Contents:
1 -Experiments and discoveries
2 -Harlequin out of love
3 -A security risk
4 -'This is Graham'
5 -David Frost investigates
6 -Computer in a loop
7 -American dream
8 -Consulting Thomas Penn, and the Vatican emissaries
9 -Keys across Stockholm
10 -Fishes, little yachts, rising suns and other symbols
11 -The land of the Samurai
12 -An interim conclusion
Format: v1.5 (PDF - no security) Genera: Paranormal / Psychic Extra's: Pictures Included Copyright: 1978 First Scanned: 2002
I imagined men in white coats would take me into hushed, sterile rooms full of instruments, that a laboratory was a bleak, discomforting place of hard surfaces, unfamiliar, without any of the little things which belong to the world outside.
It looked quite normal. There were soft chairs. Nobody wore a long white coat. There were no strict rules, I wasn't roped down, or wired in a way I could object to. The atmosphere was relaxed, and the scientists behaved like ordinary people.
I remember only one unpleasant experience: I was already attached to an electroencephalograph and had three electrodes planted on my head when they decided to make some Kirlian photographs of my hand; the Kirlian machine carried, on that occasion, 25,000 volts, and they'd forgotten to earth it; so I had the 25,000 volts passing through the electrodes into my scalp. There were no amps in it, and I wasn't electrocuted; but I shan't do that again in a hurry.
It was the summer of 1974. I was in Toronto as the main subject of a seminar on psychokinesis, involving 21 scientists from various countries, held under the auspices of the New Horizons Research Foundation and arranged by its director, Professor A. R. G. Owen, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, now Professor of Genetics at Toronto University. I had known George Owen since I was eleven, when he had investigated the very first outbreak of poltergeist, on which he's a world authority, that occurred in our house, identifying me as the 'poltergeist person'; the source of the psychokinetic force that was moving furniture around and causing all kinds of other phenomena.
The seminar lasted three days. I went for three weeks, during which time several of the scientists had a chance to do a series of formal and informal experiments, and to talk to me, while I demonstrated something of what I was able to achieve; not by any means all, because their chief interest was in metal-bending and this I'd begun to do, not very seriously, when it became obvious, after Uri Geller's appearance on British television, that it ought to be well within my capabilities. I tried; and it was. I later grew to detest it. It's a futile pursuit, always destructive and often dull. Although I didn't reach the point of wishing I'd never started it, I soon stopped altogether. However, I was in Toronto to bend metal, and I lost count of the numbers of keys, spoons and forks that curled up and were made useless objects of curiosity.
My first book, The Link, was not yet published and, when Professor Owen invited me to Canada, I had nothing much to do. This happened to suit me and seemed a pleasant way in which to spend the best part of a month; I thought I hadn't anything to lose and that if the experiments produced good results it would help to promote the book. I certainly didn't expect the trip to be as important as it was in determining the events of the next two years. It was a beginning, not an end in itself, successful though that was too.
The basis upon which I took part then, and have done in experiments since, is the understanding that the scientists will publish their findings in a report in due course. I take with me a diary in which they write up their work. They pay my air fare and expenses, but never, in any circumstances, do I accept a fee.
I stayed with Professor Owen and his family—the visiting scientists were installed in hotels—as they'd known me before they emigrated from Cambridge. Robin Owen is much the same age as myself, and was a college student. Mrs Iris Owen is actively engaged with New Horizons. They were all attending the conference. If we were not working, they would take me about and show me the city, entertaining me most kindly. I was eighteen, nearly nineteen. It seems a long time ago.
I worked a lot with Dr Joel Whitton, a child psychiatrist and, as a member of New Horizons, psychic researcher. One of the first things I discovered was that as a psychic I work better in the evening; the equipment he wanted to use at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children was only available to us in the hours after its routine hospital job was finished. And here, for once, white coats were in evidence; by putting on this simple uniform we conformed to hospital security.
Some months previously, Dr Whitton had been carrying out tests, which he hoped to repeat with me, on the reception of telepathic impulses. A subject monitored by an electroencephalogram will show sensitivity to the transmission by someone else of a telepathic signal or message—the brain registers a distinct acknowledgement of the other person's thought. In effect, a sophisticated version of burning ears. Another scientist in Toronto for the seminar, Professor Douglas Dean, of the Newark College of Engineering, had made experiments with sleeping subjects, whose brainwave patterns revealed the moment someone miles away thought positively about them. Motoyama, in Japan, has done much work in this field, as have the telepathic 'pair' Nikolaiev and Kamensky, in Russia. Telepathy, their experiments seem to confirm, is a natural function of the brain, though at a level in the unconscious which is difficult to tap, difficult to grasp.
Dr Whitton was explaining the potentialities of the EEG and of computer evaluation techniques. He suggested running a pilot test. Or why not, he said, something rather different: he wondered if anything unusual would register on the graph while I was bending, or trying to bend, a key— 'actual or attempted paranormal activity'. Since I was in Toronto to demonstrate psychokinesis, mind over matter, the moving of a material object by the mind without using any known force or energy, that was the obvious choice for the experiment.
In order to exclude the possibility of my having used physical force, he connected me to an electromyograph as well. It's a device which measures muscle movement so sensitively that I couldn't blink or twitch involuntarily without this appearing on the graph. The computer calculated the degree of force minutely. It wasn't that I was so strung up with wires and electrodes I couldn't move, but if I did move it would have been instantly detected.
Joel Whitton gave me a key. He laid it in front of me and said I was to go ahead and do what I usually did. I had to blank out my mind, withdrawing from my surroundings into another state of consciousness. It is a conscious feeling; an act of will; to a large extent I can do it whenever I wish, on request. It was soon referred to as my 'switching on the power': the scientists were not sure what I was actually doing, but they could see the results for themselves. After this blankness, I'm fully awake: I can answer questions and talk, though I can sometimes be distracted by someone else talking or coming into the room at the precise moment of concentration.
I concentrated on bending the key. I had been bending umpteen bits of metal so the result wasn't any surprise. Dr Whitton was much more intrigued with his graph. He wasn't sure whether I'd caused some interference with the computer, or if what he and his colleagues were seeing was a genuine variation in the brainwave pattern.
Dr Whitton found that a fraction of a second before the key started to bend, and in repeat runs it happened with the key bending either in my hand or untouched on the table in front of me, there was a large increase in the low theta and delta range of electrical frequency. I knew that alpha waves are associated with stages of heightened awareness, as in transcendental meditation, with relaxation, and probably with creative imagining; that beta waves occur for most of the day, during what we would term as mental effort. I didn't know that delta and theta waves come with deep sleep.
These low frequency waves were not seen in this form, nor were they subsequently, in the telepathic impulse tests. Hiroshi Motoyama had noted an increase of theta, which was more than confirmed, in his telepathy subjects; but of alpha only in his tests on a Philippino healer, whose power must have been closer to the kind I was generating.
This was something quite new. The pattern had a massive ramp-like feature, so Joel Whitton named it the 'ramp function'.
It was clear that the electroencephalograph caught the surge of energy, or whatever it was, in the brain, that caused the key to bend, not the actual bending. On one occasion it appeared a matter of minutes before the key began to bend. To quote from Dr Whitton's published report:
In test number 2 ... there were two attempts at paranormal behaviour, i.e. M.M. attempted to bend two keys without using any obvious physical force. The second key did not bend and no ramp function was evidenced during the attempt with this key. A ramp function did appear, however, in the attempt with the first key during the first 10.24 seconds of the attempt. However, the first key did not bend until later in the experiment. Mysteriously, it bent while lying on the table in an adjoining room, but before the end of the experiment while Matthew was still 'hooked up' to the EEG amplifier. M.M. claims this delayed effect occurs occasionally with metal objects he is 'psychically' bending.
The experiment was repeated many times; and after I'd left Toronto two other psychics and a control subject were brought in so as to determine whether the ramp function could be spotted in their EEGs and whether it appeared whenever and whatever psychic activity was engaged upon. Results confirmed the ramp function in the psychic subjects, though it was, I gather, less dramatic and prominent than it had been with me. One, anonymous, psychic did aura-viewing; the other, Dr Alex Tanous, an American philosopher, who was currently being investigated by the American Society for Psychical Research under Dr Karlis Osis, also in Toronto for the conference, practised a phenomenon which used to be known as astral projection but is now more prosaically termed out-of-body experience. From a sealed chamber he was able to project his consciousness to a location two miles away and describe events concurrently occurring there.
By placing electrodes strategically on the scalp, Dr Whitton could identify from which portion of my brain these electrical impulses were derived. The ramp function originates in the limbic system, the old animal brain lying beneath the neo-cortex. This brain, upon which our neo-cortical intellectual brain is superimposed, is recognized as being far more than a visceral brain; it can think and feel, and constantly does so, but not in a way it can put into words.
The large increase of theta and delta waves seem to indicate that I was in stage III or IV sleep, very deep sleep indeed is how it would have been interpreted from the graph alone. It's feasible to wonder if the energy pattern from the brain stem wasn't a function of the mental processes of man thousands of years ago, and therefore that my psychokinetic ability taps a source generally lost to modern man, homo sapiens.
I was discussing this some time afterwards with Dr Lyall Watson. Perhaps there wasn't any such brainwave in my EEG pattern, he suggested: I was merely influencing the computer, since it's well established that I do affect computers and electrical circuits. But Joel Whitton and his fellow scientists in Toronto easily refute the speculation: had I actually caused the computer to malfunction, the repercussions for the hospital, which depended on it for the intensive care unit, would have been devastating, and the computer's functioning was so inter-related that an alarm system would have registered any fault immediately.
