The Field (29 page)

Bessent’s laboratory premonitions had been highly successful, with seven of a total of eight considered right on target. In a second series, Bessent proved he was able to successfully dream about future targets as well as those he’d just seen. By the time the dream lab was closed in 1978 through lack of funding, they’d amassed 379 trials, with an astonishing 83.5 per cent success rate of present and future dreams.
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Dean Radin thought of a novel twist for how to test for a premonition. Instead of relying on verbal accuracy, he’d test whether our bodies were registering any foreboding of an event. This idea was a simplified variation on the dream research. The Maimonides tests were expensive, requiring eight to ten people and a day or so for each experiment. With Radin’s protocol, you could get the same results in 20 minutes, at a fraction of the cost.

Radin was part of the small inner circle of consciousness investigators, and one of the only scientists who’d deliberately chosen this field of investigation rather than coming to it through the back door. His involvement in this particular brand of research had to do with the peculiar marriage his life had made of science and science fiction. Radin was 50, but despite the presence of a thin black moustache and a receding hairline, he’d retained the knowing, childlike look of the child prodigy he’d once been. His particular instrument of precocity had been the violin, which he’d played from the age of five up until his mid-twenties. Only lack of physical stamina had caused him give up what might have been a promising career as a concert violinist. World-class musical performance requires nothing less than a superb athlete willing to practice and play for hours every day, honing the mechanics of fine motor control, and Radin came to realize that nothing in his spare physical makeup possessed that level of robustness. It was natural that he would move on to his next great love, fairy tales – the prospect of a secret, magical world. But the same type of precision and detachment that had led to his competence with the violin also made for a skillful investigator, a natural for studying forensic evidence or digging out elusive clues. His first-grade teacher noted the matter-of-fact forthrightness and seriousness of purpose in this slight child and correctly forecast his future vocation. What Radin really wanted to bring into his own juvenile laboratory was magic. He’d wanted to take magic apart and study it under a microscope. By the age of twelve he’d already begun carrying out his own ESP investigations.

Through ten years of university schooling, first in engineering, then a doctorate in psychology, and even a first job in the human factors division of Bell Laboratories, the workings of consciousness and the outer limits of human potential continued to be his chief passion. He’d heard of Helmut Schmidt’s machines, and before long he paid Schmidt a visit and came away with a borrowed RNG to conduct some studies of his own. Almost immediately, Radin began getting good results – results as good as Schmidt’s. This was too important to be a career sideline. Radin lobbied to work with some of the scientists already in this field, and began doing the rounds, at one point working at SRI and then at Princeton University before setting up his own consciousness laboratory at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, a remote academic outpost where he hoped he might be left alone.
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Radin’s initial contribution to this research was the hard statistical grind. Much of his earlier work entailed replicating or providing mathematical verification of the research of his colleagues. It was he who’d worked out the meta-analysis of the PEAR REG studies, among others.

Radin had studied the dream-research data that existed on premonitions. What interested him was whether people had the same sort of clear foreboding when they were awake. In his lab in Las Vegas, Dean set up a computer that would randomly select photos designed either to calm or to agitate, arouse or upset the participant. Radin’s volunteers would be wired up to physiological monitors that recorded changes in skin conductance, heart rate and blood pressure.

The computer would randomly display color photos of tranquil scenes (pictures of nature or landscapes) or scenes designed to shock or to arouse (pictures from autopsies or erotic materials). As expected, the participant’s body would calm down immediately after he or she observed the tranquil scenes, and become aroused after being confronted by the erotic or disturbing. Naturally, study participants recorded the largest response once they’d seen the photos. However, what Radin discovered was that his subjects were also anticipating what they were about to see, registering physiological responses
before
they’d seen the photo. As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was disturbing. Blood pressure would drop in the extremities about a second before the image was flashed. Strangest of all, possibly reflecting that Americans are more unsettled about sex than violence, Radin discovered a far higher foreboding with the erotic than with the violent. He realized that he had some of the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciously anticipate and act out our own future emotional states. It also suggested that the ‘nervous system is not just “reacting” to a future shock, but is also working out the emotional meaning of it’.
¹¹

Radin’s studies were successfully replicated by his Dutch counterpart, a psychologist called Dick Bierman at the University of Amsterdam.
¹²
Bier-man went on to use this model to determine whether people anticipate good or bad news. In studying the electrodermal activity of people involved in another published study which was examining learned response in a particular type of gambling card game, Bierman found that the participants registered rapid changes in EDA response
before
they were handed out their cards. Furthermore, these differences tended to correspond to the type of cards they got. Those about to receive a bad hand were more rattled and had all the hallmarks of a heightened fight-or-flight response.
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This would seem to indicate that, on a subconscious physiological level, we have an inkling when we are about to receive bad news or when bad things are going to happen to us.

Radin tried another test of seeing into the future using a variation on Helmut Schmidt’s machine. This type of machine was a ‘pseudo random event generator’, still unpredictable, but through a different mechanism. In this instance, a seed number, or initiating number, would kick off a highly complex mathematical sequence of other numbers. The machine contained 10,000 different seed numbers and so 10,000 different mathematical possibilities. The pseudorandom number generator was designed to produce sequences of random bits, or zeros and ones. Those sequences with the most ‘ones’ in them were deemed the best sequences and there-fore the most desirable. The object was to stop the machine at a particular moment, on a particular seed number, to initiate the best sequences.

