edgescience_07

8/6/2019 edgescience_07

1/20

EdgeScienceCurrent Research and Insights

Number 7 AprilJune 2011

A publication o the

Society or Scientifc Exploration

A New Primate Speciesin Sumatra

also i this issue

The Mageta PheomeaA Medium in Bazil

Courtig Disaster?The Need fo Eathquake

Advisoies in Califonia

A Lost CivilizatioUderfoot

The Uses and Misuses ofQuatum Jargo


2/20

CONTENTS

EdgeScience #7AprilJune 2011

EdgeScience is a quarterly magazine.Print copies are available fromedgescience.magcloud.com.For further information, see edgescience.orgEmail: [email protected]

Why EdgeScience? Because, contrary to public

perception, scientic nowledge is still full ofunnowns. What remains to be discovered whatwe dont now very liely dwarfs what we do now.And what we thin we now may not be entirely corrector fully understood. Anomalies, which researcherstend to sweep under the rug, should be activelypursued as clues to potential breathroughs and newdirections in science.

PBSE: The Society for Scientic ExplorationET: Patric uyghe

ASSATE ETS: ic Blasband,ominique Surel

Bk EEW ET: P.. Moncreif

TBTS: Marsha Adams, Adam avies, Brendaunne, obert Jahn, Stephen Jett, Stanleykrippner, avid abhan, Andrew Paquette

ES: Smythtype esign

The Society or Scientifc Exploration (SSE)is a professional organization of scientists andscholars who study unusual and unexplainedphenomena. The primary goal of the Society is toprovide a professional forum for presentations,criticism, and debate concerning topics which arefor various reasons ignored or studied inadequatelywithin mainstream science. A secondary goal is topromote improved understanding of those factors

that unnecessarily limit the scope of scienticinquiry, such as sociological constraints, restrictiveworld views, hidden theoretical assumptions,and the temptation to convert prevailing theoryinto prevailing dogma. Topics under investigationcover a wide spectrum. At one end are apparentanomalies in well established disciplines. At theother, we nd paradoxical phenomena that belongto no established discipline and therefore mayoffer the greatest potential for scientic advanceand the expansion of human nowledge. The SSEwas founded in 1982 and has approximately 800members in 45 countries worldwide. The Societyalso publishes the peer-reviewed Journal o

Scientifc Exploration, and holds annual meetings inthe .S. and biennial meetings in Europe. Associateand student memberships are available to the public.To join the Society, or for more information, visit thewebsite at scienticexploration.org.

PESET: William Bengston, St. Josephs ollegeE-PESET: Bob Jahn, Princeton niversitySEETA: Mar rban-urain, Michigan State

niversityTEASE : John eedEPEA AT: Erling Strand,

stfold ollege, orway

opyright 2011 Society for Scientic Exploration

3

14

16

17

THE OBSERVATORYDreams Are Memories

Andrew Paquette

FEATUrES

A New Primate Species in SumatraAdam Davies

The Magenta Phenomena:

A Medium in BrazilStanley Krippner

Courting Disaster? The Need for EarthquakeAdvisories in CaliforniaDavid Nabhan

NEWS NOTEBOOK

REFERENCE POINTA Lost Civilization Underfoot

A review by Stephen Jett of

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly

Obsession in the Amazon

by David Grann

BACKSCATTERThe Uses and Misuses of Quantum Jargon

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne

9

20

Cover art by Alan Marks. Drawingbased on a description given Marks byBritish journalist Debbie Martyr, whoclaimed to have seen orang-pendekduring a 15-year project, unded byFauna and Flora International, todocument the primates existence.

5


3/20

EDGESCIENCE #7 APRILJUNE 2011 / 3

{THE OBSERVATORY|

Dreams are memories. They are not simply a series othoughts, images, or emotions occurring during sleep,

as Merriam Websters dictionary describes them. Those thingsmay be involved, but that is just another way to describe howthe various elements o a dream are remembered. What hap-pened to you today? Was it a collection o thoughts, images,and emotions? No. What happened to you today were a serieso events that you participated in, either passively or actively.Your memory o your day, however, can be described using thedictionary defnition or dream, apart rom one thing: youwerent asleep.

Why is there a special word or memories that originaterom sleep, when there is no special word or memories related

to waking activity? Because it is not generally accepted in west-ern cultures that anything real happens during sleep, there-ore, they are not memories, because there is nothing real torecall. Instead, the images themselves are the dream, like ab-stract paintings made by an artist without a model. This is likesaying that the videotaped ootage o a birthday party is thesame as the party itsel, except it denies the birthday party everhappened and accepts only the ootage. From what is this oot-age supposedly created? According to Freud, repressed desires,combined with memories rom our waking lives, are enoughto raudulently manuacture even the most vivid, magnifcent-ly detailed dream. More modern theories state that dreams arethe by-product o chemical activity in the brain. It is wrong,

but in academic circles, it is de rigueurto accept some permu-tation o this theory. Both o these ideas are dependent upona wholly mechanical view o lie, all o which is soulless, therandom by-product o purely physical orces.

To prove this wrong, one needs only one dream, onememory retained ater sleep that is demonstrably connectedto something real but outside ones own experience. Thereare reports o many such dreams throughout history. Theyare mostly isolated incidents, occurring on only a handul owidely spaced occasions in any given persons lie. Regardlesso incidence, i any one o these are what they purport to be,then everything weve been told about dreams is wrong. In myown lie, I have had hundreds o dreams that convincingly cor-

respond with things that could not possibly be connected withanything I could be expected to know or imagine. These aredreams o uture events, such as the 9/11 disaster, the BoxingDay tsunami, the Gul War (both o them), o people at distantlocations, riends, amily, and strangers, people at the momento death or severe distress, dreams o uture Timemagazinecovers, and many more things. They are so numerous that tosomehow retain a belie that dreams are literally some kindo accidental by-product o brain activity or repressed desirewould make no sense. How does random brain activity or arepressed desire create a dream o a uture plane crash?

Over the last twenty years, I have made an eort to re-cord, analyze, and understand my dreams. This avocation o

mine was inspired by the social riction I encountered everytime my knowledge o what dreams truly are came into con-ict with daily lie. This happened ar more oten than onemight think, because so many belies are dependent on othercore belies. I a person does not believe in the existence o asoul then their perspective on all things related to death willbe aected by it. Beyond that, it can have a pronounced eecton other lie decisions, such as divorce, money, and career.It can aect ones taste in poetry, music, flm, and books. Ittouches so many aspects o ones lie, that a dierence o opin-ion may be noticed in myriad ways. I ound mysel constantlyconronted with contrary attitudes on this subject, as well asgreat curiosity. It is or this reason that I have decided to put

down on paper a description o my experiences, and an expla-nation o what they mean.

My records are extensive, and the wealth o inormationthey contain has proven enough to suggest some very intrigu-ing possibilities. At the very least, certain dreams completelydestroy commonly held skeptical arguments against precogni-tion, telepathy, and out-o-body-experiences. That is the smallstu, however. Our sleep memories are more than the occa-sional intersection o the supernatural with our physical envi-ronment. They are a continuum o shared experience, some-thing we all participate in at some level, whether to a weakdegree or strong. They are memories o our other lie, livedin another place, and with each other. Our memories may be

ragmentary and riddled with mistakes, but i you make theeort you will see that they are not just images, they are recol-lections. I you know this, you can begin to work on improv-ing your memory, and then you too will see that a dream isnot a dream, it is something much, much, more.

ANDREW PAQUETTE started

his career in ew or ity as

an editorial artist. e went on

to become a comic boo artist,

animator, and art director in the

video games industry, and has

wored in ollywood as an ef-

fects artist in such popular lmsas Space Jam and Spider Man.

e currently teaches computer

graphics. For a very brief time,

he showed his paintings of the

American southwest at the Taos

allery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Paquette rst noticed his psychic

experiences while building his

career in ew or. ver time, they established themselves as a regu-

lar part of life. This column is excerpted from his boo on the subject,

Dreamer: 20 Years o Psychic Dreams and How They Changed My Lie,

published by Boos in March 2011.

By Andrew Paquette

Dreams Are Memories


4/20

4 / EDGESCIENCE #7 APRILJUNE 2011

Our team not only spoke to eyewitnesses, but we also oundootprints, which we made casts o, as well as hair samples.