I found then, and have since, that in order to produce the most interesting and satisfactory results, it's essential to have a good rapport with the scientists involved. Joel Whitton was someone I hit it off with: he's very Canadian, he talks with a pronounced Canadian accent; in his early thirties, he wears bright tartan trousers, pink shirts and white ties, he chainsmokes, and has a strong sense of humour. He is extremely sympathetic; and that's vital in an experiment. If I have a scientist who is uncommunicative, or awkward, or who has personal problems and is worried or neurotic, it affects me.
Similarly, I like Professor Brian Josephson, Regius Professor of Physics at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1973 Nobel prizewinner at the youthful age of 31, a brilliant and, I thought amusingly vague man. He's extremely sensitive to human beings—not a bit lofty and detached—and to the behaviour of objects around him. He's utterly unperturbed by what other people might think about him. He's always wanting to take everything to pieces, to have everything explained: why it's working, why it's not working. He throws up the most amazing theories.
One experiment I did with Josephson involved a compass. He experienced a strange sensation himself, whilst I was concentrating. We began with the needle perfectly still; I moved my hands above the compass, and the needle waved around; I took my hands away, and the needle stopped abruptly, although as it was very weakly 'damped' it should, after being disturbed, have continued for some time. Professor Josephson had 'a feeling in the eyes' during the needle's movement, akin, he thought, to that in transcendental meditation: a distortion of the visual image. The instant I admitted I could do no more, that my psychic energy was drained, his vision cleared. 'It was as though I was seeing it through a heat haze,' he told a journalist who interviewed him on his return to England, 'such as you get rising from a bonfire.'
The diary records a great deal of metal-bending. A typical entry was written by Allen Spragget, dated 20 June 1974: At approximately 6.10pm Matthew asked me for a key from my key chain to attempt to bend. I removed my housekey and handed it to him [28469T Dexter].
Matthew clasped the key in his hand. Without his leaving the room and with no visible muscular effort, Matthew succeeded in bending the key.
After it was handed back to me, the key continued to bend.
Another, by Professor George Owen, describes a little of what having me to stay entailed:
11.00pm 19 June 1974
At about 7.45 pm Matthew was holding an 'Oneida Stainless' fork of natural length, 7 1/4". He was sitting in the lounge in the presence of Joel & Michelle Whitton, and Robin Owen. This fork bent backwards at a point 4 1/2" from the tip until its head made an angle of about 30º with the shaft. I.e. angle of bend was about 150º.
He went on to say how three more forks bent; the material was laid out and photographed; in one fork the prongs had splayed. Mrs Michelle Whitton, incidentally, had observed a red aura round a bending fork earlier in the evening. Then at roughly 8.15pm —
... the party each collected food & knives & forks from a pile in the dining room. Among the 'Oneida Stainless' cutlery there was, by chance, a superior type of knife, 'Ashberry Stainless, England' which Matthew had not touched. By chance also, Iris Owen brought this to the lounge. When she used it to eat her supper (about 10-12 feet away from Matthew) she noticed that the blade was bent away from the handle & that it was still in process of bending. It bent to about 10º from its original plane. The bend was about 1/2" from the handle.
The following day I must have bent dozens of keys. Professor Owen noted: 'Matthew held Sue Sparrow's key ... in his hand for some minutes. It divided into two pieces, the cleavage being at about 1/2" from the tip.'
And: '... while answering questions, Matthew took ... two keys from Mr Bruce Raymond's key ring & successively bent them. Both keys were bent thro' thicker part of the shank to about 5-8 degrees.' Their owner added: 'The apartment key had to be bent into shape in a vice which took about ten minutes' effort on the part of the building superintendent.'
But with spoons and forks bending while we were having meals and keys warping in people's hands and pockets simply because I was there with them, I was beginning to find the ability embarrassing; I couldn't control it; everything bent around me; it was out of hand, and then no longer funny. Almost every small metal object I touched would break or bend; and soon I didn't have to touch it, only look at it. I was at my peak in metal-bending.
A woman approached me—I think she was a secretary to one of the academics—and offered me a gold ring. 'It's too big,' she said, 'I keep losing it; will you shrink it for me?' I laughed.
She was deadly serious, so I held her ring briefly and mentally asked it to shrink. I then handed it back, hoping that I had pleased her. I was reasonably sure that I would have no effect on it.
At the next conference session, she rushed up to me in a panic. Hadn't she put the ring on her finger just after I'd handed it back? Yes, and it had started to shrink, and now it was shrunk so much she couldn't get it off! 'Your finger has swollen,' I said, but I didn't persuade her.
The informal tests which were made under varying amounts of control seemed quite fun; an experiment might be based on an ad hoc hypothesis put forward by one of the scientists.
Having established, from a number of subjects, that non-psychic individuals were unable, no matter how hard they tried, to produce a ramp function or to bend metal, they suggested I might conceivably transfer my brainwave to somebody else.
The volunteer was wired up to the electroencephalogram: all I did was to hold her hand. And when I switched on my power, to general astonishment, a 'mini' ramp function appeared in her EEG. It was evidently in the nature of a scientific treat: the President of the University, Dr Evans, came to the laboratory to be 'switched on' by me.
Professor Dean thought we might apply the same premise to Kirlian photography.
This is the high frequency electro-photography named after the Russians, Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, who were the first to perceive its function in taking pictures of the radiation which they identified as emanating from all animate, and inanimate objects. From human bodies and animals to trees and houses, and parts thereof, it's possible to take a Kirlian photograph of anything, though a brick has less radiation surrounding it than a flower, and a flower has less than a fingertip.
Professor Dean's apparatus consisted of a Tesla coil generating an AC current of something like 25,000 volts at 100,000 to 1 million frequency in cycles per second, with about 50 pulses per second. It was a neat metal box, quite small, the upper surface of which was opaque glass, enclosed in a double black bag to protect the Polaroid film placed on it from the light. In experiments I had already done with Professor Dean, I would insert my hand into the hole in the bag, and put three fingertips at the top of the film for the first exposure made with a timer for two seconds. Three finger coronas would thus be obtained with me in a normal state of rest. I moved my fingers to the middle of the film, and switched on my energy. At the bottom of the film, I returned to normal. The film was at once developed.
The middle three coronas, or aurioles, were far brighter than those in the control exposures. Usually in Kirlian photographs the fingertips are edged in white with squiggles of radiation coming off them. 'Matthew made the white part fill up right into the center, giving a cloud of brilliant white,' wrote Professor Dean. 'I have never seen that before.'
Then Matthew was able to concentrate the power down into a thin spot and also to concentrate it into the middle finger only.
Then Matthew tried with two Kirlian apparatus', one for the left hand and one for the right hand. After getting the apparatus' calibrated, he was able to make the power go into the left hand but not the right and then go into the right hand but not the left.
These results caused a bit of excitement.
Anyway, Dr Evans had his fingertips photographed while, first, he endeavoured to produce special radiation effects himself. I was asked to hold his other hand, and to switch on. The energy pattern was transferred; Dr Evans's coronas blazed white like mine, A unique discovery.
Almost from the moment of my arrival in Toronto, the psychokinetic effects achieved were considered phenomenal, and Professor Owen reckoned they should be filmed; it was previously agreed that he was free to videotape whatever he liked, but this was rather different. After only one day, he made a telephone call to England, seeking the consent of my company, who hold the copyright on my books, to make arrangements for filming. He describes how, even during this conversation, he watched a key bending in front of him.
Bruce Raymond, whose housekey I was to bend, causing his building superintendent so much trouble, was a member of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, and had made a film with Professor Owen before. He had also been a CBS director and now ran his own independent film company. For these reasons he was a very suitable person to approach. There was no time to lose, and filming went ahead.
It wasn't until after I was home that an agreement was drawn up between the three parties: George Owen, as scientific adviser; my company, representing me; and Bruce Raymond Ltd, who were financing the 30-minute colour movie. Rights were jointly owned; and I had the final power of veto over the material to be included.
I learnt that Bruce Raymond had fixed for Joan Kemp-Welch, the director of some episodes of the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs, to shoot five minutes of background as a lead-in—me strolling through the house where I live with my parents, brother, and sister; a word from my old headmaster at Oakham School, maybe, as many of the events in The Link took place there.
When Miss Kemp-Welch received the rushes from Toronto—all 90 minutes of them—they proved disappointing. The film crew sent in by Bruce Raymond Ltd. had somehow managed to get mostly shots of scientists' posteriors or people looking agog at things accidentally blocked from the camera by their bodies; and there were some dull discussions by the scientists about nothing in particular.
Joan Kemp-Welch was asked to film more in England. In the end, 25 minutes of background lead in to five minutes of Toronto, statements by Brian Josephson: 'We have to look very closely at our definitions of reality and non-reality,' and Joel Whitton, a still of George Owen with his voice dubbed over, and an exterior glimpse of his home to show where I'd stayed. Matthew Manning— The Story of a Psychic was edited and processed in Canada.
Soon afterwards Bruce Raymond came to England. He wanted a new agreement so that he could sell the film in a package deal to a group of television companies in America. Thames Television in England, who believed they had bought rights from an agent to screen part of the film in a major documentary, either ducked out or were forced out, cancelling their programme at short notice. John Edwards, the Head of Current Affairs, said Raymond had been unhappy, apparently, about the sum involved.
