Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  He could hear the disappointment in her voice. And within hours, her eyesight deteriorated. She needed thick eyeglasses again to see at all. For Mitchell, this was another anecdotal story that spoke to the power of a person’s belief system to effect not only what information they would accept as valid but their own health. It was a story that spoke to the power of consciousness.

  What Mitchell and his mother may have encountered is a particularly dramatic example of the placebo effect. The belief we’re being healed is often enough to successfully diminish symptoms like pain or the breathing difficulties associated with asthma. It is usually stated that the placebo effect seems to have no power over the illnesses that underlie our symptoms. But researchers have demonstrated an increased interest in seeing just how far the placebo effect, or belief, can take healing. There are occasional reports of impressively dramatic effects, including the well-documented, curious case of a cancer victim.

  In the Journal of Projective Techniques, it was reported, a Mr. Wright was in the end stages of cancer. His body was riddled with tumors. His lungs were filled with fluid. He needed an oxygen mask to breathe. His doctor was about to go home for the weekend, expecting his patient to be dead by the time he returned on Monday. But Wright heard that his doctor was conducting research on a new cancer drug called Krebiozen. He begged to receive the treatment, and his doctor relented.

  Two days later, Wright’s tumors shrank by half. He was the only one who seemed to be benefiting from the introduction of Krebiozen. But his doctor didn’t tell him that, and he continued injections for the following ten days. Wright went home healthy.

  Two months later, however, Wright heard a report that the drug was, thus far, proving ineffective. He immediately fell ill, his tumors returning. His doctor, seizing on the placebo effect, lied to him. He told Wright they had a newer, double-strength version of the drug that he believed would get results. In reality, he injected Wright only with sterile water. But again, Wright’s tumors disappeared and he returned to his normal life. Unfortunately, he later saw continued newspaper coverage describing the dramatically unsuccessful tests on Krebiozen. He immediately got sick again, was admitted to the hospital, and died.

  IONS became Mitchell’s scientific arm for attempting to understand such happenings. And IONS’s Remission Project, in fact, documented 3,500 cases of diseases suddenly and inexplicably retreating, culled from eight hundred journals, written in twenty different languages. To medical science, such cases have always been viewed as happy curiosities. To Mitchell and the scientific staff at IONS, they suggest a whole course of research into the power of mind and consciousness. And while an entire book could be written probing the pros and cons of their work, allow me to summarize it concisely: IONS has uncovered the same sort of contentious evidence for mental telepathy that has been found in research labs all over the world—a so-called psi effect that appears so small as to be without practical application, but so interesting, scientifically, that it may speak to the unity of mind and matter Mitchell felt aboard his spaceship.

  Their findings are, of course, not embraced by the larger scientific community. And until they are, nothing figures to change. The skeptics will cry, like policemen guarding a murder scene, There is nothing to see here, please go about your business! But I like IONS, if only for the incredible conclusion it could provide to the story of Edgar Mitchell. Because if (or when) this shift ever happens, if this small psi effect is ever accepted, it might mean that Edgar Mitchell will be remembered not so much for his walk on the moon, but for his experience on the ride back. He will be remembered, most fondly, for what he accomplished after he hung up his spacesuit.

  In Seattle, when I was researching my chapter on telepathy, I asked the statistician Jessica Utts what she thinks the most promising field is for those who do believe in psi. “If there is one test that might really convince the majority of scientists,” I asked her, “what would it be?”

  We were gathered in a small hotel ballroom, at a conference of parapsychologists. And in response, Utts nodded across the room at Dean Radin, the leading researcher at IONS, who sipped a cocktail and laughed with colleagues as we talked. “I think it’s the precognition work Dean is doing,” she said.

  Radin has written extensively about a number of experiments, conducted by himself and other researchers, demonstrating that a measurable physiological effect can be observed in the moments before a subject is exposed to emotional stimuli. Given the long-running debate over psi and his own involvement in it, hearing that his institute might hold the inside track on settling things might be seen as a point of pride for Mitchell. But the truth is, he seems blithely unconcerned with whether or not IONS’s findings are embraced any time soon. This may in part be due to the meditative practice he has maintained ever since his capsule ride.

  Mitchell’s experience of unity is in fact something meditators can feel just by engaging in regular practice on their living room floors. But Mitchell’s come-what-may attitude about the skeptics also reminded me of what he said about learning to live with the danger of being a test pilot. In looking into the paranormal, Mitchell seems to have adopted the same philosophical stance he did when he strapped himself into an experimental plane. “It would be nice for our work to be accepted,” he said. “But the workings of science, of what knowledge is embraced and what is rejected, are sociological. That’s not something I can control.”

  Predicted to live to the ripe old age of 109, Mitchell seems content to let the wheels of science grind slowly on. In the meantime, he keeps working. And he has developed what he calls a “dyadic” model of the universe. A dyad is a group of two—separate but one. I listened to him talk about his idea for a long time, and readers with an interest in the subject should consult my Notes and Sources. But as it relates to this book, I like his model mostly as a metaphor, for the germ of a worldview that might be worth clinging to: men and women, Republicans and Democrats, believers and unbelievers, sports fans and non-sports fans, musicians and engineers, dyads, separate but one, all trapped on the same dusty rock, acknowledging our differences but understanding we’re all connected, on a planet without borders, a planet that looks awfully improbable, awfully fragile, from the point of view of science—or the more dramatic view from a spacecraft.

