CPYRGH*PProved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4 1. "AIRPORT PROJECT" BOOKS A skim through the 21 "how to be psychic” books which form part of the Koestler Chair library, and which | felt might have some comments to make about targets, found only 6 authors who made recommendations on what might make a good target when training psychic powers. Even then, the authors invariably failed to define their terms or write more than a sentence on the subject. These recommendations should therefore be treated with caution, as they do not represent the findings of careful scientific experimentation. On the other hand, they may have something to suggest about popular ideas of what makes a good GESP target, and these ideas may be based on some grain of truth. Boswell (1969) recommended the use of “mentally stimulating” targets. Also, he felt that physical sensation and especially emotion were easily transmitted, and that colour was picked up better than black and white. Edwards (no date) suggests that faces and pictures make good targets. Denning & Phillips (1981) recommend trying to transmit a message of emotional significance to the receiver. Likewise, Sherman (1960) says that It is crucial to have some emotional content to the target. A related area of interest is psychometry, where an object is used to provide further information about its owner. Powell (1979) recommends using as a token object metal or leather which has been close to the skin for a long time and therefore has had a chance to build up some personal association with the owner. Finally, Burns (1981) feels the following make good practice targets for developing GESP: pictures (rather than words); something experienced vividly by the agent; flavours; body position of the agent, or whether the agent is sitting in the light or dark; and sizes and weights of objects. There do seem to be some common themes in these authors’ suggestions, though the small sample covered here means that any patterns could be illusory: emotional impact seems to be important (though little is said about whether the specific emotions should be positive or negative ones); and targets conveying information about events happening to humans seem popular. 2. SPONTANEOUS CASES There is a considerable literature concerning the sort of information conveyed in spontaneous cases of ESP, and so as a necessary constraint this section is limited to observations from Sybo Schouten’s (1979b, 1982) examination of two great collections of spontaneous cases - Phantasms of the Living and the Louisa Rhine collection. Schouten made a quantitative analysis of these collections with a view to finding patterns and relationships which might stimulate further experimental research. As he pointed out, the two collections covered quite different cultures and eras, and were gathered for different purposes. The collectors of the "Phantasms" cases took great pains to investigate and verify their cases, and had a special interest in receiving apparitign .rapors. as pthey. fal {hesa, migh lend suport Je pj bypathesis that olden izie @) ~1neele 249
CPYRGHT inforrraponovansatdten? apm persons. In contrast, the Rhine collection took cases more or less at face value, with the idea that inaccuracies would cancel each other out over a large number of cases, and the reports were gathered with the aim of providing suggestions for future laboratory research (Schouten, 1986). Excluding 150 of the cases (for reasons outlined in Schouten 1979b), Schouten analysed the remaining "Phantasms” cases according to in previously-defined categories (Schouten, 1979a) and found that about 75% of the cases involved death, iliness or injury to the target person, though a tendency to remember serious events for longer than trivial events accounted for some of this pattern. Only 1.4% of cases | conveyed information about positive experiences of the target person. Table 1 (from Schouten, 1979b, p.432) Situation of target person at time of experience nn a PSS Si SSS lp spas SSSA death 66.7% serious illness 12.5% slight injuries 8.7% serious material 5% slight material 2% trivial 10.0% positive 1.4% TDG SS SS Sse It is interesting to note that slight personal injuries were more often the topic of spontaneous experiences (8.7%) than serious material damage (for example, a building on fire, considerable financial loss) (0.5%). This suggests that negative events related to humans are particularly strong targets in spontaneous cases. Similar patterns are observed in Schouten’s (1982) study of the Rhine collection, where he analysed a representative saniple (15%) of cases (excluding PK). About 75% of the sample concerned negative events such as death, injury and accident while almost no cases concerned material damage. As with the Phantasms study, a tendency to remember and report serious events. more often than non-serious events accounts for some of this pattern. However, the distribution of negative events in the Rhine collection differs from the Phantasms collection, with the former having fewer cases involving death of the target person (37.7% compared wi cases involving serious accidents and slight injuries. As Schout this difference may be due to the Phantasms collectors’ prefe h 66.7%), but more n points out, part of rence for apparition cases. In summary, Schouten’s analyses of spontaneous case collections suggest that negative events related to humans feature predominantly as "targets", although this observation may be partly due to a reporting bias. It is significant that both the Rhine and the Phantasms cases share this pattern despite the very different methods used Approved For Release 2000/08/08 :25(?4-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4
