Well, we now have more than enough volunteers for the Sylvia Browne contacting-the-dead test — the preliminary test for the million-dollar challenge made by the JREF. For previously stated reasons, we did not accept any of the people who gave intimate details of their lives and the deceased person they wished to contact through Sylvia's powers. In many cases we had to exchange correspondence back-and-forth several times before we had all the basic information we needed from the applicants, although those requirements were clearly set out in the instructions.
Sylvia has accepted completely the terms of the test, which I clearly outlined on a September 3rd appearance with her on the Larry King Live TV show. This is very encouraging, and we've been working to get things together on this end. Now it's Sylvia's move.
Now, all that remains is to offer her these several possible dates for the preliminary test. We have available:
The week of October the 29th to November 3rd,
The week of November 26th to December 1st,
The week of December 3rd to 7th,
and the week of December 10th to 14th.
Since Sylvia's web page states clearly that she does not read nor answer e-mail, and we have been unable to have a response from her by postal mail, by fax, or by telephone, we would ask all readers of this page to do everything possible to communicate this information to Sylvia Browne. Surely, we won't have to resort to telepathy. In addition, I will forward a copy of this information to Larry King's e-mail address, and by postal mail. Larry appears to be able to reach Sylvia. I hope that we will shortly be able to announce to you that we have an agreed date for the Sylvia Browne test.
Ms. Browne need not devote any more than about 30 minutes to this test, and it will be done by telephone on a day and a time of her choosing, any time within the four weeks listed above. As said previously, she will give a reading for a person chosen at random from among ten of the persons who applied. There will be no feedback from the subject, and Sylvia has said that she needs none, not even the name of the person — though we insist on providing the name, gender, and age, so that the chosen person will be clearly identified; it would not do to have any doubt about who was the chosen subject.
The subject will then consider the reading carefully, and will provide us with a score between 0 and 10 for the applicability of the reading. Following this, either a transcript of the reading will be provided to each of the other nine persons in the target pool, or each will hear an audio tape of the reading, and will similarly score the applicability of the reading.
We await Sylvia Browne's response. All she need do it choose a week, a day, and a time for the test to take place. She can notify us by e-mail, postal letter, fax, or by telephone call. That's:
JREF
201 SE 12th Street
Fort Lauderdale, FL, 33316-1815
(954) 467 1660
or (954) 467 1112.
Please note: this is day number 32 on the "new" Sylvia clock.
A recent news item referred to "the Beatles' guru," who, it said, is "hoping to use transcendental meditation for world peace." You guessed it. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Indian mystic, is back. He claims he taught The Beatles and Mick Jagger about Transcendental Meditation some thirty years ago. Well, I dunno about Mick, but the Beatles dumped the whole thing soon after they started the course. They were practical guys.
The Giggling Guru says all he needs are some "American billionaires" to create his antidote to global terrorism. He says he’ll assemble 40,000 yogis in India, trained in meditation and yogic "flying," to create a spiritual force field. He needs $1 billion to build housing for the group and to pay their expenses while they meditate for harmony and world peace. That, he says, will " . . . completely stop all this violence." He says that if enough people gather to meditate and "fly" — that’s hopping about in the seated lotus position like a gigantic wounded frog — it will create a "force field" that can repel hatred and spread happiness in the world's collective consciousness.
This sounded familiar to me, and a little file-searching came up a 1982 advertisement by the TM folks that offered:
The World Government of the Age of Enlightenment offers to every government the invincible strategy of defense, which uses the infinite power and intelligence concentrated in the unified field of all the forces of nature. This will neutralize the destructive capabilities of all those who possess the power of destruction found at the electronic and nuclear levels.
So such propositions are hardly new. And who might accept such an absurd project? One Pentagon spokesman, Army Major Tim Blair, we’re informed, told The Record newspaper in New Jersey that the Maharishi's campaign is "a noble effort." They didn’t ask my opinion.....
A Book Review.... "Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" by Philip Plait. Due out soon.
