Was there any truth to Owens' abilities, or was he a fraud with a knack for picking the times and places of catastrophes? Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, a respected parapsychologist and host of the popular public television program Thinking Allowed, analyzes correspondence, interviews, newspaper reports, and remarkable life of "the world's greatest psychic," as Owens claimed to be. Whether Owens was a prodigious liar and dangerous con-man, or a true but unbalanced master who used his incredible powers primarily for petty acts of revenge, many questions remain, and the implications for the rest of us are staggering.
Was there any truth to Owens' abilities, or was he a fraud with a knack for picking the times and places of catastrophes? Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, a respected parapsychologist and host of the popular public television program Thinking Allowed, analyzes correspondence, interviews, newspaper reports, and remarkable life of "the world's greatest psychic," as Owens claimed to be. Whether Owens was a prodigious liar and dangerous con-man, or a true but unbalanced master who used his incredible powers primarily for petty acts of revenge, many questions remain, and the implications for the rest of us are staggering.
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Overview
Was there any truth to Owens' abilities, or was he a fraud with a knack for picking the times and places of catastrophes? Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, a respected parapsychologist and host of the popular public television program Thinking Allowed, analyzes correspondence, interviews, newspaper reports, and remarkable life of "the world's greatest psychic," as Owens claimed to be. Whether Owens was a prodigious liar and dangerous con-man, or a true but unbalanced master who used his incredible powers primarily for petty acts of revenge, many questions remain, and the implications for the rest of us are staggering.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571741837 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2000 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
THE PK MAN
A True Story of Mind Over Matter
By JEFFREY MISHLOVE
Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 Jeffrey Mishlove and his licensorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57174-183-7
CHAPTER 1
SNOW DURING THE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
They Were Eager to Discuss the Case
In February 1976, I visited the huge, military-industrial think tank, SRI International, in Menlo Park, California, at the invitation of physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. In addition to their groundbreaking work in remote viewing, or clairvoyance, which later became the basis for a twenty-year military intelligence program, Puthoff and Targ had also achieved fame and notoriety for their experiments with Uri Geller. This work had been published in the prestigious British journal, Nature, in 1973. When I arrived at their laboratory, I found the two physicists very excited, even flabbergasted, about another case. They eagerly explained to me that they had been contacted by a strange man named Ted Owens, who signed his letters "PK Man" and proclaimed that he was "the world's greatest psychic." Owens seemed eager to be used as a subject for parapsychological testing. Puthoff and Targ declined the offer but nevertheless for several years continued to receive correspondence from the PK Man that documented his demonstrations.
On January 30, 1976, Owens wrote to Puthoff and Targ telling them that he was going to show them the extent of his powers by causing heavy storms over the San Francisco area and thereby ending the drought that was then approaching disastrous proportions. His letter read:
Last night on 1V the evening news showed a stricken California. Crops are dead and dying and the animals are in pitiful condition. Now I, Ted Owens, PK Man, will change all of that. Within the next 90 days from the time of this letter I will pour and pour and pour rains onto and into the state of California until it is swimming in water and the dangerous drought is completely over. There will be storm after storm, lightning after lightning attacks, and high winds....
It didn't take ninety days for Owens' demonstration to come off. A freak snowstorm hit the San Francisco area on February 5. It was the first storm of winter, and many more were to follow. According to an Associated Press (AP) release, "The unexpected snowfall came as part of the first major California storm this year in a season that has brought drought to farm areas and talk of water rationing in many communities." The last snowstorm to strike the San Francisco Bay Area occurred in 1887 and dropped 3.7 inches of snow. The only other snowfall in the area fell in 1962 when mild flurries were seen. The February storm left no less than 3.5 inches of snow on the ground. As though unintentionally acknowledging Owens' complicity in the affair, the AP story also stated that "the storm featured lightning and sleet" and added that "a giant television tower on Mr. San Bruno, south of San Francisco, was hit by lightning." Interestingly, lightning is very rare in the San Francisco area.
