Skip to content

The Why Files Science Philosophy Culture

The Basement: Jeffrey Mishlove | Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness. It Filters It

Parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove, the only person ever granted an accredited American PhD in parapsychology, walks his entire life across nearly three hours in The Why Files interview room: a Norman Rockwell childhood, group therapy with murderers at San Quentin, and the 1972 dream of his dying great uncle that redirected his career. The spine is Ted Owens, the PK Man, who claimed to control weather and summon UFOs and who warned Mishlove on Christmas Eve 1985 to stop the next space shuttle, a month before Challenger exploded. Mishlove recounts the psychic 1970s at SRI alongside Targ, Puthoff and Arthur Young, and the case that won him the Bigelow Institute half a million dollar prize for arguing consciousness survives death. It closes on the title idea, borrowed from William James: the brain does not create consciousness, it filters it, with terminal lucidity as the strongest exhibit.

Published Apr 27, 2026 2:53:03 video 45 min read Added Jul 11, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

For almost three hours in The Why Files interview room called The Basement, the host sits across from Jeffrey Mishlove, the only person ever granted a doctorate in parapsychology by an accredited American university. Mishlove walks his whole life in order: a Norman Rockwell childhood in Wisconsin, group therapy with murderers at San Quentin, the dream of his dying great uncle that turned him from studying human deviance to studying human potential, and the decade he spent inside the psychic 1970s alongside Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, Arthur Young and the man he calls the most dangerous psychic he ever met, Ted Owens. The spine of the talk is Owens: the Christmas Eve 1985 phone call warning him to stop the next space shuttle, and the Challenger explosion a month later. From there Mishlove builds toward the case that won him the Bigelow Institute half a million dollar prize for the best scientific argument that consciousness survives death, and lands on the idea in the title, borrowed from William James: the brain does not create consciousness, it filters it.

Figure 1. The terrain of the conversation. Mishlove tells it as one continuous story, from a boy in the safest town in America to the archivist of a field the mainstream would rather ignore.

The man across the table

The host opens by admitting something unusual for an interviewer. When he researches episodes of his own show, Mishlove keeps turning up as a primary source, so having him in the room feels "like sitting in front of the encyclopedia." Mishlove, for his part, says he genuinely did not know he had become a living legend. "I know that there's a reputation," he says, but he had no idea the show even knew he existed. The host draws the line between them cleanly: his own job is to entertain, Mishlove's work is to educate, and the education is what matters.

Before anything paranormal, the host asks a warm opening question: not the most famous or best reviewed, but Mishlove's favorite role his mother ever played on stage. The answer is Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Mishlove's mother was an actress in Wisconsin community theater, good enough, he thinks, for Broadway had she not married and moved west. Blanche, he says, changed her completely. "It was as if the spirit of Blanche DuBois entered into my mother." He reads it not as pathology but as evidence of something he will return to for three hours: that we are much larger and much more interconnected than we think, and that good actors are channeling. "I think there is an element of channeling that goes into theater," he says.

A Rockwell childhood in the safest town in America

Mishlove was born in 1946, part of the postwar baby boom, and grew up in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a town of thirty thousand later designated the safest city in America. He describes a Norman Rockwell world: every man clean shaven, every boy in a crew cut, no drugs, no beards, nothing out of place. He had never heard of marijuana until college.

The host presses on the undercurrent, and Mishlove does not flinch. Fond du Lac in that era was one hundred percent white. He says he did not even know black people existed until he went to watch the Milwaukee Braves play. The host notes that this is the honest footnote to the Rockwell nostalgia: it was Rockwell for some people and not for others, but that is the history America likes to remember.

Criminology and San Quentin

Everyone knows Mishlove as the parapsychology man, but his degrees ran through sociology and then criminology. The reason was blunt and practical: he wanted into UC Berkeley. After a psychology degree at the University of Wisconsin, he took a job at the Singer Mental Health Center in Rockford, Illinois, a facility that prided itself on being ten years ahead of its time, which for Mishlove was not enough. He quit after six weeks and drove to San Francisco.

What drove him out was behaviorism, the reigning model of the era. The center kept a computer in the basement, and every interaction with a patient had to be logged on a form. Mishlove felt they were missing everything about human depth. He ran small experiments he had read about from the Esalen Institute and Bernard Gunther on awakening the senses. He had patients tap their heads and feel their own bodies. A woman who had not spoken in twenty years began to talk. The staff, he says, had no concept of human depth, and he did not fit in.

Berkeley admitted only about twenty psychology students a year out of thousands of applicants. Criminology had openings and a clinical track, so he went in through that door, having studied under the psychiatrist Seymour Halleck in Wisconsin. By 1972 he was doing volunteer work at San Quentin, running group therapy with murderers and rapists in the psychiatric unit.

What did they turn out to be like? "Pretty much just like you and me," he says. It convinced him that everyone carries the same seed, that the whole human population shares a collective consciousness, that nothing any criminal ever did is not in some way part of him too. The staff saw it differently. The guards, he says, were more frightening than the inmates, always scowling, keeping a menacing demeanor. He heard supervisors call the inmates "a different kind of cat," people who were "just not like us," which he names for what it is, a casual way of dehumanizing somebody. He did not leave criminology because of the work. He left because of what happened next.

Woven into this section is the story of the degree itself. Berkeley had an obscure rule: a graduate student in good standing who could not find three professors in one department to sponsor a dissertation, but could find three across different departments, could build their own program. Mishlove used it to create an individual interdisciplinary doctorate in parapsychology, which he defines as "the scientific study of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis and the possibility of human survival after death." His dissertation was on training ESP abilities. After he graduated, Berkeley canceled the rule and only reinstated it a few years ago. When he proudly showed the finished degree to his mentor Arthur Young, Young pulled out an astrology ephemeris, looked at his chart, and delivered a line that would prove exactly right: it was going to take six more years to undo all the damage the university had done to him.

Uncle Harry's death dream

This is the hinge of the whole story, and it is where the host first admits he did not expect to cry so soon.

It is 7:30 in the morning in Berkeley, 1972. Two thousand miles away in Wisconsin, at 9:30 their time, Mishlove's roughly eighty five year old great uncle Harry dies at that same moment. As best Mishlove can piece it together, Harry came to him in a dream and took him partway along for the ride. The content, he says, is ineffable, the classic mystical experience beyond words. What he can describe is that Harry, a highly Orthodox Jew who had had four wives and was president of the local Orthodox congregation in Sheboygan, disagreed with how Mishlove was living, in particular that he treated his girlfriends as equals. In the dream they discussed the yin and yang symbol, which became Mishlove's logo.

He woke up sobbing tears of joy and singing. The song was Avinu Malkeinu, "Our Father, Our King," sung in the Jewish liturgy only during the High Holy Days, a prayer asking God for forgiveness. He did not know why that song, and he did not yet know Harry had died. He wrote home asking how Uncle Harry was. His mother called the moment she got the letter: "How did you know?" Harry had just died.

Mishlove asked for an object of Harry's to remember him by. His parents sent a small book, Harry's favorite, written in Yiddish. Translated, it was the tales of the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth century founder of Hasidic mysticism. Mishlove had had no idea his Orthodox uncle was drawn to mysticism, because in that era Jewish Americans wanted to fit in, not to look like a cult. Years later he told the story to the mystical rabbi Zalman Schachter, who had a perfect reading of it. As a boy Mishlove remembered Harry, who ran a corner grocery, reaching into the freezer to hand out Eskimo Pies to all the kids, a whole freezer full, which to a child looked like wealth. "Your Uncle Harry had one more Eskimo Pie for you," the rabbi said.

Today, Mishlove notes, we would call this a shared death experience, and specifically the remote kind, which he says is the most common: roughly sixty percent of such experiences happen far away from the dying person. It could also be called a visitation, because Harry came to him. The experience made him miserable in the best way. He knew he could no longer study the negative side of human deviance, crime and psychopathology, and had to turn to the positive side, but no graduate program in creativity, intuition or mysticism existed. He agonized for months.

The magazine dream

Then one morning he woke up knowing, beyond doubt, that the answer would arrive in a dream that very night. And it did. In the dream he went to visit friends in married student housing, found no answer at the door, let himself in with a hidden key, and found a magazine on the living room floor. He woke exhilarated, certain he had the answer, even though he had not read what was in it. So he acted the dream out. He ran five miles across town in his tennis shoes to the apartment, found the friends gone exactly as dreamed, found the key exactly where he somehow knew it would be, let himself in, and there in the middle of the floor lay the magazine, sprawled open.

It was Focus, the member magazine of KQED, the Bay Area's listener sponsored public broadcaster. Paging through it, he realized for the first time that he could pursue his interests through the nonprofit media. Without a car, he walked into KPFA, the Pacifica radio station in Berkeley, and offered to volunteer. They sat him at a desk and told him to buzz people in the front door. Within three weeks he had learned to produce a program and made his first one, interviewing local psychics on the theme "you don't have to be from out of town to be psychic." The program director handed him a regular Tuesday and Thursday interview slot called The Mind's Ear, sitting across a table from world class experts. This is the same move the host recognizes: from receptionist to host in three weeks. It became a lifelong pattern.

SRI, Arthur Young and the psychic 1970s

Mishlove calls the 1970s in the Bay Area "the psychic 70s," and he had a pass to all of it. As a graduate student he could reserve Zellerbach Auditorium for two thousand people and bring Uri Geller to campus. Jacques Vallee and Stanton Friedman lectured on UFOs. Robert Monroe came through on the tour for his first book on out of body experiences. Mishlove went through Monroe's Hemi-Sync program himself without leaving his body, but says a significant share of people found it worked, and notes the throughline to the Monroe Institute trainers who later came out of the government remote viewing program, like Skip Atwater.

The central figure here is Arthur Young, inventor of the Bell 47 helicopter, the little glass bubble whirlybird used for evacuations in Korea and made famous by MASH. Mishlove gives the back of the baseball card biography, and it is one of the best passages in the talk. Young studied general relativity at Princeton in the 1920s, when almost no one understood Einstein, and was drawn to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the idea that reality is not about things but about process. Young decided that to be a serious philosopher in a technological age, he first had to prove he could master a technological problem. So in 1926 he went to the patent office looking for an unsolved one, learned that roughly thirty attempts to build a machine that could hover had failed, and set out to solve it. He worked for decades in his father's Pennsylvania barn, building toy models, until in the 1940s he had a two foot model that hovered. He took it to Bell Aircraft, they built the full size version, and the model 47 became the first helicopter licensed for commercial use. Then he walked away from aviation entirely. "Now it's time to get serious about philosophy," Mishlove quotes him. The whole helicopter had only ever been proof that he was worthy to do philosophy.

Young founded the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, funded some of the research at SRI, and invited the young Mishlove and his best friend Saul-Paul Sirag to move into his Berkeley house. Mishlove lived with Young and his wife Ruth Forbes Young of the wealthy Forbes family, who ran an International Peace Academy training diplomats to negotiate for peace rather than only for national advantage. Mishlove admits he was too young and naive to appreciate who these people were. Young, whose invention was used so heavily in Vietnam, hated that use and felt personal pain each time a pilot crashed. The host asks about the mythologized 1952 seance with Andrija Puharich, Alan Dulles and the Council of Nine; Mishlove says Young told him very little about it and he is not sure what to make of the whole affair.

The conversation turns to the SRI remote viewing program and its odd overlap with Scientology and Dianetics. Young and his wife were early Dianetics "clears." So, Mishlove notes, were several of the star psychics: Pat Price, Ingo Swann, Puthoff, and later Edwin May, who took over the program. Russell Targ, right in the middle, was not. Mishlove's read is that the movement was simply open to the paranormal, that most of these people passed through it, got what they could, and moved on, and that there is a dark side to every religion.

Ted Owens, the PK Man

Here the story darkens. Mishlove was around SRI in the scene when Targ and Puthoff handed him a file they could not use and asked what he could do with it. It was the Ted Owens file.

SRI wanted nothing to do with Owens. They were funded by the CIA, had just gone public with the Uri Geller work in Nature in 1974, and were being savaged by skeptics like James Randi, who wrote books calling Geller a fraud and stood up at scientific conferences accusing bystanders of helping him cheat. A military industrial think tank wanted to stay low key. Ted Owens wanted the opposite. He did everything he could to attract publicity.

Owens had a real pedigree. A Navy man in the Second World War, he wrote to J.B. Rhine at Duke about his psychic abilities, and Rhine eventually enrolled him and made him an assistant. Owens claimed psychokinesis, told stories of objects vanishing in his presence and earrings disappearing off women. He set himself up as a hypnotic healer until the AMA shut him down in 1954, and he became bitter. He came to believe he was working first with nature, then with a poltergeist he called Big Lorna, and finally with extraterrestrials he called the space intelligences, two insectoid beings he named Tweeter and Twitter for their high squeaky voices. He believed they had guided him through many careers, bullwhip artist, knife thrower, jazz musician, high speed typist, railroad idea man, so that his mind would be flexible enough to handle their symbolic system, and that they had been searching since the days of Moses for a nervous system strong enough to channel their energy. He thought of himself as the first such person since Moses.

Mishlove, trained by San Quentin to treat every person with respect regardless of reputation, was the right man to work with the feisty, larger than life Owens, whom he compares to Paul Bunyan: a big bearded man with a booming voice and a cigar, pulling a little red wagon piled with documentation onto conference stages, announcing he was the world's greatest psychic.

The weather demonstrations

The pattern of an Owens demonstration was consistent. He would mail scientists a written statement of some unlikely thing he was about to make happen. Right before Mishlove first visited SRI, Owens wrote to Targ and Puthoff during a serious California drought and predicted every kind of weather at once: sleet, hail, snow in the Bay Area where it essentially never snows, power blackouts, UFO sightings, and a newspaper story declaring the drought over. Within days, Mishlove says, all of it happened. That is what convinced SRI he was real, and why they wanted the file gone.

When Mishlove first met Owens in London in the summer of 1976, Owens had, by his own account, just ended a severe drought in England too. Local friends joked that to make the front page of the papers you only had to walk through Piccadilly Circus with an umbrella, the drought was so bad they were trucking water into towns. Owens arrived, it poured, and he claimed he caused it. On the always live question of whether he predicted these events or caused them, Owens was unambiguous in at least one case. After the California event, Targ wrote to congratulate him on a great prediction. Owens wrote back, in effect, "Hell, no, it was no prediction. I caused it." He stayed ambiguous only about whether it was his own mind or the space intelligences doing the work. Edwin May, who does not believe in psychokinesis at all, held that it was only precognition, that Owens saw the future rather than shaping it, one of the internal debates within parapsychology that Mishlove says people forget about when they fixate on the skeptics.

The UFO experiment

What most appealed to Mishlove was Owens's claim that he could produce UFOs on demand, with police officers as witnesses and newspaper coverage. Before Mishlove could design a proper experiment, Owens was already on it, and he called the number: not one sighting, but three, within a hundred miles of the San Francisco Bay Area. Mishlove scrambled to add rigor, setting up San Diego, a West Coast city of similar size, as a control group, and mailing every law enforcement agency within a hundred miles of both cities to report any sightings.

The third sighting never came. When Mishlove reminded him it was only two, Owens slammed down the phone, and Mishlove's throat began to burn.

Figure 2. The one controlled experiment Mishlove ran on Owens. Two dramatic, documented sightings landed near San Francisco and none near the control city, but with two rather than the promised three and no way to rule out coincidence or collusion, it fell short of statistical proof, exactly the gap that dogs large scale psi claims.

The first sighting came near Concord, California, where a sober man out walking at four in the morning reported an abduction, went to the police, and made the papers. The second was extraordinary. At what is now Sonoma State University, the art department sponsored a pilot named Steven Polansky who drew designs in the sky with colored smoke. As he flew at three thousand feet over hundreds of students with cameras, a UFO appeared in his airspace. It was photographed and filmed from the ground and reportedly seen from the air, ran on the front page of the Berkeley Gazette exactly as Owens had said, and aired on the KQED evening news.

The sore throat

Then Mishlove made what he calls a big mistake. Owens called with his I told you so, and Mishlove said, that is only two sightings. Owens slammed the phone down. Within moments Mishlove felt a scratch in his throat, the start of a bad sore throat coming on fast. Forty five minutes later Owens called back and, without referencing what had happened, simply said, "Jeffrey, I will never do that to you again." The sore throat went away. By this point, Mishlove says, he was convinced, and things only got worse.

Before going further the host and Mishlove compare Owens to Chris Bledsoe, whom they both know and both find a lovely man, and who summons orbs he believes are conscious spiritual entities he calls "the Lady," closer to angelic apparitions in the Bible than to Owens's craft. Owens, they agree, was summoning something that looked like machinery. J. Allen Hynek, the famous UFO scientist, told Mishlove he would not touch Owens with a ten foot pole, because the phenomena came from the unconscious and he wanted nothing to do with that. Mishlove now thinks Hynek had a point.

Declaring war on the US government

Owens lived near poverty, spending everything on Xeroxing documentation and mailing it to scientists, desperate for the government to institutionalize him so he could use his powers for the country. They wanted nothing to do with him. He claimed contact with a CIA agent he called George Clark, and at one point suspected Mishlove himself was CIA. When the government kept ignoring him, Owens said he would declare war on it. He announced poltergeist attacks on Navy ships and sent clippings of mysterious fires aboard naval vessels; he announced attacks on nuclear plants and sent clippings of uncanny accidents. Mishlove convened a dozen scientists, and his wife Janelle personally fetched Hynek from his hotel, but Hynek refused. Owens finally promised a massive earthquake to force the issue. It did not happen, thank goodness, Mishlove says, and he moved on with his life.

The Challenger warning

Then, on Christmas Eve 1985, Owens called out of nowhere with his booming voice: "Jeffrey, this is the most important phone call you will ever receive." The message was that Mishlove had to contact the US government and tell them not to send up the next space shuttle, because Owens's UFOs were going to knock it out of the sky. Mishlove had no leverage, no idea whom to call, no reason to think anyone would believe him, and he did nothing. About a month later, on January 28, 1986, the Challenger exploded.

The host says this is his generational memory the way the Kennedy assassination was for others; he remembers the weather, what he wore, watching it on TV home from school. Mishlove says it shook him to his bones and horrified him. He does not believe there was anything he could have done, and though guilt is an easy emotion to feel, what he felt was that he should stop ignoring Owens. He is careful to hold both frames at once: Owens never told him he asked the space intelligences to do it, only that they did it on his behalf, and there is the entirely mundane and well documented explanation of the failed O ring that NASA should have caught, plus other people who also made predictions.