The FootprintsDavid Chivers, a primatologist at Cambridge University, hasexamined the cast o the ootprints we brought back and hasno doubt that they are rom an unknown primate. Theseootprints were very exciting, very unusual because they wereo mixed character rom all the dierent apes and humans,said Chivers. They have toes that are shorter, more like hu-mans, the heel is like nothing in that it is curved. We call itbanana oot.

Je Meldrum, a biological anthropologist at the Univer-sity o Idaho, has also examined the cast o the ootprint andcome to a similar conclusion: The cast, i accurate, seemsmost likely to represent a primate appendage o some kindat ooted, fve digit, divergent medial digiteatures notcombined in other common wildlie tracks. I the cast rep-resents a primate ootprint, the very short heel, indicated bythe position o the presumed hallux (medial toe), bears some

The orang-pendek, which means short person in Indone-sian, is said to live in the dense mountain jungles o Suma-

tra. Stories about these creatures can be traced as ar back asMarco Polo, who wrote about them in his diaries. Even then,these little people were regarded as elusive. But the orang-kubu, the indigenous orest people o Sumatra, have alwaysregarded the orang-pendek as a separate tribe o real people.

Eyewitnesses normally describe this ground-dwelling, bi-pedal primate as being short, no more than fve eet tall. Itvaries in color rom a dark orange to a chocolate brown. Itshuman like ace is said to startle and even upset witnesses,

such is the intensity o the experience.I have been ascinated with the legends surrounding the

orang-pendek since I frst travelled to Indonesia in 1998; Ihave been back fve times in the last dozen years. What I amully aware o though is that no matter how interesting orsuggestive the legends and eyewitness accounts may be, whatreally matters is evidence, specifcally scientifc evidence thatcan be independently verifed and corroborated. This is whatI have sought to achieve and have done so with some success.

In 2001, I led an Anglo-Indonesian expedition to KerinciSablat National Park in Western Sumatra to look or evidenceo the orang-pendek. I chose this area to concentrate my e-orts because o the concentration o recent eyewitness reports.

A New Pimate Species in SumataAdam Davies

An artists setch of the orang-pende by arry Trumbore.

A team member maing a cast of a found footprint.Photo by Andrew Sanderson


5/20


the University o Copenhagen as a marine biologist special-izing in otoliths, the calcium crystals you fnd in the inner earso bony fshes. He was ascinated by the act that you coulddeduct an incredible amount o inormation about an animaljust rom looking at otoliths. This rather orensic approach led

him to the study o hairs and similar small bits and pieces,and he is currently working as a reelance consultant or vari-ous museums, scientifc institutions and societies, and localand national authorities.

In November 2010, Thomas drated his conclusions,which I quote here in part: A small part o the hair samplewas subjected to a DNA-analysis, but due to the small amounto DNA extracted and the rather poor condition o it, no frmconclusion could be reached. The DNA did show some simi-larities to primate DNA, possibly orangutan, but no defniteresults could be obtained. Following this I subjected the re-maing hairs to a structural analysis to see i this could bringany inormation to light that might reveal the identity o the

owner o the hairs. I checked all o the remaining 6 hairs andthey were all consistent with hairs rom large primates orhumans. They all had the rather large medulla with a lot opigmentation typical o large primates, and the intermittentholes in the centre o the hairs, making them look somewhatlike hollowed out tree trunks. I compared the hair sampleswith reerence samples o 3 dierent species o gibbon, orang-utan, chimpanzee and bonobo, gorilla and some 15 sampleso human hairs in various colours, mainly red or reddish. Iwas never able to ascertain their identity with total certainty,although I could eliminate some. The hairs were not modernhuman, and they were not rom siamangs or other gibbons.They have a very deep rusty-red colour, very similar to the co-

lour o orangutan hairs, but varied in other structural detai ls.So based on these results alone I concluded that the hairs wererom something closely related to orangutans or rom a ormo orangutan I had not seen beore.

resemblance to that o an orangutan oot, which boasts aremarkably short calcaneal process. However, this eature iscombined with short thick digits in the cast in question, un-like the remarkable long lateral digits and shortened hallux othe living orangutan oot. It seems an unusual combination o

traits in a terrestrial biped, which the orang pendek is report-ed to be. Alternately, the cast might be that o a handprint,in which case the proximal position o the medial digit, thethumb, would be more appropriate.

Hair IdentifcationHans Brunner o Deakin University near Melbourne analysedthe hair samples we brought back rom the 2001 expedition.Bruner is a renowned zoologist and animal orensic expert who published the worlds frst book on hair identifcation.His work was instrumental in analyzing the hair samples inthe amous Lindy Chamberlain dingo baby case o the 1980s.

For us, he spent months studying Sumatras native species andconducting the hair analysis, and eventually came to the con-clusion that we are indeed dealing with an unknown primate.

When I went to see him in Australia, he postulated thatthe closest creature to the orang-pendek would probably bethe orangutan (orang-utang). But he also said that the hairsamples showed unique structural dierences that made themvery dierent rom orangutan hair. I a lso sent a hair sample toanthropologist Todd Disotell at New York University or DNAanalysis. Unortunately, due to the degradation o the samplesand possible contamination, no DNA could be extracted romthe 2001 hair sample we brought back rom Sumatra.

In 2009, while leading another team to Kerinci Seblat

National Park, I came across a trail o what appeared to beorang-pendek ootprints. We ollowed them and eventuallyound hairs where it had apparently brushed up against a tree.We sent these samples to Lars Thomas who graduated rom

hipanzee Ebony eaf angurs

Pigtailed Macaque ed eaf Money

Tapir

orilla uman

hinoceros Siamang

nnown nnown nnown

rangutan

Sun Bear

White-cheeed ibbon


6/20


Whatever the orang-pendek turns out to be, however, it isimperative that action be taken immediately to protect its habi-tat, as time is running out or this undoubtedly very rare crea-ture. I have seen with my own eyes thousands o acres o virginrain orest being pulled down to make palm oil plantations or

arms or the ever-increasing population. I have witnessed thecorrupt indulge in illegal logging, despite the best and con-certed eorts o the rangers who try to protect the area. Leav-ing it alone just isnt an option. Unless we do something aboutit now, I have no doubt that both the orang-pendek, and itshabitat, will likely to be snued out o existence within mylietime.

I will be returning to Sumatra in September to continuemy research.

ADAM DAVIES has a degree in history and a post-graduate degree in

law, and is a member of MESA. e has led expeditions in search of

mystery animals not only in Sumatra, but also in the ongo, orway,

Scotland, Mongolia, and ndia. e has been described as an explorer,adventurer, and cryptozoologist, but when not on expedition, he is

a ivil Servant living in Manchester in the nited kingdom. is recounts

his efforts to bring bac evidence of often legendary beastsusually

crossing some of the most inhospitable and unexplored parts of the

world in the process in a boo entitled Extreme Expeditions: Travel

Adventures Stalking the Worlds Mystery Animals.

DNA AnalysisIn the autumn o 2010, Tom Gilbert conducted an indepen-dent DNA test o the remaining hairs rom the 2009 expedi-tion. Gilbert, who was trained in genetics and evolutionarybiology at Oxord University, is an associate proessor at the

Centre or GeoGenetics, which is part o the Natural His-tory Museum o Denmark. Gilbert was able to extract a goodamount o DNA rom the hair sample, enabling him to con-clude that these hairs were either human, or very closely relat-ed to humans. Its worth noting, by the way, that Gilbert hascategorically denied that there might have been contaminationo ape DNA with human DNA or vice-versa.

There can be very little doubt at this point that the crea-ture we call orang-pendek exists. The question is: What is it?I once thought that i you were to strip away the mythologysurrounding the creature, what you would be let with is es-sentially a bipedal orangutan, possibly a successul genetic mu-tation that had survived and bred in isolation rom others o its

kind. (There are no orangutans or hundreds o miles orm thearea where the hair samples were ound.) I have also consid-ered the idea that the orang-pendek is a completely new specieso primate, distinct and unique.

