ONE OF the most common and most easily demonstrated psychic abilities of man is telepathy, which can be defined as the mental process of transmitting or receiving thoughts without the use of one’s physical senses.

The existence of man’s telepathic powers has been scientifically demonstrated beyond doubt by Dr. JB Rhine of Duke University in North Carolina after more than 25 years of controlled laboratory experiments involving hundreds of subjects.

In Dr. JB Rhine’s experiments, both the transmitter and receiver were facing each other without seeing what the other was transmitting. They were separated only by a wooden wall. So the question that has often been raised is whether telepathic signals can be transmitted over long distances. Or is there a limit to how far telepathy can go?

This question was answered by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who conducted an unauthorized experiment in telepathy while in outer space.

Sealed envelope

According to the story I read about this secret experiment, before Edgar Mitchell left for the moon in the Apollo 14 spaceship in 1971, he gave a sealed envelope to a trusted friend with the instruction not to open it until he returned to earth.

While in outer space, Mitchell, who holds a doctorate degree in science, transmitted a telepathic message to four individuals on earth. Three of them received the message correctly. According to the story, one of those to whom the message was transmitted was the well-known Swedish psychic Olof Jonsson, who was then living in Chicago. This was the same psychic whom dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. hired to help him find the fabled Yamashita treasure.

I had the privilege of meeting Jonsson personally in 1978 or 1979. I asked Olof if it was true he was one of the recipients of the telepathic message that astronaut Mitchell transmitted while he was in outer space. And he confirmed to me the story was true.

I asked him what the message Mitchell transmitted to him was. He replied that it was the symbols on the Zener cards, which Dr. JB Rhine used in his ESP experiments at Duke University. The Zener card symbols consisted of a cross, star, wave, circle and square. Jonsson told me he got all the symbols correctly, and in the exact sequence Edgar Mitchell had sent them.

That was not exactly the way Mitchell recalled it in his book “Psychic Exploration, A Challenge to Science.” According to Mitchell, “the results were statistically significant, not because any of the receivers got a large number of direct hits, but because the number of hits was amazingly low. The statistical probability of scoring so few hits was about 3000: 1.

This negative ESP effect, called PSI-missing, is something that has frequently arisen in other psychic research-work, and theorists are attempting to explain its significance. In any case, it offers good evidence for PSI, because the laws of chance are bypassed to a significant degree.”

Later experiments by other researchers, notably those conducted by American author Harold Sherman with his British friend Sir Hubert Wilkins in the Arctic, proved telepathic communication can be carried on over very long distances. (See Sherman’s book “Thoughts Through Space,” published by Fawcett Books, New York, 1973).

For the pragmatic, scientific-minded and rational astronaut like Mitchell, seeing planet Earth from outer space created in him a profound shift in consciousness. “The rational man in me,” said Mitchell, “had to recognize the validity of the nonrational cognitive process.”

Ignored by mainstream science

After he left Nasa, Edgar Mitchell founded a scientific research organization he called The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which systematically and rationally explores those areas of knowledge and phenomena traditionally ignored by mainstream science.

In the early ’90s I had the rare privilege of being invited to address the scientists of the Institute, then based in Sausalito, California, about my research on faith healing and psychic surgery in the Philippines.

Edgar Mitchell admitted that as he delved deeper into psychic research and parapsychology, his initial skepticism began to fade. “As a student of science,” he said, “I believe there is nothing in the universe that is unworthy of investigation.”

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