The training program

Mishlove decided he had better learn what Owens actually did, so he arranged a three day training. Friends with money brought Owens to a San Francisco hotel, and for three days he hypnotized Mishlove and two friends. Mishlove recorded all of it and later wrote it up in his 2000 book The PK Man; he says he still has the audio tapes. Owens used a normal hypnotic induction, but insisted it was more than hypnosis, that the space intelligences would work on the trainee's brain, and he warned that the material should not be shared without their permission. When Owens asked what Mishlove wanted to do with the power, Mishlove said he had no interest in weather or UFOs. What he wanted was to become a spokesperson to the mainstream public about the realities of the psychic world.

He took the training in February. By June he had launched the original Thinking Allowed television series on local Marin County public access, and within a year or two it was on satellite to public television stations across North America, running from 1986 to 2002. He does not know how he could have done it himself; it seemed to happen without effort, even as he simultaneously fought a six year libel suit against skeptics trying to strip his Berkeley degree, a suit he won. The host gently points out that Mishlove already knew how to reach an audience, having gone from receptionist to radio host in three weeks. Mishlove concedes the point but keeps the mystery open. He notes the era's caution: when his show reached satellite, one Nashville PBS station asked a local psychologist whether to carry it, and the man said "the people of Tennessee are not ready for this."

Owens died in 1987 in a New York farmhouse, writing to Mishlove that the UFOs had told him to move there and were hovering over the house to come for him. Mishlove had asked him to stop making threats and always felt Owens was his own worst enemy. He asked Chris Bledsoe whether people should learn to do this. Bledsoe said no: "This is a gift and a curse. I wouldn't mess with it."

Contacting Ted after death

Around 2022, thirty five years after Owens died, a deep meditator in Germany who watched Mishlove's channel wrote to say that a presence had appeared in his meditation, resolved into a figure he recognized from photos as Ted Owens, and delivered a message: tell Jeffrey that if he wants to contact me, I am available. By this point Mishlove had won the Bigelow prize and was working on the afterlife, and it was clear to him that there is a relationship between the afterlife and UFOs.

He tried to meditate and got nothing. Then one night in a hypnagogic state in about December 2022, half awake, he felt Owens's presence and they had a conversation. It was early in the Ukraine war, and Russia was bombing Ukraine's power plants to freeze the population through winter. Thinking Owens would be sympathetic, and knowing Owens had produced exactly this kind of winter weather while alive, Mishlove asked whether they could make it warm for the winter in Ukraine so people would not suffer. Owens said that if the space intelligences agreed, they could do it. Mishlove recorded a monologue and put it out on video. A few days later, around January 1, 2023, roughly a thousand temperature records broke across Europe, an event meteorologists who track rare weather were calling insane and unprecedented on their blogs. It was, Mishlove says, totally characteristic of the things Owens had done in life, and that winter Ukraine survived the assault and was even exporting electricity.

He tried to set up an experiment to measure it statistically, and he failed, for an honest reason he states plainly: a thousand records that all correlate with each other are, statistically, effectively one record, and you cannot get good statistics from a single example. In every other regard, he says, it would have been a success, but he could not claim statistical proof. He has not entered that state again, partly from the same trepidation Owens's original victims felt, and partly because a viewer wrote to point out that some people died from that heat wave, raising the unintended consequences. He initiated the contact himself, so Owens did not invade him, and he has come to think his role is still that of educator, not someone who needs to win the war.

The host asks whether Mishlove was ever angry, and is surprised how quickly Mishlove says yes. Not at Owens, but at academia. Berkeley trying to take his degree away after ten years of work made him literally sick and affected his health. Even the Parapsychological Association initially rejected his membership application because of the controversy. It never occurred to him to punish anyone; he was only trying to protect his reputation. And Arthur Young's astrology reading came true almost to the year: six years after the attacks began, he launched Thinking Allowed and the damage was undone.

The Bigelow Prize

In 2020, Robert Bigelow, the aerospace entrepreneur whose company was ruled nonessential during COVID and never recovered, and who had lost his wife and suffered other family tragedy, launched a contest through the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for the best scientific essay arguing that consciousness survives death. Bigelow had earlier run the UFO focused National Institute for Discovery Science and now wanted to shift to the afterlife.

Mishlove assumed university researchers would win and almost did not enter. He reached out to his friend Leslie Kean, the journalist, to suggest she enter, only to learn she was one of the judges, and she pointed him to a Bigelow interview with George Knapp in which Bigelow had already named Mishlove as exactly the kind of person who should enter. His wife Janelle told him he had to. So he did, cutting back his YouTube channel and working nearly full time for six months. His first draft was terrible and he threw it out entirely.

The contest rules fit him perfectly. They wanted an essay built like a case presented to a jury, and he had the criminology background for that. They wanted first hand testimony, and he had a huge video library of it, including an interview with Francis Crick, co discoverer of the DNA double helix. In his book The Astonishing Hypothesis Crick set out to prove consciousness is generated by the brain's neurons, and Mishlove has him on tape admitting it has not yet been proven, that the religious people might be right, that consciousness might exist outside the brain and survive bodily death. Mishlove got permission to embed video clips in his essay and thinks he was the only entrant who did.

The nine lines of evidence

The thesis of Mishlove's ninety five page essay is that many independent lines of evidence all point in the same direction. He lists them: out of body experiences, near death experiences, reincarnation research, mental mediumship, physical mediumship (trumpets flying around the room), and instrumental transcommunication, also called electronic voice phenomena, where people report contact through computers, radios, and spirit boxes. Both Edison and Tesla, he notes, tried to build such a device. He is candid that most of it is bunk, but insists some is legitimate.

William James and the white crow

Mishlove's intellectual hero is William James, and he gives James's famous argument. To disprove the claim that all crows are black, you need only find one white crow. James said the medium Leonora Piper was his white crow, that she really could produce information she could not possibly have known, and he took vicious attacks for it as a Harvard professor. Mishlove also recounts James in the pages of Science, being called a crank over mediumship, responding that the quality of the criticism was so far beneath the dignity of a scientist that his opponents were treating the subject like a vile dog any stick will do to beat. He would not want to debate James on anything.

Finding out he won

The Bigelow Institute told Mishlove that Robert Bigelow would call at 9:30 the next morning. By 10:00 nothing had come, and Mishlove, unable to bear it, called them; Bigelow simply had not come into the office yet. When the call finally came and Bigelow said he had won first prize, Janelle peeked in and asked when, and Mishlove held up one finger. She went to tell his stepson Lewis that Jeff had won first prize, on the evidence of one raised finger, and when Lewis said maybe that did not mean first place, she said, wives know. She was right. All six judges voted for his essay, unanimously. The prize was half a million dollars, though Mishlove says it would have felt just as good without the money. Robert Bigelow awarded twenty nine prizes in all because the judges urged him to recognize so many strong essays, and the critics, Mishlove notes, mostly attacked the competition and other entries rather than his.

Looking back, the prize let him see that his whole life had turned on the Uncle Harry dream, and that the real proof of the afterlife is not in a laboratory but in how deeply these experiences change lives. He cites Bishop James Pike, who resigned as Episcopal Bishop of California after communications with his dead son, and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, transformed by contact with a deceased former patient. Psychic experiences, he says, are not under conscious control and you only need one or two good ones in a life to be set on a path; being psychic is not itself important, knowing it is real is.

Past lives and Seneca

Mishlove's own most striking synchronicity centers on the Roman philosopher Seneca. He was traveling to Cordoba, Spain, Seneca's birthplace, a layered city with a Roman bridge, a fourteenth century mosque with a cathedral built inside it, and a statue of Seneca. Years earlier, in a broadcast taping, the physician and guided imagery pioneer Dr. Martin Rossman had hypnotized him to meet his "inner healing advisor," which Rossman said could take any form. A figure in a toga approached. Hoping to improve his public speaking, Mishlove asked him to be the Greek orator Demosthenes. The figure answered, "I'm not Demosthenes. I'm Seneca." When Mishlove asked what he wanted, the reply was "study my life." It is all captured on video. Mishlove then learned what a figure Seneca was: playwright, philosopher, science writer, and effective ruler of the Roman Empire for five years as Nero's tutor during what is called the silver age of Rome.

Archetypal synchronistic resonance

On his way to Seneca's birthplace, Mishlove got an out of the blue email from a man named Brendan Engen. Engen's girlfriend had bought him a psychic reading with Kevin Ryerson, the trance channeler featured in Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb and an old friend of Mishlove's. The reading told Engen he had been a friend of Seneca in a past life and that Mishlove had been Seneca, so Engen reached out. Mishlove had no reason to believe he was ever Seneca, but he found the timing a striking synchronicity in the loose sense, though he notes some Jungians object that true synchronicity must be simultaneous to the second.

More synchronicities followed with Engen. A book Mishlove had once owned and sold, The Looking Glass God, on Taoism and the yin yang symbol, literally fell off a shelf onto Engen's head in a Walnut Creek bookstore, open to Mishlove's own signature inside. Engen said they needed to write it up, and in about 2007 they published "Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance" in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology: the idea that people who lived in the ancient past can influence us through a series of synchronicities, as an alternative to strict reincarnation. Mishlove notes others who feel this: his mentor Jean Houston felt it for the Neoplatonist Proclus, with the childhood phrase "hocus pocus, I am Proclus" arriving unbidden in her head.

Was he William James?

Kevin Ryerson maintained that Mishlove himself was William James in a past life, and Walter Semkiw, who drew on Ryerson's readings, devoted a chapter of Return of the Revolutionaries to the case. Mishlove let him publish it only on the condition that it state he does not accept it, because he has no concrete memories of being James. He allows the logic, a career running from science to mysticism, an establishment that attacked and lost, and admits he probably could not accept it precisely because James is his hero. He notes uncanny small echoes: under hypnotic regression he began to get stomach pains, and James was a sickly man with chronic stomach trouble who haunted health spas. One unverified detail surfaced that he offers as a test: that as a boy James was called "Billiam" rather than William. If anyone can document that, Mishlove says, he would count it as real evidence.

He extends the idea into a theory of soul energy: that James may be spread across several living people, that we all have access to what James called the cosmic reservoir of consciousness, the Akashic records, all knowledge, and that these bodies may be small expressions of a single field.

Soul groups and F.W.H. Myers

On soul groups, Mishlove turns to F.W.H. Myers, whose 1903 classic Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death gathered twenty years of work by the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882. After Myers died he reportedly dictated entire books from the other side through the automatic writing medium Geraldine Cummins, describing an afterlife where the dead continue their experiments. He is also central to the cross correspondences, in which deceased SPR members allegedly sent fragments of a single poetic message through different mediums in North America, Europe, and India, meaningless alone but interlocking when assembled. Myers described group souls, some with twenty members, some with thousands, that we share across lifetimes.

Semkiw held that the founders of the United States, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson among them, were a soul group who reincarnate and meet again, and that he himself was Adams, even carrying a modern feud with the man he identified as Jefferson. Mishlove notes the poignancy: Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, and Adams's last words were "Jefferson still lives," which is either a bitter mistake, since Adams did not know Jefferson had died hours earlier, or, in the other reading, a glimpse of Jefferson still living in the afterlife. Mishlove thinks souls choose their return, which planet or realm, and that some never come back, moving on to other levels; he half seriously suggests that if he were James, he would have asked to come back healthier and better looking, and that his wife Janelle may have been James's sister Alice James.

What happens when we die

The host asks the direct question: at the moment the lights go out, what is happening inside. Mishlove says consciousness persists, but the experience might resemble the total loss of consciousness in deep sleep, a dark unconscious stretch until you awaken in another body or another plane, or you might stay conscious the whole way through. He cites George Harrison, who deliberately worked to stay conscious through death, and whose wife Olivia said the room filled with such light at the moment he died you could have photographed it, another shared death experience. He points to Raymond Moody's work on the shared death experience, including Moody's own with his siblings when their mother died, all of them seeing their deceased father arrive and the room change shape. Mishlove is not afraid; turning eighty this year, he says he looks forward to death, though he expects trepidation as it nears, and had a taste of that fear in the hospital earlier this year facing a dangerous procedure that in the end was not needed.

Terminal lucidity

The phenomenon that most anchors the whole conversation is terminal lucidity, and it happened in Mishlove's own family. Two weeks before his mother died of Alzheimer's, so far gone that no intelligible conversation was possible, she sat up with Janelle, fully bright and lucid, and talked in detail about the family for an hour or two. People with brains destroyed by late stage Alzheimer's or tumors sit up hours before death, clear and present; someone who never spoke can get up and sing. Mishlove says there is no accepted explanation, and that William James comes as close as anyone.

The filter theory of consciousness

This is the title of the video. Mishlove offers terminal lucidity as evidence for James's theory that the brain does not generate consciousness but filters it, working like a radio or television receiver picking up a signal produced elsewhere. Consciousness, he says, is everywhere, and we are filtered down into individual minds. When the brain breaks down just enough, the larger consciousness can come through, because the brain is no longer keeping it out. If we were in a state of full cosmic consciousness, three hundred sixty degree vision, knowing everything everywhere all the time, we could not survive; as Mishlove puts it, you could not pay the rent or feed the family, so we have to filter it out.

Figure 3. The title thesis. In James's transmission model, the brain is a receiver, not a generator. It is the frame Mishlove uses to read terminal lucidity: a damaged brain filtering less, letting more of the field through in the final hours before death.

Psychedelics, Horus and DMT

Mishlove traces his own opening to his first LSD experience in 1968, which made him wildly curious about other realities, faces shifting as if showing past lives. His best friend at Berkeley theorized that LSD works by imitating the serotonin molecule at the synapse without doing what serotonin does. Mishlove thinks psychedelics can, in a way, let us tap universal consciousness, and believes Terence McKenna, too eloquent for Mishlove to speak for, would agree. On DMT entities, he notes that across cultures people report the same beings, and cites David Jay Brown, whose mantis being appeared under DMT and operated on his brain, the same claim Ted Owens made, and who says not a day passes without him thinking about it. Mishlove has not done DMT, but has taken ayahuasca, in which he found himself in ancient Egypt singing praises to the god Horus as the most beautiful of gods, a deity he calls in many ways a predecessor of Jesus Christ. He has since felt that connection, and owns a small falcon sarcophagus from the time of Moses, bought in an Arab antiquities shop in Israel and later authenticated by archaeologists. He also describes a split second flash, perhaps in an ordinary state, of being present in Nero's palace, real and gone.

Final thoughts

Asked what his soul sent him here to do and whether he has done it, Mishlove says he thinks so: the thing he told Ted Owens he wanted, to be a communicator to the mainstream about the esoteric and mystical world, is exactly what he has done, especially in the ten to twelve years since launching the New Thinking Allowed YouTube channel. His closing message, for viewers who are having experiences or who fear death, is about purpose. He invokes the idea of entelechy, that we are each born with a deep purpose, different for everyone. "If you decide that you want to become the best version of yourself," he says, and get in touch with that purpose and live it, "the universe wants you to do that, and the universe will help. The universe will open doors for you." Just be open to the messages and follow the signs, which is what happened for him, though he adds honestly that some, but not all, will be able to do it.

He ends with an invitation. For anyone who wants to dedicate their life to studying the paranormal, he helped create a new program at the California Institute for Human Science offering, for the first time since the program at John F. Kennedy University closed in the 1980s, a master's or doctoral degree with a concentration in parapsychology, where he is currently teaching a course on the practical applications of psi.

The host closes the episode with the honest ledger himself, which is worth reproducing in spirit. Mishlove's Berkeley PhD is real, earned in 1980, the first and only one; skeptics tried to revoke it and he sued and won, twice. The Bigelow prize is real, six judges unanimous, half a million dollars. The Ukraine weather event and the thousand European temperature records are documented, though whether Ted Owens caused them from the other side is a different question. The Challenger warning is documented in The PK Man, the O ring failure is documented, and the phone call is something only Jeffrey knows. And terminal lucidity is real, and nobody has a good explanation for it.

Key takeaways

Mishlove holds the only accredited American PhD in parapsychology, from UC Berkeley in 1980, and defended it through a six year libel suit that he won.
The founding event of his life was a shared death experience: a 1972 dream of his dying great uncle Harry that turned him from studying crime and pathology to studying human potential.
His career kept following a pattern of doors opening effortlessly, from receptionist to radio host in three weeks, and from Ted Owens's training to a national public television series within months.
Ted Owens, the PK Man, is the dark spine of the story: a former assistant to J.B. Rhine who claimed to control weather and summon UFOs through insectoid space intelligences, warned Mishlove about the next space shuttle on Christmas Eve 1985, and a month later Challenger exploded.
Mishlove is careful to hold both frames: the paranormal claim and the mundane one (the O ring, coincidence, the impossibility of statistical proof from single large scale events) sit side by side without one erasing the other.
His Bigelow essay argues from many independent lines of evidence pointing the same way, in the spirit of William James's white crow: one genuine case is enough to break a universal denial.
The title thesis, from William James, is that the brain filters consciousness rather than creating it, and terminal lucidity, which Mishlove witnessed in his own mother, is his strongest exhibit.
His practical closing is not about being psychic but about purpose: find your entelechy, live it, and the universe opens doors.

Chapters

0:00:00 Intro 0:01:15 Childhood and Early Life 0:06:49 Criminology and San Quentin 0:18:18 Uncle Harry's Death Dream 0:41:11 SRI and Arthur Young 0:53:39 Ted Owens 1:20:41 The Challenger Warning 1:31:37 Contacting Ted After Death 1:41:18 The Bigelow Prize 2:00:16 Past Lives and Seneca 2:17:31 What Happens When We Die 2:43:04 Final Thoughts

Notable quotes

"It was as if the spirit of Blanche DuBois entered into my mother." 0:04:04, Mishlove on how a single stage role possessed his mother.

"It's going to take you six years more to undo all the damage the university has done to you." 0:11:47, Arthur Young reading Mishlove's astrology chart the day he finished his doctorate. It came true.

"I woke up singing and crying, and I didn't know that Uncle Harry had died." 0:27:48, on the dream that changed the direction of his life.

"Hell, no, it was no prediction. I caused it." 1:04:24, Ted Owens correcting Russell Targ, who had congratulated him on a good forecast of the broken California drought.

"Jeffrey, I will never do that to you again." 1:15:50, Owens calling back forty five minutes after Mishlove's throat began to burn, having slammed down the phone.

"You've got to contact the US government and tell them not to send up the next space shuttle. Because if they do, my UFOs are going to knock it out of the sky." 1:22:21, Owens on Christmas Eve 1985, about a month before Challenger.

