Fringe-ology (7 page)

Kübler-Ross wondered how Schwartz could possibly know she was planning on quitting. But she also continued to question whether the entire event was transpiring at all. At the ghost's behest, she promised not to quit her work yet. And in return, she asked the ghost for a favor. “Will you,” she asked, “write a brief note for Reverend Imara?”

Mrs. Schwartz complied, taking a pen in her hand, then disappeared. We'll get back to that note. For now, understand her old patient's alleged reappearance as a ghost would become a prominent feature in the story of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. But for the moment, it was private. Kübler-Ross only outed herself as an experiencer of anything odd at all in 1975 when the author Raymond Moody asked her to write the foreword to
Life After Life
—the book that coined the phrase “near-death experience.” She and Imara looked over his manuscript. The experiences their own patients recounted were accurately mirrored in Moody's own research. They also believed he had written credibly. But there was something more: Kübler-Ross was changing. “At this point in my life,” she later wrote, “I was open to anything and everything. Most days I felt as if a curtain was being lifted to give me access to a world no one had ever seen before.”

This was also the problem. Because just then, vulnerable in the confines of a strained marriage, a grueling career path that was wearing her down, and new scrutiny related to her own investigation of the paranormal, she received a phone call. The people on the other end were Jay and Martha Barham, who had been drawn to her by coverage they had seen of her controversial endorsement of Moody's book. They called her from San Diego and promised her something more incredible than she had ever experienced, something that, deep inside, she longed for. They promised to introduce her to spiritual entities. They promised to reproduce the strange, sporadic mystical experiences Kübler-Ross had enjoyed—and to do so on demand.

The Barhams had found a fertile target. And the esteemed psychologist quickly booked a speaking engagement in San Diego so she could take a side trip to meet the Barhams, who met her at the airport and hugged her like old friends. From there, they whisked her to the Church of Divinity, where Barham channeled spirits for a congregation of about a hundred people. “On my first day there,” she later wrote, “I joined 25 people of all ages and types in the dark room [of a windowless building]. Everyone sat on folding chairs. Jay placed me in the front row, a spot of honor. Then the lights were switched off and the group began singing a soft, rhythmic hum that built to a loud group chant, which gave Jay the energy needed to channel the entities. . . . As the chanting reached a new, almost euphoric level, Jay
disappeared behind a screen
[my emphasis]. Suddenly, an enormously tall figure appeared to the right of me. . . .”

Over the ensuing months, Barham introduced her to spirit guides named Salem, Pedro, and an entity named Willie. This was strictly old-school, séance-style mysticism. In the 1930s people advertising themselves as psychic mediums turned out the lights and channeled the dead, asking the spirits to knock once for yes, twice for no. But really it was an assistant in on the gag or the medium making all the noise. Like the mediums of old, Barham, too, insisted all the lights be turned off—lest he or the spirits be damaged by the terrible power of the 60-watt bulb.

Kübler-Ross should have known better, but she was too vulnerable, it seems, to see straight.

Attempts were made to save her.

Her husband Manny answered the phone once to find what he took to be a man disguising his voice on the line. The man claimed to be Kübler-Ross's spirit guide. Manny hung up. How, he asked his wife, could she possibly fall for such obvious bullshit? But fall for it she did. She had quickly grown dependent on Barham and his church. And when she wouldn't give up this newfound mysticism, or the constant lectures, Manny asked for a divorce.

Ken says it was clear “they never stopped loving each other.” And because of his mother's hectic travel schedule, the kids lived mostly with their father. Without her husband or children, Kübler-Ross fled to the Church of Divinity. She acquired a parcel of land nearby and started a center she called Shanti-Nilaya, meaning the “final home of peace.” She put Barham to work as a full-time spirit channeler.

Manny still worried about her and made a phone call of his own—to Imara, who traveled to the center to investigate. He found the landscape around the center incredibly beautiful—forty acres of swaying trees and lakefront views. But what was happening inside was “pure evil.”

On the very first night, he sat through a séance. His friend had fallen for what he calls a “bad acting job.” But he was chilled, the next day, when he walked through a hallway in the center and noticed Barham in a common room, staring intently at a television with the sound turned down. Imara stood in the doorway and says he knew,
felt
, just what Barham was up to—immediately and in his bones. “That sick bastard was practicing reading lips,” he says. “Who
ever
does that?”