ConclusionsBut a serious consideration o the scientifc evidence or theorang-pendek points in two directions at once. The structuralanalysis o the hair suggests either an orangutan, or some-thing very closely related to an orangutan. The DNA analy-sis, on the other hand, points to a human or something veryclosely related to humans. But why cant it be both? Could

the orang-pendek be an example o bipedal evolution rom theorangutan, a relative rather than a direct ancestor, and moreadvanced than any we are aware o in recent human history?They display only the most primitive tool use, on a par withthe chimpanzee, but they certainly have no ability to makefre. Yet all o the witnesses I have interviewed have been star-tled by two key eatures: their bipedal locomotion, and theirhuman like ace, had they been ortunate enough to see it.

Could the orang-pendek be a hominid with ape-struc-tured hair? Zoologist Karl Shuker has no problem with thatnotion and cites a precedent, documented 20 years ago, o acreature whose DNA corresponds most closely to one taxon,though its hair structure is more similar to a dierent taxon.

Hes reerring to the King Cheetah. Genetically, the animalis known to be nothing more than a genetic variety o thenormal spotted cheetah Acinonyx jubatus, but hair samplesanalyzed by the Institute o Medical Research in Johannes-burg revealed that the cuticular scale pattern o K ing Cheetahguard hair compare much more closely with that o leopardsthan with that o spotted cheetahs. Cheetahs and leopardsnot only belong to separate eline genera but also are only verydistantly related, wrote Shuker on his blog, ShukerNature,on Nov. 24, 2010. Suddenly, an unknown hominid whosehair structure is more similar to that o apes is not so unlikelyater all, is it?

n 2009, Adam avies (left) was privileged to have an audience with

the king (right) of Suu Ana alam in Sumatra. The king told avies

how he and his son-in-law had once been chased by an orang-pende,

while they were out hunting.


7/20


crucifxion.... Interestingly, Amyr is a Muslim although hewas ecumenical in presenting his belies.

I recalled that beet salad had been served at lunch, andspeculated whether the red uid that appeared on Amidensbody could have been beet juice; however, I was reluctant toask permission to inspect the uid. Ater asking Amidens per-mission, I invited the group to fle past Amiden to observe thephenomenon.

Amiden told us he was born on July 5, 1941, and was oSyrian and Iranian descent. He worked as a government work-

ers union secretary, but at the time was on leave or healthreasons, so was helping in his brothers import business. Onweekends he also worked at a leper colony. At that time, helived in Brasilia, was divorced, and had a 15-year-old son who,he said, was also a sensitive.

Lecture RoomAter lunch we moved on to the lecture room where Weil gavea brie description o the origin and aims o the City o Peace,and then the meeting was thrown open to questions to Amyr.One member o our group recal led that Apparently, his atherand grandather were sensitive....All his siblings were sensi-

tive, but only he and his grandather maniested apportsthe anomalous appearance o objects with no easily discerniblesource. Amyr claims he astral travels and can travel at willand return with inormation which can be checked later. Hesays there have been reports o his bilocation, but he has nocontrol or awareness when this occurs. He has healing abilitiesand has healed a ew lepers in the early stages o their illnessbut not in later stages. Lights are oten seen in his presence

when apports occur.Once our group was seated in a circle,

Weil passed around an ornate cup that hadbeen resting on a table in the lecture room;he described it as a communion chalice. A

group member recalled that water was inthe cup when I held it in the circle. Onemember noted that Weil showed us a chal-ice that Amyr held shortly beore we ar-rived. What appeared to be blood covereda cross on one side o the chalice. Dr. Weilexplained that when Amyr picked up thechalice, the blood exuded rom the cross.I picked it up or a closer inspection and,ater looking closely at the marks inside andout, I passed it around to the rest o ourgroup. When it returned, created within it were several communion waers that had

My frst meeting with Amyr Amiden dates back to Febru-ary 17, 1993, when a Brazilian psychologist, Margarida

de Carvalho, and I led 20 members o the Institute o NoeticSciences on a tour through Brazil. This trip included our daysin Brasilia where we spent an aternoon at the Foundation othe City o Peace, which was established, along with its afli-ated International Holistic University, by Pierre Weil, a Frenchpsychologist who had allen in love with Brazil.

An Unusual LunchWeil had persuaded Amiden to join our group or lunch. DeCarvalho and I had heard that Amiden could supposedly pro-duce physical objects, called apports, through mediumisticabilities, though the group members were not aware o hispurported talents.

One member o the group later wrote about the lunchtimeevents that ensued: I was sitt ing in the lunch room about oureet behind Amyr at the City o Peace. I heard Dr. Weil say,Here it goes again. His statement was in response to hearingsomething drop and bounce inside the room. Shortly therea-ter, Stanley Krippner...walked over and retrieved a small pol-ished black stone encased in mud rom the oor. I watched

with interest as they discussed it...Dr. Krippner asked Amyri he elt that the phenomena happened through the work osome spiritual orce or entity operating in him. Dr. Krippnermentioned the name Christ in this dialogue. Instantly, Amyrbegan to bleed rom his palms and the backs o his hands. Adark red mark also appeared on his orehead. This phenom-enon, called stigmata, allegedly indicates that individuals soheavily identiy with Christ that they express the marks o the

The Magenta Phenomena:

A Medium in Bazil

Stanley Krippner


8/20


(3) Now that a year and one hal has passed since you hadthe encounter with Amyr Amiden, have you noticed any ater-eects?

Ten members o the group responded to the question-naire. They all answered afrmatively to the frst question. The

aspects that were elt to be the most exceptional included thealling stones, the blood on the goblet, the stigmata,the numerous apports, the objects being materialized,and access into the process and content o a dimension omind that most o us are unable to penetrate. One respondentadded, This was the most signifcant experience o my lie.

Six individuals listed lie-changing atereects:

For a while, the stone I ound elt as i it had a spe-cial energy.

The time with Amyr was so out o my ordinary ex-perience that my mind is still uncomortable about it;

Ive only told a ew selected riends about this experi-ence.

Many o his materializations could be accomplishedby a skilled magician, but the crystal dropping at myeet when no one was near me convinced me that thiswas or real.

The experience with Amyr...reshaped my corethinking, cracked a boundary, opening to me anawareness o...the enormous potentialities o expand-ed consciousness and how limited is our use o ourown minds.

I returned rom Brazil dierent...with an under-standing o things I didnt have beore, especiallyabout the dynamics o energy in human interactionand healing.

This experience had proound implications or thenature o reality; my nuts-and-bolts world had allenapart.For the our other members o the group, the atereects

simply reinorced a previous worldview:

The experience has not altered my thinking becauseI have had many contacts with mediums and sensi-tives in the last ew decades.

It did not change my thinking or eeling becausethat had happened many years ago with my earlierexperiences.

It reinorced knowledge that we on planet Earth arepart o a much larger universe.

The apparent materializations o various objects...were powerul and well-implanted in my memory.

not been there when it let my hands. To the best o my knowl-edge, the chalice was in the hands, or within plain sight, o ourgroup the entire t ime.

That evening, Amiden accepted our invitation to join usor dinner at our hotel, during which, as one participant re-

corded, He produced more stones on the oor, on laps, etc.

The Next DayOne group member saw Amiden the ollowing day, recalling,He seemed weary and exhausted. He said every month orabout ten days he develops great thirst and needs to drinkmuch water, tea, or coee. He loses weight, and his salivatastes acidic. During this time, phenomena occur, and he hasgreater healing power. Another participant noted that Am-iden had told her that he renews himsel by praying, takingrequent baths, drinking large amounts o water, and by sur-rounding himsel with the color green.

According to my notes, Every month something likethis happens...Beore the phenomena occur the saliva tastesacidic.... He drinks much water, strong tea and coee, losesweight, and takes many baths and showers.... The signs thatphenomena would happen started a week ago Wednesday andlasted or 10 days. Blood will come in spots on his legs, thenwill disappear. He does considerable healing during this time.

Exceptional Human ExperiencesThese experiences seemed to have a proound impact on somemembers o the group, so in November 1994, I sent out aquestionnaire based on Rhea Whites concept o exception-al human experience and the potential they oer or shitsand changes in ones worldviews and activities. The ques-tionnaire asked: (1) Would you consider the encounter withAmyr Amiden an exceptional human experience? (2) I so, what portion o the encounter was the most exceptional?