I emerged from all this unscathed, but much wiser. I was adamantly against being pushed into show business, being promoted and sold as a performer. Professor Owen was sorry that the experiments and phenomena available in such plenty hadn't been covered, and I saw how badly off research groups are when non-commercial filming is needed. Once the commercial film-makers come in, the venture, to use an apt word, turns into a gamble.
New Horizons Research Foundation is largely endowed, I believe, by two Canadian 'millionaires', whose pet hobby happens to be parapsychology: Mr D. C. 'Ben' Webster and Mr William McQuestion. But, Matthew Manning being in summer 1974 an unknown quantity, Mr Webster didn't fancy sponsoring the seminar, so Bill McQuestion put up the money by himself. I met him, and bent his keys, and talked, and on one occasion he took Robin Owen and myself to Niagara in his little plane.
Ben Webster dropped by in London while making his next trip to Europe; he hoped I'd accept an invitation to demonstrate privately to some of his friends, like a cabaret act at a party. I declined.
But he left behind an envelope. Inside was a piece of metal and a note, asking for it to be bent. I was irritated, and put it aside.
Weeks passed; and when I had a letter demanding that I return the metal to Toronto forthwith. I bent what looked like a nondescript rod, and mailed it from Cambridge; whether the envelope didn't arrive, or arrived minus contents, I'm not absolutely certain: Webster was furious because, apparently, the metal had been an extremely expensive part from an aircraft engine.
George Owen wrote to me in April 1975:
Mr Webster is trying to interest the Government of Canada in Psychokinesis as a field of research, and, if possible, to get us some funding thereby, which of course would help me a lot. So... when you come, he would like to have you to dinner with some of the Cabinet Ministers in Ottawa, and hopefully the Prime Minister...
Professor Owen thought I'd be going to Canada while I
was in America to promote the publication of my book there.
I wasn't immediately besieged by journalists when I flew home from Toronto, back in July 1974. It started as a trickle as they began to hear about the new brainwave pattern. The scientists gave interviews, and Professor Josephson spoke to Peter Lewis of the Daily Mail: I think we are on the verge of discoveries which may be extremely important for physics. We are dealing with a new kind of energy. This force must be subject to laws. I believe ordinary methods of scientific investigation will tell us a lot about psychic phenomena. They are mysterious but they are no more mysterious than a lot of things in physics already.
I wish all scientists were as open-minded as Professor Owen and Professor Josephson.
I think if I hadn't been to Toronto, if we hadn't got those results, The Link would not have attracted the attention it did—of newspapers like the Daily Mail which serialized it over four days. 1 wasn't known. Toronto gave me a credibility; and in an odd way I resented that. I felt that my word alone should have been enough. There was no trickery or magic up my sleeve, and I was willing to demonstrate the fact. Apart from anything else, I was only eleven when everything had begun, and at that age I would have had to be reasonably bright to plan a life of deception. Like most people who find being honest easy, I'm always surprised— mildly—that my word is doubted, yet accepted when backed up by the words of scientists.
I'm not convinced that scientists are any better qualified to judge and express opinions on psychic phenomena than anybody else, a Roman Catholic Archbishop, for instance, or a teacher, an artist, a doctor, or a magician. I'm not suggesting that journalists should ignore what scientists have to say, simply that they shouldn't listen to them to the exclusion of all others.
I became tired of journalists asking me to bend metal. There was one chap who produced a six-inch nail. I took it and I bent it to about ten degrees. 'Bent!' I said, and handed it over. 'Not bent enough,' he said. 'I want it bent 45 degrees.' Things like that are very irritating.
I preferred to concentrate on the many psychic effects which were interesting, even useful, rather than destructive. Dr Joel Whitton thought that if the ramp function was transferable, it might be helpful in alleviating certain conditions, such as autism in children. I could dissociate myself from my environment at will: I might be able to enter their state of dissociation and bring them out of it with me. Nothing came of the idea, which seems a great pity.
Nothing much has come of anything which was discovered in Toronto. Professor Owen said at the time that I was 'probably the most gifted psychic available to science in the Western world'. I've been available to science for two years, but science tends to be lethargic, and experiments seem to lead nowhere. I've travelled abroad and fitted as much scientific work into my schedule as I could. Much more could have been achieved, and I'm sad to see possibilities wasted.
In the press I grew accustomed to read, Astonished Scientists Agree ... Psychic Proves He Can Move Objects With His Mind ... The Boy With The Frightening Psychic Power ... The Super Genius from Cambridge ... He is a SUPERMAN! ... and Teenage Psychic Superstar Is Nuisance To Scientists...
Well, it's true I was a cause of perplexity, and what I did was difficult to explain, difficult to understand, and perhaps alarming from time to time. But that phrase 'nuisance to scientists' strikes an unintentional double meaning. I have since grown disenchanted, disillusioned, not with science, but with the scientists. Toronto was fine. Nevertheless, I felt progressively that, subjective though my judgement must be, I was in the best position to observe how scientists work and think, in relation to me and their experiments with me. I watched their methods, I sensed their subjective feelings, and I would have had to be an utter zombie not to draw my own conclusions.
The face was a mask, in black and white. It lay in the centre of the paper with tears, huge back-tofront commas, running down its left cheek. In the chin and high above the frowning forehead, two heart-shaped devices had been incorporated into a very stylized design; a white one, upon which another tear lingered, in the chin; a slightly smaller or squeezed-looking black one in the forehead. Inverted, a white heart surrounded the black nose. The eyes drooped and the mouth turned downwards at the corners, a big tear trickled but clung to the deepest point of the chin, and significantly the teardrops came not from the real eyes but from two more, rounder, more suggestive and symbolic, set on either side of the black heart in the forehead: the eyes of the brain. All this gave the drawing a sad and aggressive aspect.
Below, cut off from the face as though the body were of no importance, was a pair of shoes, linked together at the heel as sandals might be in a shop, with what could have been rolled stockings, empty of their legs, stockings or tights gathered carelessly at the ankle. Perhaps the disembodied creature whose mental state was so graphically conveyed through my automatic drawing wished to escape in these shoes.
And above the two single hairs which seemed to be all that remained on the head, I had written, my hand impelled there after completing the mask and the shoes, the words Harlequin out of love in an ornate semi-cursive script, Harlequin spelt thus with an i, and swashes, exaggerated flourishes on letters, made into tears.
I was in Germany, doing a series of experiments for Professor Hans Bender at the Institut fur Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene. The title of this establishment is broadly translated as 'institute for border areas of psychology and mental health'. It functions independently though in close contact with the University of Freiburg where Dr Bender who was its director, is professor of psychology and border areas of psychology and co-director of the university's Psychological Institute. German terminology in the field doesn't lend itself to an easy English equivalent. Professor Bender would, for instance, call me a medium, as there is no German word for psychic; in English the word medium has a far more limited meaning.
The doyen of psychical research in Germany over the last forty years, Hans Bender is a world authority on the poltergeist happenings and psychokinetic effects he has specialized in investigating. He is particularly known for his work on the Rosenheim case in which a severe outbreak of poltergeist in an office, phenomena including swinging lamps, blown fuses, exploding light-bulbs and general electrical confusion, was traced to the presence of an 18-year-old secretary and attributed to the emotional disturbance she was thought to be experiencing at the time.
I had met Professor Bender in October, while in Germany for the publication by Verlag Hermann Bauer of my first book, The Link. I gathered that to gain Bender's stamp of approval was the only way of ensuring success and maximum publicity for my book. All right, I thought, I will.
The Link was published simultaneously in three countries, my English publishers being Colin Smythe Ltd, an enterprising firm with a list indicating an interest in the occult, Irish, and esoteric fields. A director of Colin Smythe, a friend and associate with whom I had, and have since reinforced, a sensible working relationship, Peter Bander, accompanied me to Munich where I was supposed to be taking part in a television programme.
The disappointing results of the filming in Toronto and the disastrous lack of an understanding with Bruce Raymond had made us cautious. TeleContact in Munich agreed to the three conditions stipulated by us: a script of the ten-minute film sequence was to be approved by both parties; any psychic phenomena which must be manifested in the course of the filmed interview was to be retained in the film by Tele-Contact but not sold elsewhere nor used out of context; under no circumstances was I to be led into a 'confrontation' with Uri Geller. Geller was getting some controversial handling in the international press for his metal-bending and, to a lesser extent, his demonstrations of telepathy.
I have become a little sensitive, I admit, over the unending mention of Geller in connection or comparison with me, comparisons more often than not invidious. I believe that Uri Geller has achieved a great deal of good. He has shown millions of people in Israel, Europe, and America that exciting phenomena do occur and that psychic phenomena can teach us a lot about areas of human experience and knowledge which have been, hitherto, largely brushed aside, ridiculed, or ignored. Uri Geller spearheaded a breakthrough to reach the general public.
Psychic ability, in quantities tiny through atrophy and neglect, is an attribute probably common to many if not to everyone: a very few are much more psychic than others, are able to produce psychic phenomena at will and to work as psychics. Geller has made people aware of things they wouldn't otherwise have thought about. In my opinion he has done a great deal of harm too. He has used his gifts to perform. He likes performing. Certainly that's his prerogative. But in performing, he likes to stick to relatively simple skills and effects. I suspect he can do some remarkable things, though I've never seen him work at first hand. It's a pity he doesn't work in less flashy conditions.
