IBM
0280 A Day in New York (Clairvoyance)
One of the lunacies of Biomedical Group took place when they insisted that I fly to New York for just one day. They were having a conference for everyone in Biomedical Group, right down to the cleaners on the shop floor; and they wanted the overseas countries to be represented as well. They hired the Hilton hotel in the Meadowlands in New Jersey, just outside Newark, and took the whole factory there.
My only role was to stand up at one point in the proceedings. Thus, the vice president started this part of the proceedings by saying “…and from the rest of the world”. This was followed by a list of countries. As each country was introduced, its team stood up – to the cheers of the audience, Thus, at the point where this extended to "...and from the United Kingdom, David Mercer", I also stood up bowed to everyone, and then sat down again. That was the sole reason I had to travel backwards and forwards to the United States in just 36 hours!
Having said that, I made the most of the visit. I was in the middle of bringing the first machine into the United Kingdom, in order for the DHSS to test it, and I was able to talk to all the technical experts in the group about these tests. This did, therefore, short-circuit a lot of questions, so the trip was not totally wasted. Even so it was one of those idiotic gestures that companies are wont to make.
It was, though, personally significant from another point of view. Flying across to New York I picked up a book to read on the way. It was a book about ESP, such as telepathy, by Stamford Research Institute (SRI). As, by that time I had already experienced telepathy with the children, I was already sold on the idea. In any case SRI was very reputable organisation, and - as I read the book - I realised that their work had been very well founded. This didn't stop it being dismissed by all the many critics of such sciences. One of the more ridiculous observations is that 70 percent of people report that they have had such ESP experiences, including 70 percent of scientists, but scientists as a group refuse to accept the concept -- and do precious little research work on it. Against this general trend, the SRI work was excellent. It was particularly good at handling clairvoyance or distance seeing.
They had people (psychics and others) who were put in controlled conditions and asked to describe a position on the map many miles away. These targets were chosen at random and the clairvoyants had no way of knowing what was there in practice. Even so, these people were able to get quite accurate pictures of the places that they were asked describe. One of the more interesting cases was where they were given position in the middle of the forest and described a whole collection of buildings there. When the map was consulted, no buildings were shown there, but when it was visited on the ground it was discovered it was a highly secret American intelligence base!
The nice thing about this book was that it explained how you could do your own test; to see whether you could also see at a distance. In this way, 30,000 or more feet above the Atlantic with several hours to kill and nothing else to do, I thought this would be a great location in which to test my ESP. Accordingly I started to draw a picture of what I thought the place I was going to, the Meadowlands Hilton, would look like. I didn't know anything about this and I hadn't being told anything about it in advance. I suspect almost nobody I knew would have even heard of the location.
I drew a very strange picture. The hotel, that was what I assumed it was, looked like a normal hotel. That said, it seemed to be surrounded by something like a circus tent with some pine trees around it. Behind it, though, was an open stretch of water; with three motorways crossing over each other in the middle of the water. Even stranger, on the far side there were three high towers, a circular building with a chunk out of it and another building which was like a slab of cheese. Overall there was steam rising everywhere. I heaved a sigh of disappointment. Nothing, but nothing, could be that strange!
When I arrived at the Hilton hotel, having negotiated a surprise snowfall which had all the American cars hitting each other -- so much for American preparedness for snow -- I found the hotel was nothing special. It was just a normal Hilton hotel. Alright, there were a few stunted pine trees planted outside but that was all
The next morning when I went down to breakfast, however, I found that the dining-room was extended beyond the base the building into a sort of conservatory; over which there were brightly coloured blinds - giving the impression of a circus tent. I was taken aback a bit at this for it did seem to fit in with what I had seen.
The real revelation came when I went back to my room and drew the curtains. The hotel overlooked the water in the swamplands of the Meadowlands, and these stretched into the distance. Running over this were the three motorways crisscrossing each other - in almost the exact configuration I had imagined. The three towers were there also. They were in fact radio towers. The circular building, with the section cut out of it, was the baseball stadium and the cheese shaped object was in fact the grandstand of the racecourse.
This was astounding, since it meant that I had seen in considerable detail, from a distance, a picture of the place to which I was going; despite the fantastic nature of that view.
What was even more interesting was the fact that there wasn't any steam, but snow was falling; and this gave exactly the same impression. The problem with this was that the previous day, when I had seen it, snow was not falling. The implication for me was quite significant. It meant that I had also been able to see into the future.
I well remember - when I spent an idle afternoon in my vac job at the Strowger Works tossing a coin with Norman Killey. I correctly predicted fifty ‘heads or tails’ on the trot, an ability that surprised even me. It was not particularly useful, since it was unpredictable in its own right and never gave me anything which was useful in terms of picking the winner of the Grand National or anything like that. But the odds against getting such a result were close to infinite! The only time I tested it in terms of a casino, where I was betting on red and black, I did manage to boost my winnings from £10 to £900 before I lost my touch; and lost my stake. But apart from that I never made money from my ability to see the future.
It was significant really only in one way. That was that it convinced me that, at least, physics, and indeed all the sciences, were wrong in one major respect. Nothing in physics could predict such phenomena. There have been a few claims that particles can travel into the future but nothing which would explain how I could see into the future or even see at a distance -- or even undertake telepathy. I don't know how it is done and it's not terribly useful. At best the process works at a rate of just a couple of baud a minute. You can get very simple answers back but not particularly helpful ones. But that was pretty much the same when people were investigating the early stages of electricity. It would never have occurred to them that a whole society would, as now, become dependent on electromagnetic phenomena.
The terrible thing is that scientists, and our leaders in general, just dismiss such events as individual daydreams or mirages; or worse still - as the television programmes prove - the work of cheats. For me what remains, therefore, is the enormous question of what forces -- outside any considered by sciences at the moment -- are involved in producing the phenomena. The sciences dismiss them on the basis that nobody can reproduce the experiments, but then they couldn't reproduce lightning which led to the idea of electricity in older times, and dismissed each individual's experience as a worthless aberration.. One of these days, though, they will realise that there are massive forces at work which they have never even considered.
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