"If you want to disprove the claim that all crows are black, you only need to find one white crow." 1:52:47, Mishlove giving William James's argument, and James's verdict that the medium Mrs. Piper was his white crow.

"I'm not Demosthenes. I'm Seneca." 2:06:35, the figure in a toga that appeared during a hypnotic session, telling Mishlove to study his life.

"The brain doesn't generate consciousness. The brain functions more like a radio or television receiver. The signal is coming from elsewhere." 2:24:44, the title thesis, offered as the best reading of terminal lucidity.

"The universe wants you to do that, and the universe will help. The universe will open doors for you." 2:45:41, his closing message about living your purpose.

Resources mentioned

Jeffrey Mishlove and New Thinking Allowed and the New Thinking Allowed YouTube channel, his full interview archive.
The PK Man, Mishlove's 2000 book documenting Ted Owens and the Challenger call.
Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, where his prize winning essay and all winning essays are free to read.
Ted Owens, the PK Man, former assistant to J.B. Rhine.
J.B. Rhine and the Rhine Research Center at Duke University.
Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell 47 helicopter, and his Institute for the Study of Consciousness.
SRI International and the Stargate Project, with Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Edwin May.
Uri Geller and the 1974 Nature paper, with critic James Randi.
Robert Monroe, the Monroe Institute, and Hemi-Sync.
Jacques Vallee, Stanton Friedman, and J. Allen Hynek.
Chris Bledsoe, who summons orbs he calls "the Lady."
Francis Crick and The Astonishing Hypothesis.
William James, the white crow, and the Society for Psychical Research.
F.W.H. Myers, medium Geraldine Cummins, and the cross correspondences.
Terminal lucidity and Raymond Moody's shared death experience.
Seneca the Younger, Cordoba, and Nero.
Kevin Ryerson, Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb, and Dr. Martin Rossman.
Walter Semkiw and Return of the Revolutionaries, on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
The Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance paper in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, with Carl Jung's synchronicity, and Jean Houston on Proclus.
Terence McKenna, DMT, David Jay Brown, ayahuasca, and the god Horus.
California Institute for Human Science, its new parapsychology degree, and the closed program at John F. Kennedy University.
KPFA and Pacifica Radio, KQED, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Where it stands

Mishlove is a careful witness who repeatedly separates what is documented from what is inferred, so this section does the same rather than pre judging the material. The video's power comes from a real archivist describing events he witnessed; its claims sit at very different levels of scientific acceptance, from settled fact to firmly contested.

Claim in the video	What is documented	Where mainstream science stands
Mishlove's Berkeley PhD in parapsychology	established Awarded 1980, the only accredited American doctorate in the field; upheld through litigation.	Not disputed as a historical fact. The discipline itself remains outside mainstream science.
The Bigelow half a million dollar prize	established Real competition, unanimous judges, essay publicly available.	The prize is real; its conclusion that consciousness survives death is not a scientific consensus.
SRI remote viewing program	established A real, CIA and DIA funded program (Stargate) that ran for years.	The program existed; a 1995 review found the results not useful for intelligence, and effects remain contested.
Ted Owens weather and UFO demonstrations	Owens really mailed advance statements; some predicted events really occurred and made the papers.	contested No controlled proof of causation; coincidence, selective reporting, and forecasting cannot be excluded, as Mishlove concedes.
The Christmas Eve Challenger warning	Documented in The PK Man; the O ring failure that destroyed Challenger is thoroughly documented.	unverifiable The private phone call rests on Mishlove's testimony alone; the disaster has a full engineering explanation.
Terminal lucidity	established A documented, published phenomenon; Mishlove witnessed it in his mother.	Increasingly studied and accepted as real; there is no agreed mechanism.
Filter theory of consciousness	A serious philosophical position argued by William James in 1898.	minority view The dominant scientific position is that the brain produces consciousness, though the hard problem is unsolved.
Past lives, mediumship, contacting the dead	Long research traditions and detailed case reports exist.	fringe Not accepted by mainstream science; evidence is anecdotal or statistically inconclusive.

Figure 4. An honest ledger of the conversation's claims. Some are plain historical fact, some are documented anomalies without an agreed explanation, and some remain firmly outside science. Mishlove himself draws these lines, which is a large part of why he is treated as a credible archivist even by people who reject the survival thesis.

The through line Mishlove keeps returning to is one the host names at the end: whatever you make of the boldest claims, Mishlove knew the players and kept the files, which makes him a primary source for a corner of twentieth century science that the mainstream would rather ignore. His own posture is not to demand belief but to insist the phenomena are real enough to study, and to keep the honest gap open where the proof runs out.

