Princeton ESP lab shutting down after 28 years

hermanntrude

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Jun 23, 2006
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As a scientist I ought to be skeptical. But i'm not. I've seen the anecdotal evidence in close family members. Now it's possible my mother lied to me.... but why would she? and how did she win all those raffles?
 

Tonington

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Oct 27, 2006
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I know my mother has a long history of feeling crappy and apprehensive out of the blue, only to find out the next day that a Swiss airplane crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia. I can't remember the other things she told me about, I'll expand on what Hermann says, maybe it's only that she remembers them so vividly because she asigns meaning to them. I know she has felt apprehensive before in her life and nothing has happened.
 

hermanntrude

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Jun 23, 2006
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well the story my mother tells me is as follows:

she used to go to a singles club which held regular raffles. They let you choose the number you wanted. She says she used to look through the book and see the ticket that had already won. then she'd buy it and win. she did this so many times (winning, amongst other things, a holiday in the algarve), that they changed the rules so u had to take the number that was given to you.
 

karrie

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Jan 6, 2007
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I dreamt I was in a skyscraper, under attack, being bombed. People all around me were screaming and dying. I was running in terror. Someone shouted that the building next to us was on fire too, and that's when I woke up, drenched in a cold sweat. Four hours later, my mom called me to tell me to turn on the tv, that the twin towers had been bombed.

This year, I dreamt I was trying to talk to my cousin. He kept walking away. It felt imparative that I get him to pay attention, to turn around and talk to me. He refused, and just kept walking. I woke up angry with him for not paying attention. It was a feeling that stuck with me all through my morning. He had died at about 4AM, and I found out later that afternoon, just after my sense of frustration with him had started to fade.

So, needless to say.... when my daughter woke my husband up at 3AM Saturday morning to tell him she'd had a nightmare about the furnace catching fire, and the smoke detectors not working right, he promptly cleaned the furnace and replaced the smoke alarms in the house. : )

I think ESP and psychokinetic ability defy explanation, because they exist on a level we don't understand. They're on the periphery of our consciousness, and disappear when we try to look directly at them.
 

hermanntrude

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jun 23, 2006
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Newfoundland!
I dreamt I was in a skyscraper, under attack, being bombed. People all around me were screaming and dying. I was running in terror. Someone shouted that the building next to us was on fire too, and that's when I woke up, drenched in a cold sweat. Four hours later, my mom called me to tell me to turn on the tv, that the twin towers had been bombed.

This year, I dreamt I was trying to talk to my cousin. He kept walking away. It felt imparative that I get him to pay attention, to turn around and talk to me. He refused, and just kept walking. I woke up angry with him for not paying attention. It was a feeling that stuck with me all through my morning. He had died at about 4AM, and I found out later that afternoon, just after my sense of frustration with him had started to fade.

So, needless to say.... when my daughter woke my husband up at 3AM Saturday morning to tell him she'd had a nightmare about the furnace catching fire, and the smoke detectors not working right, he promptly cleaned the furnace and replaced the smoke alarms in the house. : )

I think ESP and psychokinetic ability defy explanation, because they exist on a level we don't understand. They're on the periphery of our consciousness, and disappear when we try to look directly at them.

i dont think anything can defy scientific explanation for ever. We may not live long enough to see the explanation, nor may the human race, but it's still explainable
 

karrie

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Jan 6, 2007
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i dont think anything can defy scientific explanation for ever. We may not live long enough to see the explanation, nor may the human race, but it's still explainable

The only theory I've ever heard that made sense (and I'm nowhere near smart enough to repeat it as brilliantly as it was put forth to me) was that ESP and psychokinetic ability can only work through the relativity of space and time. And, since we still think and live in linear time, trying to understand something that exists outside of that, is simply beyond our current ability.
 

Dexter Sinister

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Oct 1, 2004
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I wonder how many millions of dollars they managed to screw Princeton out of over those 28 years?
It was privately funded by the likes of James McDonnell, one of the founders of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, to the tune of about $10 million over the years. There was no funding from the university or the government, and no Princeton professor joined it. It operated from the basement of Princeton's engineering building, but had no real association with the university except the landlord-tenant relationship. It never published anything in any significant journal either, though the editor of one reportedly said he'd publish PEAR's results if they could be telepathically communicated to him.

tamarin said:
ESP obviously exists but how to prove it?
It's not obvious at all, which is why nobody's been able to demonstrate it exists. After more than a century of systematic, scholarly research, parapsychologists have failed to produce any evidence that can withstand routine scientific scrutiny. A research program that so signally fails to produce any results after so long strongly suggests the phenomena in question aren't real, and any supposed incidents of them, like the anecdotes reported by others in this thread, are explicable as coincidence, fraud, perceptual errors, and misunderstandings. Supposedly prophetic dreams like karrie reported, for instance, are extremely common, but people just remember ones they can tie to specific events, and don't remember all the other dreams they can't connect to anything external. Note too how vague the connection is between the dream's events and external events. The dreams were not about the Twin Towers or a cousin dying, they were about a non-specific skyscraper being bombed (which isn't what happened, they weren't bombed) and a cousin not paying attention. Pretty tenuous link.