Was this one of Barham's means of gaining supposedly “psychic information”? Imara didn't care. He just wanted to get his friend away from the man, and tried, several times, to share his own observations with Kübler-Ross. But every time he said something negative, she interrupted him. She changed the subject. This told him all he needed to know. The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with whom he worked had never interrupted people.

She listened.

In old videos of her at the bedsides of the dying, Kübler-Ross can still be seen gazing so intently at the sick as they speak that she seems to have no other possible purpose but to serve as a kind of universal mother—the receptacle for her patient's woes. But this woman seemed trapped inside herself. “I think it was all internal,” Imara says. “This was about where she was and what she needed at the time.”

He also shared with me an observation that is key to understanding the paranormal—and coming to grips with the paradoxical tale of Kübler-Ross, the insightful psychologist who seemingly lost her own grip on reality. “The things we saw,” he says, “had been incredible, but they were sudden, and you couldn't count on them.”

The paranormal, as we'll find throughout this book, simply doesn't ever occur on demand. We move through this life on life's own prosaic terms, mostly. In the materialist formulation, we feed our stomach-furnaces with food to sustain us. We input and output information using our computer brains. We live in a Newtonian realm, where most everything, most all of the time, moves in precise, predictable, patterns. Kübler-Ross had, like many others before her and since, come to need someone or something in her life that could recreate those unexpected glimpses of something
other
—that could, metaphorically anyway, show her the tunnel of light she'd heard of in her patients' near-death experiences. And she needed it so badly, she could plainly no longer see past her hopes and wishes—to spot even the most obvious con. And so she looms, I think, as the ultimate cautionary tale for all those who wish to explore the paranormal: Here be dragons. And by 1979, they were at her door.

Time
,
People
, the
Los Angeles
Times,
and
Harper's
magazine all wrote in-depth accounts of Kübler-Ross's fall. And for a while, Kübler-Ross defended herself and Barham. She began to share the Mrs. Schwartz story at lectures and talks and endorsed all manner of nonsense. Things were bad, and they got worse. “Appearing at sessions in darkened rooms . . . ,” reads
People
, “these ‘entities' [Barham channels] have assumed human form and according to some reports engaged in sexual relations with church members.”

Church congregants noticed things they should have seen early on, things that had been painfully obvious to Imara. The supposed entities smelled of cigarettes, like Barham, and spoke with similar accents, pronouncing “escape” as “ex-cape,” for instance. Five women, each of whom thought they had sex with an afterlife entity, came down with the same vaginal infection. And finally, one of them did the unthinkable. She turned on the lights during one of Barham's channeling sessions. The entity that had supposedly materialized was Willie. But when the lights came on there was no spirit. There was just Barham. Naked except for a turban.

Kübler-Ross hung on to her fantasy for a while longer. But when Barham's explanations no longer satisfied her, she parted ways with him, the great psychologist now the victim of a very long con, carried out over four years.

A skeptical mind most certainly would have been helpful, a good, ruthless debunking was called for; because a too-open mind had ruined a reputation.

K
EN
R
OSS, THE GREAT
lady's son, now looks after his mother's foundation. When someone like me comes along, looking for information, he serves as gatekeeper. HBO worked with him as they tried to develop a script. The latest to give it a go is actress Melina Kanakaredes, formerly of CSI: New York, who was developing a script with the cooperation of Kubler-Ross's estate as I put the finishing touches on this book. She faces a significant challenge. Because Kubler-Ross's life won't submit itself to a neat, one-hour-and-forty-minute retelling.

In her life's final acts, after Barham, she seemingly reinvented herself yet again, working with AIDS patients throughout the 1980s, the new disregarded among the terminally ill, who faced a level of stigmatization perhaps not seen since the lepers of biblical times. Then began the series of debilitating strokes that ultimately ended her life. The story is difficult to tell not only because of all the events packed into it, however, but because the twists and turns could polarize an audience.

What do we do with the paranormal stories that accumulated around her? What do we do with . . .
the note?

Remember, Kübler-Ross asked the ghost of Mrs. Schwartz to write a note to Imara, the story goes, and the semi-transparent being complied. According to Imara, Kübler-Ross did hand over the note—it was addressed to him, after all—and he owns it still.

