as told to Amy Schellenbaum as told to Mary Beth Griggs / illustrations by Peter OumanskiAs a social psychologist for more than 50 years, I’ve studied topics
including sexual orientation and personality theory. But I became
known for my work on precognition, anticipating the future. I got
hooked on this stuff as a kid when I saw a “mind reader” named Joseph
Dunninger on TV. In high school, I started performing my own
mentalism shows. When I became a professor, I showed my students
the same tricks to demonstrate why witnesses make mistakes.
In 1985, the Parapsychological Association, researchers who study
extrasensory perception, asked me to perform at a conference. On
stage, I correctly listed the contents of a packed box without opening it.
It was pure swindle, but the point was not to demonstrate that I could
read minds; it was to show how easily fraud could ruin their tests.
One of the scientists asked me to make his lab’s telepathy experiments
cheat-proof. He got real results—unexplained communication between
subjects in separate rooms—so I helped him get published in an academic
journal. But he died nine days before our write-up was accepted.
Suddenly, I was known for paranormal research.
Starting in 2000, I’d found existence of precognition in nine
experiments, by reversing the chronology of psychological tests. In one
classic study, people take longer to recognise an image as pleasant when
the word “ugly” lashes by before it. I lipped the order of events, so
subjects viewed the image before seeing the subliminal word. I still found
the same effect, showing they could “feel” the future. Eight of my
experiments are replicable, and I’m redesigning the ninth one so everyone
can get results from it too. In a way, I’m betting my career on it.NO PHONE HOMELooking for Life in All
The Wrong PlacesDARYL BEM,PROFESSOR EMERITUS
AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY
JILL TARTER, ASTRONOMER AND BERNARD
M. OLIVER CHAIR AT THE SETI INSTITUTEREAD MY MIND
Proving
Precognition
FROM THEFIELD
TALES
Since the 1970s, I’ve been pointingoptical and radio
telescopes at the skyto look for engineered signals
from other planets—signs of extraterrestrial
intelligence. In 1984, I broadened that search when I
helpedfound the SETI Institute.
At SETI, we built tools to look for signals we don’t
thin k nature can produce. One time, in 1997, at West
Vir ginia’s Green Bank Observatory, my team noticed
a strangesi gnal from a distant star. On agraph of
frequencies over time, it looked like a picketfence:
spikes with equal spacing between each one.
It was suchan a drena line rush.W henyou thin k
you’vefound an alien transmission, it’s heart-stop-
pin g. I wrote a computer program to take another look
at the data—but I didn’t take the time toformat it
properly. Because ofthat, I misinterpreted the results.
Hours later, we realised our telescope was pickingup
transmissionsfrom the European Solar and
Heliospheric Observatory passingin front of the sun. If
Ih adb een moreleve l-h ea ded an drea dth e output
correctly, I could have saveda ll th at time and
frustration. A BBC crew was ilmingus that day, and I
thin kth eywere more crushedthan we were.
To make it worse, we had alerted
some colleagues in California to watch that same
star. We hadgone off to bed after we sussed out it
wasn’t a signal. But weforgot to tell them! They
called back at 2 a.m., and they didn’t think it was
funny at all when we told them it was a false positive.
I had a number of f ences to mend.72 POPULAR SCIENCE