Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them ?
—Henry IV
For all the enormous achievements of science in posting the universe that man inhabits, odd things keep slipping past the sentries. The tap on the shoulder may be fleeting, the brush across the cheek gone sooner than it is felt, but the momentary effect is unmistakable: an unwilling suspension of belief in the rational. An old friend suddenly remembered, and as suddenly the telephone rings and the friend is on the line. A vivid dream that becomes the morning reality. The sense of bumping into one's self around a corner of time, of having done and said just this, in this place, once before in precisely this fashion. A stab of anguish for a distant loved one, and next day, the telegram.
Hardly a person lives who can deny some such experience, some such seeming visitation from across the psychic frontier. For most of man's history, those intrusions were mainsprings of action, the very life of Greek epic and biblical saga, of medieval tale and Eastern chronicle. Modern science and psychology have learned to explain much of what was once inexplicable, but mysteries remain. The workings of the mind still resist rational analysis; reports of psychic phenomena persist. Are they all accident, illusion? Or are there other planes and dimensions of experience and memory? Could there be a paranormal world exempt from known natural law?
Both in America and abroad, those questions are being asked by increasing numbers of laymen and scientists hungry for answers. The diverse manifestations of interest in so-called psychic phenomena are everywhere:
> In the U.S., The Secret Life of Plants becomes a bestseller by offering an astonishing and heretical thesis: greenery can feel the thoughts of humans.
> At Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, the image of a painting is transmitted by ESP, and seems to enter the dreams of a laboratory subject sleeping in another room.
> In England, a poll of its readers by the New Scientist indicates that nearly 70% of the respondents (mainly scientists and technicians) believe in the possibility of extrasensory perception.
> At the University of California, Psychologist Charles Tart reports that his subjects showed a marked increase in ESP scores after working with his new teaching machine.
> In Los Angeles, a leaf is cut in half, then photographed by a special process. The picture miraculously shows the "aura" or outline of the whole leaf.
> In Washington, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency assigns a team to investigate seemingly authentic psychic phenomena at the Stanford Research Institute.
> On both sides of the Atlantic, Uri Geller, a young Israeli psychic, astounds laymen and scientists alike by bending spoons and keys apparently with the force of his thoughts.
> In the Philippines, Tennis Star Tony Roche is relieved of painful "tennis elbow" when an incision is made and three blood clots are apparently removed by the touch of a psychic healer, who knows nothing of surgery or of modern sanitation.
> In the U.S., the number of colleges offering courses in parapsychology increases to more than 100.