That, of course, was the trick of it. The window of selection was impossibly small; as the clock in the computer ticks 50 times a second, your correct seed number would flash up in 20 millisecond windows – ten times faster than the reaction times of human beings. To be successful at this, somehow you had to intuitively know that a good seed number was coming up and press the machine down precisely at that exact millisecond. As impossible as it sounded, this was exactly what Radin and his SRI boss, Ed May, did. Over hundreds of trials, Radin and May were somehow able to ‘know’ just when to hit the button to achieve the favorable sequence.
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Helmut Schmidt was consumed by a delicious possibility: the prospect of turning back time. He’d been thinking about how the effects he’d been seeing with machines seemed to defy space or causation. What began taking shape in Schmidt’s mind was almost an absurdity of a question: whether a person attempting to affect the output of one of his machines could do so
after
it had been run. If a quantum state was as ethereal as a fluttering butterfly, did it matter when you tried to pin it down, so long as you were the first to attempt it – the first observer?

Schmidt rewired his REG to connect it to an audio device so that it would randomly set off a click, which would be taped to be heard in a set of headphones by either the left or right ear. He then turned on his machines and taperecorded their output, making sure that no one, including himself, was listening. A copy of the master tape was made, again with no one listening, and locked away. Schmidt also intermittently created tapes that were to act as controls, those where no one would ever try to affect its left – right clicks. As expected, when they were played, these control tapes had left and right ear clicks that were more or less evenly distributed.

Then, a day later, Schmidt got a volunteer to take one of the tapes home. His assignment was to listen to it and try to influence more of the clicks to come into his right ear. Later, Schmidt had his computer count up left and right clicks. His result seemed to defy common sense. What he found was that this influencer had changed the output of the machine,
just as if he’d been present when it was being recorded in the first place
. Furthermore, these results were just as good as his ordinary REG tests, as good as if someone had been sitting in front of the machine.

After carrying out a number of these tests, Schmidt realized that an effect was going on, but he didn’t think his participants had changed the past, or erased a tape and made a new one. What seemed to have happened was that his influencers had changed what had happened in the first place. Their influence had reached back in time and affected the randomness of the machine
at the time it was first recorded
. They didn’t change what
had
happened; they affected what would have happened in the first place. Present or future intentions act on initial probabilities and determine what events actually come into being.

Over more than 20,000 trials in five studies between 1971 and 1975, Schmidt showed that a highly significant number of tapes deviated from what was expected – roughly 50 per cent each of left and right clicks. He got similar results using machines that moved a needle on a dial, left or right. Of 832 runs, nearly 55 per cent had more left-hand needle moves than right.
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Of all the studies on time travel, Schmidt’s were probably the safest. Since a copy of the results had been made and locked away, it eliminated the possibility of fraud. What they showed decisively was that PK effects on a random system like a REG machine can occur at any time, past or future.

Schmidt also found that it was important for the influencer to be the first observer. If anyone else heard the tape first and listened with focused attention, the system seemed to make it less susceptible to influence later. Any form of focused attention seemed to freeze the system into final being. A few sparse studies even suggest that observation by any living system, human or even animal, seemed to successfully block future attempts at time-displaced influence. Although these types of studies have been thin on the ground, they accord with what we know about the observer effect in quantum theory. It suggests that observation by living observers brings things into some sort of set being.
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Bob Jahn and Brenda Dunne also began playing around with time in their own REG trials. In 87,000 of their experiments, they asked their volunteers to address their attention to the machine’s operations anywhere from three days to two weeks
after
the machine had been allowed to run. Once they looked at the data, what they found was incredible. In every regard, this data was identical to the more conventional data they’d generated when their experimenters were attempting their influence at the time the machine was being run – the differences between women and men were still there and overall population distortions were the same. There was just one important difference. In the ‘time-displaced’ experiments, the volunteers were getting bigger effects than in the standard experiments every time they’d willed the machine to produce heads. However, because of the relatively small numbers, Jahn and Dunne had to deem this weird effect non-significant.
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A number of other investigators tried this kind of backward time travel to influence the gerbils running in activity wheels or the direction of people walking in the dark (and hitting a photobeam), or even cars hitting a photobeam in a tunnel in Vienna during the rush hour. The revolutions on the wheels and hits of the photobeam were converted into clicks, and taped, stored and played for the first time between one day and a week later to observers, who attempted to influence the gerbils to run faster or the people or cars to run into the beam more often. Another study attempted to see if a healer could retroactively influence the spread of blood parasites in rats. Braud had even done his own studies recording the EDA response of certain individuals and asking them to review their response and try to influence their own EDAs. Radin had carried out a similar study with EDA tapes and healers. Schmidt had studies where he’d tried to affect his own prerecorded breathing rate. All told, ten of the nineteen studies showed effects significantly different from chance – enough to indicate that something out of the ordinary was going on here.
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It was results like these that most troubled Hal Puthoff. The type of zero-point energy he was most familiar with was electromagnetic: a world of cause and effect, of order, of certain laws and limits – in this case, the speed of light. Things did not go backward or forward in time.