9/20


design stated that an event would have to have amean rating o 2.1 or higher to be considered anapparent anomaly, a non-ordinal number se-lected to divide events which were elt to be easilyunderstandable rom those that were ambiguous

or difcult to explain.For example, one member o our team ob-

served our black marks on Weils bedroom door;this event was given a mean rating o 1.0 becauseWeil recalled that a poster had been taped on hisdoor a week earlier. While our group was seatedin Weils ofce, a religious medallion appeared todrop on to the oor rom the ceiling; this eventreceived a mean rating o 5.0, as did the similar ap-pearance o another medallion a ew minutes later.A mean rating o 3.7 was given to a series o static-like blips heard when a radio was tuned betweentwo bands, blips that answered questions given in

both Portuguese and English (one blip=yes, twoblips=no).

Over a time span o eight days, a total o 20sessions was held with Amiden. Using a 5-pointevaluation scale, 91 events were judged to have

been apparently anomalous, while 6 events ailed to meet thepredetermined criteria. The mean score o all 97 events was4.18.

One o the anomalous events was the appearance o stig-mata that were observed over two consecutive days. The feldnotes I made stated that red, blood-like liquid is seen onthe ront and back o Amidens right and let hands. Kel-sons notes were similar; her personal examination o Amidens

hands convinced her that the uid was, indeed, blood. I noteda beatifc smile emerge on Amidens ace when he thrust or-ward his hands to exhibit the markings.

One day, Weil took a metal chalice rom his bookcase andbegan to tell us how small drops o blood and a communionwaer had appeared in the chalice under anomalous conditionssome months prior to our meeting. Amiden asked a membero our group to allow the silver-colored chalice to balance itselupon the palm o his hand while he himsel placed both o hishands near the top o the object. This took about 15 secondsater which time Weil asked one o us to place the object on thetable. Amiden asked us all to place our hands around the chal-ice without touching the metal. Amiden placed his own hands

near to our hands. We continued to hold our hands near thechalice or about 15 to 20 seconds ater which time Amidensuggested that we remove them.

Then Amiden placed his hands near the chal ice, but with-out touching it. Weil picked up the chalice and observed thatan oil-like liquid substance with a distinct perume smell hadappeared in the chalice. The chalice was then passed around sothat we all could see and smell the oil.

We also had the opportunity to inspect a large photo-graph o Gandhi that Weil had brought rom his bookcase.Weil reported that when Amiden had frst seen it, he remarkedthat the man in the picture had been killed. This statement isnot remarkable, given the widespread knowledge o Gandhis

Return to BrasiliaThe original meeting with Amiden was so provocative thatin March 1994, I returned to Brasilia to study the anomalousphenomena occurring in his presence, events over which heclaimed to have little conscious control. Our team o research-ers included my psychologist colleague Margarida de Carv-alho; Ruth Kelson, a physician; Harbans Lal Arora, a physicist;Roberto Crema, a psychologist; I; and a very skeptical studentI brought along, who was convinced that Amiden was cre-

ating his eects by sleight o hand, although he could comeup with no plausible scenario. Kelson, Lal Arora, and Crema were colleagues o Weil. We spent several hours a day withAmiden, who joined us ater his occupational duties had beencompleted.

The settings or our work varied, but most o them werein Weils ofce where we sat in comortable chairs around atable. Amiden drove to the Foundation, was met in the lobbyby one or more team members, and escorted to the ofce sothat there could be no occasion on which Amiden entered theroom prior to the session. Several sessions were held in thecampus Meditation House; I investigated this site each morn-ing to be sure it contained no unusual objects that could later

be labeled materializations. When the restaurant was thesetting, Amiden entered and let with other group members.From the time that he arrived at the Foundation to the timethat he departed, Amiden was in the presence o one or moremember o the team.

When one or more team members elt that an unusualevent had, indeed occurred, Kelson and I took feld notes.Periodically, three members o the team rated each o theseevents on a 5-point Anomaly Observation Scale I had con-structed. It ranged rom 1 (no apparent anomaly) and 2 (slightdegree), to 3 (moderate degree) and 4 (high degree), to 5 (ex-traordinary degree o apparent anomaly). The mean o eachset o ratings was used or comparative purposes; the research


10/20


The objects that appeared anomalously included polishedstones, coins, religious medallions, onyx jewelry, small gem-stones, and a pair o linked metal rings. On one occasion, amagenta stripe appeared on a axed document; in a ew min-utes, a drop o water seemed to congeal into a diamond beore

our eyes. This event led to our naming the collective eventsThe Magenta Phenomena. Various laboratory tests weresubsequently conducted with several items; or example, someo the stones were identifed as agate, amethyst, a low-gradeemerald, and a diamond.

AtermathThe results o our investigation were so provocative that

plans were made or a more ormal investigation utilizing so-phisticated psychophysiological monitoring equipment andthe assistance o a Brazilian magician trained in sleight-o-hand eects, which we realized was a crucial missing elementrom our completed sessions with Amiden. One reason themagician was needed was the act that the gemstones that ap-peared are airly common in Brazil; another reason is that Am-

iden was in the export-import trade and would have had accessto most o the other artiacts that appeared. Unortunately,Amidens health necessitated cancellation o these plans uponthe insistence o his physician, who had observed the increasein Amidens cardiovascular and gastrointestinal problems ol-lowing our March 1994 visit.

The Parapsychological Association has a long-standingresolution that a magician be present when macro-PK is be-

assassination. However, the subsequent event was quite re-markable. Weil then observed the appearance o two blotcheso a blood-like substance on the picture. He pointed these outto us and they were easily discernible.

Data AnalysisThe Spearman rank order correlation method was used toinvestigate associations between variables.* Kelson had taken21 pulse readings o Amiden that wereollowedby apparentlyanomalous phenomena. The means rom the Anomalies Rat-ing Scale or each o these events were correlated with the cor-responding pulse readings but yielded non-signifcant results(=-0.11, p=0.62, 19d). When the means rom the AnomaliesRating Scale or antecedentanomalous events were correlatedwith the corresponding 22 pulse readings, the results werealso not signifcant (=0.14, p=0.53, 20d). Kelson consideredAmidens pulse to be rapid and symptomatic o tachycardia.

There were 12 systolic blood pressure readings ollowedby apparently anomalous events (=0.07, p=0.83, 10d) and13 systolic blood pressure readings with antecedent anoma-lous events (=0.03, p=0.92, 11d). Amidens blood pressurewas considered to be slightly elevated rom a medical point oview and symptomatic o hypertension.

There were 12 diastolic blood pressure readings with sub-sequent anomalous events (=-0.14, p=0.66, 10d) and 13diastolic blood pressure readings with antecedent anomalousevents (=0.71, p=0.01, 2-tailed, 11d). In other words, thehigher the diastolic blood pressure ater the event, the higherthe mean rating tended to be or the event on the 5-pointAnomaly Observation Scale. This eect was statistically sig-

nifcant.My student monitored the geomagnetic readings rom a

magnetometer we obtained on loan or three days rom theUniversity o Brasilia. We had placed the device in an openfeld where there was a minimum o electrical intererenceand took magnetometer readings every two minutes. Therewere 15 geomagnetic readings ollowed by anomalous events(=0.35, p=0.30, 13d) and 17 geomagnetic readings preced-ed by anomalous events (=0.64, p=0.01, 2-tailed, 15d). Thesignifcant correlation between mean ratings on the AnomalyObservation Scale and the 17 geomagnetic readings suggeststhat atmospheric electricity and geomagnetic activity are a-vorable to ostensible anomalous events such as macro-PK.

When the mean ratings (on the Anomaly ObservationScale) o each daily session were compared with daily geomag-netic activity or the Southern Hemisphere, the results werestatistically signifcant (=0.93, p=0.02, 3d). When the sameprocedure was used to compare daily mean ratings with dai-ly geomagnetic activity or South America, the results werein the same direction but did not attain signifcance (=83,p=0.09, 3d).

* This non-parametric statistic was used since it was deemed unlikely that the data, especially the ratings on the Anomalies Rating Scale,

were normally distributed. Presentation o the results o this data analysis uses to indicate the correlation, p to indicate the prob-

ability level (two-tailed or all correlations), and dto indicate degrees o reedom or each analysis.

Amiden holding purported apports, with Stanley krippner looing on.