People have asked him for copies over the years, intending to analyze the handwriting, to compare it to a sample from Schwartz. An attorney from Florida recently implored him to submit the note for investigation. But Imara said no. “One more argument behind that woman's name is not something I'm going to contribute to,” he says.

His math is simple, and unassailable, and provides a fitting end to this tale: if the handwriting doesn't match (as seems to me by far most likely), skeptics will use that information to undermine the veracity of everything Kübler-Ross ever said. But as Imara puts it, the “story about Mrs. Schwartz is nothing. It is inconsequential, in comparison to the many things that happened. Things I witnessed myself.”

Believers, in turn, would argue, less logically, that a change in Mrs. Schwartz's handwriting style might reflect some effect of, I dunno, crossing over? But, as unlikely as it seems, what if the note
did
match some existing sample of Schwartz's handwriting? Well, even that wouldn't get us any closer to real answers: skeptics would just holler fraud—or more profitably point out that handwriting analysis is downright subjective, arguably not science at all.

This tale ends, then, in the mire, the debate so polluted that sometimes, for the people involved, it seems best simply to permit no further inquiry. And so the life of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross will continue to be punctuated both by exclamation points and question marks—the sum of a life spent collecting the last stories of the dying.

The Curious Conflict Between Telepathy Skeptics and Believers

Because something is happening here. But you don't know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?

—Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

I
n 2001, British physicist Brian Josephson was asked by the Royal Mail, Britain's postal service, to write a short essay commemorating a new series of Nobel Prize–themed stamps. He could have just written the standard thing—extolling the virtues of science and urging kids into the field. But what he delivered, and the Royal Mail published, deviated more than a few degrees from standard. “Quantum theory is now being fruitfully combined with theories of information and computation,” Josephson writes. “
These developments may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science such as telepathy, an area where Britain is at the forefront of research.
”

The mention of telepathy, invoking the paranormal, caused a furor. And in response, some of Josephson's fellow physicists railed to the press, accusing Josephson of having “hoodwinked” the Royal Mail into printing falsehoods.

Josephson, a Nobel Prize winner, is an avowed believer in telepathy. (In this chapter, I use the umbrella term
psi,
which includes telepathy and covers any theoretical ability to gather accurate information outside our five normal sensory pathways.) Claims of psi-ability have been with us for millennia. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that, in 550
B.C
., the Oracle at Delphi predicted precisely when the king of Lydia would be boiling a lamb and a tortoise in a brass cauldron. Hardly as valuable as predicting, say, the winner of the Super Bowl. Still, the Oracle got gold and silver for her trouble.

Today, in the modern West, psychics can also earn their share of filthy lucre. But the mainstream view of psi is contentious, to say the least, and Josephson's full-bodied embrace of psi is surprising—not least because he could easily have continued down the less nettlesome path he had forged for himself. As a graduate student, Josephson had correctly predicted that a phenomenon called “quantum tunneling” was more powerful than previously thought. His research led to Josephson Junctions, in which two layers of superconducting material sandwich a (very) thin layer of nonconducting material. This construction allowed electron pairs to “tunnel” from one side to the other, leading to a vast array of practical applications, like microchips and MRI machines. In short, Josephson's discovery is among the most important technological leaps of the past half-century. But because of his interest in psi, some now portrayed him as a figure of disrepute. He had gone “off the rails,” they claimed in the wake of his offensive sentence, his intellect somehow damaged by his long-running study of telepathy.

“It is utter rubbish,” David Deutsch, a quantum physics expert at Oxford University, told the
Observer
newspaper. “Telepathy simply does not exist.”

BBC Radio invited Josephson to defend his position against two skeptics—the key one, for our purposes, being American James Randi. A former stage magician, Randi has been debunking all things paranormal for roughly forty years. And given the opportunity to confront Josephson, he attacked. The magician accused the physicist of invoking the “refuge of scoundrels” in referring to quantum mechanics and further claimed there was “no firm evidence” for telepathy a reputable scientist would accept. But there is a problem here. Because the evidence submitted for psi is vast, and so competently assembled, some more fair-minded skeptics have been forced to concede important ground. “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven,” says psychologist and skeptic Richard Wiseman, in a January 2008 edition of the
Daily Mail
.