The storm hit San Francisco unannounced, delighting residents but mystifying meteorologists who were totally caught off guard by it. In fact, it was so freakish that Claude Holmes, a representative for the National Weather Service, had to admit to the San Francisco Chronicle that he was baffled by it. The meteorological aspects leading to the storm were "so complicated," he said, "that I'm not sure I understand all the details myself" Whatever the case may be, the snowfall was only the beginning of the end to the drought. Just as Owens had predicted, the storm heralded several weeks of snow, lightning and winds. An Oakland Tribune story on February 5 reported that the storm exhibited "nearly every phenomenon in the weatherman's book throughout the Bay Area" including snow, hail, sleet, thunder, and lightning. Gale warnings were issued in northwestern California. The storm went on for several days and introduced what was to be one of the worst winters in California history. The rainfall was unbelievable for the rest of the season as storm after storm meandered over the state. These continual storm fronts produced formidable problems in Southern California.
Los Angeles nearly became a disaster area when the constant moisture weakened the foothills that surround many areas of the city, and this led to huge mudslides that caused millions of dollars worth of damage as expensive hillside homes were completely destroyed by mud and structural damage. Resultant flooding even took a few lives. The weather eventually became so freakish that, at one point, a tornado watch was called. This was the first time this had ever happened in recent history. Tornadoes are extremely rare in California, and none had ever struck Los Angeles.
Another peculiar aspect of that fateful winter is that there was considerable UFO activity reported in California right before the storms began. During the last week of January, half a dozen law enforcement agencies logged calls about a cigar-shaped object, complete with flashing lights and vapor trail, that was seen traveling through southeastern California. After the storm, on February 8 and 9, two scientists spotted a UFO flying over the Siskiyou Mountains in Northern California. One of these witnesses, Paul Cerny, was a noted UFO investigator quite capable of distinguishing a genuinely mysterious airborne object from a conventional craft. Since UFO activity was not rare in this area, these UFO appearances possibly had nothing to do with Owens' demonstrations. However, as we shall see, UFO phenomena often accompanied these demonstrations.
Puthoff and Targ sent Owens a note congratulating him on his successful prediction and received a telegram response from him stating that it was not a prediction, but that he, Owens, had caused the snowstorm! After all, that was why he called himself the PK Man, PK meaning psychokinesis, the ability to affect matter with the mind. This was food for thought, and when I visited the physicists some weeks later, they were eager to discuss the case.
Hyperdimensional Entities Affectionately Known as "Twitter" and "Tweeter"
Puthoff and Targ brought out Ted Owens' 1969 book How to Contact Space People, and with great interest showed me a drawing of two large, insect-like creatures in the text, whom Owens affectionately called "Twitter" and "Tweeter." The book claimed that Owens had produced many demonstrations of his psychokinetic powers for government officials and even named the officials he had interacted with in each case. For the CIA, Owens had "used his powers" to cause ships to sink. For NASA, he had demonstrated his "control" over lightning. Nevertheless, Owens bitterly complained, these agencies still refused to take him seriously.
Owens also described the visualization techniques that he used to communicate with Space Intelligences (SIs), i.e., hyperdimensional entities who were continually in his view, monitoring the Earth from UFOs. He saw them as looking into a screen where his thought-forms appeared. Other people could communicate with them using this same method, he stated. I experienced this some ten years later, when I took Owens' training program (see chapter 11). The Space Intelligences, Owens often claimed, were the ones who really had the power. Just as often, however, he attributed his powers to psychokinesis.
Because of the controversy that their research was already generating, Puthoff and Targ did not feel that they could afford to pursue an investigation of Ted Owens. Nevertheless, the recent events had piqued their curiosity. The solution, it seemed to them, was simple: turn the project over to a promising young graduate student. I was their candidate.
Owens liked to tell how the UFO entities captured him and operated on his brain to make him half human and half alien. He had a thick crease at the base of his skull that, he said, resulted from this operation. In August 1976, some months after I learned about Owens, he gave me an opportunity to inspect this crease for myself at the City University of London where we were both attending a conference sponsored by the Parascience Foundation. All of this came about because Psychic magazine, a now defunct publication but once of some distinction, ran a news item based on information gleaned from Puthoff and Targ about Owens' possible role in ending the California drought.
