My Library

I was angry -- but not stupid. If I walked out on this one there would be no less than eight witnesses. And this was not parapsychology where experiments and results are messed about all the time. THIS was SCIENCE, and THIS had witnesses, and THIS was the first time, in my case at least, there had ever been any witnesses except those necessary for an experiment. I had always been willing to try parapsychology experiments. I had never said I COULD DO anything except to try. In such experiments, one has a fifty-fifty chance of some kind of success -- and so there was no real reason not to try. You see, even if one failed, one could always try again. In the case of THIS magnetometer, though, failure was THE END -- most certainly because SCIENCE didn't want parapsychology or Psi stuff in the first place. I could walk out -- and never know if I would fail or succeed. I suppose I should say, in retrospect, that this was a challenge. And it certainly was -- an awful one. One of those "damned if you do and fail," and "damned if you don't try." Far worse (and very much more dramatic) "challenges" were to come in the years ahead. And in retrospect, I'm glad I decided more or less to look death in the face, for the experience at the Varian Hall gave me some familiarity along those lines. Puthoff is not an unkind man. But he had put me between a rock and a hard place -deliberately so, because he too needed to find out things. So I asked Dr. Hebbard: "Do you know exactly where the magnetometer is?" The answer was no. It was down there, but exactly where no one knew. So, as in Cleve Backster's lab, I started "probing" -- whatever that means.