Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier

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> In the U.S.S.R., researchers file reports on blindfolded women who can "see" colors with their hands.

> In California, ex-Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who while on the Apollo 14 moon mission conducted telepathy experiments with friends on earth, founds the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His new mission: investigate occurrences that will not yield to rational explanation.

> In London, Arthur Koestler examines psychic research with the zeal of the believer. Koestler, one of the foremost explicators of Establishment science (The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation), speaks of "synchronized" events that lie outside the expectations of probability. In anecdotes of foresight and extrasensory perception, in the repetition of events and the strange behavior of random samplings, Koestler spots what he calls the roots of coincidence. In his unforgettable metaphor, modern scientists are "Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity." That keyhole is stuffed with ancient biases toward the materialistic and rational explication and, consequently, away from the emerging field of psychic research. Once skeptics abandon those prejudices, says Koestler, they will be free to explore fresh concepts and new categories.

That exploration is already being conducted by a number of serious paranormalists in a wide range of disciplines. In his Foundation for the Research on the Nature of Man, in Durham, N.C., the grand old man of paranormal studies, J.B. Rhine (see box page 70), still keeps watch on test animals for precognitive powers. At the nearby Psychical Research Foundation, William Roll and a research staff investigates "survival after bodily death." In studies with a "sensitive" and his pet cat, Roll finds evidence for a human ability "to leave" the body and "visit" the animal. At the University of Virginia Medical School, Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson also studies the plausibilities of reincarnation.

At the Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics of the Maimonides Medical Center, Dr. Montague Ullman directs tests in which message senders "think" images into the brains of sleeping subjects. "If we had adequate funding," says Ullman, "we could have a major breakthrough in this decade." In Connecticut, Businessman Robert Nelson directs the Central Premonitions Registry, meticulously recording the prophecies of the dreams and visions that people send him.

All of these researchers believe to some extent in the existence of some form of paranormal psychic powers. But the forms are open to wide debate. Says Psychologist Gardner Murphy, professor at the District of Columbia's George Washington University and a dean of psychic researchers, "It may well turn out that parapsychology will be a multidisciplinary thing, owing much to psychiatry, neurology ... medicine, biochemistry, social sciences." One of parapsychology's most famous proponents, in fact, is an anthropologist: Margaret Mead. It was her passionate advocacy that helped give the Parapsychological Association its greatest claim to legitimacy. After several vain attempts to enter the eminent American Association for the Advancement of Science, the P.A. won membership in 1969—after a speech by Mead. Her argument: "The whole history of scientific advance is full of scientists