11/20


ing investigated, a position that Amiden never was able toathom as it seemed to cast doubt upon his personal integrity.However, I assured him that I had no personal doubt as to hischaracter and veracity. I congratulated him or his coopera-tion, knowing that he had part icipated in these sessions while

putting his health at considerable risk. However, the data romthese sessions is compromised by the absence o a skilled magi-cian, the lack o a videotaped record, and the inability to con-duct a ollow-up session that would have determined i thesephenomena were repeatable.

Amiden is now retired and devotes himsel to healing sickpeople. He is very angry with me or the conservative and cau-tionary way I described our sessions and now reuses to see meor answer my letters. He told me that he did not want me towrite about him again. Shortly ater an article o mine abouthis stigmata was published, my apartment was broken into andall the religious medallions and other apports I had broughtback rom Brazil were stolen. Fortunately, the linked rings are

still in the possession o Harbans Lal Arora in a physics labora-tory at a Brazilian University. I I were a superstitious person,I would link Amidens warning with the thet o my apports.

Reerences

Krippner, S. (2002). Stigmatic phenomena: An alleged case in

Brazil.Journal o Scientifc Exploration, 16, 207-224.

Krippner, S., Winkler, M., Amiden, A., Crema, R., Kelson, R.,

Lal Arora, H., & Weil, P. (1996). Physiological and geo-

magnetic correlates o apparent anomalous phenomena ob-

served in the presence o a Brazilian sensitive. Journal o

Scientifc Exploration, 18, 281-298.

Weil, P., Krippner, S., Winkler, M., Amiden, A., Lal Arora, H.,

ODonnell, K., Crema, R., & Leloup, J.-Y. (2002).Transco-

municao: O enmeno magenta. So Paulo: Editora Pensa-

mento.

STANLEY KRIPPNER is professor of psychology at Saybroo niversity

in San Francisco. e is an original pioneer of humanistic and transper-

sonal psychology, and is internationally recognized for his decades of

research into consciousness studies and the study of shamanism. e

has published over 1000 articles, papers, and boos, and he was the

2002 recipient of the American Psychological Associations Award foristinguished ontributions to the nternational Advancement of Psy-

chology. is boos include Personal Mythology, Extraordinary Dreams,

and Haunted by Combat. e is co-editor of Varieties o Anomalous Expe-

rience, Mysterious Minds, and Debating Psychic Experience.

Dont miss the 30th annual meetingof the SSE!The program, entitled The SSE at the Forefront of Sciencewill eature fve sessions: The Implications o Non-localityThe Science o the Subjective; Consciousness and LivingSystems; Practical Applications o Anomalies Research;and The Sociology o Scientifc Evolution.

Where: Boulder, ColoradoThe Millenium Hotel

When: June 911, 2011Invited speakers: Larry Dossey, Pamela Rae Heath,Robert Jahn, Brenda Dunne, Dean Radin, RollinMcCraty, Larissa Cheran, Francesca McCartney, JohnMcMichael, Walter Cruttenden,Jonathan Schooler.

See the website for updated details:www.scienticexploration.org


12/20


earthquake. I thats not clear enough, the USGSs KarenFelzer has stated at out that Earthquake prediction is im-possible.

The case against the predictability o earthquakes, romthe point o view o United States Geological Survey and otherseismologists, is built upon the act that ractures and ailurein bedrock deep beneath the Earth are notoriously intracta-ble. The very inaccessibility o the ault zone itsel to directmeasurement, along with a myriad o other ground-based

physical conditions, imposes severe limits to predictability. Itmay be supreme irony, though, that or all the tautologicalpronouncements about the difculties involved in orecastingquakes, part o the problem might be that scientists have beenlooking in the wrong place or the answers, looking downintothe Earth, when they might have looked up.

This could explain, at least in part, seismologys un-changed century-long mantra o impossible with regard toearthquake prediction. Those ew voices with the temerityto suggest dierentlylike Jim Berkland, Dr. Tony Fraser-Smith, Marsha Adams, and othershave been marginalizedor ignored. The conservatism is easy to explain though. Sci-entists who have spent their entire lives getting to sought-ater

positions are understandably reluctant to breezily risk theirreputations on anything that isnt rock-solid, dead-certain,or inallibly proven. And its ar less likely that broadcasting

Twenty-three large earthquakes (6.0 or greater) have struckin Southern Caliornia in the six decades between Long

Beach (1933) and Northridge (1994), and seven o them haveoccurred in exactly the same way. Those sizeable temblorsstruck either at dawn or at dusk, exactly during new or ullmoon phases, and moreover, during those phases that werenear-syzygy eventswhen Earth, Sun, and Moon were per-ectly aligned to ocus the lunar and solar tides into a t ight vec-tor o orces upon the Earth and its plate boundaries below. To

ascribe this to random chance is to be willing to accept stun-ningly astronomical probabilities. But i not chance, then itsuggests there may be solid ground on which to predict nearlya third o Caliornias major earthquakes; a modest start, yes,but one that I eel is necessary.

Earthquake Prediction Is ImpossibleUnortunately, even a decade deep into the 21st Century, itseems that earthquake prediction is an unspeakable topic ormost mainstream seismologists and the United States Geo-logical Survey. When asked i the USGS or any other agencycould predict earthquakes, Mike Blanpied, Associate Coor-

dinator o the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, replied:Theres currently no organization or government or scientistcapable o successully predicting the time and occurrence o

ate Epicenter Mag. Suns Position Moons Position egree Syzygy

3/11/33 ong Beach 6.3 us 5:54 pm Full < 1

3/25/37 Terwilliger alley * 6.0 awn 8:45 am Full


13/20


pointing an unabashed scientifc fnger straight at the tides.These peer-reviewed studies, published in esteemed journals,go back 170 years, and continue unabated in every decade

rom the middle o the 19th century to the present. RichardEdmonds said as much as early as 1845 (On the Remark-able Lunar Periodicities in Earthquakes); so did Alexis Per-rey (Frequency o Earthquakes Relative to the Phase o theMoon) in 1876 in theAmerican Journal o Science.

More recently, in 2002, Sciencepublished a study led byUCLAs Elizabeth Cochran, in conjunction with a consortiumo Japanese scientists, which concluded, ater studying 2,000earthquakes, that t idal orces speed up or slow down the t im-ing o earthquakes on aults that are about to rupture becauseo other orces. And in 2006, a team o Italian and Americanseismologists led by Carlo Doglioni at Romes La SapienzaUniversity, published their fndings that the tidal orce o the

Moon was literally dragging the entire North American conti-nental plate westward.

A Possible MechanismCould lunar and solar tides be a trigger or earthquakes alongthe San Andreas and Cascadia Fault Zones in Caliornia andthe Pacifc Northwest? I so, what could be the mechanism?During dawn and dusk, at new and/or ull moon phases (andespecially those phases that transpire during near-syzygy and/or perigee) the Earth rotates into positions where the ar plateboundaries in the Atlantic and Pacifc Oceans would bulgewith greatest intensity. Simultaneously, tidal pressures would

seismic warningselevated probability windows, or anyother kindwould garner their support. There are plenty opolitical, economic, and societal pressures that cause the au-

thorities to ear being wrong more than what could happen itheyre rightand keep quiet.

O course, it doesnt help matters that USGSs one publicattempt at earthquake prediction ailed. In the early 1980s theUSGS noticed that there was a stretch o the San Andreasault running through a small town called Parkfeld in CentralCaliornia where earthquakes o about magnitude 6 occurredevery 20 to 25 years, the last one being in 1966. Based on thatpattern, the USGS and the state o Caliornia predicted thatthere would be another one in Parkfeld in the mid-1980s.But the predicted earthquake didnt occur there until 2004.That seems to have spelled the end o the USGSs eorts inearthquake prediction. But the USGS, which has been right

about so many important things since it was ounded in 1879,is simply wrong to have given up on earthquake prediction.

Tidal Forces as Earthquake TriggersIts difcult to dismiss the possibility that lunar and solar grav-itational tides, acting in tandem and exerting maximum pres-sure on the San Andreas and Cascadia Fault Zones on the USWest coast, have had a hand in triggering an astonishing largeraction o killer quakes. I am by no means the frst person tomake such a suggestion. I one cares to rummage through thedustpan o history, dozens o studies can be ound, writtenby some o the most respected seismologists in history, and


14/20


Seismic Warning SystemA seismic warning system or the West Coast could be a pos-sibility, at least as an advisory. And not only a possibility, itssomething that could be in place tomorrow, and without cost-ing a single cent. What is proposed is something painless, un-

obtrusive, and easily accomplished. Just as the newspapers havestarted publishing UV indexes, once it was determined thatthe Suns ultraviolet rays could be harmul, theres no reasonwhy elevated seismic probability windows couldnt become aregular eature o the meteorological pages as well.