  When he finished describing his model of reality, Mitchell stood. “There is something I want you to see,” he said.

  He walked over to a closet in the hallway outside his office and came back holding a large plastic bag. When he was still some distance away, I wondered if he was going to display samples of moon rock and moon dust—an astronaut’s pirated booty. But as he drew near I realized that the bag was filled with bent spoons. “I got these,” he said, “during my visits with children, in the ’70s, mostly in San Francisco and California.”

  I removed some of the spoons from the bag. A couple were bent at right angles. Others were twisted into curlicues, the bowl end of the spoon wrapped around the shaft in tight spirals. In the wake of the publicity he received for his work with Uri Geller, he explained, he received phone calls from mothers around the country who claimed that their kids had begun bending spoons like the Israeli psychic. He visited some of those nearest to him, on the west coast, to judge for himself.

  “Go ahead,” Mitchell told me. “Try to bend one.”

  I thought he wanted me to bend one of the spoons just by thinking about it, and I looked at him quizzically.

  “With your hand,” he advised.

  I held the shaft of the spoon in one hand and tried bending the bowl end, with all my might, with the other. I pushed. I pulled. I strained. But I couldn’t bend it.

  “How did you get these?” I asked. And over the next few minutes, I questioned Mitchell, trying to figure out how the children had duped him.

  He came in, he said, to a child’s home. And he brought his own spoons with him. He sat down on the couch and asked the child to sit next to him. Then, holding a spoon upright in his hand and never
letting go, he allowed the child to rub the spoon with one finger. After a few minutes the spoon seemed to go soft and pliable, like rubber. And the child simply bent it, quickly, and with no more effort than it takes to fold a straw. The spoon never left Mitchell’s hand. But when the child stopped and Mitchell tried bending it himself, it was again hardened steel. He couldn’t move it. He carried out this same, nonscientific experiment a dozen times or more, finding children who seemed to mimic Geller’s abilities.

  After Mitchell told me this story and put the spoons away, we parted for the day. But before I left, I felt compelled to make a kind of confession.

  “I have to tell you,” I said. “I respect you, but … you do realize: I just can’t believe those spoons were bent by people using their minds.”

  Mitchell smiled at me gently. “Yes,” he said. “I realize that.”

  Then he walked me to the large lawn in front of his house and watched me get in my car, his hands in his pockets, his face still smiling, his dogs dancing in circles at his feet.

  As I pulled away, I watched him diminish in the rearview mirror, until he was just a dot of humanity on a spheroid planet, in an elliptical solar system, in a sweet spot known scientifically as the galactic habitable zone of the Milky Way.

  MITCHELL’S STORY IS NOT yet over, not only because he is still lecturing and writing, but because we as a society have not yet processed the meaning or implications of space travel.

  We may yet get our chance.

  The experience of all the astronauts who have ventured into space, and White’s book on the subject, have inspired the formation of the Overview Institute. The institute is headed up by David Beaver, a magician, who might best be described as a lifelong student and Renaissance man.

  His bio includes studies in nuclear engineering, physics, the sociology of perception, and the philosophy of science. When I spoke to him, he said that in addition to promoting the overview effect, he is also putting together a virtual reality stage show, completing a book on the cognitive science of magic, and consulting with the growing space tourism industry.

  The combination of the Overview Institute and space tourism could in fact be exactly what it takes to reframe our understanding of Edgar Mitchell—and space travel. Virgin Galactic is booking civilian flights into space right now. Flights aboard a specially designed, carbon-composite spaceship—which boasts greater strength and far lighter weight than a standard airplane—are scheduled to begin, at the time of this writing, in 2012.

  The company’s sales pitch never mentions the overview effect by name. But most of its narrative is built around the view: the look of Earth from space is something seen in “countless images,” according to Virgin Galactic’s promotional material, “but the reality is so much more beautiful and provokes emotions that are strong but hard to define. The blue map, curving into the black distance is familiar but has none of the usual marked boundaries. The incredibly narrow ribbon of atmosphere looks worryingly fragile. What you are looking at is the source of everything it means to be human, and it is home… . Later that evening, sitting with your astronaut wings, you know that life will never quite be the same again.”

  This description is both spot on and probably a bit tame. But that is to be expected. Telling people, as Edgar Mitchell has, that “your flesh and bone will melt away as you feel yourself become one with the universe!” is probably not the best way to sell tickets. Telling people that astronauts are profoundly affected, usually for the rest of their lives, and that some change their vocations altogether, also qualifies as a tad too intense for a marketing handout. But Beaver’s contention is that the tourism industry—and the rest of us—need to be prepared.

  “I think what’s kept the overview effect from having a larger impact on society, is that so few people have experienced it,” Beaver told me. “And those people are generally one small part of society. They are space explorers. When more people are going into space, from various walks of life, change is going to start happening, really fast.”