There is nothing wrong in making a living out of being a psychic. But if I were in a similar position, performing to a paying public in bull rings and night clubs, I should feel the strain of trying, night after night, to produce an entertainment; I know that psychic phenomena cannot be produced every time on demand; I wouldn't want to let the audience leave dissatisfied. It's a tight corner I shouldn't care to be pushed into.
Geller and his mentor, Andrija Puharich, have reported dramatic teleportation, or the translocation of material objects. I have no difficulty in accepting this as factual and possible. Of course it's possible. It can happen. It does happen.
But Uri Geller has incalculable gifts. But he declines, except on the rarest of occasions, such as his visit to the Stanford Research Institute in California and his meeting with Professor Owen, all invitations to scientific institutions.
In 1974, it was plain that Geller and I had similar and pretty unique abilities. As far as the popular press was concerned, a comparison was inevitable. No one else was producing the kind of phenomena we were. The News of the World offered a considerable sum in an effort to obtain a photograph of Geller and me together. The German newspapers made a cannibal feast of it, describing me as 'the exact opposite of Uri Geller' and as a 'blue-eyed blond boy from England', although my hair is dark and my eyes are brown. One magazine went to the trouble of changing the colour of my hair, dyeing or bleaching it to flaxen in a picture with a full-page feature on me, under the heading 'The Superman'. And sadly, an interviewer asked me, 'What do you think of Jewish tricksters?'
Disguised in all this was an element of truth. I was the exact opposite of Geller in that I wanted to do experiments whereas he apparently did not; I shunned publicity, except in promoting my book.
In Munich, we found our third proviso in the agreement with TeleContact had not been adhered to and that though Geller himself wasn't in evidence, Andrija Puharich was. The hoped-for 'confrontation', even with Puharich, apparently remained a star attraction. I insisted, with Peter Bander's support, that the hope was doomed. And indeed, Dr Puharich duly left Munich.
The next two days were a farce. The director of the television programme appeared not to glance at the script. He sent me to walk across a busy square. The camera couldn't pick me out of the crowd.
'You must feed the pigeons,' the director said.
I declined.
It began to snow.
They drove me then to the Olympic Stadium. I was told to move on cue from a specific tree and proceed down a slope. In the background would be the stadium. I wondered why.
'It will prove to the viewers that you've really been in Munich, the stadium is so recognizable...' I was too innocent. I assumed they meant well and that the scripted sequences would follow. In the afternoon I was taken to a beer cellar. TeleContact had hired an upstairs room where, in the thick of a beer-swilling, sausage-chewing, and extremely noisy gang of customers, they set up their cameras.
To my astonishment, a distinguished German physicist, Professor Werner Schieberle, arrived with a suitcase packed with gadgets. These were arranged on a table.
'Action,' shouted a woman journalist, 'action. Let us see some glasses fly. Levitate a table.' The reply she received from Peter Bander, who is tri-lingual and has fluent German, turned her purple. She stormed out, causing Herr Kirner, my German publisher, to quake about what she might write. I was past caring.
I did do an experiment with Professor Schieberle, while the cameraman was filming a fish bowl or a frothy mug of beer. Schieberle had brought two light-bulbs attached to a board. The electrical current to the bulbs was regulated by a flip-flop switch, a mechanism which, as its name implies, has to be shifted and 'held' to keep the current activated. I didn't touch anything with my hands. I had to light the bulbs by concentrating my mind on the switch. I managed this successfully.
But Professor Schieberle's elegant experiment was reported in the German press with ironic understatement: 'Psychic only lights two lamps' captioned a photo of me with the professor and his apparatus.
Another abortive attempt to get something on film during the second morning was abandoned in favour of an interview between me and the director in his office. I tried some automatic drawing or writing. I was due to leave for Freiburg at midday, for the arranged meeting with Professor Bender. Outside the office building a pneumatic drill rendered the interview inaudible and concentration impossible. I heaved a sigh of relief, putting Munich behind me.
At Freiburg, Professor Bender was joined by Jorg Dattler of the German television company Sud Deutsche Rundfunk which had a long-standing contract with Bender for several series of parapsychological programmes. Again there was the problem of cash. It takes money to devise and carry out experiments, and individual institutions are unable to finance these projects adequately, Freiburg being no exception. It was understood that I should return to Freiburg in about a month's time and that although SDR were inevitably involved there would be only one remote-controlled electronic camera operated by Professor Bender as and when he wished to record a particular happening. Dattler was to have an interview with me but Bender would choose which video sequences he thought most suitable for the programme. Allowance was made for a period before the filming started in which Professor Bender and I might establish a rapport, an asset to experimental work now clearly essential.
I had taken to Professor Hans Bender straight away. He is a thoroughly nice man, the most sympathetic of scientists. I had great respect for him while I was in Freiburg. I felt I could trust him, and I have never had to alter that view. Apart from anything else, he seemed able to grasp, unlike the vast majority of scientists, that as a psychic I was and am a human being, with human feelings, human weariness, human impatience, human emotions. He didn't expect me to work like a machine. He realized I possessed a mind of my own and, I suppose, a will. Nevertheless this trust and mutual liking was strained to the utmost.
I was still rather innocent. I came back to Freiburg at the end of November anticipating a group at the institute comprised of Bender, the physicists invited to collaborate from the University of Copenhagen, Professor Richard Mattuck and Scott Hill, some laboratory assistants, with somewhere unobtrusively in the background a silent electronic camera. I hadn't forgotten Slid Deutsche Rundfunk. But I was intensely dismayed to see no fewer than nineteen television technicians, directors, sound and lighting engineers and cameramen, with their clutter. They'd decided that more than one electronic camera would have been too expensive, so they had four ordinary film cameras, each with its crew. They had clapperboards, they had arc lights, they had a web of wiring, they had microphones. It didn't strike me as the ideal situation in which to work.
I had more lessons to learn. Sud Deutsche Rundfunk were paying for the experiments, the institute's experiments with me, and thereby were subsidizing the institute's funds. There was immediately friction between the director of the institute, Professor Bender, and the television director, Jorg Dattler, and enormous arguments over the way in which the experiments should be conducted, what would be attempted, and how the laboratory or quasi-studio would be run during my visit there. Bender wished to assert his absolute right to conduct the experiments as planned.
He explained to the television people that their methods, the pandemonium they created, couldn't be conducive to even a modicum of success. It was disruptive and harmful. I meanwhile sat in the laboratory knowing no German and at a loss to understand what was going on, except that I was at the centre of the argument. At one point I had been wired to an electroencephalograph for two hours, with nothing happening.
Professor Bender realized I was becoming irritable and unhappy but the wrangling continued unabated. The television director and assistant directors had the bright idea that I might perform tricks instead of experiments: I must roll up my sleeves to show I had nothing hidden. Then, not my sleeves: I must take my shirt off. Professor Bender intervened angrily. He would vouch for my integrity, he said, and that I concealed no means on my body to produce effects by trickery. There was a raucous bellow from the rear, 'Let's have Matthew in the nude!' Peter Bander, who felt my bewilderment very personally, extracted me for the moment. The atmosphere was terrible; somehow they all had to calm down.
It may have been then or on another occasion—there were many so similar—that Professor Bender had retreated behind one of the television cameras and I, seated in the midst of the hubbub, had picked up his train of thought. It wasn't difficult to read his mind because he was distressed and emotion is an excellent catalyst for telepathy. He saw that he was losing his control of the television programme and, worse, his experiments; he felt his authority and academic standing were being flouted. Instead of applying my concentration to whatever it was Dattler wanted me to do, I had tuned in, not at all on purpose, to the annoyance Professor Bender was generating.
Peter and I had a snack in a nearby restaurant. 'Professor Bender was thinking.. .'I said. Peter scribbled a note of what I told him and presently recounted it to the man himself. 'But that is true!' exclaimed Professor Bender, with some delight.
It was Jorg Dattler who suggested I ought to be given a break and taken for a 200-mile trip to the television centre in Stuttgart.
On our way we called in at the German Space Agency, which occupies a vast science-fiction campus, and I was introduced to Professor Peschke. He had constructed superb machines, massive balances with laser beams and instruments to measure atmospheric pressure with the most sensitive precision, which would have been ideal to use to test me with. They would all have liked me to try affecting these gadgets psychically but they were apprehensive about the effect I might have elsewhere in the laboratory. I might have upset other delicate and very expensive machinery. Professor Peschke couldn't allow Jorg Dattler and SDR to transport the gadgets to a television studio, so the idea was dropped.
We reached Stuttgart at about six in the evening, an hour behind schedule. Another television team waited in the foyer while I was booked in to a room on the ground floor. After I had done the requested interview I sat down to dinner, fairly weary, at seven thirty. I had finished, I think, the first course, when Jorg Dattler said I was needed in the studio, and he rushed me off to the television centre.
There were two cameras, a low table, two deep armchairs, twin microphones. At eight thirty, to whip up my enthusiasm, Dattler said generously, 'Do anything!' And in case I might be in the mood to bend metal he had acquired spoons, forks, and knives from the canteen.
I was very tired, having travelled all day, walked miles over the German Space Agency campus and worked until late the previous night. I was still expected to do 'something spectacular'. Perhaps they didn't consider they were being unreasonable.
I tried: I did some automatic writing, which was recorded on videotape. But it didn't seem spectacular enough, the camera didn't zoom in, and Dattler was uninterested. At eleven o'clock, finally, the technicians packed up and I was free to go to bed.
