My Library

Psychic phenomena have a long history of being notoriously spontaneous -- which means they happen when they do and don’t happen when they don’t. This, in turn, means the phenomena are unpredictable and dis-continuous. The scientific demand required that an "effect" be demonstrated as continuous and predictable in order to achieve the status as a real and acceptable effect. Psychical and parapsychological researchers could produce short-term, spontaneous effects which randomly appeared and disappeared. But their experience of long-term, sustained effects within proper scientific safeguards was exceedingly rare. In other words, predictable and reproducible effects was almost nil. The average reading public didn’t understand this -- didn’t really understand that what was MISSING from parapsychology research was the REPEATABLE effect -- i.e., the REPEATABLE EXPERIMENT. So great was this prevailing situation as of September 1971, that most parapsychologists had given up all hope of a reproducible experiment involving a test subject. Now, however, in the case of the graphite experiments, Backster could ASK that the effect be produced, again, again, and again. And the more times this happened, the more there came into existence the illusive experiment which was reproducible on the demand not of the test-subject, but on the demand of the experimenter.