  This sounds a bit dramatic. But is that because the power of the overview effect is overstated? Or because, when we listen to this story, we don’t have ears that are prepared, in the least, to really hear it? This is the question—and the answer may be that we don’t fully understand what travel into space will mean for us; that in fact we can’t understand it until it happens.

  Frank White, who literally wrote the book on the overview effect, is also a part of the Overview Institute. And he thinks of space travel largely as Mitchell does—an evolutionary step. “If fish could think at our level of intelligence,” White said, “back before humanity existed, and some fish were starting to venture up on land, a lot of them would be saying, just as we do now about space: ‘Why would we want to go there? What’s the point?’ And they’d have literally no idea of what venturing onto land was going to mean.”

  The move from water to land, according to White, is a kind of mirror in history—a pane of glass for us to stare through and understand that our next shift, from Earth to space, will be equally important. But what species has ever understood its own evolutionary future?

  Because we are more intelligent than the fish, because we have developed the scientific method, because we can create art and films that provoke our imaginations, we of course have a better opportunity than a trout to understand what’s next for us. But there is abundant evidence that we don’t even understand what is happening right now.

  The space tourism industry has long been plagued by a phenomenon known as “the giggle factor.” In short, when people hear an idea that is profoundly disturbing—like the destructive effects of climate change—or scientifically challenging—like the idea of microscopic life once was—we giggle. And in the case of space tourism, we giggle because the idea seems too far-out—too remote from our experience. Our natural hubris, it seems, is most clearly captured in our automatic inclination to laugh at information we don’t understand.

  The implications of this for the paranormal are obviously great. Yes, some people want to embrace every New Age idea. But others laugh, just as automatically, before even considering what they’re laughing at. “In my conversations with people in the aerospace industry,” Beaver told me, “they expected they would announce flights into space—and that would be that. People would start calling for reservations. But it wasn’t like that, and they realized the ‘giggle factor’ was to blame. They needed to do more work, just convincing people this is real.”

  That work has since been done, and what Richard Branson is selling through Virgin Galactic is real. We as a species just had (and some still have) a hard time believing it. Branson’s newly designed craft have been making successful test flights, and industry observers believe that even the most far-out plans—like Bob Bigelow’s idea to sell $8-million weekends in a space hotel—are when, not if, propositions. Branson even has competition, from the likes of PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Branson has been working with no less a visionary than Burt Rutan, whose ideas can be found in the ever-so-practical unmanned drones currently hunting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Check the clips covering the progression of the aerospace industry, and it appears that circa 2005 everyone involved adopted the same mantra: “The giggle factor is gone,” as a means of overcoming the public’s doubts.

  When it comes to perception, perhaps just saying it can really make it so. People are now booking flights with Virgin. But according to Beaver, aerospace insiders aren’t taking any chances. They are now loath to say too much about the overview effect, for fear of reigniting our mirth. And they probably aren’t wrong.

  My favorite example of the skepticism that greets the overview effect is a 2007 article in Wired magazine, covering the Overview Institute’s first conference. “Scratch a Space Nut,” reads the unwieldy headline, “Find a Starry-Eyed Hippie.”

  I think, in the end, this is the conundrum of Edgar Mitchell. He helped usher in what appears to be the next step in human evo
lution: from land to space. But he can only be viewed through the glasses we’re grinding today. Too much of what he has involved himself in provokes our laughter—from mental telepathy, to shamanistic healers, to the overview effect itself. But where he has landed is more nuanced than all that.

  “There is a strict idealism,” he told me, “which is where the New Agers are at, which says that essentially there is no matter or that matter is irrelevant. And then there is extreme scientific reductionism, which tends to dominate science, and says that consciousness is epiphenomenal—a kind of illusion produced by materialistic processes. I say somewhere there is reality in all this. And our task is to find it. But both of these, the New Age way of looking at things, and the strictly materialistic way, are wrong. It’s a more inclusive view of reality that I’m after.”

  Mitchell’s journey, then, goes both in and out—as deeply into ourselves as we can go, as deeply into and as far from scientific dogma as we can get, as far out into space as we’ve dared. And he has paid a price.

  The most poignant conversation I had about Edgar Mitchell was with Dr. Marilyn Schlitz. The current president of IONS, Schlitz has known Mitchell for close to twenty years. And I was frankly a bit afraid to share my final observation with her. “Edgar struck me,” I said, “as lonely.”

  Schlitz was quiet for a couple of seconds before she responded, long enough for me to wonder if she was offended on Mitchell’s behalf. But then she spoke: “I think Edgar is lonely,” she said, and from there she painted a portrait of Mitchell, suggesting history will judge him, as it judges all things, far more accurately than the present can.

  “He grew up on a farm,” she observed, “and he has great respect for his family history. But he traveled to the moon and back. His experience of life is so unique. You have to consider: Even his fellow astronauts, there is a fraternity there that means a lot to Edgar. They had the same experience as him. But they didn’t pursue it the way he did: So there isn’t anyone on Earth he can look at, and feel that sense of total, shared experience. There isn’t anyone on Earth who really understands him.”