Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

McMoneagle sketched a large vessel, much larger than any submarine in existence, with a long flat deck and tubes for eighteen or twenty missiles. The nSc officials were doubtful. The vessel was too big for a submarine, and the building was about a hundred yards from the water. Also, none of the intelligence services had picked up any reports of such a submarine under construction in the Soviet Union. Looking into the future, McMoneagle predicted that in four months time the Soviets would dig a canal from the building to the water to launch the submarine. In January of 1980, satellite photos revealed the submarine, the largest in the world, moving through a new artificial channel from the building to the harbor. The submarine had a flat deck and twenty missile tubes. It was the first typhoon class submarine. Radin (1997, p. 195) said, “Scientists who had worked on these highly classified programs, including myself, were frustrated to know firsthand the reality of high-performance psi phenomena and yet we had no way of publicly responding to skeptics. nothing could be said about the fact that the U.S. Army had supported a secret team of remote viewers, that those viewers had participated in hundreds of remote-viewing missions, and that the dIA, cIA, customs Service, drug Enforcement Agency, fBI, and Secret Service had all relied on the remote-viewing team for more than a decade, sometimes with startling results.”

In 1988, Edwin May, director of Stanford Research International, reviewed the results of all psychical research tests carried out at SRI from 1973 to 1988, involving over 26,000 trials in the course of 154 experiments. The odds that the success rate in these trials could have been the result of chance guesses were 1020 to one, more than a billion to one (Radin 1997, p. 101). In 1995, the congress of the United States asked the American Institutes for Research to review the cIA-sponsored remote viewing work carried out at Science Applications International corporation (SAIc) during the years 1989–1993. The two chief reviewers were dr. Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of california at davis, favorable to psychical research, and dr. Ray Hyman, a long time critic of psychical research. Radin (1997, p. 101) noted, “The SAIc studies provided a rigorously controlled set of experiments that had been supervised by a distinguished oversight committee of experts from a variety of scientific disciplines. The committee included a nobel laureate physicist, internationally known experts in statistics, psychology, neuroscience, and astronomy, and a retired U. S. Army major general who was also a physician.”

In her evaluation, Jessica Utts concluded: “It is clear to this author that anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated” (Utts 1996; in Radin 1997, p. 102). Utts also said: “The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research . . . have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud” (Utts 1996, p. 3; in Radin 1997, pp.4–5).

Even Ray Hyman found little to criticize: “I agree with Jessica Utts that the effect sizes reported in the SAIc experiments . . . probably cannot be dismissed as due to chance. nor do they appear to be accounted for by multiple testing, filedrawer distortions, inappropriate statistical testing or other misuse of statistical inference. . . . So, I accept Professor Utts’ assertion that the statistical results of the SAIc, and other parapsychological experiments, ‘are far beyond what is expected by chance.’ The SAIc experiments are well-designed and the investigators have taken pains to eliminate the known weaknesses in previous parapsychological research. In addition, I cannot provide suitable candidates for what flaws, if any, might be present” (Hyman 1996, p. 55; in Radin 1997 p. 103). nevertheless, he still was not prepared to admit that the tests confirmed psychical abilities. He proposed that although he was not able to identify any flaws, or even propose any possible flaws, that some flaws might be there. He therefore insisted on more “independent replication” of the results, although the results, in the course of twenty years, had already been independently repeated by different researchers at SRI and elsewhere.

Among the labs that had already independently replicated SRI’s remote viewing work was the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory, at Princeton University. Remote viewing experiments started there in 1978. The published experiments involved

334 trials between 1978 and 1987. “The final odds against chance for the PEAR researchers’ overall database were 100 billion to one,” said Radin (1997 p. 105).

Ganzfeld experiments

In recent years, psychical researchers have been conducting telepathic experiments with a technique called the ganzfeld (Radin 1997, pp. 69–72). The ganzfeld technique grew out of dream telepathy experiments carried out by psychiatrist Montague Ullman and psychologist Stanley Krippner at the Maimonides Medical center in Brooklyn, new York, during the years 1966–1972. It appeared that if a waking person

194 Human Devolution: a vedic alternative to Darwin’s theory

sent mental images to a dreaming person, the dreaming person would see those images in dreams. The dreamer would go to sleep in a closed room that was soundproofed and shielded from external electromagnetic waves. EEG monitoring of the sleeper’s brain waves would signal the beginning of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, during which dreaming occurs. during the REM period, a sender isolated at a different location would try to send to the dreamer an image, randomly selected from a group of images, in most cases eight. Experimental protocols kept contacts between the experimenters and the sender to an absolute minimum. The sender would simply hear a buzzer at the onset of the dreamer’s REM sleep, and at this signal would begin sending the target image. At the end of the REM period, the sleeper would be awakened, and an experimenter would ask the sleeper to describe the dominant dream image. In some cases, the dreamer would go back to sleep and the process would be repeated. Afterwards, independent judges would compare the dream descriptions to the entire set of eight images from which the actual target image had been selected. The images would be ranked according to how well they matched the dreamer’s description. The best match was assigned first place, the second best match second place, and so on. If it turned out that the actual target image sent by the sender was one of the four best matches, this was counted as a hit. If we assume there was nothing significant in the dream descriptions, and that the judges had no knowledge of the actual target image, then the matchings of the eight images to a particular dream description would be random. In that case we would expect that the actual target image would show up in the best four matches from the whole set of eight images only fifty percent of the time. Radin (1997, p. 70) noted: “In journal articles published between 1966 and

1973, a total of 450 dream telepathy sessions were reported . . . the overall hit rate is seen to be about 63 percent . . . the odds against chance of getting a 63 percent hit rate in 450 sessions, where chance is 50 percent and the confidence interval is . . . small [plus or minus 4 percent], is seventy-five million to one.”

The dream experiments were based on the premise that psychical effects would operate more strongly on a receiver’s mind when ordinary sensory inputs were lessened. charles Honorton, a parapsychologist involved with the Maimonides dream experiments, sought to develop a method for putting subjects into an artificial state of dreamlike sensory deprivation. Researchers would thus have more control over the experimental process, as it no longer depended on waiting for the subject to fall asleep and enter the REM state. William Braud, a psychologist at the University of Houston, and Adrian Parker, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, joined Honorton in producing what came to be called the ganzfeld method.