A large Mercedes arrived soon after breakfast to take me back to Freiburg, where the days which followed were more profitable. The time was occupied, on the whole, with the physical experiments planned in advance by the professor of physics from Copenhagen, Richard Mattuck, and Scott Hill, technical adviser to the Physics Faculty. I was lucky to have a good working relationship with both scientists.
Inadvertently, I produced what I term as spin-off effects:
phenomena occurring which are not theoretically part of the main experiment but which are sparked off, it must be assumed, by the main experiment or by the psychic energy generated for that experiment. A spin-off effect usually manifests itself slightly off-centre: something will happen in a corner of the room whilst all the attention is being focused on the table, object, or apparatus at the centre. Scientists frequently can perceive more in these odd effects, and discover more in them, than can be deduced from the results of the main experiment.
Professor Mattuck had two principal pieces of equipment with him. One of these comprised a light beam passing through a hollow tube. The opaque nylon tube or rod, 25 cm long, was fixed to the table to prevent me from moving, pushing, or picking it up. In one end was an electric light-bulb, at the other a photoelectric cell monitored by a device which drew a constant graph. As the light went through the hollow tube 'undisturbed' this showed a straight line. I was asked to bend the nylon rod. If I could do it, the graph would immediately record deviation of the light beam. Any bending of the tube should also be visible with the naked eye.
Closed circuit television cameras were focused onto the gadget and the movement of my hands was shown clearly. I began to concentrate. Nothing happened for a few minutes. I had placed my hands about 10cm above and away from the tube. I concentrated on the middle of the tube. Then I moved my right hand backwards and forwards, towards the end where the light-bulb was. And suddenly the graph altered its tracing. According to the graph the tube was bending, slightly at first but after 30 seconds quite noticeably. It was unfortunate that the tube remained perfectly straight. The graph, upon which many a scientific judgement can be made, told the scientists the tube was bent, and that because of this severe bend not much light was reaching the photoelectric cell.
The graph continued to register the tube bending after I had left the table and gone away. Mattuck and Hill asked me to put my hand again above the apparatus. I concentrated for a moment, the graph dropped to the bottom of its axis and ceased to register anything at all. 'At first we assumed the bulb had burned out,' wrote Scott Hill to me later, 'which would account for the strange tracings on the graph. However ... analysis of the bulb showed it to be intact...' The bulb was new and when taken out had a black film inside it, but tested, worked at full strength. Scott Hill went on '.. .so the only remaining hypothesis for the event is PK, in my estimation.'
The rod had not bent. Had a planned effect been achieved? No one could suppose so unless the only thing desired was a demonstration of psychokinesis. But as a spin-off from what had been intended, I had affected the graph so much that it had collapsed.
The second gadget set up by the physicists was an electronic ESP tester, called an ESP-1AT, which is a random number generator controlling four lights. I had to anticipate the sequence in which the lights came on and off.
The widespread use of a random number generator in ESP testing is to ensure that the experimenter cannot by mistake transmit telepathically the run of the cards, colours, or lights. However hard the experimenter tries to disengage his mind, however determined he may be not to transmit information, the possibility is inherent: telepathy is no respecter of wishes, nor of conscious will. The psychic mustn't pick up what he is supposed to predict.
In excluding telepathy, so that the experimenter is as much in the dark as his subject and has no notion of a sequence which hasn't yet occurred, the field is narrowed to the perception, by one psychic human being, of events created by a machine. If hits are scored at a rate significantly above probability, more than by sheer chance, it can be suggested with some caution that either clairvoyance, direct awareness of a physical object or event - or precognition, awareness of a future event - or a combination of both is involved. Differently designed tests are predisposed towards one or the other; a series of light flashes seems to require precognition; a sequence of cards already randomly selected is equally amenable to clairvoyance. But it cannot be ruled out that a psychic may influence the machine itself to produce the sequence he anticipates.
So the field, albeit narrower than it was previously, still lies remarkably open. The machine is called merely an extra-sensory-perception tester: if it records a success rate apparently achieved by paranormal means, these unusual abilities, or usually unused abilities, are accounted for by anything under the umbrella title of PSI, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet, which covers the entire range of psychic activity.
I hadn't done an experiment with this type of apparatus, nor had I taken part in a controlled ESP test. 'Initial significance levels looked good,' wrote Scott Hill, 'but unfortunately an error on our part, not telling you the rules regarding the choosing of the first lamp, which must be made before the power is switched on, has reduced the significance of these tests, which is why we would like an additional session or two.'
But the machine failed after about ten runs. Scott Hill checked this malfunction with its designer: '... he said the situation we observed was electronically impossible.' A complete failure of the components would have had 'an associated probability of less than 10"10, but since the failure was only temporary, this is an upper bound for the probability.'
Probability theory forms the basis upon which much ESP testing is calculated. For every ten attempts one hit is to be expected by chance. The figure 10"10 represents a probability of one in ten thousand million. Tossing a coin, the probability of heads or of tails is one in two.
I wasn't very clear as to what actually happened to the ESP-1AT except that I could see it had died a little death while I was working with it.
Dick Mattuck and Scott Hill were intrigued by my automatic writing. They were not, they thought, in a position to evaluate it as such, but they offered to scrutinize any scientific information it might contain. Scott Hill suggested I might 'communicate with deceased scientists ... Fermat, Newton, Galileo ...' or contact 'ordinary men who participated in great scientific projects, such as the building of the great pyramid.'
If I considered the latter feasible, I was to let him know: he had a list of questions already drawn up. Late in the afternoon of the fifth day, after the day's work, Professor Bender asked me if I could manage one more experiment of, he said, a special nature. I hesitated. Inwardly I was groaning, thinking of the intense concentration I'd been expending for hours and how I felt I had done quite enough. I thought, I can't refuse. 'All right,' I said.
For some reason, the chap assisting Bender in the laboratory chose to play back the tape-recording attachment of the video machine a short while later.
We heard Professor Bender asking me the question. 'Once more!' shouted a voice from the tape, clearly my own, but as if across a deep valley, and then me again: 'All right.'
We were absolutely certain I had not spoken aloud the words 'Once more.' The tape had articulated my thoughts. It was played back a dozen or so times, and vanished.
Magnetic tape, it appears, can register what might be supposed telepathic impulses from the human brain and form these into speech corresponding to the original whims and fancies, and this was the phenomenon we had obtained. If I had really said 'Once more' it would have been impolite, at the least, and Professor Bender had not reacted to or sensed any such thing. Everyone present concurred.
A mass of evidence has been accumulating on electronic voice phenomenon since the Swede Friedrich Jurgenson and German born Konstantin Raudive discovered and developed in research what they both believe to be the reception on magnetic tape of voices from the dead.
But while it is well established that voices do appear on the tape, the explanation is extremely debatable. Professor Bender would maintain that all electronic voice phenomena are attributable to the human brain. His is an essentially animistic theory, and the incident at Freiburg supported this view. He would say, I think, that the voices claimed to be heard by Konstantin Raudive and others are genuine, not imagined from patterns of sound, though unacceptable as communications from the dead: these voices too have their origin in the minds of the researchers clustered around the tape recorder.
Unwittingly, the researcher transmits thought and the computer-like knowledge of his unconscious mind; recognizable phrases are formed and speech which seems to possess characteristics of individual dead persons. Something similar in rationalization might be accorded to many a spiritualist seance. It has been pointed out that Raudive's voices tend to manifest themselves mostly in his native Latvian.
I had agreed, anyway, to one more experiment.
Professor Bender was interested in my automatic drawing. In The Link I described how I began doing automatic drawing and writing, and how this seemed to absorb much of the psychokinetic energy which had caused poltergeist havoc in my home and at school. Bender had read The Link and the opinions and assessments of the art experts and graphologists it contains.
I have made hundreds of automatic drawings, work which is signed by and purports to be in the style of such artists as Durer, Aubrey Beardsley and Picasso. I have never for one moment tried to suggest that all the automatic writing and all the automatic drawing I do is communication from dead painters and people. I believe that 80 per cent can be explained, some would say explained away, as coming from my subconscious. The unconscious mind is known to be capable of astonishing feats. No reason, therefore, why that should be denigrated. But 20 per cent cannot, I think, be explained in such terms.
Professor Bender's special experiment was devised to see if I really did 'link up' to dead painters, or whether there might be some other explanation, some previously unnoticed feature which could suggest a working hypothesis for future experiments. By 'some other explanation' I guessed he meant, if he expected any result at all, any explanation not only other from a survival theory, but from the animistic concept of the origin of automatic drawing as well.
He would give me the pseudonym of a living artist, a completely unknown artist whom I had never met and had no knowledge of whatsoever. If I could produce a drawing in the style of an artist who was totally unaware of the experiment proceeding, we would have, by that fact, something to go on.
I hadn't a clue if it would work, and said so.
I was told the artist was a woman, but was neither given her age, nor told where she lived. The name supplied for me to concentrate on was unintelligible, though it sounded long and German. It wasn't written down. I sat at a table in the room at the institute where we had been all day. Professor Bender, Professor Mattuck, Scott Hill and I were alone, with an assistant to operate the videotape camera. I emptied my mind, and waited. My hand began to move. A configuration resembling an eye had been drawn, when I stopped.
Dick Mattuck sat directly opposite me and was quite close. I felt I was encountering a force far stronger and more insistent than anything I'd been accustomed to in automatic drawing. Dick is feeding me telepathic information, I thought. I challenged him on this. He denied a conscious attempt to transmit. I was so sure I stopped a second time. But it was a red herring. He knew nothing. He had no information he could transmit.
