens was working with a famous science fiction and science writer named OT Bender actually the man who uh created the Shazam comic strip and Oto Bender


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published four articles in Saga magazine about Ted Owens in including this story about the plane crashes in the Chesapeake Bay and um after one of those articles was published Ted Owens was on an expedition to Egypt one of his wealthy backers had financed a trip for him to go and explore the mysterious psychic powers of the pyramids so he's returning to New York on a flight from Cairo and uh he's sitting up in first class getting drunk and has the Saga magazine article and he's showing to the stewardesses you know like I'm the guy


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who caused these airplane crashes I can do PK and as he's bragging about this at that moment and I might mention that often when he does PK he creates what he calls a PK map pictures of what he intends to accomplish and he focuses on those pictures and then these events come true in his mind he's sending a telepathic message to his friends the space intelligences who have the power to control all these events but so so here he is focusing on the pictures he's in an altered state of consciousness


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from alcohol the same altered state he uses when he likes to control athletic events and as his plane is coming into what was then called the Idle Wild airport in New York the plane right ahead of his was struck by lightning and crashed it was at that time the largest crash uh in the United States now you took Ted owens's course I did do you want to describe that well after the Challenger explosion I felt I needed to pay more attention to Ted Owens and I um decided he had a training program and I had interviewed maybe a


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dozen people who had gone through his program and they reported they could cause lights to appear in the sky and strange phenomenon uh I thought you know I owe it to myself because I I was studying at the time uh methods of training psychic abilities I published a book side development systems about that I decided to take that course and well we only have about a minute left now I can only say that for me the outcome of that training was I launched the thinking alloud television series and that was my goal when he asked me what


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do you want to do I knew I don't want to create spook things UFOs or frightening things what I want to do how I want to manifest myself in the world and I had been pretty beaten down at that point in my life is I want to be a communicator I want to communicate parapsychological realities to mainstream audiences and within months I had launched a TV series which eventually was out on over a 100 public television stations throughout North America and and I might mention with regard to the training program that


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we have in the studio Deborah ly Catz a former guest of this show a a person who is a specialist in training psychic abilities who was been studying the Ted Owens training program herself and she's going to conduct another interview with me so um we'll focus on that and viewers of this interview um I think might want to pay special attention to that one I think so well Stephen thank you so much for being the interviewer today it was my pleasure and I hardly recommend that your viewers read the PK man it's a


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fascinating study thank you Stephen and thank you for being with us [Music] [Applause] [Music] book three in the new thinking alloud dialogue series is UFOs and UAP are we really alone now available on Amazon you can now download a free PDF copy of issue 7even of the new thinking allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy