How Shaky Are the Saudis?
TERROR IN THE GULF
Newswee
July 8, 1996: $2.95
Out There
From
Independence
Day' to
'The X-Files,'
America Is
Hooked on the
Paranormal
28
'Independence Day's'
Will Smith
01134
07062889
LIFESTYLE
Alien In
Some very nasty extraterrestrials are
coming to conquer us in the movie
Independence Day.' Pop culture
has already been captivated by all
thin
hot
How
mail
vasion!
things paranormal, from psychic
hot lines to out-of-body experiences.
How did this far-out stuff get so
mainstream? BY RICK MARIN
TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
UFObia: An
ID4' saucer
arrives to
eliminate
Manhattan
J
LIFESTYLE
A
MAN WHO ONCE
worked for NASA is
lecturing a couple of
hundred normal-
looking Americans
in the exceedingly normal-
looking ballroom of the
Asheville, N.C., Radisson.
His name is Brian O'Leary,
and he is not normal. Just
look at him. The guy is wear-
ing a shiny periwinkle shirt
under his gray suit and is
talking to a giant purple pig
puppet. "We are no longer at
the top of the cosmic pecking
order," O'Leary berates the pig puppet.
Then, addressing this national meeting of
the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial
Intelligence, he explains, "People like Carl
Sagan, Stephen Hawking and the pig are
mouthpieces for the old way of thinking."
They do not believe in UFOs. O'Leary
does. So do the members of his audience,
who gaze raptly at a slide show of everyday
scenes with little flying saucers in the back-
ground. Some of these even manage not to
look like pie plates or Frisbees. Paul Walk-
er, an Asheville bookkeeper who calls him-
self an "open-minded skeptic," says he's
here listening to the pig-puppet man be-
cause he wants the answer to one simple
question: "What else is there to life beyond
this dimension of existence?"
He's not the only one. According to a
NEWSWEEK Poll, 48 percent of Americans
believe UFOs are real and 29 percent think
we've made contact with aliens. Another 48
percent think there's a government plot to
cover the whole thing up. In April the gov-
ernor of Nevada officially renamed State
Route 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway be-
cause of the frequency of UFO "sightings"
reported there. Last week three men were
arrested on New York's Long Island for
plotting to assassinate local officials who
the men believed had concealed a UFO
landing. The American Astronomical Soci-
E.T.
ety recently announced the discovery, in
deep space, of a building block for amino
acids, the foundation of life on Earth. Less
reputable stargazers claim to have seen
Elvis eating fried chicken on Uranus.
We're in a major alien moment, even
more intense than the "Chariots of the
Gods" mania of the '70s. This week the
baddest aliens of all arrive-flying the
baddest saucers you've ever seen-in "In-
dependence Day," projected to be a sum-
mer blockbuster of galactic proportions
'The truth
is out
there':
David
Duchovny
and
Gillian
Anderson
of "The
X-Files'
(page 51). They blow up New York, Wash-
ington and Los Angeles, then we fight
back. Actually, we kick their alien butts,
thanks to the planet-saving heroics of Jeff
Goldblum (geeky science guy), Bill Pull-
man (cool president guy), Will Smith
(wise-cracking fighter-pilot guy) and an
awesome arsenal of special effects. If
aliens ever do invade, we should forget
about our primitive weapons and fight the
bastards with special effects.
Predictably, almost every purveyor of
Astronomers have found the
building blocks of human life
in space; less reputable
stargazers claim to have seen
Elvis eating fried chicken on Uranus
50 NEWSWEEK JULY 8, 1996
**
pop culture has been busy cash-
ing in on this renewed obsession
with little green men. Disney
World has revamped Tomor-
rowland to include an attraction
called ExtraTERRORestrial
Encounter. This fall, your tele-
vision sets (do not adjust them!)
will be invaded by clones of
Fox's huge supernatural soap,
"The X-Files": more paranoid
sci-fi fantasies about alien ab-
LEFT TO RIGHT: KOBAL COLLECTION, MICHAEL GRECCO-FOX
to
oft
T
V
in
pl
T
fe:
bit
C
us
ductions, government cover-ups and who
killed JFK. "Contact," directed by "Forrest
Gump"-ster Bob Zemeckis, and Tim Bur-
ton's campfest "Mars Attacks!" are just two
of the 11 UFO movies on the way. "Starship
Troopers," from "Showgirls" director Paul
Verhoeven, will hopefully answer the burn-
ing question: is there lap dancing in space?
But UFOs aren't the only paranormal
phenomenon scrambling our brain waves.
The best-seller lists are seldom without a
few helpful manuals on how to be em-
braced by the light, or a prophecy of the
Celestine variety. And it's not only the
usual crystal-grippers and "Jerry Springer"
guests who are into this stuff. Forty per- |
cent of those polled by NEWSWEEK admit-
ted to believing in the supernatural. All
manner of weirdness has taken hold of
otherwise sensible people. Hillary Clinton
is imagining conversations with Eleanor
Roosevelt. Sony has set up an ESP lab.
Designer Donna Karan says that in pre-
vious lives she was, among other things,
a cowgirl and a painter in the court of
the Medicis.
Now, Donna may be a fashion designer,
but she's not crazy. She's not one of those
wackos who think aliens built Atlantis and
that reptilian sewer-dwelling dwarfs were
'Earth, You Have a
Problem': Kaboooom!
responsible for the missing-children scare
in the '80s. The lunatic fringe represents
one end of the paranormal spectrum. At the
other end are sober researchers who think
there might be something out there worth
looking into (page 54). The interesting peo-
ple are the ones in the middle. Donna. The
guy in the next cubicle. The woman who
runs your division. They have families.
They can tell a joke and usually know
where their car keys are. Yet they had their
house exorcised before moving in and can't
wait to see John Travolta get telekinetic in
his new movie, "Phenomenon" (page 64).
The extent of their belief drops them some-
Aliens invade the Land of the Free. BY DAVID ANSEN
W
HILE WE'RE ON
the subject of the
paranormal, has
anyone noticed
something almost ... extrasen-
sory going on in Hollywood?
(Cue the theremin music.)
Somehow everybody in town
knew, before a foot of film was
seen, what the three summer
blockbusters would be:
"Twister." "Mission: Impossi-
ble." Independence Day. The
first has already grossed more
than $211 million. The second,
more than $156 million. The
third will explode on the
Fourth of July weekend to
record-book figures.
In some weird way, the suc-
cess of these products was pre-
ordained-by the multimil-
lion-dollar mumbo-jumbo
marketing. Few civilian
moviegoers actually speak
warmly of "Mission: Impossi-
ble"; they find it cold and con-
fusing. "Twister"? The com-
puter tornadoes are great. But
did anyone give a flying cow
whether some Ping-Pong balls
got sucked up by a funnel? No
matter: there are a few high-
concept movies that have been
deemed Events, and Ameri-
cans resist them at the peril of
becoming aliens themselves.
Zapped: The White House is blasted to bits
you
Which brings us to "Inde-
pendence Day." Unless
were sharing a cabin with the
Unabomber, you already
know what it's about (space
aliens invade the planet,
Earth fights back). So does it
live up to the hype? Well, if I
were a 10-year-old boy, I'd
probably think it was the
coolest movie going. Actually,
I saw this movie when I was
10, for it turns out to be a rein-
carnation of a cheeseball '50s
B science-fiction flick, albeit a
B movie that cost $70 million
and comes with a PG-13 rat-
ing, which means its ideal au-
dience needs Mom's and
Dad's consent. (Give it.)
Brought to you by the "Star-
gate" partners (director
Roland Emmerich and his
producer and co-writer, Dean
Devlin), "Independence Day"
has the saving grace of not
taking itself seriously: it
knowingly serves up recycled
popcorn. One of Emmerich's
inspirations was '70s disaster
movies; as in those lumbering
epics, we're given a medley of
wildly divergent characters
coping with the imminent de-
struction of the planet.
There's the president of the
United States (an improbably
cast Bill Pullman, keeping a
straight face). Will Smith is a
fighter pilot so cocky he leaps
into an alien spacecraft no hu-
man has ever seen before and w
zooms off into battle. Quirky
Jeff Goldblum is the smart
Jewish cable guy who is the
only person in the world to
figure out the evil invaders'
communication system. Judd
Hirsch is his father, supplying
borscht-belt comic relief.
