[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Judean desert, after flying to the Holy Land with his wife to pursue his studies in Christian origins.
And so they go on, day after day, year after year, big predictions and little predictions.
Major disasters all have their share of advance documentation. The San Francisco earthquake and fire,
the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pelee which destroyed Martinique, the sinking of the Titanic were all
foretold graphically before they occurred.
What explanation, if any, can be offered for these unfailing harbingers of coming events?
There is the time-space continum theory, which postulates that time and space do not exist as we
know them, but are all run in together in a mystic communion of one-ness.
It seems pretty evident that the future exists for us in some form. The Universe is governed by certain
rhythmic laws, and nothing ever happens by chance.
Some scientists look upon the future, not as a potentiality, but as a reality, and believe there is no way
we can possibly change the inexorable progression of events. If we change our mind and don't take the
11 o'clock plane for Chicago, it only indicates that Destiny wasn't quite ready to take our life in the
crash that destroyed that plane.
Others postulate a more plastic or provisional future; they believe that certain events may take place if
we do nothing to prevent them.
Thus, the age-old battle between Predestination and Free Will still rages.
29 - Psychic Photography
There are two ways in which elements of the psychic world impress themselves upon photographic
film.
One is bizarre... and the second is even more bizarre!
The first oddity was responsible for a new word being added to the vocabulary of psychic
phenomenon-Extra.
This "extra" had nothing to do with motion picture production, for it was coined over a hundred years
ago, predating Hollywood by a considerable length of time.
A Boston photographer named William Mumler began noticing pictures on his film that had no
business being there.
There were more faces on the exposed film than had sat in front of it when the shutter clicked.
Because these "extra" faces were ethereally out of focus, Mr. Mumler assumed that they must belong
to discarnate spirits.
The Mumler fame spread rapidly, and soon came to the ears of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, recently
widowed, She came to Mumler's studio incognito, so the story goes, wearing a heavy veil over her
face, and asked to be photographed. When the plates were developed, the unmistakable features of
Lincoln, blurred but still distinct enough for identification, were there in the background.
Mumler's reputation was now established, and he did a brisk business photographing "extras" - until
he was taken into custody by the police and charged with fraud.
The authorities decided there was not enough evidence, and refused to prosecute him. It will probably
never be known whether the extras he produced were the genuine article, or whether he faked them.
Spirit photography is very easy to fake by anyone who has rudimentary knowledge of film developing
techniques. This is why it has never been dealt with too seriously in psychic investigations. However,
within the past 30 years it has taken on a new prestige due to the attention given it by the Psychic
Observer, a highly regarded occult tabloid newspaper published in England.
To launch its campaign to publicize the importance of spirit; "extras" on photographic plates, the
Psychic Observer staged a beauty contest. In addition to being beautiful, all contestants had to be
dead! Submissions were to be made from these strange surplus faces that turned up, from time to time,
on photographic film.
The Psychic Observer had its own spirit photographer pets, one of them being John Myers (the same
psychic who won a UNESCO prize with his painting of Marilyn Monroe).
Myers was carefully tested, and no one was able to prove any fraud in his operation.
His procedure was to have his testers pick up fresh film for him themselves. They were to pick it up at
random at any store of their choice that dispensed film, thus precluding any possiblity that the film
could be tampered with in advance.
The pictures were shot under Myer's direction, but he never at any time so much as touched the
camera himself. The exposed film was taken into a darkroom and processed by technicians supplied
by the testers. There was no way in which Myers could compromise the results of the tests. And yet,
when the developed pictures were produced, "extras" were present, hovering in the background.
The second photographic gambit deals with a remarkable man, Ted Serios by name, who can sit in a
hotel room in Evanston, Illinois, point a camera at his forehead, and take a picture of a building in
Canada!
One of the most remarkable things about Ted Serios is that he does not seem in the least remarkable.
An eighth-grade drop-out, he became a bellhop in a Chicago hotel and later took a job as a truck
driver. Not at all the sort of man one would take a picture of a thought, and have it materialize on a
developed film.
Yet he does it. He has been tested over and over by university scientists, and there is no chance of
fraud being involved in his performance.
His strange gift grew out of an experiment in do-it-yourself hypnotism. George Johannes, a fellow
bellhop at Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel, put Ted into a deep trance and implanted the suggestion
that the contents of his mind could be photographed.
His mind has been photographed ever since - with one small qualification: sometimes the pictures that
come out are not things that are being visualized in his mind at all; in fact, some of them he never saw
before.
One time he took a picture which no one could identify; the only clue was a sign, identifying the
locale of a remote Canadian town. The examiners sent the picture to the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police of that village and asked whether they could identify it. Yes, they could. It was a very clear
photograph of one of the town's landmarks!
Thus, Serios took a photograph of an impression on his mind that never really could have been there.
He had never even heard of the town, much less the building in question.
Usually his photographs show very clearly identifiable buildings. The Taj Mahal, the Washington
Monument, the Lincoln Memorial. Sometimes he will pick up historical personages, and sometimes
even prehistoric monsters.
An experiment conducted in Denver proved that he could even shoot pictures on cue. He was directed
in advance what image to project, and succeeded in projecting that precise image.
This is the sort of thing the defies explanation. There must be, in his head, available through some
mystic x-ray power of a simple Polaroid camera, an image that is capable of refracting light.
30 - Psychokinesis
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]