Full transcript

Today we're sitting down with Jeffrey Mishlove. On Christmas Eve 1985, Jeffrey got a phone call from a man named Ted Owens. Owens was a former assistant to J.B. Rhine at Duke University. He claimed to control the weather and summon UFOs on command. >> He summoned UFOs on command, huh? Must be nice. I'm still waiting for an Uber eats I ordered last Tuesday. >> He told Jeffrey to call the US government and warn them not to send up the next space shuttle. His UFOs were going to bring it down. >> [music] >> And a month later, Challenger exploded. Now that's the kind of story you're going to hear today. And Jeffrey spent 50 years as the most important interviewer in parapsychology. UC Berkeley gave him the only PhD in parapsychology ever awarded by an accredited American university. In 2021, he won first prize and $500,000 from the Bigelow Institute for the [music] best scientific case that consciousness survives death. >> Yeah, Camilla. He's going to find out the IRS also survives death. TAXES ARE A DEATH. >> This one got emotional. Let's go down to the basement. >> Jeffrey, welcome to the basement. >> Thank you. >> I'm excited to have you here. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> It's weird for me because there's so much research goes into my episodes on my stupid show. And you constantly come up as as a primary source. So, thank you for your contributions. Um, this this is it's like sitting in front of a cycle the encyclopedia. I don't even know where to start. Um, >> Well, let me just say it's very gratifying to me to know that I'm having that kind of an impact. >> Did you not realize that? >> No. >> Oh my goodness. >> I did not. >> When I told my audience you were coming in, they're blown away by it. No, you're It's weird to be a living legend and not know it, I guess. >> Well, I know that there's a reputation, but I I think you've built up a fabulous business here with a huge audience, and I had no idea that you even knew I existed. >> Oh, of course I did. Um My show is I don't want to say silly and dismiss it because the topics are important. >> [clears throat] >> But your work is actually important. You know, I'm trying to entertain people. >> Yeah. >> Your Your work is really important in educating people. >> But I I want to get to the bottom of some of that stuff. So, before we get too deep, I want to know your favorite, not the most famous, not the most well-reviewed, your favorite character that your mother ever played on stage. >> Blanche DuBois. >> Streetcar? >> Yeah. But it changed her life completely. She My mother was an actress in local community theater, and and good. I imagine she could have had a career on Broadway if she hadn't married my father and moved from the East Coast to Wisconsin. So, she was very active in local community theater, and Blanche DuBois, the female character in Streetcar Named Desire, possessed her. It was as if she was a different person after that. She became Blanche DuBois. I have always depended on the kindness [laughter] of strangers. >> That's right. Was she like that with all of her roles? Would she just inhabit that character? Or >> That particular character It's as if the spirit of Blanche DuBois entered into my mother. >> What do you think that is? Cuz that's There's kind of a a darkness to that to that story a little bit. >> Well, you could say that, but it probably reveals a lot about the the human psyche in There we're so much larger than we think we are and we're so much more interconnected than than we think we are and I think our consciousness just bubbles up with possibilities and Blanche DuBois was in my mother all along. It just sort of bubbled up. >> Right. I hadn't considered that, that we're all connected, that that's that could be a way that that actors, good actors are channeling characters is our connection. >> I I think there is an element of channeling that goes into theater, yeah. >> So, Dad was in the army, Mom was an actress. What was life like for little Jeffrey? Did you travel around? >> Well, no. My father was out of the army by the time I was born in 1946. The war was over. My dad had come home. I was part of the baby boom generation right after the war and I grew up in the 1950s and it was sort of like Norman Rockwell's America. Everything seemed good and healthy and normal and for example, in that era you didn't ever see a man wearing a beard. All the men were clean-shaven everywhere. If someone had a beard, you'd say, "Oh, that's from the last century." And and all the boys, young boys had crew cuts. So, uh >> No weird hats? >> No, none of none of that. No no drugs. I never heard of marijuana or cannabis until I was in college. It was it was a a time of absolute innocence and I grew up in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, which later became designated as the safest city in America. >> Really? >> What I People who grew up during that time, like my parents, all say the same thing, Norman Rockwell. Do you think it was really like that everywhere? >> So, what what cuz there I feel like there was an undercurrent during the '50s that that wasn't quite so public? >> Well, if for example, in Fond du Lac, where I grew up, a town of 30,000 people, I think um there were no black families at all. It was all white, 100%. And uh maybe occasionally there after I left, there might be one or two black families coming into town. Um So, I I didn't even know black people existed >> Right. >> until I went to see watch the Milwaukee Braves play in >> [laughter] >> Well, I'm glad you said that because it really wasn't Norman Rockwell for everybody. >> But, that's but that's the history that I think we like to remember. >> It It what Fond du Lac was completely a Norman Rockwell kind of town. >> So, going into sociology Everyone knows you as the parapsychology guy, but >> So, sociology and then criminology. >> That's right. >> What attracted you to criminology? >> Well, the truth is I wanted to get admitted to Berkeley. I >> Just Berkeley? Didn't matter why? >> I Soon as I graduated from college in Madison, Wisconsin with a BA in psychology, I got a job in Rockford, Illinois at a mental health program, the Singer Mental Health Zone Center, which prided itself on being 10 years ahead of the times, which for me wasn't enough. I quit after 6 weeks and got in my car and made a beeline to San Francisco. >> Why did you What was going on at the mental health facility that made you quit so quickly? >> Behaviorism. >> Behaviorism from from the from the doctors. >> That was that was the philosophy of the time. The behaviorist model of human behavior and and psychology was dominated by B.F. Skinner and behaviorism and they had for example a a big computer in the basement of this facility and every time I interacted with a patient, I had to fill out a computer form and they were going to keep track of it and I thought to myself they're they're missing everything here. Um for example, when I was with some of the patients, I did some simple experiments I'd read about the Esalen Institute and a guy named Bernie Gunther who talked about awakening the senses and I had people like I just say, "Tap your head, you know, use your fingers, experience the feeling of of what it's like to have and there was a woman who hadn't spoken in 20 years and started talking after that and I realized that uh the facility where I was had no concept of human depth. >> Did the other professionals there think you were strange cuz you mentioned tapping, that's a real thing now. >> Did they think, "Like why is this guy making them hit themselves on the head? What is he do Were they >> I I don't think I fit in there very well. I for whatever reason I I was destined to do something different with my life. >> I think we're going to see that as a thread is when you land into an institution, it doesn't work for you. I think we're going to see that. >> it it's really true. In fact, every time I was at a university, University of Wisconsin or even Berkeley which was much more attuned with my way of thinking, my favorite professors would get fired or would leave. >> Just cuz they were just too outside the mainstream? >> And and I give you another example. >> Okay. >> I after years of struggle, as you mentioned, I achieved a a doctoral degree, a unique individual interdisciplinary doctoral degree in parapsychology, the only one ever awarded to this day, 40 years later. >> And what's the quick definition of parapsychology? >> Para- parapsychology is the scientific study of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis and the possibility of human survival after death. >> Mainstream doesn't like this. And but the point is that I want to make just in the context of this conversation, I got the degree and I went to see my mentor at the time. I was so proud. Uh I my committee had just finalized everything. So, I went to visit Arthur Young. Uh who who was a 70-year-old man at the time or in his 70s. >> The Arthur Bell helicopter Arthur? >> Yes. >> Was your mentor? >> Okay. This This is going to get interesting. >> Arthur was an amazing guy and and he I have a talk about him up forever. He pulled out an astrology ephemeris and started looking at my chart and he said to me, uh "How long did you work on this degree?" And I said, "It's been about 6 years, little over 6 years since I entered the doctoral program that I created for myself in parapsychology." And he looked at me and he said, "Well, it's going to take you 6 years more to undo all the damage the university has done to you." >> Wow. So, he saw that in you. >> Not just me. It's >> Well, how do you create a PhD? >> Because it's a it's accredited and you had to fight for that, didn't you? >> Well, there was a program at Berkeley whereby if you're already a graduate student in good standing, you want to do a dissertation on a topic where uh you're you can't find three professors in your department who will sponsor you, but you can find three professors in a variety of different departments who will sponsor you, you can create your own program and I took advantage of that very obscure rule. After I graduated from Berkeley, they canceled the whole thing. >> The Oh, you can't do that anymore? >> Uh they just reinstated it a few years ago. >> Finally. >> What was your dissertation about? >> Training uh ESP abilities. >> Wow, and so you got sponsors for that. >> Faculty >> Faculty sponsored you? >> That's amazing. And I think it's interesting that there was there was Didn't they try to take that away from you and you fought? >> Well, there were organized skeptics, there still are. >> Oh, yes. >> Organized skeptics who were offended by the the very idea that a major school, Berkeley's one of the best in the world, would uh grant a degree in parapsychology. This horrified them because they see it as the rising tide of superstition and and um so they put pressure on the university to cancel the degree after it had already been awarded and and the pressure was quite significant. They yeah, university tried to do that. I had to um [snorts] I had to pull some strings. Uh fortunately, I had, you know, some support from people who believed in what I was doing and those people failed in in their effort to get the university to undo my degree, but it put me through hell at the time. >> and your doctorate stands. >> So, um criminology >> Take us back to What attracts you to criminals? You go from mental health >> now criminals. I mean, are we talking serious >> I say, I moved to Berk- California to the Bay Area and I wanted to enroll at Berkeley and I had studied when I was at Wisconsin with Seymour Halleck, who was a psychiatrist and is who specialized in criminology. So, and I knew, frankly, that um I could get in to criminology. Um there were openings in the School of Criminology at Berkeley. Psychology, they accepted, I think, 20 students every year and they had like thousands of applicants and uh even though I had a good grade point and so on, it was I didn't know that I would get admitted, but I knew I could be admitted in criminology. So, I went for that because they had a psychology track. I was interested in clinical work and I could do that in the School of Criminology and so if you had known me in 1972, for example, you would have seen me doing volunteer work at San Quentin Prison in the psychiatric unit conducting group therapy sessions with murderers and rapists. >> What were they like as people? >> You know, that's the interesting thing. I thought they were pretty much just like you and me. >> That's very interesting. >> That That makes me think that everyone maybe has a certain trigger or there's something in everybody. >> We We all have a little larceny in our hearts. >> Yes, we do. >> You You might say it's part I cuz I'm pretty convinced, you know, that the whole human population shares a a collective consciousness. >> I agree. I agree. >> There's There's nothing that any criminal has ever done that hasn't affected me and isn't in some way part of me. >> Sure. >> But I can tell you that the staff in the prison didn't see it that way. >> I bet not. Did you also have a a unique approach to therapy with when you were speaking with the >> Well, I was a young kid at the time. I I can't say I was experienced, although I will tell you that young inexperienced college students are very good therapists. >> I bet they are because you're not you're not so hardwired yet. You're still kind of exploring new things. >> You're willing to listen. >> Did Did you make a difference in any of those people's lives? Those criminals? >> I can't say for sure. I I None of them I didn't do any follow-up with them and so I don't know. >> Did you feel like >> I think they made a difference in my life. >> That's interesting. What did they contribute to that? >> They contributed a a sense of humanity, of understanding what it meant to be human, what something about myself ultimately. >> Did that surprise you? >> It felt natural. It did I can't say it surprised me. >> Cuz a lot of people would be frightened to be in that situation with those people. >> Mhm. >> But you feel like that experience enriched your life in a way. >> I Yeah, I I would say the guards were more frightening than the inmates. >> Okay, fair enough. They probably weren't as empathetic as you were. >> And and you would you know, they were always hovering around to make sure I was safe. >> But but they they kept a sort of a menacing demeanor um on their if you look at them, they would be they'd be scowling. And uh I don't perhaps things have changed since then, but the general attitude was that these inmates aren't quite human. >> So, those guards didn't feel like we shared a consciousness at all or anything with these people. >> Not only the guards, but you know, my supervisors in the psychiatric unit were they would you'd hear expressions like they're a different kind of cat. They're just not like us. >> That's um that's a casual way of dehumanizing somebody. >> That really is. >> Is that what made you leave criminology? No, [clears throat] I would have stuck it out, but for the fact that I had the most powerful uh mystical psychic paranormal event of my life at at that time. >> Did you Were you a believer in >> You are. >> Uh from from as an undergraduate even, I I was I did a senior honors thesis the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate on the psychology of religious mysticism, and I went into it, to be honest, as a skeptic. I thought these people who claim to be religious mystics, whatever that is, it's undoubtedly a form of psychopathology, and I'm going to that's what I'll write about. That'll I'll talk about the psychopathologies that make people believe they're having psychic and mystical experiences. And I started digging into the literature, and the more I dug into the literature, the more I became convinced that uh it was just the opposite, that these people were some of the most creative, successful uh people on the planet. And uh at that point I I would and I became aware of the research of J.B. Rhine and parapsychology and the uh studies of life after death going back to the 1880s. And so and at the same time in my senior year as an undergraduate, I was exposed to LSD and uh the whole psychedelic scene that was uh burgeoning at at that time on college campuses. And it all fit together for me very naturally that um LSD was a tool for uh exploring your own mind and and that this these mystical experiences were quite real. Um and you could have a taste of it, you know, from from drugs. But but then in 1972, I had a full-blown experience. >> Before we get to that >> academia seems very comfortable with religious studies but uncomfortable with parapsychology, but there seems to be a lot of overlap in those fields. >> There There is an enormous overlap uh with with it also with what is now called transpersonal psychology, which pretty much didn't exist back when I was uh studying as an undergraduate, but most scholars in the field of religious studies, I'm told, are are really atheists and skeptics. >> Yeah. There There are a handful who who take it seriously and I got to know Huston Smith very well, the author of The World's Religions, who was deeply involved in the mystical core of all religions, but for the most part the scholars of of religion were and I think even today were under the influence of what was in those days called, you know, Marxist materialism. Later on became known as deconstructionism and postmodernism. But but they were they saw religions basically as power trips, as a way to manipulate people and to control society. >> That is an interesting take that I hadn't considered. religion is a tool to do that. >> Yes, it is. >> It is. I would never to dismiss any religious people, but it certainly has that >> There's that side of it. >> There certainly is. >> So, your experience your your was your first paranormal experience was life-changing. >> I don't know if it was my first paranormal experience, but it was life-changing. There's no question. >> So, this is the dream. >> It's a dream. >> Did you but you had a an experience before the dream possibly? >> Well, I was doing ESP experiments and things like that. >> Where? >> It is an undergraduate at in Wisconsin in my in my experimental psychology class. >> As a matter of fact. >> On what? On on other on like undergrads coming >> Well, it was informal. It you know, I'd take a deck of playing cards and hold it up and I'd have my girlfriend try to guess what the cards were and Uh, you know, the results were interesting, but >> You Did they base Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters on you? >> When you saw that, you must have been like Right. >> Well, when I first saw Ghostbusters, [laughter] I did think, "My goodness, they made the movie about me." >> Right. That's what it seems like with the cards. They all have They were all >> Yeah, that was a funny movie when it first came out. It was hilarious. >> So, the dream. Tell me about the day leading up to the dream. What was going on in your life that because when people have these experiences, often they're primed for it and maybe don't realize until after the fact. >> well, yes, I was primed for it. I In fact, as an undergraduate, I in what they called the free university at Wisconsin, I offered a course on religious mysticism. I was teaching it as an undergraduate, but by the time I was a graduate student in criminology, I was kind of put all that behind me. And and I can't say that I was primed at all. At that moment, I didn't know. Um, 2,000 mi away, I'm in Berkeley, California, waking up uh, from the most powerful dream of my life. It's 7:30 in the morning. In Wisconsin, at 9:30 in the morning, my great uncle Harry, who was about 85 years old, had died at that moment. And as best I can piece it together, he came to me. He visited me and took me along partway for the ride. >> What was the dream about? Take us through that. >> well, >> cuz this is not an unique story. >> I cannot put it into words very well. It's beyond description. It's what they say it's ineffable. The classic mystical experiences. What I can tell you is that Uncle Harry came to me in the dream and we had a deep conversation. he disagreed with some of the ways I was living my life. >> What was some of the dialogue in that dream with Harry? >> Dialogue, well, the dialogue in retrospect is trivial. Uh the dialogue was he's telling me that uh you you treat your girlfriends like they're your equal. >> What was Harry like that in real life? >> Well, I all I can say is he had four wives. >> Okay. [laughter] >> And not at the same time. Uh he wasn't a Mormon. Uh he he he um and I don't think he treated women as an equal. He was a very religious man, highly Orthodox Jew, the president of the local Orthodox Jewish congregation in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And so that was part of it. And I'm saying no, women are equal and I we discussed the yin-yang symbol, which has become my logo, and >> Comes out of that dream. >> Yes, in part. >> And and but the thing is when I awoke from that dream, I was sobbing tears of joy. >> Of joy? >> Of joy. >> Did you know he had died? I had no idea he had died. >> What was so joyous about that message? >> Not only was I it I can't put it into words. It's as if he took me into heaven. >> That's what it was. also I was singing. >> You woke up singing? >> I woke up singing and crying and the song I was singing for any of your viewers who were Jewish uh Avinu Malkeinu, which is a song that is only sung in the Jewish liturgy in the what we call the high holy holidays and at some of the most poignant spiritual moments of the religious service. they sing Avinu Malkeinu. Our father, our king. It's a prayer to God to forgive us. >> I was going to ask you about that, what that song is about and when it's sung. >> It's about forgiveness? >> It's about forgiveness. It's about asking God to forgive us for our sins. >> Why that song do you think? >> I don't know. >> When you woke up, you don't know why you were singing that song? >> No. I don't. But it was like coming out of my heart. And I'd been so deeply touched. I didn't know that Uncle Harry had died. I didn't know where I had been. I didn't know why I woke up from a dream singing and crying like that. But I can never forget the experience. And even though I can't put it into words and make it intelligible, it was at that moment that I realized or shortly thereafter as I'm digesting all of this that I can no longer pursue a career studying the negative side of human deviance. That I had to move away from psychopathology and crime and and start focusing on the positive side of human deviance. >> It's interesting that you were working with criminals and woke up singing about forgiveness. >> That's that's very interesting to me. Who was your first phone call? >> Well, I wrote home immediately to my parents and and said, "How's Uncle Harry? I had a dream about him." And my mother called as soon as she got the letter and said, "How did you know?" And Uncle Harry had just died. And so I I said, "Well, I didn't know." And could they arrange for me to have an object that Uncle Harry owned, so I can keep it. And to remember him by, they sent me a book. A little book. And they told me, "This is Uncle Harry's favorite book." >> What was it? >> It was It took me a while to figure it out because it was he written in Hebrew. >> Uh and I later learned actually it was in Yiddish, which is a German Jewish slang language. >> I'm from New York City. I know you. I I know what it is. >> So Yiddish I had to get it translated and and it's the Tales of the Baal Shem Tov, who was a mystical teacher of the Jewish Hasidic sect going back to the 18th century. >> Did your mother know you were into mysticism? That she chose that book? >> Um >> This is a lot of synchronicities. >> I had no idea that my Uncle Harry was into mysticism or that anybody in that I knew, any Jewish person, had anything to do with mysticism because in that era Jewish people wanted to fit in. They wanted to be like considered normal Americans, not some kind of weird cult-like people. Now they don't mind so much, [laughter] but >> Again, that's very strange to hear because I'm from New York. So Jewish is very much part of our local culture and and my family. So it's very part of our culture. It's always strange to hear like friends talk about I never met a Jewish person until I was 30 years old. It's a strange to me. >> It's a very different country. >> So, you decided after the dream you had to make a change or after the book? >> After the dream. Well, it around that time it all happened, you know, within a few weeks and it took me months to figure out how to make this shift because I assumed, well, I could shift into a graduate program on creativity or intuition or mysticism, but they didn't exist. So, I I agonized about it for many, many months. >> Still working at in criminology? >> You had to be completely distracted by then, no? >> I suppose. I suppose I was, but I was, you know, still showing up at the psychiatric unit [laughter] in San Quentin prison and and taking my courses and and doing well. I got a master's degree in criminology and uh eventually what happened was kind of interesting. I agony and agony and agony. I was a stressed out unhappy person after that beautiful mystical experience because I knew I had to change my life and I think that happens a lot for people who have near-death experiences and what I had today we we would call a a shared death experience. >> Yes, we would. I just did a an episode on that. It's a very real phenomenon. >> Yeah, and you had a remote shared death experience, which >> I believe is the most common kind. 60% of people have those experiences are are far, far away from that person. >> Because it was you could also call it a visitation. Uncle Harry came to me. I didn't go to him. I didn't know he was dying. >> No, but he knew that you needed him. Did he visit anyone else? I'm touched by this story. Did he Did he visit anyone else? >> Uh you know, I think so. I I'm pretty sure there were there were some cousins who had some experiences along those lines. >> I wonder if he was telling everyone to make some changes. Is that how Harry Harry was a opinionated? >> No, I don't remember him that way. I Here's what I remember about Uncle Harry is he He ran a corner grocery store in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And what I'd be a young kid, 8 9 10 years old, and my father was very fond of him, and we'd often visit. when we came to visit him, he'd He lived in an apartment behind uh the grocery store. He'd go into the freezer at where they had Eskimo Pies, >> and he'd pull out Eskimo Pies and hand them to all the kids. And I thought to myself, "Look, he's got a whole freezer full of >> Eskimo Pies." To to a young child, that's wealth. >> And so I told this story once to a rabbi I was friendly with, Zalman Schachter, a mystical rabbi. And he said to me, "Well, your Uncle Harry had one more Eskimo