Astronomer Phil Plait, who is the guiding force behind www.badastronomy.com, was enraged, as I was, at the suggestion — promoted by FOX TV in a ludicrous "special" — that possibly the greatest adventure in our history, the Moon landing, was an elaborate, expensive, deliberate hoax perpetrated (for some obscure reason) on the public of the world. But I didn't write a book about it, like Phil did. In fact, in Bad Astronomy, this wonderful author has provided us with just about every possible hoax, myth, notion, blunder, and bit of quackery that most of us will ever get to hear about — and he grandly and thoroughly erases every one with broad, long, strokes.
In doing my magic act years ago, I used to get a laugh at the end of one small trick, from the remark, "You see? Educational, as well as entertaining!" Well, Phil has provided the reader with both of those features. He gives us more than enough excellent answers to the usual party-bore's declarations about standing eggs on end at the equinox, the direction water drains north and south of the equator, mirages, the latest UFO "flap," and his/her astrologer's latest success at predicting world-shaking events. We usually don't have effective enough responses to these idiocies, but with Phil's book firmly in hand, we are better armed and ready to let fly with the facts.
It's not enough to express doubt about the claim that a "planetary alignment" won't wipe out life on Earth. You have to have hard data. You can't just say that astrology is bunk. You need hard data. You can scoff at palmistry and phrenology, but you need the figures and facts to fight it. No, it's not all there in Bad Astronomy. If it were, I'd just be opening volume four about now. But Phil Plait has given us a readable, erudite, informative, useful, and highly entertaining book that contains simple experiments (thought and practical) and super demonstrations to make each of us into Mr. Wizard when the irrational claim shows up.
Bad Astronomy is Good Science. Very good science....
I'm told — by very good authority — that the ratings on the new John Edward TV show are not as high as expected, and that we just might expect that it will be pulled. One must also wonder about the Anderson and Van Praagh TV shows that are in the hopper. The recent WTC tragedy seems to have alerted TV producers to the obvious fact that the presentation of superstitious prattle shows little respect for those among us who are grieving. It seems very sad that they could not have recognized this fact long ago....
Skeptic Jim Oberg sent us news of an upcoming event, a project called "International Contact Day 2001" scheduled for October 20, 2001 at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, and directed to "All Officers, Representatives and Members of Skywatch International, MUFON and any other organization and all UFO and Alien enthusiasts,"who are asked to participate in an Intergalactic experiment. They "will attempt to send a message to the occupants of the [flying] saucers by use of mental telepathy [sic]." I can hardly wait.....
Each participant is asked to "memorize the message below" and to "close his [or her, presumably] eyes in a quiet secluded spot, lie down if possible," and repeat the message in their mind. They are admonished, "Do not repeat vocally." This wise caveat may be offered to save the enthusiasts from being carted away by alarmed authorities, but we're not told. Say the instructions,
If the saucer people are able to pick up mental telepathy, they will be able to pick up a message that will be sent by hundreds of people simultaneously. You must remember that, in order for mental telepathy to work, you must have nothing on your mind at the time you send the message.
Jim Oberg paraphrases this last phrase in the instructions to read, "In order for this to work, your head has to be empty."
This is the important message that the faithful should commit to memory:
Calling occupants of interplanetary craft! Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet Earth. We wish to make contact with you. We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on Earth. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of Earth. Please come in peace and help us in our Earthly problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you. We are your friends.
As you might expect, I'll offer my short analysis here..... "We are your friends." Hmm. We may be their friends, but they may not be our friends, I would suggest. The theme of very many science fiction stories over the years (I refer here to Earth science fiction) has been that the critters out there often find us either delicious, dangerous, ugly, stupid, or useless, which makes us anything but their "friends," and more likely Dinner, or The Enemy. Also, when I read, "We . . . would like you to make an appearance here on Earth," I'm understandably surprised. The UFO nutcakes have insisted that aliens (the interplanetary/intergalactic sort, not Canadians or Mexicans) have been making all sorts of appearances, regularly, to us Terrans! And they never tire of telling us about it in detail, since examination and manipulation of human genitalia seems to be the saucer folks' specialty, if not obsession. A secondary preoccupation of theirs appears to be sticking high-tech gadgets up our noses. I don't want to dwell on either of those hobbies.