How a Drought Ended during the London Parascience Foundation Conference
In May 1976, Owens received a letter from Suzanne Stebbing, a British student of the paranormal and a friend of Professor John Taylor, a well known mathematician at King's College in Great Britain and an ardent student of parapsychology. England was at the time suffering from its worst drought in 150 years, and Stebbing, having read the Psychic magazine item about Owens' powers, was wondering if he could end it. In a return letter dated May 10, Owens informed his admirer that he would begin work on the project but asked that Taylor himself write to him asking for the demonstration. As part of his performance, Owens promised massive rainfall during the next ninety days as well as lightning strikes, high winds, and UFO appearances.
Stebbing wrote back to Owens in early June, explaining that Taylor was too tied up with other work to write to him. However, included in her letter was an invitation for Owens to come to England where he could meet Taylor in order to give an address to a paraphysics conference scheduled to be convened at the University of London. (Paraphysics is to physics as parapsychology is to psychology. Both fields engage in scientific inquiry into the paranormal aspects of nature.) In this same letter, Stebbing advised Owens that the drought had begun to abate slightly but that it was still a serious condition threatening to create havoc across the country. Although some rain fell in June, these showers did little to offset the deleterious effects of the prolonged drought.
Owens finally heard from Taylor towards the end of his self-imposed deadline. Taylor pointed out that, since so little rain had fallen during the last ninety days, he considered Owens' rainmaking attempts to be a dear failure. He reiterated his feelings in a letter to Owens two days after, in which he pointed out that British meteorologists had announced that there was no end to the drought in sight.
This was all quite true. By August, when the paraphysics conference was slated to convene, England was in bad shape. London residents were being asked to reduce water consumption by one third. In some outlying villages, water had to be trucked in. By August 27, the London Times had to report that, according to government ministries, there still seemed no end to the drought in sight and it could easily last through September. My friends in London joked that if I wanted to get my picture in the Times, all I had to do was appear in Piccadilly Circus with an umbrella!
August 27 was also conspicuous since that was the day Owens arrived in London. Synchronistically, it rained there that very day. It was the first rain in twenty-eight days, and although it did not end the drought, it dampened the entire southeastern section of England. It rained again the following day, and, as typically happened when Owens was around, a mysterious power failure crippled the London subway system and stranded thirty trains during the showers. The rain never stopped. It continued throughout September, and on September 29, the drought was declared officially over by government sources.
Despite the fact that Owens' London demonstration was not a clear-cut success, it was curiously impressive to me, as I was in London at the time and well aware of events in California earlier that year. The rain that ultimately ended the British drought began the day Owens arrived in London, even though no end to it was officially in sight. The fact is that Owens specialized in trying to cause power failures, as shall be shown throughout this book. This, coupled with the fact that such a failure occurred the day of his arrival, was also too synchronistic for comfort.
In any event, no matter what role Owens played in the rains, at least England had been saved from disaster, but whether by Owens, chance, nature, or God, one cannot say.
During my 1976 summer trip to England, I was able, for the first time, to meet Owens at a conference convened at the City University of London by the Institute of Parascience, a small, private parapsychology research facility in London. Owens was an invited speaker on the program, and spoke to a somewhat stunned audience—an impressive speaker with a booming voice that rang through the auditorium. Yet, paradoxically, despite his large frame, he seemed like a child. He even pulled behind him a red toy wagon stacked with newspaper clippings documenting his exploits, and he spoke about the hundreds of demonstrations that he had conducted for scientists. He shocked the audience with his claims that he had direct contact with UFO beings, that they had endowed him with psychic powers, that he was being used by the Space Intelligences to end worldwide drought, and that he could be useful in psychic warfare against the Soviet Union.