Remote Viewing (RV) is the claim of a real Mind's Eye—the ability to see things and describe them accurately without being bodily present to see them at all. This seemed a startling admission. And Wiseman was asked to clarify. As expected, he claimed to have been misquoted—but not in the way we might think. He wasn't referring
only
to remote viewing, he said. He was describing the entire field of telepathy—or psi research in general. What's more, fellow U.K. skeptic Chris French
agrees
with him. “I think Richard's right,” he told me. “For an ordinary claim, the evidence we already have would be sufficient.”

The issue, as described by both Wiseman and French, is that telepathy is no ordinary claim. The finding of an as yet undiscovered sensory capacity might force us to question all kinds of scientific truths—in physics and neuroscience, just for starters. So, the thinking goes, the evidence provided for telepathy must be as extraordinary as the claim itself. Which, they maintain, it isn't.

It seems, then, when the evidence for psi is closely reviewed, the reputation of Brian Josephson can safely be removed from hell (the Landing Place of Scoundrels) and cast into purgatory (the Landing Place of Stuff We're Still Debating). What we'll learn here, in the muddled middle, is that psi proponents and naysayers seem diametrically opposed—like rival families in the Ozarks, pop-eyed with adrenaline that can only come from really, really wanting to shoot someone else in the heart. But truth be told, the skeptics are far more like the believers than they first appear. And in a very real sense, psychic slayers and psychic supporters are, shockingly, both right.

I
WALKED TO MY
first session of the Parapsychological Association's (PA) summer 2009 meeting through a light Seattle mist. Though I knew that most of the leading researchers in the field of parapsychology would be here, I didn't know quite what to expect. This was an academic conference, and the talks promised to be incredibly technical. But I did have an impromptu introduction to one of the weekend's speakers. I had checked into a dormitory on the University of Seattle campus the previous night and run into a big, bald-headed man out by the elevators. The hallway was cramped, and we were ostensibly here for the same reason, so I introduced myself.

“How you doing Steve!” the man replied, pumping my outstretched hand as if we were old friends. Before I knew it, I'd been invited to sit at a desk in the tiny dorm room of Paul H. Smith, a former military man who had carried out remote viewing trials for the U.S. Army.

I'd come here, I thought, with an open mind. I'd read the scientific literature on remote viewing, pro and con. I knew the Army really did have a remote viewing program, investing money and facilities in a network of psychic spies. But until I sat with Smith, those were just words on a page. Remote viewing is such a strange idea. Theoretically, a viewer can “see” things with his or her mind—no matter how many miles away, underwater, inside cabinet drawers, and even in outer space. Not even time is a factor, as proponents of remote viewing claim to see the past and the future. Confronted by Smith, I was a little dumbfounded that this big, matter-of-fact Texan was here, talking to me about mind sight.

“I was skeptical about it, too, when I started,” Smith told me. “But I wanted to see if it was real.”

I wondered if I was smirking at him. Because seeing things at a distance just didn't fit into my own personal experience, and seeing someone
up close
who claims to see things at a distance felt even stranger. I'd imagined that recruitment into this odd military experiment was conducted with equal weirdness. Perhaps the sergeant in charge read his morning coffee grounds? But Smith had been brought aboard after a couple of innocuous conversations with a neighbor on the Fort George G. Meade military base. The neighbor was involved in the remote viewing program, a fact he concealed from Smith. But when he saw Smith had some talent for drawing, he tapped him for a tryout. Over the next couple of years, Smith put his artistic talent to use—trying to see unknown targets with his mind's eye and sketch them for his superiors. He had his share of success, he told me. And on that first night in Seattle, we talked for more than an hour—me mostly feeling odd that Smith himself seemed so credible, a plainspoken Texan who retained the upright bearing and polite demeanor of a career soldier.

The next morning, after worrying about whether or not my skepticism had shown, I kept looking in vain for some crowd of people all headed in the same direction, figuring they would lead me to the first conference session. But no crowd ever materialized. And it was only after I saw Smith walking across campus with the steady gait of a soldier that I found my way. The conference organizers at the Parapsychological Association had warned me the gathering would be small. Just how small came as something of a shock. I counted maybe thirty people on hand for the morning's first presentation, a panel dealing with the role that belief systems play in science. “Dick Shoup continues to work on psi-related issues, undistracted by any significant funding,” read the bio of one of the panel's participants.