And where do they get the notion that these other sorts would be in any way capable of, or even willing to, "help us in our Earthly problems"? These "UFO and Alien enthusiasts"are going to ask the alien pilots to "Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality"? Hey, guys, this Foundation — and others — have been trying to do this for years now, and that scale of miracle appears to be just out of reach.
But, I'm told, miracles do happen.....
This last Monday morning, the phones lit up at the JREF, and our e-mail was festooned with accounts of an embarrassing situation involving The Royal Mail (RM) of the United Kingdom. What was meant to be simply a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize by their issuance of six commemorative postage stamps, ended up making some scientists furious. They're incensed that a booklet — published as part of the stamps' presentation package — contains a claim by Professor Brian Josephson, Nobel Laureate from Cambridge University, that quantum physics may lead to an understanding of telepathy and other paranormal claims. "I think telepathy exists, and I think quantum physics will help us understand its basic properties," he told The Observer, a prominent UK newspaper.
[Readers are referred to archived files here. Do a search on "Josephson" to see my previous comments on his statements. Or click here.]
Dr. David Deutsch, who brought us news here of the amazing "crop cylinders" a few weeks ago, is a quantum physics scientist at Oxford University. Said he of Josephson's statement, "It is utter rubbish. Telepathy simply does not exist. The Royal Mail has let itself be hoodwinked into supporting ideas that are complete nonsense."
Professor Josephson won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1973 for what's become known as "the Josephson Junction," a revolutionary discovery which well merited the award. But he has also become a defender of what other scientists call junk science, saying, "I think journals like Nature and Science are censoring [paranormal] research. There is a lot of evidence to support the existence of telepathy, for example, but papers on the subject are being rejected — quite unfairly." In the RM booklet, he wrote that developments in information and quantum theories "may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science, such as telepathy."
"I am highly skeptical,"said last year's physics Nobel prize winner, Professor Herbert Kroemer of University of California, Santa Barbara. "Few of us believe telepathy exists, nor do we think physics can explain it. . . . Certainly, if the US Postal Service did something like this, a lot of us would be very angry." The Royal Mail explained that it had asked a British winner of each of the six different Nobel Prize categories to write a small article about their award and the implications of research in their field. "The trouble is that there are only a couple of British physics prize winners we could have asked, and we picked Josephson," said an RM spokesman.
That was not a auspicious choice, many scientists now say. To quote Dr. Deutsch again, "The evidence for the existence of telepathy is appalling. If engineers or doctors accepted the level of proof that is accepted by paranormal supporters, bridges would be falling down round the country, and new medicines would be killing more than they cure." This view is backed by Bristol University physicist Robert Evans, who said in a Nature article that he was "very uneasy" about a Royal Mail publication that said quantum physics "has something to do with telepathy."
Nobel Prize winners worldwide, though often treated as modern gurus incapable of error, sometimes go off at wild angles and endorse pseudoscience. As examples, Dr. William Shockley, inventor of the transistor, became involved in the study of inherited intelligence and claimed to have found significant basic IQ differences attributable to racial variations, and others like Kary Mullis, a prominent expert in gene research, have expressed doubts that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Both these views have been shown to be quite wrong, and I believe that eventually Brian Josephson will similarly be found to have erred concerning paranormal claims.
The Observer reported that a leading UK scientist put it: "The trouble with the Nobel prize is that it is given to a man or woman for making an individual discovery. It is not awarded as a recognition of their total, integrated contribution to science. That is why you can get unstuck."
I remind our readers that Professor Josephson has still not responded to our inquiries, first sent to him years ago, regarding his challenge to the American Physical Society (APS) in regard to their possibly testing homeopathy. They had immediately sent their acceptance to him, and offered to pay all the costs of any tests. Josephson has not responded to any of our inquiries since that time.....! Why?
Good old Ben Franklin had an observation on a man of his own time: "He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on."
Amen.
Often, pictures are better than words alone....