There's Randy Quaid swag-
gering around as a dipso crop-
duster who claims he was
once abducted by aliens, and
Vivica Fox as Will Smith's
girlfriend, a stripper who
dances only to support her kid
(have we wandered into an-
other summer movie here?).
Even Harvey Fierstein shows
up, camping giddily.
In the course of this ami-
ably gung-ho adventure, New
York, Los Angeles and Wash-
ington are destroyed, and
Houston is contaminated by a
nuke set off in a vain attempt
to destroy a 15-mile-wide
alien ship. Yet the surviving
characters react to this apoca-
lypse as if it were a mild flu
epidemic. "How do I look?"
perkily inquires the about-to-
be-wed stripper, evidently
having recovered from
mourning the deaths of every-
one she knew in L.A. The dia-
logue is tacky, the characters
stock and the special effects 4
no improvement on anything a
George Lucas did 20 years
ago. Which is not to say you le
won't have some fun at this
cheerful destruction derby,
but just to prepare you for
deep silliness. In the old days,
this terribly important Event
would have been on the bot-
tom half of a double bill.
JULY 8, 1996 NEWSWEEK' 51
1
"
LIFESTYLE
where along the slippery slope from "X- | launching "The Living Theater of the Soul,"
Files" viewer to alien abductee.
Colleen Fogerty has never spotted a
UFO, but she sees auras all the time. A 49-
year-old hospital-administration consul-
tant in Minneapolis, she's been known to
turn boardrooms into Ouija-boardrooms.
"I'll be sitting in a meeting and a vaporlike
apparition will come out of people and tell
me what's really going on in that meeting,"
says Fogerty. "Now try to concentrate
when that's going on. It's, like, 'Scoot!'"
She doesn't channel spirits from The
Other Side much anymore. "It makes me
dizzy." But she does rely heavily on ESP.
"These administrators can't for the life of
them understand why they can look for a
person for a year and I give them one in a
week." She is, after all, a headhunter.
Strange things are going on
in Minneapolis. Twin Cities
business consultant Deborah
Savage and her restaurateur
husband head a neo-Masonic
group that studies the teachings
and consciousness-enhancing
methods of Armenian mystic
G. I. Gurdjieff. These lawyers,
nurses, teachers (and one air-
line baggage handler) all aspire
to the group's enigmatic inner
circle. "The aim is to move to-
ward a higher level of being,"
Savage says. "People become
attracted to this after they dis-
cover there's more to life than
material wealth."
Horst Rechelbacher, CEO of
the Aveda beauty-salon chain,
discovered that 20 years ago
when he gave up a life of drugs
and debauchery as a jet-setting
hairstylist to the stars and got
heavily into meditation. He now
refers to his company as his
"spiritual practice" and is a
devotee of shamanic journey-
ing a sort of tourism for the
soul, where you never have to
worry whether they take Ameri-
can Express. "I like to bring my-
self into a state that I call alpha,
which is tranquillity," he: says.
"I
call it brain-wave surfing." Late-
ly he's been surfing with New
Age healer-to-the-stars Deepak
Chopra. Together they're con-
cocting a line of "wellness"
elixirs designed to give your au-
ra that extra bounce and sheen.
Eric Utne, founder of the hipster
digest The: Utne Reader, excit-
edly predicts "shamanic jour-
neys will be for people in their
30s and 40s and 50s what rock
concerts are for people in their
teens." Later this year, Utne is
a paranormal road show where astral fellow
travelers can commune and pay way too
much for T shirts.
Why has this vast middle class of credu-
lous neospiritualists sprung up over the last
few years? Boomers approaching their gold-
en years are still searching for Meaning in
their lives, something more transcendent
than an old Grateful Dead record. Disillu-
sioned Gen-Xers, prone to conspiracy theo-
rizing, are convinced they have a better
chance of encountering an alien than they do
of collecting Social Security. It's a substitute
religion for people who haven't got one and
a supplemental one for those who already
do. Carl Jung called flying saucers "techno-
logical angels," a modern mythology com-
bining science with a notion of salvation.