Such an index would give vast numbers advance warning.Millions o people each eecting just the slightest deviationin their routine and schedule (at their own discretion) wouldbe worth a hundred governmental earthquake committeesoverseen by dozens o saety czars. There is no more powerulagency o public protection than the public itsel. In almostevery catastrophic seismic event, by ar the most atalities havenot been caused by the quake itsel, but by the attendant exi-

gencies that sprang upon people taken unawares. Just inorm-ing large populations o the increased probabilities o seismicactivity rom time to t ime may turn out to be very benefcial inthe long run. The populations o the West Coast are sophisti-cated enough to be able to view those proposed advisories orwhat they would be, and prudent enough that sufcient pre-cautions would be taken so as to blunt the blow struck shouldthe next great quake strike like so many others beore.

Over the last 16 years, through perhaps 70 to 80 radio,television, newspaper, and magazine interviews, Ive been mak-ing a public request o each o Caliornias last our governors,starting with Pete Wilson, that the Cali ornia Earthquake Pre-diction Evaluation Council be convened to pass judgment on

the allibility or viability o the plan I have been proposing ora rudimentary seismic warning advisory or the West Coast. Ihave every reason to believe that the current governor, JerryBrown, is just the sort o open-minded and progressive ChieExecutive that Caliornia needs at this juncture. Id also cat-egorize him as a poor candidate to be led about unquestion-ingly byany orthodoxy, including those who see red at themere mention o the words earthquake prediction.

Proposed Earthquake Advisory or 2011In order then that the governor should have a plain, unvar-nished, unalterable record o what was said, how it was said,

and when it was said, and as an expedient to public saety, hereare the times and dates or the rest o the year that I believepose an increased risk o a major earthquake.

Locale: San Andreas Fault Zone, Cascadia ThrustZone, US West Coast

Time: 4:45-7:55 AM and/or PM (Dusk and Dawn) orall dates unless otherwise indicated

Apr 18, May 17, Jun 15, Jul 14 (Dusk), Jul 15 (Dawn), Aug 13, Sep 11 (Dusk), Oct 26, Nov 10, Nov 24(Dusk), Nov 25 (Dawn), Dec 10, Dec 24

And with a reduced probability: May 3, July 30, Aug 28(Dusk), Aug 29 (Dawn), Oct 11 (Dusk)

be minimized at the opposite ends o the Pacifc and NorthAmerican Plates (on the West Coast), attening the crust andperhaps pulling it apart enough to allow the plates edges toslip by one another. Or, maybe its just the reverse. Perhapsthe San Andreas is crimped, the pressure on it increased asboth the Pacifc and North American Plates are pulled up atone o their ends, yet stubbornly maintaining their rigidity,causing the other ends to be shoved even tighter miles beneaththe West Coast. The San Andreas and Cascadia Faults are al-most perectly equidistant rom the ar edges o the two platesin question, almost exactly in the locale best suited to receive

maximum leverage rom the tidal bulging.It just might be that these quirks o geography (orienta-

tion o the ault line north and south, equidistant position othe San Andreas and Cascadia with regard to the ar edges oboth platesand those ar edges also being the areas simulta-neously bulged by the tides) account or the empirical evidencewhich suggests that earthquakes and tidal interaction on theWest Coast may have a stronger connection than at other seis-mically active regions o the Earth. Slight pressure dierences would be very important no matter which way. Any changein the equilibrium could be crucial, even i it only resultedin minute changes in the rictional coefcient along the aultlines.

DO ATMOSPHERIC ABERRATIONS PRECEDE

SEISMIC ACTIVITY?

By Marsha Adams

MA AETA ATS exist of aberrant atmospheric col-

ors, rainbows, and light ashes prior to seismic activity, but few

have been recorded. At the 30th annual meeting of the Society

for Scientic Exploration, to be held June 9-11, 2011, in Boulder,

olorado, will discuss possible mechanisms for these aberrations

and present my collection of optical anomalies that have occurred

prior to seismic activity. These include:

My lm pictures from the early 1980s that show reddish hue sy

color changes prior to local earthquaes in the San Francisco

Bay Area.

A re rainbow in Sichuan hina that occurred just 30 minutes

before the 2008, M7.8 earthquae. Flashes of light recorded on video in a clear sy prior to an earth-

quae swarm near the alifornia-regon border.

An anomalous mirage seen from the air over the San Francisco

Bay area the day after the ivermore 1980, M5.8 quae.

ramatic changes in the sy color over Sedona, Arizona, prior to

the April 4, 2010, uadalupe ictoria Baja M7.2 quae (approxi-

mately 250 miles from Sedona).

Subsequent photographs of similar sy color changes prior to

major Baja aftershocs and other notable seismic activity includ-

ing the Japan M9 earthquae and its aftershocs.


15/20


DAVID NABHAN spent the

greater part of his life living

in Southern alifornia. e

graduated from Mesa ol-

lege and San iego Stateniversity in the 1970s,

was a certicated bilingual

public school teacher for 19

years for the os Angeles

nied School istrict, and

was the districts earth-

quae preparedness coor-

dinator at his school site in

South entral os Angeles

for 15 of those years. e has

been calling for the creation

of an earthquae warning

system for the .S. westcoast for the last two decades. abhan is the author of Forecasting the

Catastrophe: An Analysis o When and Where the Next Great Earthquake

on the West Coast Will Strike, published in 2010. abhan is now retired

from teaching and has relocated to the ortheast.

For those who might ask what good could come o know-ing in advance in any case, there are good answers. Police, fre,and EMS, or starters, might consider reraining rom crewchanges at these times to avoid the conusion that might be

caused in an emergency. Tens o mill ions along the ault linewould be oered repeated occasions to address all the little yetimportant things (checking supplies, reviewing amily plans,orming a neighborhood group). At the very least, peoplewould have the option o dealing as best they could with theparticular saety shortcomings o their domicile, such as tem-porarily moving heavy objects rom nearer to the ceiling tonearer to the oor, in a way that would minimize injury shouldthe worst happenalong with flling prescriptions, toppingo the uel tank in their car, etc. Theres every chance that thegreatest benefts, should everything written turn out to be vi-able, would involve contingencies that cant even be imaginednow. But one thing is surely certain. The greatest weapon in

any enemys arsenal is that osurprise. Depriving the SanAndreas o that weapon, would be advantage enough.

This book is the culmination

of one of the most importantresearch projects of the

twentieth century. It not onlyinvites us to reassess ourworldview, it compels us

to do so. Some bookstransform lives. This one

may transform a culture.Ly DOSSEy, MD, author of

Healing Words and The Power of Premonitions

Consciousnessand the

Source of

Reality

The PEAR Odyssey

Consciousnessand the

Source of

Reality

The PEAR Odyssey

Rbr G. J d

Brd J. D

-

nw M CL P

Order rom Amazon or Barnes & Noble


16/20


Homeopathy Redux

When Luc Montagnier speaks, mainstream science listens.And no wonder: Montagnier is the French virologist and win-ner o 20 major scientifc awards, including a Nobel Prize inPhysiology or Medicine in 2008, which he shared with Fran-

oise Barr-Sinoussi or the discovery o human immunodef-ciency virus (HIV). But a year later Montagnier stunned hiscolleagues when he published two controversial research stud-ies on electromagnetic waves that, he claims, emanate rom thehighly diluted DNA o various pathogens. These signals, saysMontagnier, can reveal the bacterial or viral origins o condi-tions such as autism, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinsons Disease,and Alzheimers disease. I the results are correct, theoreti-cal chemist Je Reimers o the University o Sydney, Australia,told New Scientistin January 2011, these would be the mostsignifcant experiments perormed in the past 90 years, de-manding re-evaluation o the whole conceptual ramework omodern chemistry.

The fndings lend support to the high dilution concepton which homeopathy is based. In an interview published inthe journal Science in December o 2010, Montagnier stated:High dilutions o something are not nothing. They are waterstructures which mimic the original molecules. In his experi-ments Montagnier ound that he could not go urther than a10-18 dilution beore losing the signal. Although not a singlemolecule o DNA was let at th is dilution, he still managed toobtain a signal.

