It was my first time at university. I was burning the candle at both ends. I was really
tired. I joined the Psychic Research Society, just as you do—something interesting. We'd
had a Ouija board session, which is a bit of a daft thing to do and puts you in a bit
of a funny state anyway.
I went back to a friend's room afterwards, smoked a joint—this was 1970; what we did,
that that wasn't unusual—and listening to some music, which I think was probably Pink
Floyd but I'm not sure. So there I am listening to wonderful music, sitting on the floor,
really tired, a little bit stoned, not very much, going down a tunnel. I was going down
a dark tunnel towards a bright light. The tunnel was made of trees. You know, I've never
heard of tunnel experiences. The term near-death experience hadn't been invented. But there
I was, in retrospect, I can see, going through the classic thing: down the tunnel, out of
the end. Suddenly I'm on the ceiling, looking down. There's my body down there. There's
my two friends over there. I'm on the ceiling, looking down, and I could see the mouth down
there going, "I'm on the ceiling, looking down." This is the real me. That's just a
shell. All those intuitions we have about being a spirit or soul or something inside
the body that can leave us—wow, it's really true!
Then one of my friends said, "Whoa! Can you go, move?" And I went shooting off and I travel—I
mean, it's a long story. To cut it very short, I seemed to travel the world, to fly over
the sea, to become really—I was originally a sort of human shape, but then I became other
shapes. Then I thought—I got a bit frightened, and I thought I had to come back, and I couldn't
get back. I got back to the room, but I was so disoriented. I tried to go inside the body,
and I went smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. I've never heard of any of these things.
They happen to people quite—not commonly exactly but, you know, all over times and places, they've happened.
So I tried to get bigger, so I got bigger and bigger and bigger, and that led me to
the classic experience, mystical experience of oneness, where everything was me and not
me. The concept of me made no sense. Time and space sort of—there were time and space
but not in the ordinary sense we know at all. Things happen but not within a matrix, like
we normally think of it.
Then I was left at the end with a very powerful sense of: where ever you go, there's always
something further. I came back saying that. It took me a couple of days to get remotely
back to normal. I had a very supportive friend who helped me.
You can imagine, I was studying—cutting up rats' brains to try and understand memory.
That's the sort of thing we did in those days, long before the cognitive revolution, and
long before people were talking about meditation or mindfulness or anything like that. There
I was. What's going on? Looking back, I can understand why I leapt at paranormal explanations
even though they're hopeless and don't get you anywhere—because how could I possibly
understand it? Now the science is catching up, but it's taken all those 44 years to make
sense of what happened remotely.
Obviously, moving from that amazing out-of-body experience to studying paranormal psychology
and ultimately becoming a skeptic didn't happen overnight.
No.
Can you give us a sense for how that path happened from moving to that experience to
where you are, I suppose, now?
Yes. I struggled along. That was the first year of my—first term of my three-year degree.
I loved studying the physiology and psychology, but I kind of struggled along all the time
with this in my mind. I ran the Psychical Research Society at Oxford for the whole time
I was there. We did experiments not just with Ouija boards but telepathy and clairvoyance.
We went and visited haunted houses, and we invited mediums to come and communicate with
the dead with us. I did a lot of that as an undergraduate.
Then I was absolutely determined that I was going to become a parapsychologist because,
by then, I discovered there was this thing called parapsychology, that there were very
few scientists out there in the world studying these things scientifically. That's what I
wanted to do. My tutor said, "No way. That's rubbish. You mustn't do that." I got a sensible
PhD place studying rat brains, which I turned down. Eventually I found the university that
would let—I had to pay my way, got a job, did a part-time PhD, which was really unusual
in those days, and funded my way, worked my way through a PhD, and designed all these experiments.
I'd got this grand theory of the akashic records, and the psychic field, and the phenomena out
there, that, really, memory is not in our brain at all. It's all out there, and that's
therefore when I get something telepathically from you, it's really the same thing as a memory. Lovely theory.
I discovered two things. One, I wasn't original in this. There are versions of that, have
been—Bergson back in 1910, going way back, lots of them. Secondly, it doesn't work.
I did experiment after experiment after experiment. The first two or three experiments got little
hints of what looked like ESP, but as soon as I timed up the methods, got the statistics
right, did the experiments well, all the effects went away. I did dozens of experiments that
showed no sign of any telepathy or clairvoyance or precognition or anything.
So I thought, well, I still know Tarot cards work. By then I'd learned to read the tarot
cards. I had my crystal ball, and I'd learnt—I could stare into the crystal ball and see
things, all this stuff. I believed in those, and I'd had this extraordinary experience.