The force grew. I sensed a terrible oppression overwhelming in its intensity: it was like being held under, smothered, I was suffocated beneath a blanket of dreadful affliction. On the paper a face was emerging. The Harlequin.
The drawing took longer than I would have expected for a relatively uncomplicated piece of work: twenty minutes. And all the time I felt my whole personality was pervaded by an indescribable despair and anguish, something of which was also expressed by the grotesque, beetle-browed visage staring out of the paper. I was disappointed by the crudeness of the drawing and so, I think, were Mattuck and Hill.
Professor Bender, a tall, bespectacled eminence grise, seemed shaken and agitated. He leapt up and demanded that the videotape camera should be switched off before he spoke another word.
'The artist is my daughter.'
The name he had given me was a pseudonym she used.
Why he had chosen such a personal connection, such a subjective matter for me to experiment with, I don't really know. But by selecting an artist with whom he was extremely well acquainted and whose style in painting and drawing he knew intimately, not to mention a state of mind he understood only too clearly, he had, he considered, set up an experiment, the success or failure of which could be easily verified, and at once.
Maybe he didn't imagine it would succeed. I might have done a flower, or a bird, innocuous and insipid, and he would have dismissed it as inconclusive, an obvious miss. If so, he had miscalculated, because he was utterly thrown by the result.
His daughter, he told us, had been living under severe stress after the breakdown of her marriage, and was emotionally very disturbed. During the morning, he'd had a conversation with her in which she said her personality was in schism, and she used a word - Harlequin - that struck him greatly. It described her feelings: with one half of herself she perceived and was aware of all the good in the world, the love and kindness and happiness; with the other half she carried all the desperation and hatred and destructiveness of her fellow humans on earth.
Professor Bender made a swift sketch to show us how opposing human characteristics clashed simultaneously in her mind. Harlequin out of love: Harlequin out of love. She was loved and unloved, she was someone out of love with the world and yet a child of love. I remember Professor Bender saying I had encapsulated into four words what many psychologists would have spread over pages.
Bender's anxiety increased the more he stared at the Harlequin.
Abruptly, he brought the session to a close and although it was by now dusk he suggested that he and I should drive to his house, about ten kilometres away, where his daughter was. I had been due to return for dinner to the house where Peter Bander and I were staying, so I telephoned Herr Kirner and asked if it would disorganize them if I arrived later than planned.
Professor Bender was talking almost compulsively in his excitement as he drove me along. His home was set on the side of a mountain, with a panoramic view of Freiburg lit up in the dark below. I was confused afterwards, and it was difficult to recollect what happened precisely as we entered.
Frau Bender and their daughter were in the sitting room. The daughter was dressed in the fantastic costume of a Harlequin. She had smeared thick black eyebrows, over white pancake, onto clown's eyes. She had painted her face in a perfect caricature of my drawing. Her skull was shaven bare but covered by a shawl which she clutched frantically. She was petrified at the sight of me, a fear which seemed to have little to do with embarrassment at being discovered in such a strange state. She was enraged at setting eyes on me. She fled into the kitchen or some room at the rear.
I felt very awkward.
Professor Bender started to tell his wife what had happened. Before we left the institute he had phoned to warn her we were coming and briefly, that there had been an experiment with a curious result. Now his wife was exasperated with him for being so idiotic and unthinking as to use their daughter for this or any kind of experiment.
Every few seconds the head of the young woman would be peering round the door, unable to grasp whether I was still there or not. I wondered if she would attack me. If she was frightened of me, I was hardly less frightened of her. I felt she wanted to hiss and claw at me and I braced myself for a physical assault. I thought she was going to hit me. I thought she was mad.
Professor Bender was distraught. He had no idea that this transformation had taken place and was caught off guard, quite regardless of the experiment.
They spoke German. If it hadn't been so embarrassing it would have seemed like a comedy. Frau Bender was obviously berating the professor. He was protesting that it was all in the interest of science, the experiment was justified in the cause of advancing scientific knowledge, and so on. After what was for me a hair-raising 10 or 15 minutes, Professor Bender realized he ought to take me away.
He drove slowly, his mind preoccupied. He was talkative and thoughtful at the same time, trying to work it out and, perhaps, to divide his subjective response from scientific detachment, no simple task. He had given himself much to think about. And to question.
From seeming to be an experiment which suggested a powerful telepathy between Professor Bender and myself having been instrumental in its success, the whole thing had taken on an entirely new dimension. Telepathy could not explain how I had tuned in to the mind of his daughter, someone unknown to me and at a distance, and had reproduced in automatic drawing a physical and mental event which had occurred within hours - one or two - of the experiment, and of which Bender had no prior knowledge. He knew his daughter's state of mind, and the word Harlequin had been mentioned. No one, least of all Bender, could have thought she would act out this fantasy, that she would shave her head, dress up in weird clothes, paint her face as a grizzly mask. It was too extreme for reality, predictable reality.
We passed through Freiburg and on to the foot of the Black Hills, to the Kirners' villa. Frau Kirner had laid on a late dinner for both of us. I was thankful to eat and then to sink into a soft chair. I felt exhausted by the day's events. The language barrier made it even more wearisome and baffling, though the atmosphere had been positively electric. Professor Bender has spoken English whenever he could in deference to my incomprehension of German, but at crucial moments the talk lapsed into the unfamiliar language. I had strained to understand the gist of it as if from a mime.
Bender related the turn of events to Friedrich Kirner and Peter Bander. He was, he said, absolutely shattered. I can remember that word in German, I always shall: erschuttert. It means mentally, emotionally, and spiritually shattered, according to Peter. Professor Bender was erschuttert. The experiment and its consequences occupied them until three in the morning.
Because of his personal involvement, I assume, Professor Bender was reluctant to agree to any kind of release to the press. As my publisher, and as the proprietor of a magazine, Kirner believed it to be startlingly good publicity for my book. But in the end, the three of them decided not to publicize the experiment.
Much to our surprise, therefore, Professor Bender only two months later gave an interview to the German magazine Esotera in which he spoke guardedly about his experiment and the Harlequin automatic drawing.
He made some extremely generous and wide-ranging remarks about me. He described me as a psychic whose gifts embraced the whole spectrum of PSI. He outlined my story, from my first experience of poltergeist phenomena to the automatic drawing and writing in which he had a particular interest, and my trip to Toronto. He confirmed that the ramp function had been monitored during paranormal activity. He spoke briefly of the work done with the physicists from Copenhagen. He was asked if the presence of the television team had not been a bother for everyone. He said it was a pity they had insisted on trying to film from the very beginning but that it was important to show psychic phenomena in the laboratory to viewers and to enlighten people, even more so since a wave of 'hysterical anti-reaction' had swept Germany after Geller's departure.
And he went on to describe that special experiment. He didn't tell the whole story. I can understand why: he was too involved personally. He didn't reveal that the artist was his own daughter. He didn't mention the incident at his house afterwards. There was consequently no indication whatsoever that anything more than a remarkable instance of telepathy had been achieved.
This was 'no automatic reproduction of information received' : it was 'more likely a creative representation of something most complicated and paranormally received'. He thought I was consciously blocked from exhibiting normal artistic ability, he pointed out that I couldn't draw, but that in an altered state of consciousness 'extremely fascinating creativity' came to the surface.
The critical word is 'creative'. The subconscious mind had received or intercepted various facts and feelings, had unscrambled them, and created from them an expression of those facts and feelings. All my automatic writings and drawings emerged from the chimney-pipe of my subconscious, Steigrohr des Unbewussten. Animistic theory again.
The coincidence of a parallel event was shuffled, no doubt, to the back of his mind, too uncomfortable to contemplate. The possibility of Bender himself having been a catalyst in the experiment is undeniable. I expect he did transmit something of his own concern, and perhaps this enabled me to tune in to the right person. It cannot be overlooked that the automatic drawing contained a vital clue to the tuning in to the daughter rather than the father: the two apparently single hairs on the head. A shorn head has nothing to do with Harlequin, nor had anything she had said to Bender in the morning given him the impression she wished to perform such mutilation upon herself.
He hasn't discussed it in public or written about it: only that one interview and then silence. I felt that in publishing half the story he was rather taking advantage of me. I would have preferred it to have been told in total, or not at all.
Peter Bander likes to tell an anecdote about our return journey from Munich, at the end of October.
We had asked for the two seats nearest the tail: it's safer if I travel in the rear of a plane, as far from the flight deck and instrument panel as possible.
This was a DC 10, therefore we had the two seats on the right-hand side as you enter, and behind us was the newspaper rack. I sat beside the window, and while we were settling down to read, we switched our lights on overhead - except that Peter's came on and mine didn't. I clicked it off and on several times; it wasn't working. After take-off I tried leaning towards him to get the benefit of his light, but he found me a bit cumbersome and called the steward.
'I'm terribly sorry, sir,' said the steward, 'I reported the fault on that lamp three days ago, they still haven't checked it, it's probably the bulb; would you care to change your seats?'
We didn't want to move, so we said no thank you. Peter offered to change places with me, but I didn't think it was necessary.
I said, 'I'll fix it.'
I raised my arm and put my palm a couple of inches away from the false ceiling, where the box is, containing the lights and oxygen mask. I held my hand there for five seconds, and the light came on.