CPYRG& proved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4 to gather these collections. Evidently parapsychologists cannot inflict physical injury on their experimental participants in order to simulate real-life spontaneous cases. However, negative physical events are likely to have a negative emotional impact both on the target person and on the percipient (especially if they are emotionally close). Possibly, therefore, targets which have some strong negative emotional impact on a person may have more success in a free-response experimental setting than trivial or impersonal targets. Further, it might be expected that any emotional impact is better than none, and so positive emotional targets could perhaps be successfully used in experimental research - this might circumvent any researcher's concern about the ethics of exposing experimental participants to unpleasant targets. 3. THEORETICAL SUGGESTIONS BY PARAPSYCHOLOGISTS Although this is not a comprehensive review, | have tried to cover instances where authors have made specific comments about likely successful targets. Their suggestions range from post hoc inferences based on the kinds of targets which were successful in experimental studies to observations of what makes a good target in areas of research related to parapsychology. Le Shan (1977) criticizes parapsychologists for often neglecting to consider the theoretical assumptions underpinning their research. There has been little discussion, he feels, of what kind of information psi transmits even though there seems to be wide agreement that psi does transmit information. As an example of how theorising on this issue might influence our experimental design and choice of target material, Le Shan considers the possibility that psi might depend on individual differences, being better adapted for one purpose with one person and another purpose in a different person. In this case, he suggests we should "customize" our targets by examining experimental participants for their personal interests, philosophies, preferred sensory modalities, and so on. One of the few studies specifically to examine how target characteristics relate to psi performance was conducted by Williams & Duke (1979), who go on to discuss theoretical suggestions derived from their observations. Taking an evolutionary perspective and asking what sort of information might have been most crucial to communicate before language evolved in humans, they conclude that targets reflecting “emotion, sex, survival, nature, food and other basic concerns might be psychically perceived better than other types of targets" (p.15) In a similar vein, a theoretical paper by Nash (1980) on the characteristics of psi communication considers that, to be effective, psi communication must convey "meaningful information”. Also, one of the Maimonides experimental participants, in a letter to Ullman and Krippner, gave her overall impressions of a dream telepathy series in which she had recently participated. She felt that the more “potent and unusual” the target material the better, because with subjects who might be subconsciously afraid of telepathy this kind of target might be less likely to be "kept out” (Ullman & Krippner, 1973). Perhaps unfortunately, it is very rare to find any published opinions from the experimental participants who play a crucial part in Hplesied FaneRMBase 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4 I51
CPYRGHT Withee Ted (PaBP SASSis0 Rd CRO RUM TRR RID SAMOARS ED UheRPRY thuch of our research - that psi involves redundancy with our other known senses. For instance, most of our experimentation involves primarily visual targets such as art prints. Braud suggests that it would be useful if psi provided information which is not immediately evident to our other known senses. Such non-evident information could concern the larger relationships in which a target participates, for example its history. Similarly, Gertrude Schmeidier in her 1971 PA Presidential Address stated that the ESP target is not the physical stimulus variables, but the “meaning” of the target or an “informational pattern” (Schmeidler, 1972). Braud conducted a pilot experiment to test the theory of non-evident psi, where subjects were confronted with five identical boxes containing, respectively, three control objects and two samples of hair cut from one person's head. The hair samples were therefore related to each other, while the control objects had no long-term association to a particular person. Subjects were told which box was the "key" (one of the two boxes containing a hair sample) and, while remaining unaware of the contents of all the boxes, were asked to rank the remaining four boxes according to how “related” their contents were to the contents of the key box. This study failed to achieve significant results, but this may still be an idea worth further investigation. The 1986 Esalen Conference discussed techniques to improve the reliable practical use of psi abilities. Targ (1987) recommended that experimenters look for common elements in the "psychic appearance” of targets (i.e. in mentations), and that they should compose a glossary of typical target transformation errors. Tart (1987), at the same conference, suggested that experimenters create a pool of "hot" targets - ones that are consistently successful, either because they are comectly described or are described in a recognisable fashion. In other words, what makes a good target would be defined operationally. So far, this section has considered research purely within parapsychology. Some parapsychologists have taken a more interdisciplinary approach, however, and have related the findings from other areas of research back to the question of what makes a good GESP target. Tart (1982) looked at how responses to targets are measured in conventional psychophysiology, and asked what were the characteristics of a successful target in this field of research: what kind of stimuli are most readily responded to, and easiest to analyse. To be successful, a target stimulus in psychophysiology should stand out from Its background. For targets in parapsychological research, this may be achieved by having the target stimulus occur suddenly, be discrete in time, and have what Tart calls “psychic intensity” - the sense that the target is important and meaningful within the experimental context. Tart suggests that we could instruct our experimental participants on the significance of the target in order to give it the required meaningfulness. Psychic intensity could also reflect an intense event happening to an agent - a methodology which Tart finds attractive. The idea that a good target should stand out from its surroundings is strongly supported by the psychological literature on human attention which | will be introducing later. 252 Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003100120001-4