The line got a nice laugh from the audience and set the tone for a real budget catering affair, all of it held in one college lecture hall, with a table out front at the breaks holding bottles of water, raisins, and the occasional cookie. In my capacity as a journalist, I've attended enough professional functions to know where the money is (trial attorneys throw the fanciest parties). And clearly, I found, there is no money in psi research.

On one level, this might not be so surprising. After all, the participants had arrived to spend the weekend discussing a phenomenon many don't believe exists. Perhaps more commonly known under the heading of ESP, or extrasensory perception, the Greek letter
psi
is employed by physicists to depict a quantum mechanical wave function, and by paranormalists to cover four main areas of research: telepathy, or a connection between separate minds; clairvoyance, or “clear seeing,” which would encompass remote viewing; precognition, somehow perceiving events in the future; and psychokinesis, or PK, which might mean bending a spoon or influencing the output of a random number generator, affecting the physical world using only the power of our consciousness.

The attempt by paranormalists to co-opt a term employed by physicists probably speaks to two things: one, they think the mechanism by which a “sixth sense” works is physical, and scientific, not immaterial and unverifiable; two, they need, want, wish,
long for
the imprimatur of mainstream science.

In his 1979 paper, “Experimental Parapsychology as a Rejected Science,” University of Pennsylvania sociologist Paul D. Allison surveyed members of the Parapsychological Association. What he found was a small group of dedicated and demonstrably qualified psi researchers who reported that they had been routinely discriminated against by their mainstream, university bosses in hiring, promotions, publications, and funding research.

Thirty years later, after eating my share of raisins at the PA's small, dispirited annual conference, I wondered if anything had substantively changed. I contacted Allison, who dug up a draft of the questionnaire he submitted. I reshaped it as an online survey, had a techie friend slap it on the Internet, and asked the PA's current membership to respond.

What I found is that the relationship between psi researchers and mainstream science remains the same: more than half of my subjects felt they had been discriminated against or were aware of some kind of discrimination having been waged against a psi researcher. That figure was down only marginally from Allison's survey. Further, nearly half of my respondents felt they had been denied funding or facilities for the crime of studying psi. I received just thirty responses, less than half of what Allison got. But these self-reports matched the downbeat parapsychogical procession I had witnessed with my own eyes. And maybe that
is
to be expected. Maybe parapsychologists don't
deserve
funding. Maybe this state of affairs shows how well science works, and nothing has changed substantially in the way parapsychologists are treated because their findings remain stagnant. But that seems an unlikely answer. Because their findings have changed—a lot.

There are several major areas of psi research. But I'll quickly sketch out three here. (Readers interested in exploring the research personally should consult my Notes and Sources section, which includes information on many studies, the vast majority of which were published in the past twenty years.) Let's start with remote viewing, one of the most prominent and successful areas of psi research to emerge in the past three decades. The military conducted a lot of its own experiments to see whether remote viewing worked.The protocol the Army employed went something like this: a viewer in training is set up at a table. His supervisor gives him some minimal piece of information, like latitude and longitude coordinates, or merely tells him to focus on “the target,” without being given the foggiest clue what the target might be. The viewer is supplied with a pen and paper to record his or her presumably psychic impressions, usually in a sketch. In these trials, any written impressions produced by the viewer—in words or pictures—are given to an independent judge. The judge is also supplied with four photos, one of which displays the target. The judge, blinded to the true target, then matches the viewer's report to the image he feels it most closely resembles, giving any viewer a 25 percent shot at scoring a hit purely by chance.

In practical applications of remote viewing, the Army simply took what information the RVer provided and looked for anything that might contain actionable intelligence. Few dispute that the Army's remote viewers occasionally scored remarkable hits or dazzle shots along with their misses. Pat Price accurately described a military installation, including some current and past activities and even the site's code name. Joe McMoneagle, one of the most (in)famous RVers, was asked to see the content of an airplane hangar. In this instance, he was even given a photo of the hangar's exterior. His handlers were trying to fool him, figuring he might start drawing pictures of airplanes. Instead, he drew a tank parked inside the hangar, accurately depicting the vehicle's interior, including laser range-finding equipment, visual systems to compensate for low-visibility conditions, and cutting-edge computers.