It was a loose connection, we assumed. I switched it off and on, on and off, but it stayed on even when switched off. It stayed on for the whole journey, and it was on when we left the plane, at London.
That was the day I suggested to Peter Bander we should make a new form of agreement to handle all my professional commitments. Originally, I had signed a contract with Colin Smythe Ltd to write a book, The Link; and Peter Bander, as a director of Colin Smythe, was my publisher. It gradually became obvious that I needed to be represented in negotiations with film and television companies; arrangements for experiments with scientists had to be vetted; and that this was growing beyond the scope and resources of a smallish publishing company - neither Colin nor Peter had the time to devote themselves continually to my affairs. None of us had realized, least of all me, how everything would snowball, with The Link sold to eleven countries and translated into nine languages.
Under the Colin Smythe umbrella there was a group of subsidiary companies, two of which had been set up by Peter. One of these existing companies, Van Duren Contract Publications Ltd, already the nominal copyright holder of my books, was detached from the group; Peter Bander amicably severed his connection with Colin Smythe Ltd; and Van Duren then commenced acting almost solely for me. The directors are Peter Bander, Leslie Hayward, Colin Smythe, and myself. Leslie Hayward had moved with Peter from Colin Smythe Ltd.
Particularly when I was younger, and fresh from the cloistered years of boarding school, I needed advice and help, and an element of protection. Peter provided it. The world of press and television is no place for a boy of eighteen. It's hardly a secret that one's words can be twisted and filmed interviews distorted by cutting. I think I get on fine with most journalists and I'm wiser with experience. I feel I am capable of coping on my own perfectly well, on trips abroad and in studios and with press interviews.
Peter used to decline or accept, mostly decline, the many invitations from universities and institutions to take part in experiments. The decision was always mine, and it wasn't simply my being unwilling to go, it was that I didn't have time to fit them all in. However, Peter replied for me, thus taking the brunt of the accusations and demands that I should make myself more available. People often assume they have the right to work with me, that I should be bandied about like a freak whose personal wishes are immaterial.
Peter Bander is very well able to take care of this side of things. In his mid-forties, a qualified psychologist and graduate in theology, he hides beneath a flamboyant personality of considerable charm a tough, academic mind and a shrewd judgement.
It is from this secure and sound basis that I have worked in the way I preferred during the last three of four years.
Behind its facade of hedge-lined lanes, the village of Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire is not exactly a dozing dormitory. It has the distinction of retaining its own telephone exchange. It seemed on one occasion that the office telephone at Van Duren was being tapped. Colin asked the Post Office engineers to investigate the odd and discrepant noises. They turned the wiring inside out, inspected the instruments meticulously, and discovered nothing unusual.
The science editor of The Times rang up: 'Why is your telephone bugged? Don't you know why? You must know why ... somebody must know ..." How on earth did he know it was?
The same day the editor of New Scientist telephoned with a similar enquiry, and he later sent a complimentary copy of his magazine in which he had published an article describing the ease with which subscribers' telephones in a certain village in Buckinghamshire could be bugged.
After a while one learns to brush aside these ... coincidences - it doesn't do any good to dwell on them, though they may be tips of icebergs.
I think of myself as an ordinary citizen. But as a rule ordinary citizens are unaware of the security and intelligence network, not to mention the unofficial snoopers, operating in this country and elsewhere.
I first met Wing Commander Algy Llewellyn under impeccable circumstances. The night after I was interviewed on the Frost programme on 17 October, Peter and I were going to a rather select social gathering at Wimbledon. Because of the television show I was being besieged by reporters. With an hour to spare, Peter left his car in central London, at the multi-storey car park in Great Cumberland Place, and from there we took a taxi to his club. The car that had been following us from Gerrards Cross would, we thought, pursue the taxi, but it would be quite impossible for a reporter, in whatever disguise, to penetrate the East India and Public Schools Club.
We drank coffee in the smoking room, and it was here that a gentleman who seemed to know Peter fairly well approached us: this was Llewellyn. He had watched the Frost Interview and was genuinely fascinated; and entering into the spirit of things, he recommended that in order to elude the reporters we should slip out by the ladies' entrance; a nice touch of melodrama.
It was a chance meeting, and I promptly forgot him.
It so happened that Wing-Commander Llewellyn hadn't visited Peter's house in Gerrards Cross for several years, at which time Llewellyn was vetting the book Colin Smythe in due course published and fought a protracted libel action over, The Assassination of Winston Churchill by Carlos Thompson; it dealt with the Sikorski incident, and consequently some aspects of British Intelligence during the war.
On 29 December, Llewellyn telephoned Peter and asked if he could come that evening to Gerrards Cross. He implied there was some urgency. Peter was surprised.
When Llewellyn arrived, he at once expressed concern for my safety; he had, in fact, come about me. He had heard, among other reports of my current activities, about the Bender experiment in Germany, though it had not been publicized ...
I was at home in Cambridge. I was reading at around nine o'clock in the evening when suddenly I started to pick up a very powerful impression that someone was tampering with my car. It was vague; then my mind cleared, as it were, and I was seeing a sequence: the brake fluid being removed, the steering interfered with, nuts taken from the wheels. I had the same sense of oppression I'd had with the Harlequin. I rushed out to the garage and put on the light; there was nobody. I opened the bonnet, I looked under the car; all looked normal. I couldn't understand it.
Instead of feeling relieved that I had merely fallen victim to my own imagination, I sensed the impression growing stronger and stronger, taking hold: I would crash against a tree. I had lost control of my car, I was having an accident. A fatal accident, possibly. I returned to the car, to the parts being tampered with, again and then again.
The impression was confused, cloudy: it was a warning of danger like an alarm signal in the brain .... I couldn't think what to do. I telephoned Peter.
As soon as he lifted the receiver I said, 'Matthew,' as usual. Peter said, 'My God! Why did you ring now?' I thought this peculiar. I began to blurt it out. 'I've had the strange feeling somebody's been tampering with my car ...' 'Slow down,' he said, 'tell me step by step.' There seemed to be consternation at the other end. Peter had a person with him. I could distinctly catch a voice saying, 'Incredible!' and 'That proves it, doesn't it!', and someone muttering.
Wing-Commander Llewellyn had just been describing to Peter and Colin how, since I was now a security risk, my car might be interfered with, how I could be made to have an accident and how natural that accident would be made to look.
I had been 70 miles away, but I had picked up telepathically the words he spoke. His gloomy view was thus vindicated.
'Peter, your house,' he had said, 'is not far from Chequers. Matthew stays here frequently, doesn't he? If he can tune in to an event, or to conversation, or acquire knowledge of, say, documents, by psychic means, from a distance as he did at Freiburg, he is capable of tuning in to events, similarly, at a place where those events are unlikely to be so innocuous.'
Chequers is, of course, the country house owned by the nation and used by prime ministers in office; visiting world leaders may be entertained there, in informal seclusion; no doubt top level talks and highly important conferences take place there too.
I suppose his idea was not all that outlandish: the Americans and Russians are very much alive to the uses of extrasensory perception in intelligence work and in submarine communication, indeed ESP is the only way of communicating with a fully submerged vessel, whose radio is automatically out of action in this position.
Peter, without referring to his listener, told me to drive to Gerrards Cross the next day, which was inconvenient, to go no faster than fifty, to have the car checked before leaving and to take the utmost care. I was perplexed, but I knew Peter too well not to believe he was summoning me to Gerrards Cross for good reason, and I felt reassured.
Algy Llewellyn had been on the point of leaving the drawing room to go to the lavatory, and therefore when the phone rang both Peter and Llewellyn were in the hall; Peter was showing him where to go. The master telephone in the hall is very loud, and amplifies what is being said at the other end so that it can be heard by anyone standing nearby. Llewellyn was excited by my demonstration of mind-reading, Peter said.
But I had difficulty in remembering who Llewellyn was, because we had talked fairly unremarkably at Peter's club. Anyway, who was he to decide I was a security risk? Whom did he reckon would be interfering with my car, and for whose benefit might I put myself out of action?
'Wing-Commander Llewellyn,' said Peter, 'was in intelligence during the war, he was flight commander of top secret VIP flights to the Middle East for a start, and you may be quite sure people like that never shake off their security connections.'
I was sceptical.
If Chequers was a bit of a joke, my ability to affect metal and delicate instruments, and by inference, machinery, was not. It was obvious my powers were formidable, in the light of the results from Toronto. But, Llewellyn stressed, the Bender experiment could have very real repercussions. The Germans knew about it, didn't they? And the British knew, didn't they? And there was no knowing who else. If I was 'got at' it would probably be by that someone else ... eliminating me before I could be used against them.
'Matthew should not be so foolish as to travel to "certain countries", he should shun publicity, avoid becoming an instantly recognizable figure, and refrain from publishing his experiments, because they cause a security paranoia in some quarters.' It was no laughing matter. Matthew was an innocent party whose gifts might be abused, and he, Llewellyn, didn't visualize any government sitting back complacently. I think I was a species of espionage time-bomb, in his eyes.
In a slightly grandiose house, in leafy Gerrards Cross, lived a gentleman by the name of Mr John Steele.
Steele set up an acquaintance with Peter Bander through placing an order for a Christmas card at the printing subsidiary of Van Duren Publications. He had left it very late and it had to be done in a rush. The card featured a photograph of his wife's large hairy dog; inside were the customary greetings. Steele beamed at Peter on the doorstep and said, 'Please will you do my Christmas card, my wife's pregnant,' which was an engaging beginning.