Despite Owens' bizarre claims and wild theatrics, I was intrigued by him. His words were dear and articulate. His manner was confident. His eyes sparkled with charisma and precocious genius. He rocked the audience with his claim that he had established telepathic contact with other dimensional Space Intelligences. He described how they, the Space Intelligences, had guided his career from infancy to adulthood through over fifty different occupations—bodyguard, bullwhip artist, judo expert, jazz musician, knife thrower, dance instructor, shorthand expert, high speed typist, parapsychology researcher—so that his mind would be flexible enough to manipulate their complicated symbolic system.
Owens held up a signed letter from Dr. Max L. Fogel, the director of science and education for Mensa, who had testified that he had received a written prediction from Owens, two days prior to the event, accurately forecasting the appearance of a UFO in Chase City, Virginia.
Owens, however, explained to his London audience that he had caused the sighting and not merely predicted it. He also produced an affidavit from a radio producer in Dallas, Texas, verifying the accuracy of a claim that Owens would produce a major demonstration of his powers by wreaking havoc with the local weather. Owens' pronouncement was followed by some of the most intense and unseasonable weather in Texas history. An earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale struck, tornadoes came fast and furious, the coldest temperatures in Texas history followed suit, and fierce, hot winds capped the ordeal by destroying half the Texas wheat crop.
Because the conference was running behind schedule, the moderator asked Owens to finish his talk early. This abrupt news shook his self-assured manner. He left the podium like an obedient but bitter child, without taking advantage of the few minutes remaining.
It was a scientific conference and, in this context, Owens was out of place. He was speaking as a psychic to scientists who are by profession and nature skeptical of all psychic claims beyond those that they have personally investigated or that have been reported in the scholarly literature, and even those claims are subject to intense and often hostile scrutiny. To make matters worse, another psychic preceded Owens on the speaker's podium—Susan Padfield, the wife of noted British physicist Ted Bastin. Padfield, whose psychokinetic abilities had been extensively tested, spoke about "psychic support figures." She claimed that when she first started doing PK, she assumed that UFO intelligences were working through her. Since then, she had come to realize that the powers were her own; and the notion that UFO intelligences provided psychic support might have been initially necessary to satisfy her emotional needs but did not explain her PK abilities. Other psychics who claimed to work with spirit guides, saints, or deities were also satisfying the same emotional need, she claimed.
When Owens got up to speak, the cards were clearly stacked against him. Even if the audience would accept the seemingly outlandish claim that he could cause large-scale weather changes, it was not inclined to believe that he did so through the agency of UFOs. They were not inclined to embrace his desire to use his talents in psychic warfare with the Soviet Union; and they were not inclined to accept his messianic claim that he was the supreme Earth ambassador of UFO intelligences. Owens was a liar or a madman, an evil magician or an egotistical crackpot. Few people saw him as a fellow human struggling to share with them the methods by which he had cultivated powers so rare they seem either chimerical or demonic.
The Parascience Foundation Conference was not prepared to handle a character like Owens. Those attending the London conference had mixed reactions to him, ranging from exasperation and incredulity to fascination. Many felt that if Owens wasn't an outright liar, then he was a dangerous character. His claims were difficult to accept, yet the documentation was there for all to view.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE PK MAN by JEFFREY MISHLOVE. Copyright © 2000 Jeffrey Mishlove and his licensors. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
FOREWORD,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
Chapter 1 SNOW DURING THE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT,
Chapter 2 MY SAN FRANCISCO EXPERIMENT,
Chapter 3 TED OWENS RECALLS HIS EARLY YEARS,
Chapter 4 THE SPACE INTELLIGENCES,
Chapter 5 THE PK MAN'S GREATEST HITS,
Chapter 6 DANCING WITH HURRICANE DAVID,
Chapter 7 IS IT REALLY PSYCHOKINESIS?,
Chapter 8 SUPER FAN,
Chapter 9 CONTACTING THE SPACE INTELLIGENCES,
Chapter 10 THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE,
Chapter 11 THE FINAL GIFT OF THE UFO PROPHET,
Chapter 12 IMPLICATIONS, APPLICATIONS, AND RAMIFICATIONS,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,