|
|
|
|
|
|
Carolina coast. I (Russell) had just finished talking to a hundred futurists at a NASA conference on Speculative Technology about experiments my partner David Hurt and I had done with an electronic ESP-teaching machine.
3 After my talk, I walked down to the water's edge with Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, rocket pioneer Werner von Braun, NASA Director James Fletcher, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, and NASA's New-Projects Administrator, George Pezdirtz, who had organized the conference. I was looking for a way to leave my job in laser research at GTE Sylvania, where I had worked for the past decade, in order to start an ESP program at SRI. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I had been kept later than I had expected at the lecture hall, answering questions about ESP research, while everyone else had gone off to put on sweaters to counter the chilly evening ocean breeze. As I stood in my short-sleeved shirt on the pier, I tried to remember my Kundalini meditation in order to summon up enough warmth to keep from freezing. I struggled not to shiver while I explained the concepts of contemporary psi research to the men I knew could determine my entire future as a psychic researcher. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In my experience trying to interest people in supporting ESP research, I have often found that the top people in an organization know that psi is real, and they are willing to admit it. Edgar Mitchell had carried out some ESP card-guessing experiments from space, and had a spiritually transforming experience viewing the earth while standing on the moon.4 Werner von Braun told us of his beloved psychic grandmother, who always knew in advance when someone was in trouble and needed help. Fletcher was concerned that the Russians were ahead of us in psychic research, a fear based in part on the recently published book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.5 Only the science fiction writer Clarke expressed skepticism, despite his hugely successful book Childhood's End, which was all about psi.6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In the end, with Mitchell's great assistance and continuing help from Dr. Pezdirtz at NASA, physicist Hal Puthoff and I were offered a contract to start a research program. The inauguration of our program was not without controversy. When we first undertook our remote-viewing investigations at SRI, several prominent scientists, and Martin Gardner from Scientific American magazine, wrote angry letters to the president of SRI in |
|
|
|
|
|