"I want to believe" is the movement's (and
the moment's) mantra. These very words
are inscribed on a UFO poster behind
Agent Mulder's desk on "The X-Files," the
hit TV show that has codified and popular-
ized once obscure lore about the alleged
alien crash landing near Roswell, N.M., in
1947. According to legend, the remains of
the spacecraft's alien passengers are now at
a secret air force base in Nevada known as
Area 51, where they were autopsied. Earlier
this year Fox aired a program called "Alien
Autopsy," a sensationalist pseudodocumen-
tary of this very event. "Independence Day"
takes us inside the same base. "The truth is
out there" is another "X-Files" slogan that
neatly skirts the issue of how much of this
mythology is or isn't, or might just maybe,
possibly be true.
A Guided Tour of the Twilight Zone
UFOlogy: Belief in little
green men from distant
planets
MECCA: Area 51,
"secret" Nevada base
alleged to house a
crashed UFO
SACRED TEXT: 1947
newspaper accounts of
the crash
CELEB ADVOCATES:
Laurence Rockefeller,
alt-rock icon Perry
Farrell
'This Island Earth's' ET
Out-of-body experi-
ences: Traveling into
another body or the
next county
'White light' glimpsed at
near-death experiences
MECCA: Monroe Inst.
for out-of-body re-
search, Char-
lottesville, Va.
SACRED TEXT: "Life
After Life," by
Raymond Moody
CELEB ADVOCATE:
"The Celestine
Prophecy" author
James
Redfield
Shamanic jour--
neying: Soul-
traveling through
upper and lower
worlds to learn
"healing" lessons
MECCA: Ameri-
can Southwest,
for proximity
to Native
Americans
SACRED TEXT:
"Way of the
Shaman,"
by Michael
Harner
Channeling and
psychics: Using
people as
conduits for
chatty, other-
worldly beings
MECCA: Se-
dona, Ariz.,
and Santa Fe,
N.M., spiritual-
energy vortices
SACRED TEXT:
"Channeling,"
by Jon Klimo
CELEB ADVOCATE:
Shirley MacLaine
The old turban and crystal ball bit
Hands-on healing:
Using meditation,
crystals or "subtle
energies" to influence
Venice, Calif., faith healer
the body's health
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Alien
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MECCA: Deepak
SACR
Chopra's planned
"Para
retreats in San Diego
and New York
Caspe
SACRED TEXT: "Tibetan
friend
Book of the Dead"
by Robert A.
Thurman (Uma's dad)
CELEB ADVOCATES:
Donna Karan,
George Harrison
Telepathy, ESP,
psychokinesis:
Psychic com-
munication, mind
over matter (spoon
bending)
MECCA: Princeton
Univ.'s PEARLab
V
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52
NEWSWEEK JULY 8, 1996
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: ARCHIVE PHOTOS, ANDY SNOW-ZUMA IMAGES,
M. GRECCO-STOCK SHOP, EVERETT COLLECTION (4).
LESTER GLASSNER COLLECTION-NEAL PETERS, EVERETT COLLECTION
omy
Like more conventional religions, para-
normalism has a strong millennial compo-
nent. "There's going to be a boom econ-
in this [subject] at least until the year
2000," predicts Dennis Stacy, editor of the
UFO Journal. Every thousand years, peo-
ple expect the heavens to open up
and
reveal either God or little green men.
"Independence Day" plays shamelessly to
'Close Encounters
Boardrooms have
become Ouija-board-
rooms. In meetings, says
one medical consultant,
Judgment Day eschatology, with its fiery 'vaporlike apparitions will come out of
people and tell me what's going on.'
scenes of mass destruction, heaving dark
firmament and plague of locustlike aliens.
As one of the teenagers the movie is clear-
ly aimed at might say, "It's, like, Biblical,
dude." Totally. Dean Devlin, who co-
wrote and produced "Independence Day,"
wanted his movie to be about "how will
Iwe react at the end of the world?" Ronald
Reagan used to carry on about the same
thing. "Star Wars" (intergalactic Armaged- |
don) as opposed to "Starman" (friendly
alien falls to Earth and looks like Jeff
Bridges) is the narrative du jour. Gone are
the cuddly Spielbergian fairy tales of
super-
Aliens and UFOs are the most prominent paranormal obsessions, but that's just a slice of the
natural. From psychokinesis to cryptozoology, here's a clip-n-save directory to "The Other Side".