Pie for you." >> Oh, that's lovely. >> He did. That sounds like it would must have been very difficult those months. >> They were. They they were very difficult, but one morning I woke up, and I knew, beyond a doubt, that I was going to have a dream that evening, and the answer to this whole search of how to reorient my life was going to come in a dream. >> So, everything is chaotic then, and then >> And you felt like tonight is the night I >> Tonight is the night, the dream is going to come and the answer will be there. >> It was just a knowing. >> And it happened. >> What was that dream about? >> In that dream I was visiting >> I didn't expect to cry this soon, Jeffrey, but that's it's a good story. >> I had good friends in Berkeley who I used to live with, who were in married student housing at the time. And in the dream, I was visiting Peter and Marcy Hartman uh in married student housing. I knocked on the door of their apartment and there was no answer. And in the dream, I found a key, let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room, and found in the middle of the living room floor a magazine called I, E Y E. I picked up the magazine and paging through it and then I woke up with this feeling of exhilaration, like I have the answer. >> What was in the magazine? >> Well, I didn't know. >> You didn't know? >> So I acted out the dream. I figured I've got to find that magazine. >> So I put on my tennis shoes ran across town 5 miles from where I live to as married student housing in Albany, California and knocked on the door of the apartment. >> What are you thinking during that run? Is it elation? Is it relief? Or are you still >> elation. >> It it was. You You knew. >> I just knew I'm going to find the answer. I have to go to this apartment. they weren't home as I had dreamt. It turned out I did know exactly where they hid a key. They were good friends. So I took it and I let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room, and smack-dab in the middle of the living room floor, exactly as I had dreamt, there was this magazine sitting, sprawled, you know, pages open. >> I magazine. >> It was called Focus. >> Oh. >> And Focus was the magazine of KQED, which was listener-sponsored radio and television in the San Francisco Bay Area. And as I'm paging through this magazine, it dawned on me for the first time in my life, I could pursue my interests by getting involved in the nonprofit segment of the media. >> When you got into that apartment, did you know that magazine was going to be there? Were >> You weren't confident? You You weren't Cuz everything was lining up. You >> Well, everything was lining up, but I hadn't I had no way of knowing. >> Well, then when you saw it, you had to go, "Oh my goodness." >> So, you have to follow where this leads. >> Okay, so the magazine Focus is there. >> It brought Focus into my life. >> all very clear. >> But because I lived in Berkeley, I didn't have a car in those days, I don't think. Uh No, I did not have a car. I went to KPFA, which is a Pacifica radio station in Berkeley. Actually, a very well-known nonprofit radio. And at the time, I had my master's degree, and I said to them, "I'd like to volunteer." And they said, "Sure. Sit at this desk, and when you hear the doorbell ring, push this button and let people in the front door." That's how it all That's how it [laughter] started. And I was glad to do it. >> Yes, because I mean, you're if this is a mission now. You're on a mission. within two, three weeks I had learned how to produce a radio program and I produced my first program, which was um interviewing local friends of mine in Berkeley who who were psychic. And I And the theme was you don't have to be from out of town to be psychic. >> How did they Did they let you create your own show? They They let me. They showed me how and they broadcast it and after it was released, the program director came to me and said um I was only at the station for three weeks and he said, "You We have an opening every Tuesday and Thursday at noon uh for a program, a regular program. We call it the Minds Ear and it's an interview program and you'll sit just as you and I are now across the table from each other with world-class experts in all the topics that interested me the most." >> How long from that dream of the magazine to that show? How much time passes? >> Maybe six weeks at the most. >> Six weeks? Well, let me think. The dream of the No, well, maybe even three weeks. Uh somewhere just a few weeks. >> You must be just coasting now on this feeling of I This is meant to be. Because you're just I come from radio. >> I didn't get my own show in three weeks. >> It took a little longer than that. >> Well, of course, KPFA was staffed by all volunteers. So, there I was a volunteer who seemed to know something about psychology. I was a kid. I was 25 years old at the time and that gave me the confidence to go back to the university where they offered no courses or programs in the topics that I was interested in, but I did come to meet some professors who were supportive. And I said I wanted you know, create this interdisciplinary program, would you sponsor it and and be on my academic committee and I already had access to people like Robert Monroe and who was writing his first book on out-of-body experiences and you know, everyone on a book tour coming through the San Francisco Bay Area would want to stop at KPFA. >> What year is that? >> 1972. >> So Robert Mon- I mean, there's a lot of great characters coming through San Francisco Bay Area during that time. >> The 1970s in San Francisco Bay Area, I think of it as the psychic 70s. It was an amazing time. >> So Robert Monroe, I've covered him quite a bit. Hemi-Sync and what Was he able to achieve achieve out-of-body on command using Hemi-Sync? I can't say that for sure. Um I did go through the program. I didn't have an out-of-body experience myself. I didn't either. What about the um the Gateway Project at Monroe Institute? Did That was I think one of his last projects. >> Yes. Well, I I certainly know Monroe trainers and and people who have been through the program and I I think it's fair to say that a significant percentage of people found it worked very well for them. >> So Monroe trainers is an interesting segue because quite a few of those Monroe trainers come from SRI and Project Stargate. Was happening about the same time. Yes, it's as >> Yeah, the after Stargate closed down >> Right, I'm talking like Skip Atwater went over to Monroe. Um, but SRI and 72 weren't Targ and Puthoff? >> Jacques Vallee was there? >> Did you spend any time with them? Oh, sure. >> We Well, what what [laughter] what No one's been on the inside except we hear from No, we hear from Targ and Puthoff all the time, but I haven't heard you talk much about what was going on at SRI. What was going on behind the let me let me step back a a little bit. Um, when even as a criminology student, there were graduate students that I knew, friends of mine, who were all interested in consciousness, and we would meet. And at the same time, people like Jacques Vallee and Stanton Friedman were occasionally coming on campus and lecturing on UFOs. And once I got started at KPFA, I was sponsoring big symposiums of on these topics as well, taking advantage of uh, the access that was available to me as a graduate student. I could, for example, reserve Zellerbach Auditorium that held 2,000 people, and we brought Uri Geller onto campus and and the like. And one of the visiting speakers was Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell helicopter. >> Is that how you met him through there? >> Yeah, we'd have a small seminar, and you know, there would be 30 graduate students, and Arthur Young would come and talk about his cosmologies and his theories, and he was actually funding some of the research at SRI at at the time, and he decided to set up a branch of his Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley. He bought a house, 2924 Benvenue Avenue in Berkeley, and he had an apartment in the back of this large house and he invited me to move in. >> Could you give everyone just a back of the baseball card biography of Arthur Young because it's very interesting. >> He invented the Bell helicopter which was the first commercially licensed helicopter in the United States. We think of it as the Whirlybird, the little helicopter with the glass bubble dome and the skids. And it was used for example in Korea. What was that movie? MASH? >> To do all the evacuations. It was I remember as a young child 4 years old seeing a helicopter and people would point, "Look at that." No nobody had ever seen such a thing before. It was in 1947 it was invented. >> That's right. And I do you have to correct me but he did he wasn't like an aviation nut, right? He just saw a problem to solve. >> It was Here here's the story. He went to Princeton. He studied general relativity in the 1920s at Princeton University as an undergraduate. >> That's an interesting time to be there. >> Yeah. And and he >> So Einstein's around at that time, right? At the Institute >> for Advanced Studies, yeah. He he became familiar with Einstein's work as an undergraduate in the the 1920s at at a time when very few people understood Einstein at all. >> And he decided he was influenced I think by Alfred North Whitehead amongst others who had what he called process philosophy. He believed he saw that what was going on wasn't about things, it was about process. And he wanted to develop his own process philosophy. But he said to himself, "Look what's going on in the world. It's all about technology, and philosophers seem to have missed the boat. They don't understand technology. They don't talk about technology." He said to himself, "In order to be worthy of doing real philosophy, of being a real process philosopher, I have to prove to myself that I can master a technological problem." So, he went to the patent office in Washington, D.C. in 1926 to find an unsolved technical problem that he could solve. [laughter] >> What do you got? Just What do you got? >> And and he learned that there had been, I don't know, something like 30 attempts, unsuccessful, to develop a vehicle that could hover in midair. >> They were trying to do it since Da Vinci made that sketch, and they couldn't figure it out. >> Right. And and so, he set himself to solve that problem. In 1926, he his father was a landscape painter, pretty well-known, and he owned a farm in Pennsylvania with a big barn, and he used the barn as his laboratory, and he began building toy models, and it took him decades. He worked for years and years on problems on solutions that didn't work, like propellers at the ends of the rotor blades and things like that. But, the 1940s, he had he had a toy model, something you could maybe 2 ft wide, and and it would hover in midair. He he had solved the problem, and he took it to the Bell Aircraft Company, and he said, "Look what I got. >> We can make big ones." >> We can make big ones. >> And and they said, "Okay. >> Let's let's do it." And and the 19 model 47 was the very first helicopter that the government licensed for commercial purposes. >> That's right. I think Operation Highjump down in Antarctica was the first time they were deployed on that famous mission in '40s. Um so, he made a bag of money. >> And then no more in that industry, right? >> he said, "Now it's time to get serious about philosophy." >> The whole point of the helicopter was just to show that I was worthy to do philosophy. >> What an amazing man. Um he's someone everyone should know his name. He was so incredible. >> He he was a gift. A gift to me. >> You've had many gifts, Jeffrey. I mean, I'm really you really have. Talk about him. >> W- Well, >> What we I mean, what was he really like? >> He was the sweetest person. he loved young people. He This was of course during the Vietnam War era and he would tell all of his older friends, "Uh listen to the young people." And of course the young people such as myself at the time were you know, into anti-war and into things like mysticism and and also drugs. >> How did he feel about his invention being used so heavily in that war? >> It made him unhappy. He He He didn't like it and he also felt personal pain every time a pilot crashed. Uh cuz sometimes the I think at least on one occasion they lost a test pilot. uh it it affected him deeply. His wife, uh Ruth Forbes Young, who came from a famous Forbes family, very wealthy New England family, uh created what was called the um International Peace Academy. And they were training diplomats. They offered seminars to young diplomats from all countries how to negotiate for peace instead of for personal or advantage only for your country. >> Have we learned nothing? Um did did Arthur ever talk to you about that famous seance in 1952 with Forbes and the Astors and Alan Dulles and the Council of Nine and Puharich? >> Puharich, yes, we we well, not specifically that seance. I had many conversations with him. I lived at the institute with him for about six maybe nine months until um >> You were living with Arthur Young? >> I I He invited me to move into the house where he he and his wife were living and along with my best friend at the time, Saul Paul Sirag. >> Wow, I can't uh you were too young to realize how important that was. >> Yeah, I had no real appreciation for many of the people I knew at that time in terms of their depth and who they were. I was young and naive. Um but I you know, I was a good learner and he had obviously noticed in the various seminars that Saul Paul and I were the ones who asked the most questions and he got really engaged in in his work. So, he he wanted us to be part of his institute and we were more than happy to do it. >> What did he tell you about that seance and Puharich and >> Really very little. >> Cuz it's become it's mythology at this point. >> It it has been. I don't as I look back on what I now know about it all, I I'm not sure what to make of it. Uh Arthur, he did a lot of things. He was one of the early Dianetics clears, he and his wife >> both were. He he >> There was a lot of that at SRI. >> He he Well, there was, yeah. >> What is it about Dianetics and Scientology that speaks to >> Well, they in Dianetics and Scientology, they're very open to the paranormal. >> And I don't think that um I can say much else of a positive nature about it. There's a dark side to to every religion. Um but there's certainly something maybe more so in Dianetics is >> appealing to I mean one of the most famous psychics, who's my personal favorite, is Pat Price. >> I believe he was a Scientologist, Hal Puthoff. >> Ingo Swann, Scientologist. >> That's all true. >> But Russell Targ, who was right in the middle of all of it, was not. uh it hard to say what influence Scientology actually had. I think Ed May, who took over the program after Hal Puthoff left, was also. >> So there there is that, but I don't think any of those people maintained, except for Pat Price, maintained their connection with Scientology. It's something they went through, they got what they could out of it, and they moved on. >> Right, they got clear, and that was enough. Um we'll take a quick break, but this is a good time to transition to SRI, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about Ted Owens. Okay, we'll be right back. >> So how I heard it was you're you're a researcher, you're around SRI, you're in the scene. >> Russell and Hal hand you a file and say, "We can't do anything with that. What can you do with this?" >> Was that the Ted Owens file? >> That was the Ted Owens file. >> Why couldn't they do anything with that? well, they were receiving funding from the CIA. >> They had already gone public with uh their research on Uri Geller. It was published in Nature magazine, one of one of the world's premier scientific magazines. >> When was that around '75? >> '74, as I recall. and they didn't want to have a flamboyant psychic. They didn't want to be in the news. Uri Geller at the time was incredibly controversial. >> Why why? Because >> Well, because he was being attacked by the skeptics because he was a public performer, a stage magician, and you had people like The Amazing Randy writing books about what a fraud he was. And and going, in fact, going to scientific conferences and claiming that in public that people I knew who were in no way confederates with Uri Geller were helping him cheat. >> And and so you know, what people at SRI wanted, who were, you know, it's largely a military industrial think tank, they wanted to be low-key. They didn't want to have any kind of public prominence of that sort. And Ted Owens was doing everything he could to attract publicity to himself. >> More so than Ingo Swann? >> Oh, I think so. Although Ingo was probably much smarter >> about it. But Ted Owens >> Much kinder, too, I would guess. >> Well, Owens had his kind side. >> He did? >> Yeah, I mean, he was kind to me. I had a good relationship with him for many years, but if you if you crossed him, that was another matter. I was I had learned by that point to because of my experience in San Quentin to treat everybody with respect, regardless of what they may have done or what other people think of them or and so on. I I believe every human being deserves respect. Just for being human. >> Sure. You were the perfect person for that cuz he has a this sort of infamous reputation for being a little bit cagey. >> Feisty. >> Feisty. For sure. Feisty. >> He was feisty. He He was um a you know, sailor. He He'd been a sailor in the Second World War and then he went to Duke University. While he was in the Navy, he was doing psychic stuff right and left and he wrote a letter to J.B. Rhine at Duke University and said, "You know, here's what I'm doing. I want to do experiments." and Rhine was writing back and giving him pointers and after he got out of the Navy, Rhine said, "Come to Duke and I'll we'll get you enrolled at Duke University." and he did it. He became J.B. Rhine's uh assistant. >> Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah. So, what was special about Ted? What could he do? >> Well, he claimed he could do psychokinesis. >> Okay, so moving things. >> Moving things. He He told many stories he had about um things disappearing in his presence and he He said he did seances for the Rhines and things of this sort and apparently when he was around girls, their earrings would disappear. And J.B. Rhine actually tried to investigate this, according to Ted. And um but it it he he got he eloped with another woman from Duke and left and tried to set himself up as a healer. He knew hypnosis, and he he was quite successful as a healer until, I think in 1954, the AMA shut him down. Uh because they thought at at the time hypnosis was not uh acceptable. And they thought he, you know, he's practicing medicine, he's a quack, and so on. And he became very bitter. >> AMA has been like that since its founding. Very against herbalists and natural remedies. I'm not surprised. >> I think it's changing slowly, but in any case, he began to think that he was working with nature, and then working with a poltergeist. He thought it was a poltergeist he called Big Lorna. And finally, it dawned on him that it could be extraterrestrials. And he remembered having had some weird experiences that appeared to be uh of an extraterrestrial nature. And finally, he felt, "Wait, I'm in telepathic contact. They're talking to me, and they're giving me instructions how to interact with them, and teaching me their language." And he he held many different jobs. He was a bullwhip artist at a circus. And then he had a knife-throwing routine. And he was a jazz musician and a high-speed typist. And and and and and and he worked at one time as what he called an idea man for a railroad company. And he said that the aliens, he called them the space intelligences, had guided him since his childhood to have many different careers so that his mind would be flexible enough to understand their very complicated symbolic system and also he claimed that they had been searching since the days of Moses for somebody with a nervous system strong enough to handle all the energy that they were going to run through him. And he thought of himself as, you know, the first person since Moses to be able to do these kinds of things. >> Messianic figure. >> He was. >> I think he's the first person to bring the insectoid aliens to to the public. Well, that was his contact, right? >> Yeah, yeah, that was it. He said they he Tweeter and Twitter. >> That's right. [laughter] That's right. >> Who who he called them that because they had high spit pitched squeaky voices. >> They communicate with him telepathically and he learned how to send them telepathic images of what he wished them to accomplish. But uh and then they would sit at their invisible UFO high above the planet in front of a big screen and push buttons and whatever and make these things happen. >> What was your research like with him? >> It was mostly about collecting information because he he was a force of nature. He he spent he wasn't a wealthy man, but he spent almost all of his time and energy making these doing these demonstrations. He would send he had a list of scientists. He would mail >> [snorts] >> to each of these people a statement, "I'm about to do this or that." And they were unusual things you would not expect to happen. For example, right before I visited Puthoff and Targ at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, he had written to them. He had been pestering them for a couple of years saying, you know, stop wasting your time with Uri Geller. >> I'm the world's greatest psychic and finally he he wrote to them and he said, "I'm going to prove it to you for good." He said, uh "I'm going to give you weather like you have never seen before in Palo Alto. I'm going to make It was a drought at the time and in the San Francisco Bay Area, it almost never snows. There's no snow." >> there. And he said, "You're going to have every kind of weather. There'll be sleet and hail and snow and there'll be power blackouts and UFO sightings and it's all going to happen in a couple of days and your local newspaper is going to write a story saying that the drought is over because of all of this." At the time the papers were saying no end in sight >> to the drought and all of this happened in a few days. >> It happened? >> It did happen. >> Were you working with him during this >> No, this is This is right before I show up at SRI. So, not only do they have the files and do they want to get rid of the files, but they are now convinced this guy is for real. >> The CIA probably didn't know about him because they would have liked to have that guy handy. >> He tried everything he could to interest >> Yes, he did. >> I'm I don't know why they didn't take him on. He's He can create snow in California? they had nothing No, they never to my knowledge expressed an interest. He claimed that he was in contact with some agent from the CIA he called George Clark and uh but at one time he thought I was a CIA agent, [laughter] so >> Do you think he did that? Do you think he made that happen? it's always a question of whether he predicted it or whether he caused it. Now, Russell Targ sent him a letter after that event and saying, "That was a great prediction." And he wrote back and said basically, "Hell, no, it was no prediction. I caused it." And he was always a little ambiguous as to whether he caused it through his own powerful mind or whether it was the space intelligences who did it and had nothing to do with him. >> And I think Ed May was of the same school of thought that that's just precognition. You didn't do that. You just saw something. >> Ed May doesn't believe in psychokinesis. >> He He just believes it's precognition. >> Yeah. That's very interesting the arguments that happen within parapsychology. You forget the skeptics. Within there's all these different opinions. >> That's true. Yeah. you take Ted's file, what type of work did you do with him? >> Well, the first thing I wanted to do after reading it over carefully and seeing, you know, by that time I I first met Ted in um 1976. In the summer of '76 and and he I was in England at the time. We met in London. And he had ended yet another drought. >> He went on He ended another drought? >> Well, what happened was at SRI, they leaked a little story about the drought in ending the drought in Menlo Park, in California. It was a big drought. And there was a drought going on in London, a very serious drought in all of England in that summer. And when I arrived for a parapsychology conference, my friends there said, "If you want to have your picture taken on on the front page of the London Times, all you have to do is show up in Piccadilly Circus with an umbrella, and people will [laughter] think you're crazy, and they'll take your picture, and it'll be in the newspaper." It was that serious. They were bringing water by truck >> to cities outside of London where they water had already run dry. But when Ted Owens arrived, all of a sudden it rained and poured, and >> And he predicted that? >> He claimed he caused it. >> Claimed he caused it. >> So that that there that's the circumstance of my meeting him, and it was a parapsychology conference, and he was a speaker, but you have to imagine this guy sort of I think of him like Paul Bunyan, larger-than-life big folk hero, and he had a big booming voice, and he was a large man at the time with a big beard, and he smoked a cigar, and he walked on to >> the stage of this parapsychology conference where he had been invited because the people in London brought him there for the purpose of ending the drought because they learned about what had happened in California. >> Unbelievable. It worked? >> It worked, and he's on stage, and he's about he carried a little red toy wagon behind him on to the stage with piled high with papers, and and he said, "These papers are all the documentation of the many demonstrations I've done cuz I'm the world's greatest psychic, [laughter] and I can control the weather, and I can make UFOs appear." Well, the British people are not accustomed to or fond of that kind of American braggadocio >> behavior. And >> the strangest thing happened at that time, which was one of the speakers at the conference didn't show up. So, Ted Owens was scheduled to follow him. And so, they said, "You go on." So, he's halfway through his presentation and the guy shows up. >> And so, they tell him, "Okay, Ted, you've got to leave the stage." >> Uh-oh. so, before he left the stage, people the audience was already practically booing him. >> What, just because of his attitude? >> Yeah, he he didn't sit well with the British public. >> And I got up and said, "Well, I happen to know about what happened in California first hand." And And I just mentioned that. And you know, it was a way to kind of ameliorate things. >> Sure, a calming presence. >> Which you are. so, we bonded over that. And I began looking at the files. And the thing that