Fringe-ology (22 page)

If you listen closely, of course, you can hear the skeptics laughing. But Mitchell has never embarrassed himself in the manner Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did, as recounted in chapter 1. The world-famous psychologist, Kübler-Ross, was forced to abandon the psychic she'd hired to work at her institute. But Mitchell has never publicly aligned himself with any particular mystic for any great length of time. And even his position on Geller allows him an intellectual out: he considers the psychic's claims of metal-bending ability scientifically unproven. Still, the range of personal, strange experiences Mitchell has claimed runs long: he spent much of the 1970s meeting with a variety of healers and psychics. Most failed to impress him. But a few did.

The most compelling experience he reports relates to his mother, and it's easy to see why he finds it telling: the little drama that played out between them, if true, illuminates a nexus point among the paranormal, belief, disbelief, and consciousness.

Mitchell's mother had been losing her eyesight for years, due to glaucoma, and was legally blind without her glasses. Just beginning his explorations into the claims of healers, Mitchell decided to introduce his mother to a man named Norbu Chen. A Buddhist and self-proclaimed Tibetan shaman, Chen agreed to try and heal Mitchell's mother and restore her eyesight.

The three gathered in a quiet hotel room. Chen sang a strange mantra, passing his hands slowly over the head of Mitchell's mother and pausing at her eyes. The whole process lasted just a few minutes. Nothing happened immediately, but the next morning, at 6:00
A.M
., Mitchell's mother came rushing to his room. “Son,” she said, “I can see!”

She then proceeded to read for Mitchell, unaided, from the Bible. Then she made a show of tossing her glasses on to the hotel room floor—and breaking them with the heel of her foot.

Mitchell relates this story, and many other odd tales, in his book
The Way of the Explorer.
“I am not,” he writes, “by this account nor with any other anecdotal story, attempting to convince the doubtful. That can only happen when the open-minded skeptic sets out for himself or herself to view (or better, to experience) such peculiar phenomena (at least peculiar to the western mind).”

Chen's healing of his mother, he concludes, “wasn't science, but as far as I was concerned, it indicated where I personally needed to probe more thoroughly.”

Remarkably, according to Mitchell, his mother went about her daily routine for several days after this healing without her glasses. Her vision was restored. Then Mitchell's phone rang. His mother wanted to know if Chen was a Christian. She herself had remained a fundamentalist, so Mitchell wanted to keep the truth from her. But being a good son, he couldn't lie to his mom.

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.

M
ITCHELL'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.”