(brain-wave
experiments)
SACRED TEXT:
"Parapsychology: A
Casper, the user-
friendly ghost
www.
Controversial Science,"
by Richard Broughton
CELEB ADVOCATES:
Dionne Warwick, Dan
Aykrod
Bigfoot, Seattle's first
grunge rocker
Apparitions & ghosts:
Souls who have been
sidetracked on their
way to the afterworld
MECCA: Edgar Allan
Poe's grave in
Baltimore
SACRED TEXT: "ESP,
Hauntings and Polter-
geists," by Loyd
Auerbach
Witchcraft:
Casting spells
MECCA: Salem,
Mass., site of
witch trials in
17th century
SACRED TEXT:
"Witchcraft: The
Heritage of a
Heresy," by
Hans Sebald
488
benevolent beings from the sky. In "Inde-
pendence Day" alien-loving earthlings
gather on top of the Library Tower in L.A.
with placards saying WELCOME! and TAKE
US AWAY! They are among the first to fry.
As "X-Files" creator Chris
Carter says, "Steven Spielberg
did two wonderful alien
movies a long time ago. The
new approach is more apoca-
lyptic, and that's interesting."
Not coincidentally, Carter's
next TV series, moving into the
"X-Files" time slot this fall, is
called "Millennium." Fox is
optimistically hoping its view-
ers will know what the word
"millennium" means, even if
they can't spell it.
Christopher Lee's Dracula
Cryptozoology:
Freakish fauna
like Bigfoot and El
Chupacabras, the
"goat sucker"
MECCA: Pacific
Northwest, Florida
SACRED TEXT:
"Mysterious
World," by Arthur
C. Clarke
Vampires: The
undead, who drink
blood and wear weird,
"goth" clothing
MECCA: Hollywood
SACRED TEXT:
"Interview With
the Vampire," by
Anne Rice
SOURCE: THE INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES; THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
THE PARANORMAL.
Who says witchcraft isn't a viable modern religion?
When the end of the world
does come, it seems safe to say
there'll be a home page devot-
ed to it on the World Wide
Web. Already the Internet has
attracted a critical mass of
sci-fi dweebs, paranormalists
and conspiracy theorists who
crowd sites like The Alien
Exploratorium. "The under-
ground population was there
and interested, just like mili-
tias," says UFO Journal editor
Stacy. "The Net simply makes
that information available." If
the paranormal is a new kind
of religion, the Net is where its
gospels are being written and
spread to an ever widening
body of the faithful. Linked
sites cross-reference one user's
fantasy to another's paranoia
to another's casual voyeurism.
On America Online's Para-
Scope site, launched in April,
hundreds of thousands of sub-
scribers read and jabber about
everything from UFOs to
sightings of El Chupaca-
bras, the demon "goat-sucker"
blamed for various farm-ani-
mal deaths in Florida and the
Southwest. The Chupa is the
Bigfoot of the '90s. Naturally,
JULY 8, 1996 NEWSWEEK 53
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ea
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}
1
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LIFESTYLE
he has his own Web site, though he may
still be looking for a corporate sponsor.
Is all this nonsense harmless or perni-
cious? Much of it is merely modernized
pagan folklore about faeries and change-
lings. Chris Carter points out that "writers
have always used the supernatural, para-
normal, mystic and miraculous to tell sto-
ries." Hey, "Independence Day" is just a
ba
Is There Anything to
It? Evidence, Please.
movie, right? Sure, but every time a Holly- Science on the fringe. BY SHARON BEGLEY
wood movie or "Communion"-like book
penetrates the public consciousness, up go
reports of alien encounters, sightings and
paranormal experiences. Such is the fluid
interplay between pop culture and the col-
lective unconscious. Talk-show confes-
sionals and the Net encourage not just
writers but everyone to use these fantasies
to tell the stories of their own lives. The
part of our brain that used to be filled with
hobgoblins and incubi is now populated by
bug-eyed aliens or creatures with Spanish
names that suck the blood from goats. We
dream in imagery manufactured in the lab-
oratories of Hollywood or downloaded
from AOL.