So of course all my tutors are wrong. They're close-minded scientists. They don't realize
there's more in the world than your philosophy—all that stuff, you know.
I stayed like that for quite a long time. It is like the world, the truth, the evidence
was eating away my beliefs, and I had to drop that and drop that. Then there was another
corner and another corner to turn, and drop that.
Then there came a point—and I can remember it. It was one of those flashbulb memories.
Although I could have invented it because we know the doubts about how memory works,
but it has some truth in it at any rate. There I was sat in a bath one day in my house in
Guildford, and I thought, "What if none of it's true?" It was awful to then have to go
through all I knew over the next weeks, really, and think, "Is it possible that I was completely
wrong?" That experience happened. My memories of that are very clear. They could be a bit
distorted and I've selected bits and so on, but I cannot deny the experience. I met loads
of other people who had extraordinary experiences, too. Somehow, those experiences have to be
valid, meaningful, life-changing experiences without there being telepathy, clairvoyance,
other worlds, all of that stuff which after experiment after experiment, I'd found just isn't there.
In a way, the rest of my life has been that unfolding. I've had jobs as a university lecturer
and reader, and now a visiting professor at Plymouth, but most of the time I haven't had
a job. I guess, I just wanted to do my research. I want to write my books. So I sort of limped
along, kind of, and made a life out of exploring these things.
Sure. Can you give us a sense for what one of these experiments might look like?
Someone who might not be familiar with the experimental method and so on—if you wanted to test,
for example, tarot cards, or whether one of these claims were true, what would it look
like? How would you do the experiment?
I'll tell you about three very different approaches. Where I started was very lab-based straightforward
tests of telepathy and clairvoyance. A simple example: I would get—I used to teach a parapsychology
course to a lot of students at Surrey University. I'd have maybe a hundred of them in a lecture
theater. We would have hidden targets in another room, and they would sit there with a sheet
and they'd have to, on a time signal, they'd have to think what the hidden target was and
tick it off. Then you do all the statistics and you compare it with how many correct you'd
expect by chance. It always came out just what you'd expect by chance.
Those sort of experiments, you can say, "Well, that's not telepathy in the real world. In
the real world, it happens between twins; it happens when people are in special states
of imagery or relaxation." So I moved on from those to get people into special states, to
put them in the ganzfeld with great relaxation and white noise and things over their eyes,
to get them to imagine things. No better results.
A completely different kind of experiment—you mentioned the tarot. Now I'd become a competent,
not brilliant, but a competent tarot reader, and people said things: "How did you know
that? That's amazing," you know, all that stuff. So I devised a method for doing the
tarot reading in two separate parts so that an assistant would sit down with a person,
do all the laying out of the cards, get them in the right frame of mind and so on, get
them to shuffle the cards, lay them out and so on, and then turn them away, give me the
order of the cards. I would get myself into the right frame of mind, imagine that the
person was there, which they weren't, and do the reading to myself and then write it
all down. Do that for ten people, and see: can those people pick their own reading out
of the ten? No, they can't. Trying all the time not to make it so artificial
to try to make it more realistic.
Finally, you mentioned out-of-the-body experiences. I have, for a very, very long time in my house
in Somerset—I used to have targets in my house. I met this strange young man who ran
an astral projection group in a magazine and so on. He came to visit me, and we talked
about all this stuff. He said, "If you put a five-digit number in your house, I will
come and visit." And he said, "I have out-of-the-body experiences spontaneously at night. I can't
say when they're going to happen, but if you have that there all the time, when I have
one, I will come and visit." And he said, "Cook me an apple crumble every so often.
That will bring me back. That's my favorite thing," so I would do that, too.
This is not an artificial lab experiment. This is an ongoing experiment. Now I had to
put it where nobody could come—and I didn't think he would—but I had to make sure he
couldn't look through the window. I had to change the number every so often. For the
first few months, every Sunday evening I'd change the number. I had word chosen from
one in twenty words. I had a small object like a toothbrush or a penny or something,
and I stuck that on the wall. There were three possible things. Every time I met someone
else who had spontaneous out-of-the-body experiences, I would explain that to them and say, "Anytime
you come..." In all those years when those targets were there, I had three people who
wrote to me and said, "I've been to your house, and I've seen it," and none of them got it right.
Really?
One got one word right, but you know that just appears in the noise. They were sure
they'd seen it. You see, when you have an out-of-body experience, it looks so vivid
that you can't help but believe that you're actually seeing something physically there, but you're not.