appealed to me was that he claimed he could produce UFOs on demand. And there were examples in the files where he'd go to police officers and he'd say, "I'll make you a UFO and you will see it. It'll be in the newspapers and you can tell them that I I said it would happen." And then there would be. >> So, those files were real? >> Yeah, oh yeah. >> Did you see him produce UFOs or anything like this? >> I set up an experiment. I said, "Let's do it again." >> And and um before I had any opportunity to really set up the experiment, he was on it. He said, "I'm going to do this." He said, "You There won't be one. There're going to be three." And it's >> He called the number, okay? >> He said there'll be three big UFO sightings within um 100 miles of the San Francisco Bay Area. >> How skeptical are you? >> Well, skeptical enough to realize that this wasn't the way you should be done. >> Right. Right. [laughter] >> Uh so, I scrambled. I said, "We need a control group." Uh I have friends in San Diego, a California West Coast city, about the same population as San Francisco. I wrote to them and said, "We'll use San Diego as a control group." I sent letters out to every law enforcement agency within 100 miles of both cities. Said, "Let me know if you get any UFO sightings in your area." Uh and waited to see what would happen. And sure enough, there was a fellow near San Francisco, a little town called Concord, California, with out walking in 4:00 in the morning, and claimed that he'd been abducted by aliens >> at 4:00 in the morning. Perfectly sober person at the time, with no background in UFOs. We interviewed him, and it actually, from all accounts, seemed like he had reported it to the police. It was in the newspapers, and it seemed like, yeah, this this was appeared to be the first legitimate sighting. >> And were there three of them? after that, Owens called me up on the phone. He He, at the time, as I recall, was living in Oregon. He moved around a lot. And he said uh to me, "I can tell the next one is going to be really big." He said, "I feel it coming." He said, "There's going to be a UFO. It's going to be one of the best sightings ever." He said, "It's going to be seen by hundreds of people. It's going to be photographed, and the photograph will be published on the front page of one of your local newspapers. Uh which is what happened 4 days later. >> 4 days later it happened. >> I At some point, are you starting to really believe this guy? >> Um and I I'd be hoping don't predict anything bad. >> Well, there were. >> I know. Um before we get to that, I know we both know Chris Bledsoe. >> I think we both agree he's a lovely man. >> He he can summon something. >> Um I don't think that's a debate. He's He's studied by the government, CIA. He believes that he's summoning spiritual entities. >> What do you think? >> Well, yes, you could call them orbs. >> And he believes and people I think other people would agree that these orbs they are either conscious themselves or they are inhabited by conscious beings. He calls the lady. >> It does indeed appear to be something not so different um from angelic apparitions that occur in the Bible. >> He made predictions on this very show a few months ago that are that are coming true. >> Was Ted summoning those same type of entities? don't think so. >> It doesn't sound like it. It sounds like craft. >> Well, yes, it does seem like craft. The one that occurred that I just mentioned uh was seen both from the air and the ground. They California University, what's now called Sonoma State University, at the time it was had a different name, Sonoma State College or something, and near San Francisco in Rohnert Park, California. The art department was sponsoring a an artist named Steven Polansky who had a airplane. He was a pilot and he had smoke trailing out the back of his airplane, colored smoke. He made designs in the sky. >> That was his art? >> That was his art. >> What a cool What a cool job. Cool art project. >> an artist and so the art department sponsored him and he's flying over the campus uh, 3,000 ft altitude. There hundreds of students are outside with their cameras watching the whole thing, including video. And a UFO shows up right in his airspace. And so it seemed from the air and by hundreds of people on the ground simultaneously photographed and videotaped. It got a lot of PR. The Berkeley Gazette ran a photo on the front page as Ted Owens had said would >> And the video was shown on the channel 9 KQED evening news. >> Did your phone ring with an I told you so? >> Of course. >> Yeah. And I made a big mistake. >> What was that? >> I said, "Ted, that's only two >> Oh, no. >> sightings. >> So what did he do? >> He slammed the phone down. >> Oh, okay. >> He slammed the phone down and I began to feel sick. You know how you get a little scratchy feeling in your throat and you think, "Uh-oh, uh, this is going to be a bad sore throat." >> And you can tell it's starting. >> That's what was happening. >> As soon as you >> Yeah. Right away it happened. And then 45 minutes later he called me back and without saying anything about what had happened, he simply said, "Jeffrey, I will never do that to you again." this this sore throat went away. >> You're well known for being very balanced. Um I've never seen you really fully commit without hearing all sides. I you've got to be a full believer at that point. He He can He can hurt >> Yeah. I I would say by then I was [laughter] definitely convinced, but it it got worse after that. >> He Your relationship with him? yeah, because he he was, as I say, trying to get the attention of the CIA and the US government. He he was living on the edge of poverty. He was spending all of his money on Xeroxing all of the magazine and articles and newspaper articles validating the different demonstrations that he was doing and mailing it off to scientists who um were trying Some of them were, you know, seriously following his work, but none of them had the resources and he wanted the US government to set him up as an institution and he would use his powers for the benefit of humanity and for the United States. And of course, they wanted him nothing to do with him. >> I wonder why that is. Did they ever approach you? I mean I mean just to ask about him. >> No. No, I was never approached, but I was, you know, at the time I was pretty well known, I suppose, as a long-haired hippie uh psychedelic drug user and and the CIA would have no interest in a person like me. >> Right. The CIA but doesn't want anything to do with drugs or psychedelics. >> Ex- except [laughter] except if it's Puharich right researching, but but they they weren't particularly interested in in the type of person I was at the time. but Owens was desperate for for their help and attention and he finally said, "I'm going to declare war against the US government until they give me what I want." >> you that? >> And this is after the sore throat? >> So, you know >> he can do this. >> Well, he he declared war. He said, "There're going to be poltergeist attacks on US naval ships." And then he showed me newspaper articles about mysterious fires and things that happened aboard naval vessels. And then he said, "I'm going to attack power plants." And he would send me newspaper clippings about uncanny accidents at nuclear power sites. But >> Why would the CIA not bring this guy in? He sounds like exactly what they wanted. Is just unstable? I first of all, I think it was too unbelievable. >> It's It's unbelievable. >> Unbelievable. >> But But you've you've confirmed what about 2/3 of his >> I have, but that was me. I've heard I get convened a meeting of scientists. My wife, Janelle, went L J Allen Hynek was in town in San Francisco and she went and fetched him from his hotel room and brought him to the meeting and we had about a dozen scientists there. I said, "Look, we've got to research this man." >> And J Allen Hynek said, "I wouldn't touch him with a 10-ft pole because the phenomena that he produces come from the unconscious and I don't want to have anything to do with that." >> I think he had a point. I think I think Hynek had a point about Ted There's something that scares me about him. >> After that sore throat and you hang up the phone, you've got to be thinking, "I can't cross this guy again." >> I know I wasn't I was naive. I suppose. >> Well, and I also trusted him. I He said he wouldn't do it again, and >> Oh, boy. >> I and and I had no intention to cross. I didn't cross him just to say, "You know, you promised me three and we only got two." >> Why [laughter] did you say that? Were you teasing him? >> I wanted the third one. >> I Well, and then it never came. There were only two. And I I can tell you in San Diego, there were zero. uh so, he didn't fulfill his promise exactly as he said he would. And it it never works out exactly quite the same way. There's always some differences, and these are large-scale phenomenon. They're hard to assess uh statistically in any way, and people figure, "Well, he's just fooling you somehow. You don't know how." Um but maybe he, you know, knows, or he's predicting, or he he he's in cahoots with the newspapers. Who knows? >> There's always going to be that. >> So, you continued to work with him for a number of years. >> But it began I began to lose interest. >> Why? >> Because his war against the US government wasn't going too well. [laughter] And at some point, he he made a big prediction, and you know, they weren't paying attention to the poltergeist attacks and the nuclear power plant problems. And and he said, "Okay, this is going to be it. Massive earthquake. I'm going to really show them." And it didn't happen. >> It didn't happen. >> No. Thank goodness. >> It didn't happen. And at that point, I was moving on in my life. I wasn't thinking about Ted Owens until it would have been Christmas Eve and he called me up with a big booming voice. I had hadn't had much I was keeping the files. I still have all the files. >> You still have those research files? >> We are putting them online. They will eventually become searchable >> Oh, that's >> online. We're making them all machine readable and uh even the handwritten ones. And he said, "Jeffrey, this is the most important phone call you will ever receive." Uh he obviously wanted to get my attention. >> You've got mine. >> Yeah. He said, "It's up to you. You've got to contact the US government and tell them not to send up the next space shuttle." >> Because if they do, my UFOs are going to knock it out of the sky. >> That's what he said. >> And I first of all had no leverage whatsoever with the US government. I wasn't about to I didn't know who to call and I wouldn't have known what to say and they wouldn't have believed me in any case. And so I did nothing. And then it was about a month later when the Challenger exploded. >> That's one of those moments that uh I don't know if it is for you, but everyone says where they were when JFK they found out JFK was killed. For me it's it's Challenger. I remember what the weather was. I know what I was wearing. I remember watching it on TV. I was home from school. >> Do you remember that day? >> Not particularly. I I remember reading and learning about it, of course, but uh I don't remember the moment the way I do remember the assassination of Kennedy. >> Right. Did you make the connection when when Challenger exploded? >> Oh, it shook me to my bones. would >> so. >> I I felt like horrified. >> What about guilt? Like you should have done something? >> Uh no, I don't think there was anything I could have done. >> think there was, but but guilt is an easy emotion to feel. >> I felt I should stop ignoring him. >> And [snorts] and what I arranged to do at that point was to take his training program. >> Did to try to learn to do what he does? >> He had a training program and I felt I better learn about it. >> It's This sounds like what? You're training to defend yourself? What would you >> Well, you could do whatever you want with it. That's the thing. >> This is scary. >> He said to me, "What do you want to do with these powers?" We He I arranged for him to come to San Francisco. I had some friends who had some money, so we could afford to bring him out and >> So you called him, "Please stop crashing shuttles. Come on down." >> Well, he claimed it wasn't he who crashed the shuttle. >> the >> It was the UFOs in his behalf. >> But But he He asked them to do it. >> No, he didn't say that. >> Okay, because that would be evil to me. >> He didn't say He never told me he asked them to do it, but he said that they did it. >> He did ask you to warn them, so maybe >> me to warn them. >> Maybe he was trying to save them. I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it's But I There's so much of darkness to this character. >> to it and and and of course there's the other story. It was the O-ring. There were There were warnings. NASA should have known better. There was all of that. >> And not only that, there were other people making predictions. >> Yes, there were. I All I could say for myself was I better pay more attention to Ted Owens. So I uh arranged to take his training program, which was 3 days. And it was mostly hypno- hypnosis. We We got a hotel room for him in San Francisco, and I had a couple of friends with me, and for 3 days he hypnotized us. >> And what kind of What kind of hypnosis is this? Is he I mean, it's not the He's not wagging a watch in front of your eyes, right? >> No. No. He does a normal hypnotic induction, and he And he gives you suggestions, and it I wrote a book called The PK Man, in which I because I recorded the entire thing. I had I still have the audio tapes. >> You have those? >> Of the entire training. >> I mean, I've I've read the transcripts in PK Man. I didn't know you still had the tapes. >> I have the tapes. >> You need to make those available. >> Well, maybe. Yeah. I I could, but uh, he warned me. He said, "You shouldn't really share this with people without getting the permission of the space intelligences." >> Oh, so the whole training is around these the space intelligences? >> He He said that I asked him, "Is this just hypnosis? Is that what you're doing?" He said, "No. The hypnosis is only part of it." He said, "It's we're working on you on your brain. The space intelligences will work on your brain." He said, "What do you want to do with this power?" And I said to him, "I don't want to do what you're doing." >> I [laughter] I have no interest in controlling the weather and calling down UFOs. So, what I really want to do is become a spokesperson to the world at large, to mainstream public, about the realities of the psychic world. that was my goal. And it was 6 months, I think I took the training and it would have been February and by June I had set up uh the original Thinking Allowed TV series. We started out on uh cable local cable public access TV in Marin County and within year or two we were out on the satellite to public TV stations all over North America. >> And that show, I think ran 16 years. >> From 1986 to 2002. >> Do you credit that training and the intelligences or >> I don't know how I could have done it myself. >> What did they do that you could You were already in media, no? >> Well, I had I kind of gave up my radio show and >> Because I wanted to complete my dissertation and get a doctoral degree. Okay. >> So, [snorts] I you know, I became a full-time graduate student and wrote a dissertation and wrote a couple of books and it was only 1986, 6 years and then I was fighting this lawsuit >> because >> the skeptics were trying to take my degree away from me and I was being libeled by them and so I fought a libel suit for 6 years, which I won. >> Which you won. And and then I set up this program and before we knew, you know, we started on a public access cable and >> not even in any of the mainstream San Francisco stations, but in a in a suburban station and you know, 2 years later we're out on the satellite covered by 120 and 20 TV stations. I It just happened. >> And you think that it was that training and this >> I did >> Why couldn't you have done it you still could have? >> I could have. Who knows? >> I can't say for sure, but I I can say that it seemed to happen without any effort. >> Because it seems like you forgot that you went from intern as a receptionist at radio station to a hit radio show in 3 weeks. So clearly you know how to reach the public. >> a good interviewer. I understood that. >> Yeah, but you know, this material had hadn't gone mainstream and PBS stations were very hesitant. And and and even in the early days we didn't cover a lot of parapsychology the way I'm more inclined to do now on YouTube. Where I don't have, you know, in PBS they're very conservative actually. >> And for example in when our program went out on the satellite we had some sponsors, the Institute of Noetic Sciences sponsored us well and I think it was Nashville, Tennessee the local PBS station went to a local psychologist and asked him, "What's your opinion? Should we run and carry this program?" And he said to them, "The people of Tennessee are not ready for this." [laughter] >> They really were. They were ready for it. Um Ted Owens died in 1987. How did that relationship wrap up for the two of you? at that point obviously we were in touch. This was a year after I had done the training with him and our TV show had was launched. I was I was getting what I had asked for. I heard from him. He He wrote to me from a farmhouse in Fort Ann, New York where he had moved. And he his letter was quite strange. He said, "The UFOs told me to come here. They're They're going to come for me." And then he sent me clippings of newspaper articles about UFO sightings and in the area and he said they're actually they're hovering right over this farmhouse where I'm living. And and he died there. >> Did you keep those clippings? >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, I have them all. >> I had heard you say at one point that uh you almost warned him or told him that not that he was evil, but he was dangerous. To be careful. >> I I did. I was very unhappy with the threats that he was making and I asked him to stop doing it. I I've always felt that he's his own worst enemy. >> It's what it sounds like. I I tried as much as I could to interest the scientific community. I was still trying to do that. But it's it's like for most people it's a step too far. Although things are changing. >> Yes, they are. >> Chris Bledsoe, as you mentioned. >> And um I asked Chris I said, "Do you think people should learn how to do this?" He said, "No." He said He said, "This is a gift and a curse." he said, "I wouldn't mess with it." >> I think he's probably right. >> Could Ted Owens' consciousness have existed past his death and contacted you? >> Well, in fact, it was I think 2023 if I recall, 2022, I heard from a viewer of my YouTube show, some fellow in Germany, wrote to me and he said uh "I was meditating. I'm a deep meditator and while I was in meditation, I experienced a presence. And the presence uh became more solid to me in my meditation, and I recognized it as Ted Owens cuz I was a fan of your program, and I've seen some pictures of Ted Owens that you've shown, and it was him. And he said to me, "Reach out to Jeffrey and tell him that if he wants to contact me, I'm available." >> And um Now, this is 35 years after his death, something like that. I guess that would have been 2022. so I endeavored. >> You did. Cuz at this point, you're well-known, you won the Bigelow Prize. So, you're working in in death afterlife experiences on consciousness. And and it was quite clear to me at that point that there's a relationship between the afterlife and UFOs. >> Oh, yes. So, how did you try to contact Ted? what happened was I I would try to meditate. >> And nothing happened, and but one night I was asleep. And you know, you're kind of half awake, half asleep, in a hypnagogic state, and I felt his presence. I see said to him, we had a conversation. I I said to him, uh this is the early phases of the Ukraine war at the time. It would have been I think around December of 2022. at the time, the Soviets were not the Soviets, the Russians >> were um bombing the power plants in Ukraine trying to freeze them in the winter. And I I for the people of Ukraine. I said and I thought Ted would be sympathetic to that. And I said to him and this just popped into my head in this altered state of consciousness. Can we make it warm for the winter in Ukraine so the people don't suffer. That That was my concern. And he and I knew of course that he had done this sort of thing while he was alive. Exactly this sort of thing. He waves in the middle of winter with there were examples of. So he said to me if the space intelligence is agree then we can do it. And so I um I created I think I a monologue. I put it out on the video. This is This is what he says is going to And again it was just a few days later I'm thinking January 1st if I recall correctly 2023 there were a thousand temperature records broken all across Europe. >> It was. And it was totally characteristic of the kinds of things he had done in the past and and I recall because I was now the internet was very active uh and and there were meteorologists who specialize in rare weather patterns, absurd things and they were posting on they had blogs and things and saying this is insane. We've never seen anything like this before. It came out of nowhere. It was unanticipated. And I endeavored to set up an experiment to see you know could we measure statistically and I failed. >> Failed? >> Well, the reason is simply that a thousand records are all correlated with each other. So, in effect, it's one record. >> And you can't get good statistics out of a a single example. And yes, it was a warm summer in Ukraine, and they survived the Russian onslaught. In fact, they were exporting electricity at the time. And um uh but it wasn't something I could say, "Here's statistical proof." I couldn't do that. But in every other regard, it would have been a success. >> Did you go back and talk to Ted again? Thank him? Cuz by >> no, I never entered into that state again. And and I've been reluctant since then, too. Excuse me. [clears throat] I felt some of maybe the some of the same trepidation you spoke to. Like, I shouldn't be playing around with this. it works too well. And somebody wrote to me. A viewer wrote to me and said, "Do you realize that because of that heat wave, some people died from the heat?" >> I didn't consider that. >> Yeah. And and I thought, well, what maybe there are unintended consequences, and I don't know entirely what I'm doing. And it but it wasn't as if I had ongoing communication >> uh with him. And I haven't felt that kind of contact, and I haven't in tried to cultivate it, either. >> And you initiated that. So, it's not like he invaded your consciousness. >> Right. I I was, you know, at at that time hoping to have it. And And when it happened, and and when it worked, I uh I began to think, well, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the one doing it. And I don't know, but I I just felt like it's it's better left uh uh to other people. Or that my role is still as an educator and a communicator and I I don't need to try to win the war. >> I totally agree. Even if it was you, you probably don't want that responsibility. you've been in this space for a long time and how do you handle I I know you handle criticism very well now because you've been doing it a long time. Were you ever angry? >> And you were? I'm surprised to hear you say that so quickly. >> Well, I don't get angry easily. >> No, you don't. >> I mean I mean nowadays I critics attack you and it just rolls off. But there was a time where you were frustrated with academia or mainstream? >> Well, I that's I made me sick, literally. They were trying to I had spent 10 years at Berkeley. I was a graduate student from 1970 to 1980 uh when I got my doctoral degree and they [clears throat] were trying to take it away from me. I was very angry and and it affected my health. >> uh as as well. It never occurred to me to try to punish those people. I was just struggling to protect my reputation because even parapsychologists in the parapsychology community, they wanted to I was being attacked so heavily, they didn't want to have anything to do with me. At the time, my my application for membership in the Parapsychological Association was rejected initially. >> For on what ground? >> Because of the controversy that >> Ah. >> I got a doctoral degree at Berkeley and and people were saying he's incompetent, he shouldn't have gotten the degree, the whole thing, you know, it was became a major point of focus. I filed a libel suit. >> So you have no Do you have any allies at that point? >> Yes, of course I had some allies. Like my professors. >> Oh, right. What about personal Were there personal costs? Were there personal support? >> Well, I You know, it affects you inwardly when that happens. I I felt mortified. And I felt a little bit embarrassed to show myself in public. And you know, Arthur Young had predicted it will take you 6 years to undo all the damage. >> And he was right. >> It It was 6 years later when I launched the Thinking Allowed television series. >> Arthur was right again. >> And it's interesting that your mom was an actress. >> Very outward. Then becomes a yoga instructor. Very inward. >> And you kind of had a similar path. With criminology and sociology is very outward. >> And then parapsychology is very inward. >> Did you get that from her? >> Well, now that you mention it, I >> I I think that um balance was very important. My mother always used to say to me, "Moderation in all things, including moderation." >> I just thought it was very interesting. So, you wrote a 95-page essay. Can you tell us what the Bigelow prizes? I mean, in Vegas everybody knows the name Bigelow, but can you tell us about that? And why And why did you enter that contest? >> It was very strange. >> Okay, I'm ready. I love strange. >> Well, I I got the news. Robert Bigelow is sponsoring a contest, Life After Death. And I thought to myself, well, there are a lot of smart people who will enter that competition, people in the universities who are studying like University of Virginia where they do a lot of work in that area. Surely one of those people is bound to win. And I knew Leslie Kean. >> You did. >> Yeah, I'd interviewed her. >> Oh, I guess you would have, yeah, cuz this is 2021. >> And well, this would have been 2020. >> 2020, okay. >> But I I launched the YouTube channel in 2015. And Leslie had been on as a guest. And so I reached out to her. I said, "Leslie, it's perfect for you. You should enter this contest." And and she wrote back and said, "Well, I happen to be one of the judges." >> And she said, "Furthermore, you should listen to this uh interview that Robert Bigelow did. I think it was with George Knapp on uh uh radio or TV." She gave me a link and I listened to it and she said, "He's already predicting