sponge
poor
There is a psychic toll. Listen to the
young woman who told the International
UFO Congress and Film Festival in Mes-
quite, Nev., that she was abducted by aliens
and sexually "probed," that the little men
"took eggs out of me" and gave her a "very
detailed
bath." You think, this
woman is crying and could use some seri-
ous couch time. Then it turns out it's taken
six regression-therapy sessions to recover
these so-called memories. Scary. John Hor-
rigian, a Boston software salesman who
moonlights as paranormal investigator and
debunker, says, "There are definitely lu-
Alien³
S
AY THIS ABOUT ASSERTIONS THAT ALIENS
have been, are or will soon be landing on
Earth: at least a scenario like that of "Inde-
pendence Day" would not violate any laws of
nature. In contrast, claims in other fringe
realms, such as telepathy and psychokinesis, are
credible only if you ignore a
couple or three centuries of
established science. That
alone does not mean that
the claims reflect self-de-
ception or hoaxes, as skep-
tics assert. But it does mean
that the standard for ac-
cepting the claims is higher
than it is for, say, accepting
that aspirin reduces a man's
risk of a second heart at-
tack. As Cornell University
astronomer Carl Sagan puts
it, "extraordinary claims re-
quire extraordinary evi-
dence." Here are the exper-
iments that offer the best
evidence of paranormal
Every time a
probe for the existence of
telepathy, experiments
have a "sender" in an isolat-
ed room look at a randomly
selected "target" (magazine
ad, art print, movie clip) for
30 minutes or so. Then the
experimenter, ignorant of
the target, shows the "re-
ceiver," in another room,
that image plus three de-
coys. The receiver rates
how closely each image
matches her thoughts dur-
ing the isolation period. By
chance alone the receiver
should score a hit one time
in four, for a 25 percent suc-
cess rate. In a 1985 analysis
of 28 studies from several
labs, the late Charles Hon-
orton of the University of
Edinburgh calculated a
UFO movie or TV combined hit rate of 35 per-
show penetrates
our collective
unconscious, reports of alien
sightings and abductions go up
natics out there, but if all these claims are
hoaxing and lying, we've got a serious
pathology affecting this country." He's
right. We do.
Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A
Space Odyssey" and noted millennialist,
once observed: "Two possibilities exist:
either we are alone in the universe or we
are not. Both are equally terrifying." It's
enough to make you call one of those psy-
chic hot lines. Almost.
With ADAM ROGERS and T. TRENT GEGAX
54 NEWSWEEK JULY 8, 1996.
phenomena and some
of the objections to their
conclusions:
Telepathy. Strap half a
Ping-Pong ball over each
eye. Cover your ears with
headphones and lose your-
self in the white noise. You
are now supposedly in an
ideal state to receive anoth-
er person's thoughts. To
cent. A run of 354 sessions
by Honorton, reported in
1994, yielded 32 per-
cent. And a recent run at
Edinburgh, using arts stu-
dents, got a nearly 50 per-
cent hit rate.
Was it telepathy? Some-
experiments failed to take
into account that people
hearing white noise think
about water more often than
sex (or so they say); if beach-
es appear more often as a
target than a couple in bed, a
high hit rate would reflect
this tendency, not telepathy.
Also, receivers tend to
choose the first or last image
shown them; unless the ex-
perimenter makes sure that
ANDREW BRUSSO, EVERETT COLLECTION (LEFT)
YIELD
Is it psychic, or is
it sleight of hand?
The Amazing
Randi
the target does not appear
in the first or last place more
often than decoys do, the
hit rate would be mislead-
ingly high.
Skeptic Ray Hyman of the
University of Oregon found
that, in the Edinburgh runs,
video targets that were used
just once or twice had hit
rates of about chance, while
+
PRINZES
those
more
"telep
How
run th
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playe
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from
belie
mor
the V
scru
men
"clea
says
those appearing three or
more times yielded a
"telepathic" 36 percent.
