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Most scientists have greeted the experiments with open skepticism—with good reason. After his plants would not respond for a visiting Canadian plant physiologist, for example, Backster offered an interesting hypothesis: the plants "fainted" because they sensed that she routinely incinerated her own plants and then weighed the ashes after her experiments.
Backster is the essence of conservatism compared with the book's more adventurous researchers. A New Jersey electronics buff, Pierre Paul Sauvin, attached a Rube Goldbergian machine to his plants, and then spent the weekend with his girl friend at a place 80 miles away. He found that even at that distance the plants had responded to his sexual relations with the girl. The tone oscillators went "right off the top," he says, at the moment of orgasm.
In Japan, Ken Hashimoto, another polygraph expert, discovered that his cactus could count and add up to 20. George De La Warr, a British engineer, insisted that young plants grew better if their "mother" were kept alive. Ironically, the authors did not address themselves to some significant facts about botany. Plants do respond physiologically to certain sound waves. Talking to a plant may indeed make it healthier, because it thrives on the carbon dioxide exhaled by the speaker.
Many psychics and their followers believe that paranormal powers may be dependent on mysterious auras or "energy flows," phenomena that they say can be recorded by Kirlian photography. The technique, developed in the late 1930s by Russian Electronics Expert Semyon Kirlian and his wife Valentina, involves introducing a small amount of high-voltage, high-frequency current into the subject and recording the subsequent discharge on photographic film. The result is a photograph showing an "energy body"—a weird aura—around the plant, animal or human part being photographed.
Soon, Kirlians claimed that photographing a portion of a leaf, for example, would produce the aura of the entire leaf on film. Some psychics claim that in time the aura of a missing limb might be discernible with Kirlian photography. Today the process is an integral part of paranormal exploration.
In the U.S. the leading proponent of the art is U.C.L.A. Psychologist Thelma Moss, who has taken more Kirlian photographs and done more experimental work with them than anyone outside Russia.
Moss, a former Broadway actress, found her interest in parapsychological phenomena kindled after LSD therapy. "From the first," she recalls, "I intended to specialize in parapsychology because of the glimpses of psychic phenomena I experienced during the LSD treatments. But I certainly don't feel the need to use drugs any more ... When you've gotten the message, you hang up the phone." For Moss, the message is that Kirlian photography clearly demonstrates a human aura. "We have done work with acupuncturists and [psychic] healers," she says, "and we find that the corona of the healer becomes intense before healing, and then afterward is more relaxed and less strong. We think we're looking at a