that you should enter the contest." And I listened and George Knapp, I think it was George Knapp, was saying, "Who should enter your contest?" And he said, "Well, people like Jeffrey Mishlove should enter. People who've been studying this their whole lives." And I thought to myself, um "Gosh, you know, that's um how can I uh enter because there's so many people who would be much better at at it than me." >> Not true. how can I not? >> How can you not? >> So so I I did and and I struggled with it. It wasn't an easy essay to to write. I had help. >> Why was Bigelow so interested in after death? >> His wife had had died and he'd been through a lot. Uh his you know, he had set up this aerospace business and then an AIDS or not AIDS, COVID. COVID came along and the governor of Nevada had basically ruled that he had a non-essential business. He had to let all of his employees go. the business, the aerospace company, to my knowledge, has never recovered. >> I used to drive by every day on the way to work and the ghost town. It's just a big yellow building. No one's there. >> He still maintains a skeleton staff, but >> But he had personal tragedy. >> he had, you know, personal tragedies. He I think a grandchild had committed suicide and a >> And his son? >> His wife had died and he he had earlier in his career launched the National Institute of Discovery Science and they were big into UFOs and and extraterrestrial intelligence, but and then at this point he said he wanted to shift. He wanted to For he couldn't do both UFOs and life after death, so he wanted to study life after death and launching the competition would be his entry in into that arena. >> And he he asked for your help? >> Well, he [laughter] indirectly, I didn't know him at that point. >> But he knew you, so now >> He knew of me. Yeah. >> You were the name, though. >> So, you got to work. >> Yeah, I think maybe we had spoken once or twice at by that time and >> What what what When did you make the decision to say, "Okay, I I have to enter this?" >> Well, I talked it over with my wife. >> Right. [laughter] >> And she said, "Of course you have to." >> Of course you have to. >> Yeah. I was reluctant at first. >> Uh because I felt there were other people who were far more qualified. >> You don't give yourself enough credit. You've You've You've been You've talked to every legend in this field. >> It's true. I I have In that regard >> Who has interviewed more people than you? >> Well, maybe you have for all I know, but >> This is episode 11. >> You've done 1,500. >> Well, there are people who have done more, but in any case doing interviews isn't the same as researching, doing experiments, publishing in scientific journals. I I was more of a popularizer than an original researcher. It's not as if I have hundreds of scientific publications to my name. I don't. >> You had You had a few peer-reviewed papers out there. >> I have a few, and and there are people who have hundreds and who who know this field back and forth and some of them entered the competition, and some of the people I thought were sure to win didn't even enter. I guess they felt maybe they were too old or something. So, Janelle says you got to do it. >> I got to do it. >> And you What's your approach to the essay? >> Well, I decided if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to win. >> Attaboy. >> And so I I cut back on my other projects, including the YouTube channel. >> We noticed. and I focused myself nearly full-time for 6 months to work on it, and I had some good friends who would read over my drafts. My first draft was terrible, and I completely had to discard it and and start over. But I finally, you know, got into the groove, and I realized also that I wrote to the Bigelow Institute and said, "Can I include a video segments in the interview?" Cuz I had a big video library about it. They said, "Yes, you can." So, I think I was the only person who did that. >> [gasps] >> And and of course the the ground rules for the competition fit me very well because they said what they wanted was an essay that would be as if you're taking a case to a jury in a courtroom. So, I had my criminology background. >> And I could approach it that way as a criminologist. And they said, "You know, first-hand testimony." And I had a big library of first-hand testimony. And in particular, I realized I had I'd done an interview long ago, but I had the video, with one of the world's great scientists, Francis Crick, the the man who invented or discovered the the helix property of DNA. >> we know who he >> He he sort of opened up yeah. >> I and I and he had written a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis, in which he said, "I'm going to set out to prove that consciousness is generated by the neurons of the brain." He said, "It hasn't yet been proven." And I have him on tape saying, "You know, the religious people might be correct. The the consciousness might exist outside the brain completely, and we might actually survive the death of the physical body." So, I was able to include that video clip uh in in the essay. I thought that was one of the the strong points, plus all the testimony that I had from many, many people who had personal experiences, plus my own story. >> That's why those scientists didn't go in the contest. They saw you were going to be there with Francis Crick and they said, "Ah, We got We got nothing. We can't compete with that." >> didn't know. >> Come on. So, it's 95 pages, which I which I read. It's brilliant. Can you break down the thesis then the nine categories? >> Well, the basic idea is that there are many independent lines of evidence all pointing in the same direction. It could be out-of-body experiences, it could be near-death experiences, it could be the reincarnation research, it could be mental mediumship or physical mediumship, which is really extraordinary. Trumpets flying around the room. >> Yep. it could be what is called instrumental transcommunication or sometimes called electronic voice phenomena. People who communicate with their deceased relatives using a computer or radio. Or they have these devices, what are they called now? Voice Spirit boxes. Spirit boxes and and the like. Of course, there are lots of TV programs that feature these >> things. And and some of it's legitimate. >> Some of Most is bunk, but some is legitimate. Edison and Tesla were both trying to build one of those. That's right. Some, but not all. >> Some, but not all. >> Yeah. And so, >> But but there's the white crow theory, I think. Wasn't William James? >> William James. >> white crow? >> Who was my intellectual hero. >> Is he? >> So, do you remember his saying about the white crow? >> Please. >> Well, William James put it this way. Said, "If you want to disprove the claim that all crows are black, you only need to find one white crow." >> And then he said, "Mrs. Piper, the medium he was working with, is my white crow and he took a lot of heat for that too because the scientific establishment was in no way interested in here he is a Harvard professor saying this medium can really do it. She's talking to the dead and and coming up with information that she couldn't possibly have known and people were attacking him viciously for that. >> But he stuck to his guns. He did. I think I remember reading about him saying, you know, what about these other mediums and he said there's no stick big enough to not you know, to knock them around with he didn't like them in this space but he liked his particular his white crow. >> Well, you you know, I think if I remember the quote about no stick big it was it was this that he he was this this is in the pages of science main American scientific publication where he's arguing about mediumship and the people are calling him a crank and and and all sorts of insults and he wrote responded by saying the quality of the criticism is so poor. >> Their arguments are are are so beneath the dignity of of of of a scientist to argue the way they're arguing that any stick will do you can >> this dog is is is such a vile creature that any stick you can find is is you can beat the dog with it doesn't matter. You you hold mediumship in such contempt. >> I wouldn't want to debate William James on anything. He's one of the great thinkers of of our time. >> Yeah, I I would agree. >> So in your paper we've got all these things pointing in the same direction. I'd like to know what happened when you found out you won? >> Well, I got a phone call from the Bigelow Institute and they said Robert Bigelow would like to speak with you. Uh he will call you tomorrow morning at 9:30. So I'm sitting by the phone. >> I'm sitting by the phone. And 28 it was 10:00. Finally I hadn't heard from him. >> a long half hour. [laughter] >> So so I called them. >> Oh, you did? >> I called them back. I said Robert Bigelow was going to call me at 9:30. What happened? And they said, "Oh, he hasn't come into the office yet. He'll call you when he gets in." >> This is killing you. >> Is is your wife Is Janelle home? >> Janelle was at home. >> She's just telling you to calm down. He's going to He's going to be calm down. And and so I Finally he calls and we're talking and he says, "Well, you won first prize." Janelle is peeking her head in the door. She says, "When?" So I hold my finger up like this. One finger. I held it up and and she goes to tell my stepson Lewis who lives with us. She says, "Jeff won first prize." And Lewis says, "Well, how do you know?" And she said, "Well, he held up one >> one finger." And Lewis says, "Well, maybe that doesn't mean >> I know, but [laughter] >> But it was. >> Wives know. >> Yeah. She knew. >> So how did you feel though? I mean, talk about validation. >> It was validating, but I can tell you this. I knew. >> You did? >> I knew. >> You were so humble going in and so >> But by that time I It was the way I knew I was going to have a dream that night when I had the dream of the magazine, that changed my life. I had absolute certainty at that point that I was going to win. >> I wouldn't looked up um how many judges voted for your paper. Do you remember how many? >> All of them. >> Unanimous. >> All six, yeah. What did you do when you hung up the phone? >> Um well, I was elated, obviously. It was I I think the first thing I did was write to the people who had helped me and and to even to my professors back in >> and thanking them. >> This is five decades of work. It was a uh a validation for me for taking a huge risk. >> Yes, it was. And a lot of personal cost. >> Health to your health, the litigation. >> Is this one of those proudest moments? Is this a victory? Is this triumphant moment for you? >> I mean, sure. Yeah. And and of course the financial benefit was appreciated. >> How much did you win? >> It was half a million dollars. >> That's real. That's That's green money. Yeah. It was >> I think if there was no money, it would have felt just as good. >> Probably. It probably would have. Many people get awards with no money attached, and they feel good. >> You were further attacked by mainstream when you won that prize. a little bit. >> It I guess it didn't matter at that point. I mean, cuz I followed it. I'm not aware of really any serious attacks. The Bigelow competition was seriously attacked. >> That's really what it was. >> It was about but I noticed that the the critics for the most part focused not on my essay but on some of the others because there were 29 different prizes awarded. The judges said that there were so many good essays that were contributed they urged him to award more prizes than he had originally agreed and he did. >> Are those available to the public to read? Oh, that's that's going to be interesting. >> They they are all online. >> How comfortable were you with life after death going into that? Were you you were convinced it was it's a real phenomenon? >> me a chance to look back and and remember how this all started for me. I had kind of almost forgotten about my dream of Uncle Harry but as I look back on it, I could see from the benefit of decades that my whole life turned around after that dream. And I thought that's the power of the afterlife. You can find it in examples of people who have been deeply touched by these experiences. They change their life permanently. And there were many other examples. Bishop Pike in California who was the Episcopalian Bishop of California resigned. >> As a result of his communications with his son who had died. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross became one of the most influential people in America as a result of communications that she had had with a former patient of hers who had who had deceased at that point. That these things are life changing and that to me was more proof than you would ever find in a scientific experiment if you look at the how it's touched the lives of people. >> I think Uncle Harry would have been proud of you for winning that prize. >> Well, he sure had a lot to do with it. >> did. I can't say that I felt much uh contact with Uncle Harry since that dream. It I think the important lesson for me is you don't have to have psychic experiences all the time. They come when they come. They're really not under our conscious control very much. They a little bit a little bit, but you only need one or two good ones in in your life and it can put you on a path where you can appreciate, you know, they're all around us. It's happening all the time to millions of people every day, but it's it's not that important for a human being. It's important to know that they're real, but you know, we have other responsibilities in in our life than to be psychic. >> Well, when those messages come, it's important to to listen, I think. >> Let's take a um a quick break and when we come back talk about synchronicity and what's what's on the other side? >> All right, we'll be right back. Well, let's lighten the mood and talk about death. you spent a lot of time documenting and talking about other people's paranormal experiences and then you had one of your own that fascinates me and I think it's the archetypal synchronistic >> resonance, which sounds like a mouthful, but those words are meaningful. >> What is that and what happened? >> Well, it wasn't a single event. It was a whole series of of events and it all started for me, as I recall, I was traveling. I was um visiting Europe and I was on my way to the city of Cordoba, Spain which uh happened to be the city a very unusual city uh because it was at one time Muslim and and there still is a huge uh 14th century mosque >> still still there in [clears throat] which after the Christians took over and expelled the Muslims and the Jews from Spain, they built a huge cathedral in the middle of the mosque. >> They did that? but it's this also it was an ancient Roman city. There still exists a a bridge from Roman times. >> Oh, yeah? >> And there is a statue in in the city uh of the Roman philosopher, playwright uh Seneca and scholar Seneca and I wanted to visit for that reason. What is it about Seneca? I don't know if >> if he's that well known. I mean, he is to me cuz I love that part of history. Is this Is the statue you're talking about of one man or two? >> One. >> Just Seneca? Okay. >> One one man and it doesn't look There are other statues of Seneca that look very different. >> And sometimes there's two men in those. >> Yeah. [clears throat] There Well, there was the Seneca the Elder and Seneca the Younger. >> And some are Seneca and Nero. >> Some are Seneca and Nero. >> And Nero. >> Uh-huh. Well, he was Nero's tutor and Nero's advisor and I knew nothing about Seneca back in my early days of the TV program. When I did an interview with Dr. Martin Rossman. >> Who was hip hypnotherapist. Medical doctor, hypnotherapist. And he was going to demonstrate the hypnotic technique. At that point, we did a half-hour interview for broadcast and then we did another hour for the DVD or not even DVD videotape VHS market in those days. And he So, when that session, he hypnotized And he told me, "You are going to experience your inner healing advisor." >> Inner healing advisor. >> That's what he said. He said, "It could be anything. It might be a chipmunk." >> "It might be some figure. >> It'll come to you. Just let it come, whatever." I'm I'm already at that point. I've been inducted. I'm in a light hypnotic trance. I experience this a person walking toward me wearing a toga. And I thought to myself, "Oh, good. I want to improve my public speaking abilities. So, I want you to be the famous orator the Greek orator not Democritus, but >> Demosthenes? >> Demosthenes. That's right. You you be Demosthenes. And and help me with my public speaking. he said to me, "I'm not Demosthenes. I'm Seneca." that took me >> Did you say, "Who?" >> Well, I remembered when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in the library building they had emblazoned in the actual in the concrete of the building the names of famous people from ancient times and Seneca's name was up there so I knew there was a famous person from the ancient world named Seneca. I was that much I knew. Very little else. I think I probably knew that a few other minor details. at that point in in my hypnotic state silently I said to well since you're Seneca and since you're here what do you want me to do? >> And he said study my life. >> Oh, beautiful. >> And and then I came out of the hypnotic state. I had this silly grin on my face. It's all captured on video. >> And this is captured on video? >> The whole thing. >> Roman historians right now are very excited about what you just said. >> Well you know I reported to him experience was and then I began studying the life of Seneca and realized what an amazing historical figure he was. He was not only a playwright and a philosopher and had scientific writings as as well but he literally ran the Roman Empire for five years. >> And and it was considered I think they called it the silver age of Rome. He was considered a very good administrator. >> Yes, when he was tutoring Nero. >> Yeah, so here I am traveling to Seneca's birthplace and I get an email from a fellow named um um Engan. I'm now his first name is um he was became the the co-author with me. >> And I'm stumbling over his first name, but it'll come. >> Brendan Engan. >> Brendan Engan wrote to me out of the blue. I had no idea who he was. And he said, "I'm writing to you because my girlfriend bought me a psychic reading for my birthday. >> And uh and it happened to be with Kevin Ryerson, who was a good friend of mine, a trance channeler featured by Shirley MacLaine in her book Out on a Limb. >> Uh Kevin and I were good buddies, and uh this psychic reader told me that in a past lifetime I was a um good friend of Seneca's, I think Lucretius. Seneca wrote his epistles to Lucretius. uh he said that you were Seneca in a past life. And and so I'm reaching out to you because maybe we were together in a past And I thought, "How interesting. Here I am about to visit the birthplace of Seneca. And >> How could he know this? Could he know this? >> No. No, he just knew my email. He found my email at >> So you weren't public. You hadn't gone public about the Seneca vision yet. >> Well, now let me think. No, I hadn't gone public, but Kevin Ryerson was the trance channel who gave him the psychic reading had also uh done readings with me. >> And and that's I think that's the connection. >> That's it. But >> I've had many readings from Kevin and because he was a friend. And that was his thing. >> Nice to have access to that. >> Yeah. Well, as a parapsychologist I've had a lot of psychic friends along the way and they helped me from time to time. They've been very instrumental crucial moments. But I didn't have any reason to think I had been Seneca in a past lifetime and I wrote back to Brendan and said, "Well, it's quite an interesting synchronicity you would write to me about Seneca right when I am about to visit the city where he was born." And that's an example. I said, "This is all synchronistic." >> And are you talking about like Jungian synchronicity? >> Just things that just How would you describe it? He He had the scarab story. >> Well, and and there are some Jungians who have taken real issue with me over my use of the term synchronicity because I was using it in a kind of vague generic sense like I'm on my way to see Seneca and I get the email from you. And I had a Jungian who wrote back and said, "No, it must be at the very precise second." >> I don't I think that's debatable. >> I think so, too. But in any case I I suggested that there's something Jungian, something synchronistic that Seneca is a obviously a a psychic influence on me. It doesn't mean I was And but I thought it was interesting and Brendan and I stayed in touch and eventually uh other synchronicities began to occur between Brendan and myself. Uh for example uh when I was doing radio interviews on KPFA long ago I interviewed a fellow who had written a book called The Looking Glass God all about Taoism, the yin-yang symbol and uh and he had this book, The Looking Glass God, and I owned it. And I must have sold it at one point or another because Brandon told me he was in a bookstore in Walnut Creek, California, and this book, as he's walking along the aisles of the bookstore, fell on his head. And and he opened it up, and it's The Looking Glass God, and he saw my signature in it that I had once owned >> that book. >> Your book. >> And you were already in touch? >> Does he see this as a sign or >> Yes. Yeah, he said he said this is this is significant. He said we need to write an article. Or you need he said you need to write an article >> about what you just told me about the synchronistic connections that occur and are related to possible past life influences of of this sort. And I said, "Well, we can write it together." And and we did in I think 2007 or so, we published a jointly written article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance, and in which we [clears throat] talked about the idea that people who lived in in the ancient past can influence us, and we can have a whole series of synchronicities that support that influence. It doesn't necessarily mean it was a past life. It was an alternative to thinking about reincarnation, actually. >> I thought it was very a very interesting take, is that it's not necessarily reincarnation, it's just influence. >> Something about uh vibration in the universe, that conscious something something deeper. >> And I've subsequently met other people who have felt the same way about different historical figures. Jean Houston, who was a another mentor of mine, a person I greatly admired who said for her it was Proclus. >> Pro- Oh, that's amazing. >> Proclus who was another Neoplatonic philosopher, the last of the Neoplatonic philosophers and she said, "I I would be as a child just this phrase would come into my head, hocus pocus, I am Proclus." >> I think if I have a few of those myself. I I I don't have really spoken about them, but I think we all do. We find ourselves sketching a name, writing a word, saying a phrase. I think it's coming from somewhere. I think I have a similar relationship with William James. >> Do you? >> Well, Kevin Ryerson would maintain that I was William James in a past life and I've even had regressions to try and explore that. Uh so far nothing has convinced me that I was William James, but Walter Semkiw who got a lot of his information from Kevin Ryerson and wrote the book Return of the Revolutionaries about people's past lives that he had identified as a chapter in in which he describes why he believes I was William James and I gave him permission to do that provided he state that I don't accept it. >> Why don't you accept it? >> Because I don't have any concrete memories of having been William James. >> Okay, but that doesn't mean you weren't. >> No, it doesn't mean I wasn't and it just doesn't mean I was, that's all. >> What's his argument? What's his chapter about? >> Well, he talks about you know, how my career follows William James and >> From from science to mysticism and so forth. >> That you know, and I can see there's a kind of logic there. I can see why I might have been. I'll go that far and and I'm curious, you know, because he's my hero and that's why I think I couldn't have possibly been him because he's my hero. >> I don't know. He the establishment attacked him. He fought back and won. There's a lot of similarities. >> There are similarities. >> How do you think William James would think about you today? >> Well, I if I asked myself about that, I would say he probably say that he's definitely doing things that I would like to do, but he's he's a more shallow person. >> That you're a more shallow person? >> Yeah. Yeah, William James was a deep thinker. I don't purport to be. >> I don't think you give yourself enough credit. Um William James famously said there's a problem with the scientific method where a personal experience is just as valid as any type of science. >> Any objective reality >> is fact as part of science. And I I subscribe to that wholeheartedly. >> You're continuing his project. >> I I guess. I would I would say that I am. And I would say that uh he was a sickly man his his whole life. He was always visiting health spas because he had stomach problems and the like. And the one thing that I did experience under hypnotic regression, I began to have stomach pains and uh and so I would come out. I didn't want to go any further with the regressions. And one other little piece of information that came to me, I've never had it validated. If you can find anything that validates it, then I would regard that as evidential. Is that when he was younger people called him Billiam instead of William. >> I didn't know that. >> Well, I don't know if it's true. It's just something that came to me. >> That would be interesting to find that out. Someone would know that. >> If if there's any evidence that he was ever called Billiam instead of William, I I would say that that would count in favor of that I might have been William James or at least had access to that piece of information somehow. >> Have you had any new regressions that convinced you you were someone? >> None? >> Uh you had an interesting theory about soul energy, which I kind of agree with. Is that maybe William James maybe you are a little bit William James and he's he's spread out across a few people. >> Yeah, there are there are many people who have said and including people today who say he speaks to them from the afterlife even now. So, I I'm inclined to think that we all have access to what William James called the cosmic reservoir of consciousness or the Akashic records. We all have access to all knowledge. are we all one consciousness and these bodies are just a small expression of the same field? >> in favor of that perspective. what happens when we die? And I don't I don't mean the tunnel and the all of that just yet. I mean at that moment when the lights go out, what's going on inside? >> Well, consciousness persists, but I've experienced the total loss of consciousness in deep sleep. It could be like that. You might go into a a deep unconscious state until at some point you're awakened and maybe you're in another body or in another plane of existence. Or maybe you're conscious all the way through. George Harrison made a point of saying he wanted to be conscious through the death process and there's you know that he really worked toward that so there's and his wife Olivia at the time said, "If you would been in the room at the moment he died, there was such light you could have photographed it." >> That's I mean that's another shared death experience. >> That um that there's a there's a lot of documentation for that and specifically the light, the room changing, >> seeing figures. I'm specifically thinking about Raymond Moody's work >> who studied shared death experience for a while and then had one with his siblings when his mother passed away. >> His father arrived and they all saw him. They said, "Dad's here." They all saw it. They said the room changed shape. >> So I think there's something to that. >> You're not afraid? >> No, absolutely not. I'm I'm totally comfortable with the idea that I'll die and I'm going to be 80 this year so it could happen soon for all I know and I'm uh I'm I'm sure as I get closer there will be trepidations. I I was in the hospital earlier this year and was told I might have to undergo a very dangerous procedure and I I was nervous about it. It turned out that they didn't need to do it at the end of the day but uh you know, I'm sure I'll approach actual death with a certain amount of trepidation but at the moment I can say I look forward to it. >> I don't know if Janelle would be as optimistic but when did you when did that switch happen for you? We're all afraid of it. >> Yeah, it's sort of biological. >> It is and >> survival instinct. >> You know, I just I just wrote an episode where I called it the a curse that we know that we're going to die, but it can also be a gift because you can seize the moment. When did you stop being afraid? >> At some point as I began thinking about probably while I was writing my first book, The Roots of Consciousness, I began to appreciate the idea it's called um How does it go? Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. >> I'm stumped. >> Well, it means the development of the embryo recapitulates the entire evolutionary history of the species. >> It kind of does. >> Yeah, we start out as a single-celled organism of an embryo and and then we gradually evolve the early stages of the embryo. We begin to look a little bit like a fish or a reptile and until we become fully human. And it dawned on me if I just think of my whole body, the entire history of evolution exists. In effect even this body, even this physical form is the product of a billion years of evolution. >> And I began to perceive of myself as as actually a being who has been around at least a billion years. >> You can feel that. >> There's all these stories about famous people dying and seeing something saying, "Oh my god." or "I can't believe it." >> Um my brother was with my father when he passed a few years ago and he said, "Dad got up and saw something." there are stories another episode I'm working on of people who are near death who are close to brain death or dementia >> that suddenly sit up >> and are perfectly terminal lucidity. >> Terminal lucidity. It happened to my mother. >> It happened to your mother? >> What I don't want to get I don't want to pry what happened >> Well, I wasn't there at the time. My wife Janelle was with her in the hospital very close to her death maybe 2 weeks before and my mother had Alzheimer's. She was out of it completely. You couldn't have an intelligible conversation. She was always very sweet. I will say that and a pleasure to be around, but she sat up with Janelle. She was bright. She was lucid. She had a lengthy conversation with Janelle talking about the family and many many other detailed things. >> How long was the conversation? >> Maybe an hour or two. >> That's a long one. >> Did she call you? >> Well, she told me afterwards. I I don't know where I was at the time, but you know, I got a complete rundown of it and um 2 weeks later she was dead. >> What do you think is happening there? What are we seeing? Why are we lucid? >> Well, it seems to be a way of um or or or reinforcing. It's evidence that I would say reinforces William James theory of consciousness, which is that the brain doesn't generate consciousness. The brain functions more like a radio or television receiver. The signal is coming from elsewhere. Consciousness I I would say is is actually everywhere. >> It's uh it's like a filter. >> That we're and we're filtered into these individual consciousnesses, but >> And at some point when the brain starts breaking down just enough the the larger consciousness can kind of come through. The brain is no longer keeping it out because if we were in a state of cosmic consciousness where you have 360° vision and you know everything everywhere all the time, you couldn't survive. You You couldn't pay the rent. No. Pay the mortgage or feed the family. You have We We have to filter it out. >> This answers the hard consciousness question. This makes sense. >> Um terminal lucidity happens to people where their brains are damaged beyond repair. >> There's tumors. There's no way it could work. >> Someone who's never spoken their whole life could get gets up and starts singing. >> It's I don't think there's an explanation for that just yet. It's the William James is close as >> It's as close as we can come as to my knowledge. >> How do you um what is your take on soul groups? Life between lives. >> I don't know if you've ever read um Michael Newton's work. His >> Uh Michael Newton's work is quite interesting. I I haven't really studied it in in depth. I ought to. Um but what I can say is um F W H Myers. Uh Frederick William Henry Myers who wrote uh the classic book on life after death in published in 1903 posthumously called human personality and its survival of bodily death. It's a classic. A massive book incorporating all the findings developed by the Society for Psychical Research since it was founded in 1882. So, 20 years worth of scientific investigation and brilliantly put together. He maintained Where Where did we start? What was your initial >> Soul groups. >> Soul groups. Well, okay. Thank you for getting me back on track. After he died, as I say, the book was published posthumously. Some 30 years after he died, he he uh communicated entire books from the other side through a medium named Geraldine Cummins, who did automatic writing. >> Oh, I've got to look into this. >> And he wrote a book called um He wrote two books through her. And um now, the title is on the tip of my tongue. It'll come again. And but in those books, he's describing what the afterlife is like. >> He did He That's his? >> He's describing It's And I think of it as one of our best descriptions because he's the guy who spent his adult life pioneering the study of of the afterlife. And even before he died, he wrote that, you know, things are going on in the other side. They are doing their experiments. And And then he came back. And uh there was something called the cross-correspondences that the Society for Psychical Research studied for decades, in which Myers and others other deceased members of the Society for Psychical Research were coming back and proving that it was them because what they would do is create very unique messages that were poetic. Myers was a poet and a Greek scholar, among other things, and so they create these complex messages, but they would deliver part of it through a medium, let's say, in North America, part of it through a different medium in Europe, and part of it through another medium in India. all of the mediums were instructed, "Send your peculiar messages that make no sense whatsoever to the Society for Psychical Research." And they would put the messages together and see that they interlock with each other, and it's the same communicator coming through. So, that was Myers was doing this, and then some after 30 years in the afterlife dictating entire books. >> Well, how did he What did he see over there? How did he describe it? >> souls. That's where we were going. >> He said, "Yes, there are group souls, and you you get to different levels." He said, "We all have are part of larger soul groups. Some of them," he said, "might have 20 members. Some of them might have a thousand or several thousand." That That we are we share soul groups with. >> And soul communities that soul clicks? >> Cuz >> And Walter Semkiw, who wrote Return of the Revolutionaries, maintained, and I think uh most parapsychologists reject his work out of hand because they don't like um past life regressions, and they don't like mediums. Uh They like working with young children. But um >> Why young children? Because of the reincarnation stories? >> Yeah, the reincarnation story is not going to be contaminated >> uh if it's a young child who hasn't learned about these things because, you know, they don't know how to read yet or something of that sort. But an adult who comes up and remembers a past life in psychotherapy and I once was a past life therapist. I know it's a very powerful form of therapy, but I think on sometimes it's evidential of a real past life, but often it is not. In any case, once again, can you remind me where we were? >> I I think about it because sometimes you meet somebody and you just have a connection to them. >> Yeah. And Walter Semkiw maintained that there are soul groups and that the people who were the founding fathers of the United States of America, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the like were members of a soul group and they come back as and and they meet each other in the next lifetime and he felt he was John Adams. >> Does he have a feud with whoever Jefferson is? >> Well, he yes, as a matter of fact. >> He does, he really? >> Well, there was another person he identified as Thomas Jefferson and and they knew each other and had um some debates and arguments about it all. Yes. >> It's interesting because those two men died on the same day. And as I recall, John Adams' last words uh when he died were "Jefferson still lives." >> It's true. That's what he said. >> Bitter to the end. >> Well, but if it's unclear whether he was bitter about that he was dying cuz he didn't know Jefferson was dying on the same day or if he actually saw Jefferson in the afterlife still living. I hadn't considered that. >> That could be the other interpretation. It's not clear. >> Do you believe that our souls, when we go back, that we make a a choice in that consciousness like when we come back we choose our body we choose what we're going to try to learn to bring back. >> I think we have many options whether we're going to come back maybe which planet we're going to come back to or which realm of existence I think there are other levels of reality apart from physical reality and even within physical reality surely there are many other planets and and life forms that we could inhabit. >> So that means there's a lot of souls. If you're talking about you're talking about the universe? >> I and I think there you know what we call the universe meaning the three-dimensional or four-dimensional space-time that we inhabit is one possible level I think there are many other levels of reality but even within this level many many options so I I think there are lots of choices. Some people may never come back they'll just move on to higher levels or different levels. >> So you can choose to not come back? >> I think what happens is that you the the way people phrase it you are going to be with your guides. Now what that means could be just other parts of yourself or your larger self and and you're going to make a you're going to have a conversation about it and you'll make certain determinations like it occurred to me if I had been William James and I was going to come back I might have said I'd like to be a bit healthier >> this time around. Right. And and I might like to look better. >> Are you saying you're more handsome than the than William James? >> Well maybe. >> You are? >> I I I kind of you know I I have my vanity and I suppose I think that I was probably and I think he felt I don't think he felt good about how he looked. I could be wrong about that, but that's my impression. Because his father selected his wife for >> Like he needed his father to do it. >> Then I wasn't going to have that happening. >> No. No, I'm just thinking that >> But I think possibly Janelle was Alice [snorts] James. There's there's some some reason to think so. Walter Semkiw and Kevin Ryerson thought so. >> What reason? one of the things that Semkiw felt is that very often people maintain the same basic facial structure from lifetime to lifetime. And you see that for example in in his work with birthmarks. You know, that people care have birthmarks that might be the death wound of a previous lifetime. So some physical things carry from lifetime to lifetime and I actually think I especially if you see photos of me in the my early days when I had a beard, I kind of resembled William James, but better looking. >> And I kind of imagine if I had who were to fantasize about it that William James would have liked that. He might say, "This time around I'll be a more shallow person, but healthier [laughter] and better looking and still very interested in the things that interest me. And intelligent enough to make some progress. >> And a lot of those personality traits can carry over as well. >> So you do have that same I mean you're carrying it you you're continuing his >> I I think intellectually I feel very compatible with William James, but really he's far deeper thinker than I >> Well, what do you think why do you think you chose this path? Why did you make this decision? Because you're very impactful. You've impacted millions of lives. >> I wonder about it myself. And and because, you know, my father ran a furniture store in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and I imagined I'd probably grow up and run a furniture store. then somehow you know, what can I say? LSD must have had something to do with it. Uh because I was I you do have a kind of mystical experience under LSD. You begin to experience other realities. >> Can control. >> swirling around you and um you can look at another person and and you begin to see their face change as if you're looking at their past lives. And all of these things made me very curious. What's going on here? And I after having had in 1968 my first LSD experience, I was incredibly curious uh about all of this and began exploring mysticism and uh my best friend as I got in in to Berkeley was a guy who thought he could explain how LSD worked in the brain and how it uh imitated the serotonin molecule and took the place of serotonin in the nerve synapses of the brain, but didn't do what serotonin did, did other things. >> That's right. It's a lot of psychedelics are serotonin just kind of flipped. psychedelics could be allowing us to tap into universal consciousness? >> I think in in a way, yes. >> What did Terence McKenna think about that? >> Well, I hate to speak for Terence because because he was so eloquent >> and he could put things in into such beautiful phrases that that I can't do. >> I But how do you How do you feel? >> I I think he would be in agreement. >> Is that when I hear DMT stories >> even across cultures, they're all seeing the same entities, wood elves, all this stuff. >> It sound kind of silly until you line up all the cases together and it's it's all pointing to one thing and that there's that there's a field around us that we can tap into. >> And and you know, David J. Brown wrote the book on DMT entities. >> I interviewed him and he had an experience reminiscent of Ted Owens, the uh mantis being appeared to him >> under LS- under DMT and he says operated on his brain, which is the same claim Ted Owens made. And he's told me, I have it on He said there isn't a day in his life when he doesn't think about that >> You haven't been interested in a DMT experience? >> I I haven't had one. I have had ayahuasca, so I suppose Yeah, I have had ayahuasca, but not these days people inject DMT pure DMT. I haven't done that. >> What did you see during your ayahuasca journey? >> Well, now that you mentioned it, I had quite unusual experience. I It was as if I was in ancient Egypt and I was singing praises to the god Horus, that Horus is the most beautiful of gods. And it was a very profound connection to to Horus, who was an amazing deity. If you If you look at the history of all deities, Horus is in many ways you could say the predecessor of Jesus Christ. >> could. >> didn't you have a a sort of a flashing image of ancient Rome? >> I have had that. I don't know if it was at that occasion of ayahuasca. I think it might have been just I think maybe even in a normal state of consciousness for a split second. For just a split second, I felt like I was in Nero's palace. >> Did you see it or did you feel it? >> It was more of a feeling and it was so fast that it's hard to to capture it all, but it felt real. It felt like I was there. >> What What was the emotional feeling? I'm asking. >> Uh-huh. >> Is because the end of Seneca's life he they he they were he was bickering with Nero. Cuz Nero was building the big palace then when uh when Seneca had to kill himself. So, I'm just wondering if you if you appeared there and you were annoyed. Like look at all this opulence. >> so quick. It was only simply that I was there. I was really there. And then it ended. >> You're so lucky. So, ancient Egypt, were there entities or guides there during that journey? >> I can't say that there was. It was just a deep sense of connection with how magnificent Horus was as a deity. And and subsequently, I have uh uh felt that connection with with Horus. In fact, I happen to own a sarcophagus, a tiny little sarcophagus about 2 3 ft and it was used it's from ancient Egypt it goes back to the time of Moses and and it was a sarcophagus for a falcon. >> Wow, where did you get that? >> In Israel and my first trip to Israel in a little Arab shop they you know was interested in the Antiquities and they pulled that out of the back room and said look at this. It was very expensive but I >> I bet. >> I had to have it and I subsequently had it looked at by archaeologists who have told me this is the real thing. >> Did you feel any energy any emotion from that object? >> Well, something must have gotten me to pay many thousands of dollars for it. >> Cuz I think there's something to that to a residual energy with objects or locations. >> Did you visit Seneca's Villa his death place outside Rome? I have not is it still in in existence? >> It is it's about three it's mile marker three on the Appian Way outside Rome. >> Oh my. >> Pretty remarkable. >> Have you been there? >> I have. >> Yeah, that's where he was he was killed >> There's so many he's a great story. >> occurred to me to go there or to visit William James grave either. >> Oh I would I I bet you'd feel something at those places. >> I might yeah. But I would always doubt myself. I think I would say you know, you're making this up because of the history that you have and things that people have said. >> That's okay. That's even if you are that's okay. >> To make it up. >> It would be but on the other hand I thought you know, I'm here I'm living this life. I don't have to revisit those lives. >> So what was mission? What when you came back? Your soul sent you here to to achieve something. Have you Have you done it? >> I think so. I I think you know, when I expressed to Ted Owens, when he said, "What do you want to do with this power?" And I said, I want to be a communicator to the public at large, the mainstream culture about the realities of esoteric, paranormal, mystical world. And And that's been uh certainly for the last uh 10, 12 years since I launched the YouTube channel, I I've been doing it and and even long before that and the radio and television work I did. That's That's been my a career as an adult with with some detours along the way. >> Some fun detours. >> We normally end with with plugs, but we'll link to those, but this is This is too important. For people listening who are having experiences who are fear of death or things like that, do you have any message for them? What should they do? How should they think about it? >> Well, normally when I tell people about my life, I think if there's a lesson in it to that I can share with people, it's that if you decide that you want to become the best version of yourself, which would be, you know, being in touch with your purpose, your entelechy, that the idea of being that we are born each with a deep purpose, and it's going to be different for everybody. But if you want to get in touch with that part of yourself and live it, the universe wants you to do that, and the universe will help. The universe will open doors for you so that you can do that. >> So, just be open to the messages and follow >> the signs? >> Yeah. That seems to be what happened for me. And And I think I think it's largely true. Some, but not all, will be able to do that. >> Anything else that you want to say or impart before we go? >> Well, I would like to say that if if among your viewers, if there are people who think they'd like to dedicate their lives to the study of the paranormal, that we've created a a new program at the California Institute for Human Science, where you can get for the first time since the program at John F. Kennedy University shut down in the 1980s, for the first time in the United States, you can get a doctoral degree or a master's degree with a concentration or specialization in parapsychology. And I'm one of the directors of that program, and I'm currently actually teaching. >> I'm teaching a course right now on the practical applications of psi, which is the word parapsychologists use for ESP and psychokinesis. >> Well, we'll link to all of that. We'll put it all on screen so people can find you. Jeffrey Mishlove, thank you so much for coming in. This has been a joy. >> Thank you. It's been a joy for me, too. >> Bye, everybody. [snorts] That was the great Jeffrey Mishlove. [music] 50 years of research and 1,500 interviews in parapsychology. He's a legend. [music] Now, here's what we know. Jeffrey's PhD in parapsychology from UC Berkeley is real. He earned it in 1980, the first and only [music] parapsychology degree ever awarded by an American university. Skeptics tried to revoke it. >> Jeffrey filed a lawsuit and won, twice. The Bigelow Institute prize is also real. [music] Robert Bigelow funded a $500,000 award for the best scientific essay arguing consciousness survives death. >> Jeffrey's six judges voted unanimously. Now, for the bold stuff. Jeffrey told us he reached out in a hypnagogic [music] state in late 2022 to the consciousness of Ted Owens, who died in 1987. >> He asked Ted to keep Ukraine warm so civilians could survive Russia's attacks on the power grid. He says [music] a thousand temperature records broke across Europe in early January 2023. That is documented. Now, whether Ted Owens caused it from wherever [music] Ted is now, that's a different question. The Challenger warning claim. Jeffrey's 2000 book, The PK Man, >> documents the Christmas Eve call in detail. The O-ring failure that actually or allegedly caused the Challenger to crash is well documented. The call is something only Jeffrey knows. But, if that call happened, and I believe [music] it did, I think Jeffrey's still carrying some guilt about it, which is only natural. And here's what I keep coming back to, terminal lucidity. [music] People with completely destroyed brains from late-stage Alzheimer's sit up hours before death and have a final, clear, fully present conversation. >> Jeffrey's mother did it. As sharp as she'd ever been, she talked to his wife 2 weeks before she died for about 2 hours. This is a real phenomenon, and nobody has a good explanation for it. William James argued in 1898 that [music] the brain doesn't generate consciousness, it filters it. Like a radio receives a signal it didn't [music] produce. Terminal lucidity looks a lot like the filter breaking down just before it goes dark. Jeffrey Mishlove is the most credible living archivist of 50 years [music] of paranormal research, full stop. He knew the players, Targ, Puthoff, Vallee, Owens, McKenna, Monroe, [music] everyone. Whatever you make of his claims, he's a primary source for a part of science that the mainstream [music] would like to ignore. And when the mainstream pushes back on something, it's worth taking seriously. Jeffries full archive [music] is at New Thinking Allowed on YouTube. His book on Ted Owens is the PK Man on Amazon and the Bigelow essay is free. Search Bigelow Institute Consciousness [music] Studies and you'll find it. Now on the channel I've covered SRI and Project Stargate in a bunch of episodes as well as [music] the afterlife in the episode about the skull experiments. Links will be down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind and know that you are appreciated. [music] >> Oh, oh, oh, yeah. >> I played Bilali as an Area 51 a secret code inside the Bible said [music] I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music [music] songs ain't written like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes [music] the truth my friends and it never ends. No, it never ends. >> I fear the crack head I got stuck inside Mel's [music] hole with them kale chips. I'll be on my way to a way. Did Stanley [music] Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Oh, were the shadow [music] people there? The Roswell aliens killed off the smiling man I'm told >> and his name was cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the Feds, the head of the Feds >> on Thursday nights with Agent Mulder and the wild balls on repeat all through the night. All I ever wanted [music] was to just hear the truth, so the wild balls on repeat all through the night. [music] >> The Mothman [music] sightings and the solar storms still come to a god the secret city underground. >> Mysterious number stations, planets and both Project Stargate and [music] what the dark watchers found. We're in a simulation, don't you worry though. The black knight satellite is told. Oh, I can't believe I'm [music] dancing with the beast. Hexadecimal Thursday nights with AJ, and the wild balls on repeat >> all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the [music] truth, so the wild balls on repeat all through the night. Hexadecimal Thursday nights [music] with AJ, >> [singing] >> All I ever [music] wanted was to just >> Give me love today. Yeah, give me love >> on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to >> dance when the feeling is right all the wasting time. Gertie loved to dance. >> Gertie loved to dance. [bell]