Approved For Release^01/03/26
: CIA-RDP96-00787Rq09200080047-3
MvTurn
Dan Greenburg
Confessions of a Nonbeliever
I
have something to tell you and I don’t
know how you’re going to take
it.
I
don t really know how to take it myself, if
-v.
you want to know the truth.
What I have to tell you is that, all those
years when we used to giggle at anything
having
to
do
with
the
occult—with
ghosts and clairvoyants and faith healers
and voodoo and mind-over-matter and
whatnot—well, maybe we were wrong to
'
giggle.
Look, I’m a rational,
logical,
linear-
thinking, sensible fella, same as yourself,
and
if about two
years
ago
I
started
running around with witches and medi-
ums
and
practitioners
of ceremonial
magic,
it was mostly because
I figured
they’d be fun to write about. Have a little
chuckle
at their expense, and where’s
the harm, you know? I certainly never
expected
to
encounter
anything
I
couldn’t explain away with my rational,
logical, linear-thinking, sensible, old be-
lief system, but that
is what seems
to
have happened.
It didn’t happen in the melodramatic
situations I found my way into either—it
didn’t happen in the spooky home of a
black magician next to Loch Ness, Scot-
land, and it didn’t happen in the coven of
teen-age
witches
I hung out with
in
Brooklyn, and
it didn’t happen during
he sinister voodoo ceremonies I got into
Haiti. Where
it happened was
in
Jectly ordinary apartments in perfect-
ordinary places like Chicago and New
4^/ork City and Toronto. There was no
*
weird chanting, no voodoo drums, no
whooshes of fire, nothing like that.
SEEING IS BELIEVING?
The first thing that happened was that
'
a psychic named Alex Tanous asked me
and a ladyfriend to participate in a little
experiment. He went into a room adja-
cent
to
the one we were
in, found a
magazine, opened it at random so none of
us could see it and put it face down on a
bed. Then he came back into the room
we were
in and,
in a semi-meditative
^
process, guided us into trying to "see” it.
He asked us to describe the picture in the
other room and, not believing there was
the remotest chance of doing so, we took
awhackatit.
We each described entirely different
images: the young lady described a small
black-and-white
portrait
of
a woman
with a broad-brimmed hat. I described a
religious painting, dark in color, with a
three-quarter-inch white border around
it and a glare on the page. We went into
the
other room and
turned
over
the
magazine. On one page was
a
small
black-and-white
portrait
of a woman
with a broad-brimmed hat. On the facing
page was a religious painting, dark in
color, with
a three-quarter-inch white
border around it and a glare on the page.
Our reaction was giddy laughter.
It
didn’t seem
possible.
It
didn’t seem
frightening
either.
It was just fooling
around.
PARANORMAL SHENANIGANS
The next time something happened I
was fooling around too. While watching a
ghastly old movie on TV, I half-seriously
suggested to my companion that
I was
going
to hurl an
invisible bolt
at the
screen and shut the set off. I hurled. The
set shut off. We laughed that time too, but
maybe not as loudly.
The next thing involved a psychic in
Chicago named Olof Jonsson, who did
the by now famous ESP tests with astro-
naut Edgar
Mitchell
from
the moon.
When I met Olof he had me hold a deck
ofordinary playing cards in my hand and,
although he never came within 15 feet of
me, he caused a card in the deck I held to
dematerialize.
I’ve described this incident to a num-
ber of stage magicians. They all assure
me it’s the oldest trick in the book, but
when I ask them how it was done the best
they can do is mumble something about
how I only thought Olofwas 15 feet away
from me the whole time. All I can tell you
is that he was 15 feet away. I mean, I was
there and the magicians weren’t. (Olof
did something else that day of an eerie
nature, but
I’ll
tell you about that in a
moment.)
Now then,
if it isn’t satisfying to de-
scribe such incidents to stage magicians,
it’s even less so to tell them to physicists.
Most physicists say they don’t believe in
paranormal shenanigans any more than
you do, but don’t get them started talking
shop or before you know
it they’ll be
telling you about things like tachyons,
which are subatom-
ic
particles
which
travel faster than the
speed
of light and
arrive at their desti-
nations
almost
be-
fore they
start out.
And don’t talk shop
with astronomers or they’ll tell you about
black holes, which are collapsed
stars
with magnetic fields so strong they swal-
low up even light waves. And biologists
are no better because
they’ll
tell you
about eels that can smell a thimbleful of
rose
scent diluted
in
a
lake covering
14,000 square miles.
Anyway, what I did about all this was
write a book called “Something’s There”
and, although
it’s come out,
I haven’t
stopped my research. I have even tenta-
tively called myself a psychic investiga-
tor a couple of times, just to see how it
sounds.
I must confess that I have also been
doing a lot of chuckling at all my old,
rational,
logical, linear-thinking,
sensi-
ble
friends who don’t believe
in
the
occult—they’re obviously threatened by
it. Not like us hip, open-minded psychic
investigators.
EERIE NATURE
Funny thing, though, about us
hip,
open-minded
psychic
investigators
sometimes we don’t act so hip. Remem-
ber my saying that Olof did something
else of an eerie nature when I met him?
What he did was he had me think of a
short phrase, and then he read my mind.
Not once, but three times in succession.
I’m so hip and open-minded that, the
moment it happened, I blocked it out of
my mind until long after it was too late to
put it into my book.
So I guess I’m pretty threatened by the
paranormal
after
all. There’s only one
problem about this
field, though—I’ve
come too far and seen too much to go
back to my comfortable old beliefs. But I
have gone back to giggling a little at the
occult. Laughter is still the best method I
know of dealing with fright.
Dan Greenburg is the author of “How
to Be a Jewish Mother,” “Scoring” and
other books.