How come? A video clip
run through a player sev-
eral times may look dif-
ferent from one never
played for the sender;
a canny receiver would
choose a tape that looked
"used" over one that
didn't. Also, of the 28
studies Honorton ana-
lyzed in 1985, nine came
from a lab where onetime
believer Susan Black-
more of the University of
the West of England had
scrutinized the experi-
ments. The results are
"clearly marred," she
says, by "accidental er-
rors" in which the experi-
menter might have
known the target and
prompted the receiver to
choose it. Researchers
have been hoodwinked
before. Says magician
James (The Amazing)
Randi, "I can go into a lab
and fool the rear ends off
any group of scientists."
Psychokinesis. The
most credible experi-
ments in whether mind
can affect matter come
from the Princeton Engi-
neering Anomalies Re-
search laboratory, found-
ed by rocket engineer
Robert Jahn in 1979. (In
response, Princeton
stripped Jahn of his dean-
| ship.) In Jahn's experi-
ment, an electrical diode
produces, at random,
equal numbers of posi-
tive and negative electric
pulses. The machine also
counts how often the
pulses alternate: plus-mi-
nus-plus-minus. Then a
volunteer concentrates
on making more, or few-
er, pulses match this pat-
tern. After more than 14
million trials, Jahn has
found a persistent effect:
in every 1,000 trials, sub-
jects somehow produce
one more or one fewer
match than predicted by
chance. The odds that
this is a statistical fluke
are 1 in 5,000. In a similar
vein, Dean Radin and
colleagues at the Univer-
sity of Nevada, Las Ve-
gas, tapping into the local
resources, found that of
the five days with huge
slot-machine payouts,
four came on days with a
full moon, when psychic
powers supposedly soar.
The odds on that happen-
ing by chance are
2 in 1,000.
That's worth
further study. But
it means little un-
til independent
labs replicate it.
As for Jahn's re-
sults, there are a
couple of puzzles.
First, one of the
subjects, rumored
to be on Jahn's
staff, is responsi-
ble for half of the
successes even
though he was in
just 15 percent of
the trials. Second,
some peculiari-
ties in how the
machine behaved
suggest that the
experimenters
might have ig-
nored negative
data. Jahn says
this is virtually
impossible. But
other labs, using
Jahn's machine,
have not obtained
his results.
Researchers
plead that para-
normal phenome-
na are extremely
subtle. For in-
stance, explains
psychologist
Daryl Bem of
Cornell Universi-
ty, if the hit rate
for telepathy is 34 per-
cent, then an experiment
with the typical 30 ses-
sions has less than 1
chance in 6 of finding
the effect.
UFOS. The possibility
that intelligent life exists
far beyond our own has
grown more plausible in
just the last year, thanks
to the discovery of the
first planets (seven) orbit-
ing other suns. Sure, the
existence of extraterres-
trials requires more than
a habitable rock orbiting
a stable star. But other
demands that life begin
and evolve, that a civi-
lization arise and send
emissaries to distant
worlds-are looking
more likely, too. Biolo-
gists hot on the trail of
how a soup of molecules
sprang to life, for in-
stance, suspect the
process isn't that diffi-
cult. Says astronomer
Frank Drake of the Uni-
versity of California, San-
ta Barbara, "It's widely
accepted in the scientific
community that there are
other civilizations.'
But do UFOs come
from such a civilization?
Witness accounts are not
proof. Photos come clos-
er. But Joe Nickell of the
Committee for the Scien-
tific Investigation of
Claims of the Paranor-
mal, a group of skeptical
scientists who check out
UFO sightings, spoon
bendings and similar
claims, has amassed a
catalog of ordinary ex-
planations for UFO pho-
tos. A blister in the emul-
sion can create a round
object in the photo, for
instance. And computers
make perpetrating UFO
hoaxes as easy as coun-
terfeiting the old $100
bill. Says Drake, "There
is not one accepted fact
that would lead one to
conclude UFOs are
extraterrestrials."
Believers are right in
complaining that their
results are subjected to
more scrutiny, and after-
the-fact nitpicking, than
those in any other field.
But then, no other field
makes such extraordi-
nary claims.
With ADAM ROGERS and
PETER BURKHOLDER in
New York and WILLIAM
UNDERHILL in Edinburgh
JULY 8, 1996 NEWSWEEK
55