The detected electromagnetic waves, claims Montagnier,serve as a biomarker by which one can test or the presence othe microorganisms even when they are undetectable by clas-sical bio-medical techniques. The hope is that the treatment

with antibiotics will k ill the pathogens, which Montagnier be-

lieves come rom the gut, end up in the plasma, and eventuallycause damage to the brain. A study could then be conductedto see i, ollowing the antibiotic treatment, the DNA signaldisappears and the patients with these conditions improve. Iso, the fndings could then possibly be used not just or diag-

nosis but or treatment, with electromagnetic waves o certainrequencies being used to kill the organisms directly.

But Montagnier will not be able to pursue his controversialwork in France, or elsewhere in Europe or that matter. In theScienceinterview, Montagnier revealed that because o Frenchretirement laws (Montagnier is 78) he is no longer allowed towork at a public institution, and that his eorts to apply orunding o this research elsewhere in Europe had been turneddown due to the ear around this topic.

Indeed, the fndings by Luc Montagnier evoke the workand controversy o another French researcher, an immunolo-gist named Jacques Benveniste. In a paper published in Naturein 1988, Benveniste claimed that extremely highly diluted IgE

antibodies had an eect on certain cells, a fnding that sup-ported the claims o homeopathy. Ater a week-long investiga-tion that involved the illusionist James Randi, Natureendedup calling the paper a delusion. Benveniste died in 2004.Montagnier eels the Benveniste aair had spooked many re-searchers who are now reluctant to publish their own work insupport o Benveniste and who might otherwise be interestedin Montagnier s own fndings.

To escape the intellectual terror o people who dont un-derstand the subject and regard it as pseudoscience rather thanas real phenomena worthy o urther study, Montagnier in-tends to continue his research in China, where he has accepteda leadership post at a new research institute at Jiaotong Uni-

versity in Shanghai.

{NEWS NOTEBOOK|

The Not-So-Wrong Way

For decades aircrat pilots and ground observers have reporting see-ing something they called rocket lightning or wrong-way light-ning, but to no avail, as scientists denied the possibility o lumi-nous electrical phenomena above the upper deck o thunderclouds.Then in 1989, University o Minnesota researchers waiting to recorda rocket launch had their video camera pointed at a distant thun-derstorm when they incidentally captured just such an event in two

rames o the flm. Since then the phenomena have become ofciallyknown as Transient Luminous Events, or TLE. Decades o geo-physical silence and denial have now turned into a ood o papers andimages on the zoo o TLE creatures that go by such names as sprites,jets, and trolls.

Amateur astronomer Timo Kantola took these remarkable blackand white images o TLE over Pieksmki Finland on October 9,2009. See page 19 or a color reconstruction o the event.

Photo Stars and Space / Timo kantola, smo uuonen

Kajosalama 9.10. klo 3.53

Keijusalamat 9.10. klo 5.47


17/20


took up Spiritualism. Two Spiritualist mediums assured himthat Z existed and that the lost city was ull o jewels. It may benoted at this point that Fawcett was a riend o H. Rider Hag-gard (18561925), the enormously popular author o antasticadventure novels such as She(1887), which involved discoveryo the lost Arican Kingdom o Kr. Haggards more amousnovel, King Solomons Mines(1885), involved the search or,and discovery o, the ancient Jewish monarchs abled mines

with their heaps o gemstones.Fawcett clearly suered rom narcissistic personality dis-

order, with paranoid and delusional tendencies. Over time, hisearly eorts as a simple feld surveyor and scientist along theBolivian border were replaced by obsessive treks into Brazilsnotoriously resistant Matto Grasso jungles. As his brutally di-fcult expeditions turned up no Z, and as he aged, Fawcettsinitial vision o modest scientifc investigation evolved into oneocused on imagined treasures and then into one in which heperceived his elusive Z as being an Atlantean cradle o civi-lization and one o Theosophist Madame Helena BlavatskysWhite Lodges where one could attain transcendence. (Be-ginning in the late twentieth century, Fawcetts handul o

Col. Percy Fawcett (1867-ca. 1925) was the quintessentialEnglish amateur explorer o the frst hal o the twenti-

eth century, a man o incredible personal toughness and per-sistenceand an impossibly exigent taskmaster, brooking noweakness rom his subordinates in the feld. He became asci-nated by Spanish-colonial chronicles o the search or El Do-rado in Northwest South America and was urther stimulatedby the American politician Hiram Bingham IIIs (18751956)1912 rediscovery o the Incan lost city o Machu Picchu inPerus eastern Andes (Heaney, 2010). Having himsel seen amanuscript in Brazils National Library that spoke o a ruinedcity o stone near high mountains in the interior o the coun-

try, viewed in 1753, Fawcett was inspired to search or thisreported mysterious abandoned settlement. He dubbed thesupposed site Z, and his quest to fnd Z occupied most ohis middle years, ultimately leading to the loss o three lives:his own and those o one o his sons and the sons best riend.

Fawcetts ascination with orgotten treasure had beenfrst sparked by an experience as a young military man in Cey-lon (Sri Lanka). There, a local man presented him with a trea-sure map that led him to seek a purported cache o uncut gemsand gold hidden in a cave in the interior. Fawcett ound thecave but nothing o interest in it; nevertheless, his fre hadbeen ignited.

Fawcett served as a Lieutenant Colonel in combat duringWorld War 1, and ater experiencing that conicts horrors he

{REFERENCE POINT|

A Lost Civilization UndefootBook Review by Stephen Jett

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly

Obsession in the Amazon by DavidGrann, Doubleday, 2009.


18/20


occult writings have aroused a number ocultic and individual seekers o this a llegedmagical portal.)

The New Yorker sta writer DavidGrann became intrigued by the Fawcettstory, which had been a journalistic big

deal at the time o the explorers vanishingin back-country Brazil in 1925. A numbero others had endeavored to ascertain whathad ultimately happened to the English-man during his fnal expedition, but all hadailed. Grann decided to take up the taskonce again. He took into account the actthat Fawcett had deliberately alsifed co-ordinates o his routes in order to preventpotential claim-jumping.

In the 1950s, Fawcetts son Brian hadown over the area o his athers disap-pearance and had spotted a stone city

on a ridge; but the city turned out to bemerely naturally eroded sandstone orma-tions. On Granns expedition decades later,that writer traveled northward rom theBrazilian rontier settlement o Cuib andthen eastward into the upper Rio Xingdrainage, making local inquiries and ol-lowing his reconstruction o the Fawcettroute. At one point, he arrived at a plateaureminiscent o the mountain mentioned inthe report o 1753. Atop, his guideshowed Grann natural rock columns anda natural arch; these could have inspired

the eighteenth-century tale o a ruinedcity.

The Kalapalo Indians o the regioncame to admit that they had killed Faw-cett, his son, and the companion. But laterthey denied this, alleging instead that theparty o Englishmen had gone on eastwardrom Kalapalo territory, toward the Riodas Mortes (River o the Dead Ones),a tributary o the upper Rio Araguaia. It was in these neighboring lands, occupiedby hostile natives, that the killing had beenperpetrated, now said the Kalapalo. At any

rate, it seems clear that the Fawcett party was indeed murdered by Indians in thisgeneral part o Brazil, presumably with-out their ever having ound Z or any otherabandoned city.

Was there such a city out there? I oneis thinking o a Machu Picchu-like com-munity eaturing monuments and dwell-ings in stone masonry, the answer is almostcertainly no. However, large sites o hu-man settlement involving extensive earthworks have, or decades, been coming tobe recognized in regions o South America Fazenda olorada site in the Amazon. Photo by Martti Parssinen, nstituto beroamericano de Finlandia


19/20


that earlier had been perceived as always having been sparselypopulated by relatively primitive peoples. Such earthworksridged felds, canals, causeways, and moundswere mostlyin low-lying plains subject to periodic ooding and were di-fcult to detect on the orested ground. They were frst rec-ognized rom the air, in the Mojos o eastern Bolivia, more

than 40 years ago (e.g., Denevan, 1966, Mann, 2005:3-12).Remarkably, such works have also been discovered in the up-per Xing drainage (Grann, pp. 310-14, Heckenberger, 2005,Mann, 2008), particularly surprising in view o the act that inpost-1500 times that region has been a reugium or some othe most primitive tribes o the Amazon Basin. More recent-ly still, vast areas o the upper Purs drainage o Brazil nearthe Bolivian border have been recognized as d isplaying huge,precisely geometrical, human-made, ditch-and-embankmentgeoglyphs as well as arrow-straight roads (Prssinen, Schann,& Ranzi, 2009). These all are regions in or near which Faw-cett explored; but, ironically, he (like everyone else at the time)never recognized that he was traveling past striking maniesta-

tions o an advanced ancient culture.*

ReerencesDenevan, W. M. (1966). The Aboriginal Cultural Geography o

the Llanos de Mojos o Bolivia. University o Caliornia Press

series Ibero-Americana, 48. Berkeley.

Heaney, C. (2010). Cradle o Gold: The Story o Hiram Bingham,

a Real-Lie Indiana Jones, and the Search or Machu Picchu.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heckenberger, M. J. (2005). The Ecology o Power: Culture,

Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon. AD 1000-

2000. (Critical Perspectives in Identity, Memory, and the

Built Environment). New York: Routledge.Mann, C. C. (2005). 1491: New Revelations o the Americas beore

Columbus. New York: Alred A. Knop.

Mann, C. C. (2008). Ancient earthmovers o the Amazon. Sci-

ence, 321(5893), 1148-1152.

Prssinen, M., Schann, D., & Ranzi, A. (2009). Pre-Columbian

geometric earthworks in the Upper Purs: A complex society

in western Amazonia.Antiquity, 83(322), 1084-1095.

STEPHEN C. JETT is Professor Emeritus of eography and of Textiles

and lothing, niversity of alifornia, avis. is major research areas

include avajo history, material culture, sacred places, and place-

names; his boos on the subject include Navajo Wildlandsand Navajo

Architecture: Forms, History, Distributions(with irginia E. Spencer).

e has also published widely on his second major research interest,

pre-olumbian transoceanic inuences between the ld World and the

Americas, and he founded and edits Pre-Columbiana: A Journal o Long-

Distance Contacts.

*These rainorest societies seem to have depended on raised felds

in the ood-prone ats and, atop the blus, on the recently ar-

chaeologically recognized terra preta do indio, a dark, partially

artifcial soil that had resulted rom past peoples augmenting

the natural low-nutrient lateritic soil with nutrient-absorbing

charcoal and other organic materials.

re-ry o sexy quantum concepts and language, we need ratherto develop a resh lexicon o scientifc conceptualization thatcan capture and advance the deeper essence o our most pre-cious and powerul capacities or inormation acquisition, pro-

cessing, and utilization. Most notably, we need to extend thesweep o scientifc methodology to embrace the subjective aswell as the objective dimensions o human experience. Thiscaution by no means needs to exclude the use o aptly selectedmetaphors, but it does enjoin us to recognize them as such andto realize that even they cannot convey the deeper ontologicalaspects o reality. Rather, like all other theoretical tools, theyare attempting merely to share useul representations o howhuman consciousness perceives reality, and indeed in somesense, participates in its very creation and organization. Thisis no playground or nave or sloppy language or thought; it isvery sacred scientifc terrain.

Reerences1 A. Einstein, in P.A. Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-

Scientist, Evanston, IL: The Library o Living Philosophers,

1949, pp. 175-76.2 Ibid., p.13.3 W. Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond. New York: Harper and Row,

1971.4 W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern

Science. New York, Harper and Row (Harper Torchbooks),

1962.

ROBERT G. JAHN and BRENDA J. DUNNE of the nternational on-sciousness esearch aboratories in Princeton, .J., are the authors

of the new boo Consciousness and the Source o Reality: The PEAR

Odyssey( Press, 2011).

BACKSCATTER, continued from page 20

NEWS NOTEBOOK, continued from page 16

olor reconstruction of ct. 2009 TE event by the Finnish

astronomical journal Thdet ja avaruus, showing bright red sprites

inside an elf, two forms of lightning now nown to occur between the

tops of electrical storms and the ionosphere.


20/20


appropriated rom their Bohr/Schrdinger/ Heisenberg phys-ical counterparts. Wave/particle complementarities likewisewere invoked to help conceptualize certain wave-like eatureso consciousness experience and behavior that had appearedin our empirical observations. Unortunately, many readersmisconstrued these metaphorical representations as literal de-scriptions o the activity o consciousness being derived rom

physical quantum processes, rather than as a set o conceptswhich have proved to be useul in ordering things.

Over prior and ensuing years, scholars o various otherbackgrounds and insights also have proposed quantum me-chanical treatments o consciousness mechanics, using an as-sortment o mathematical ormalisms and fgurative illustra-tions that have reected their personal theoretical backgroundsand skills. In act, many o the patriarchs o early quantumtheory themselves had, individually and collectively, ponderedthe relevance to mind/matter issues, but largely deerred anyattempts at resolution thereo pending the acquisition o morecomprehensive and reliable empirical data. 3,4

More recently, however, the popularity o quantum analo-

gies or modeling all manner o anomalous phenomena hasbeen penetrating much urther into the communities cur-rently addressing the assessment, comprehension, and utiliza-tion o a much broader range o consciousness-related topics.Not only does this trend urther alienate quantum physicists,but it adds the unortunate eect o promulgating implicit as-sumptions that limit the eects under study to str ictly physicalinterpretations, thereby precluding options or more prooundways o thinking. In our view, this prolieration o quantumlogic and jargon is now becoming intellectually and pragmati-cally unproductive, and should be utilized more astutely lest itdeteriorate into simplistic mantras and slogans that obuscateattempts to develop more seaworthy models o the undamen-

tal processes underlying the consciousness dynamics in play.Fascinating as our consciousness-correlated anomalies

may be in their own right, their higher intellectual value liesin the hints they provide regarding the broader experienceso consciousness,per se, and o the inadequacies and outrighterrors that persist in our prevailing attempts to construct in-cisive models thereo. Titillating coee table conversationsinvoking quantum leaps or collapsing wave unctions donot greatly advance our comprehension o the ull sweep othe capabilities o the human mind. To pursue that epistemo-logical challenge, rather than resorting to some metaphorical

Many people involved in rontier areas o scientifc studydisplay a tendency to invoke the nomenclature o quan-

tum mechanics to bolster their scholarly credibility with boththe public and mainstream academia. While such strategiescan be eective or clarifcation o subtle concepts, and maybe useul ways o emphasizing the need or alternative per-spectives o reality, carried to excess they can easily become

counterproductive and should be deployed cautiously. First oall, there is an understandable, i not totally legitimate, recal-citrance o the exact science communities to surrender theirproprietary quantum conceptualizations and classifcations towhat they regard as less precise and rigorous sectors, especiallywhen such appropriations are blatantly shallow, i not totallyincorrect. In our ongoing struggle or development o a broad-er conceptual ramework capable o accommodating the sub-jective dimensions o reality, such nave representations tend tobe more oensive than persuasive. But beyond this, they alsotend to obscure the important act that quantum mechanics,like any theoretical structure, is itsel an essentially metaphori-cal technique or ormalizing and communicating objective

representations o subjective observations and interpretationso experimental data. As Albert Einstein so aptly put it:

Concepts which have proved to be useul in order-ing things easily acquire such an authority over usthat we orget their human origin and accept themas invariable.1... The system o concepts is a creationo man together with the rules o syntax, which con-stitute the structure o the conceptual systems....All concepts, even those which are closest to experi-ence, are rom the point o view o logic reely chosenconventions2

Early in the course o our Princeton Engineering Anoma-lies Research program, we too were struck by certain commoneatures appearing both in our empirical observations o con-sciousness-correlated anomalous physical phenomena and invarious theoretical aspects o quantum science, that lent them-selves to useul metaphorical associations. Subsequently we at-tempted to verbalize these analogies in a sequence o such met-aphorical propositions as consciousness atoms, conscious-ness molecules, and consciousness resonant bonds, alongwith consciousness uncertainty, complementarity, exclusion,and indistinguishability principles that we had unabashedly

The ses and Misuses of

Quantum Jagon

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne

{BACKSCATTER|

( ti d 19)

edgescience_07

Documents