Shortly afterwards, Peter was invited to a christening party. The Steeles' garden - it was an al fresco affair - appeared to be surrounded by Special Branch police, and there was no mistaking the Panda cars in the drive and the RAF guard dogs and their handlers patrolling.
John Steele became friendly. He arranged for Leslie Hay-ward to have a week's course in some special colour technique at Agfa-Gevaert, by courtesy of that firm. It transpired he was Agfa's technical director in the United Kingdom.
One day, Steele came to Peter, in the office, and asked if, for a favour, I would 'test' a pair of handcuffs. They were Clejuso handcuffs, made in Germany of very special metal, very light, and unbendable. There were only 19 pairs in this country.
I tried them on in the afternoon, but nothing happened and in a little while Peter unlocked them and freed me. I thought I would have them on again in the evening. I was watching television, and by ten o'clock they were causing discomfort. Colin reckoned that I'd 'tested' them enough.
Peter took the key and released the ratchet of the right cuff. As the bar wound out, it was, Peter realized with horror, bending, but my wrist was free. 'Stand under the light,' said Peter. He peered into the locking mechanism of the left cuff. Inside it, the bar had already bent. His key was useless. He straightaway telephoned John Steele.
Steele screeched to a halt by the downstairs window within fifteen minutes, in a dark limousine. He appeared to be convinced that Peter had concealed somewhere in his house the very heavy hydraulic apparatus capable of bending Clejuso metal, and that a trick had been perpetrated upon him. He later was to tell the German magazine Esotera that the machinery needed to produce such a bend could not be hidden in a house the size of Peter's and that if it had been it couldn't have been removed in fifteen minutes. Because Peter said a search warrant wasn't necessary and he could look anywhere he wished, Steele went with me into the dining room where he interrogated me. I was frightened. All I knew was that I had done as he had asked, I'd tested his handcuffs; he wanted me to try to bend them, and I'd bent them. The fact that he had chanced the 'impossible' was his problem, not mine.
After a time, Peter intervened. I've been told that by this time my hands were cold as ice while my forehead was covered in sweat.
Peter took a risk. He tightened the device, by two notches. With a wet tea towel protecting my wrist, he got a pair of mole grips onto the tiny end which now protruded through the lock and managed to force the bar back out another two notches, turning the key simultaneously, thus widening the circumference of the cuff. My hand is fairly slender, and Peter managed to drag the handcuff slowly over the cramped bones.
Steele departed, carrying the handcuffs, which he told us would be sent to the police forensic laboratories at Brunei University. He wanted me to undergo a series of tests - he didn't specify what or where, except that I would be hooked up to a lie detector.
Or so he said when he returned after the extensive tests at Brunei showed that the right cuff had bent approximately fifteen degrees, the left ten, with no change in the molecular structure. Clejuso is compounded of two metals; a base with a thin coating; it's this coating which breaks down after a deviation of only three degrees into multiple fracture. What had happened to Steele's handcuffs was inexplicable. There were special X-ray photos to prove that no physical force had been applied.
Steele seemed irritated with the laboratory findings, but he was in a buoyant mood when, having telephoned to ask if he could come, and undaunted by the presence of Herr Kirner and the head of the German Press Agency in London, Gert Ludemann, and the editor of Esotera, Gert Geisler, whom Peter had warned him were visiting us that day, he confronted me again with his queer mixture of hostility and charm. It was 1 June 1974, and I had not yet been to Toronto or to Freiburg.
He proceeded to give a lengthy interview to Esotera. He allowed himself to be photographed with me, with the handcuffs, and even let Gert Geisler have one of the X-rays. He placed no restrictions upon what Herr Geisler could print - and he was photographed with him too.
'The scientifically absolutely inexplicable,' Steele told Geisler, 'happened five weeks ago in this house!' The magazine didn't name him in the article they consequently published; he was referred to 'in view of the high position he holds' as Kriminalist S. In German, said Peter, this means not exactly a Criminologist but someone actively engaged in fighting crime and it's used when that someone has seniority and rank.
'Kriminalist S. admitted that he had been keeping a very close eye on Matthew Manning's developing psychokinetic abilities, pretty well from the time Matthew had appeared on the scene; and that he personally had interrogated Matthew, and had instigated the forensic tests at the laboratories.'
Geisler went on,' ... and after all that, he told me, "The tests carried out on the material show, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the handcuffs were not bent in a way, mechanical or otherwise, which we could possibly explain. I'd say, in fact, that they couldn't be bent, and certainly not like this, completely distorted, yet it happened!" I asked him if he accepted this now as evidence of the existence of psychokinetic powers; he declined to answer positively; all he was prepared to say officially was, "I only know we are unable to explain in scientific terms what happened, more I cannot tell you at the moment".'
'If a bend in the locking device had been made with the hydraulic pressure which that requires, the boy's arm,' Steele said dramatically to his interviewer, 'would have been reduced to pulp. If it had been done beforehand, the lock couldn't have worked, and anyway, molecular damage would have been inevitable.'
Some time later, I believe that John Steele and his wife left Gerrards Cross. However it wasn't the last we heard of him. In the wake of the Frost Interview he was inspired to ring up Leslie, would we like to use the Clejuso handcuffs story in the follow-up David Frost was planning? He, Steele, might testify to the truth of it. Before committing himself he must get clearance; he'd phone back in an hour or two. He seemed to be regarding us with utter goodwill. When phoned back, the clearance, he said sadly, was not forthcoming.
There wasn't anything obscure about the letter Lady Rothschild wrote to my father, dated 30 September 1974.
Dear Mr Manning,
I hope you will not mind my writing to you, but David Briggs, of the Choir School, said he thought it would be all right. It is about your son, Matthew.
My husband, who was a biologist, has always wanted an opportunity to study the kind of phenomena that your son produces. Do you think he would be interested in cooperating, or has he already committed himself to some other research worker?
My husband is about to retire from his Government job in London and will be in Cambridge next weekend before going to America for a week or two. He would be most grateful if there could be a chance of having a chat with Matthew, but did not wish to suggest this unless you agreed. If you did, and Matthew were interested, perhaps he could ring up and suggest a time to come here for a talk.
Yours sincerely, Teresa Rothschild
Lord Rothschild was head of the Think Tank, the crack troops of consultative policy-making: this was the government job he was about to retire from.
My father handed over the letter to Peter Bander, who replied on 12 October: '... I want to assure Lord Rothschild that I am delighted with the suggestions you made in your letter.' But, Peter thought, they should 'arrange a mutually convenient meeting' to discuss in general terms the particular field of investigation Rothschild wanted to pursue.
As the Rothschilds lived no more than twelve miles from my home, I dropped in the recently published preliminary report from Professor Owen in Toronto, my book, and Peter's letter.
Lady Rothschild wrote by hand on 31 October:
Dear Matthew,
My husband would be very interested to have a chance of an 'off-the-record' talk with you when you are back from your filming. Would it be possible for you to telephone here & fix a convenient time? From his point of view, I'm afraid it would have to be a week-end.
Many thanks for bringing the book & papers which we found most interesting.
With best wishes Yours sincerely, Teresa Rothschild
When I telephoned and spoke to Lady Rothschild, the time and date was arranged. Saturday 23 November at six o'clock.
I duly arrived and was shown directly into Lord Rothschild's study. The interview lasted 45 minutes.
It seemed to me obvious that the unfortunate Lord Rothschild was, far from wishing to do research, briefed to ask specific questions, to extract information from me - whatever there might be to uncover, he had to lift the lid: he set about his task like a man doomed to cut the crust of a blackbird pie. He looked uncomfortable and embarrassed. First, he was occupied with my movements: where had I been, with whom had I worked, in what countries would I be taking part in experiments in the future? Then he wanted to know if I could psychically affect things at a distance. Could I make objects move at a distance? If so, what distance? And did my power diminish with increasing distances? Did I think I could interfere with radar, and at what range? Did I think telepathy was really feasible or reliable, and could it be applied at will? How many people did I guess there might be in Britain capable of emulating me?
I mentioned that I was shortly due to go to Germany. But as to the experiments, I said, I didn't know what Professor Bender had in mind. I could only tell him what happened in Toronto.
The 'off-the-record talk' was then concluded. Neither of the Rothschilds got in touch with me again.
A newspaper picked up an item on the possibility of Lord Rothschild and Professor Josephson collaborating for a series of experiments with me. Rothschild was asked if there was any truth in this. No, he answered, he had never invited Matthew Manning to participate in experiments - quite right, he hadn't; nor had he the intention of doing so, I expect.
Shadows in the dark loom up - one can't see properly, one feels uncertain, one thinks: I'm exaggerating - and they shrink.
I kept encountering little oddities which neither loomed nor shrank, but were simply there.
The Belgian magazine De Post published an article mainly to do with the Kirlian photographs made by Ted van der Veer, the managing director of Aura Electronics in Holland, and my inroads on his equipment's proper functioning. Mr van der Veer, interviewed by the journalist, suddenly says: '... for this meeting' - that is, with me - 'I was accompanied by Mr Michiel Crom, a senior civil servant from a Netherlands Ministry.' As a passing reference, it was superficial, yet not insignificant. Why was a senior civil servant of the Dutch Government so interested in Matthew Manning?
I was receiving letters, at this time, from a man who signed himself Marcel Bloemendal, from an address in Leiden. He wrote two letters, to begin with, via Peter ... 'Did you let read my letter already by Matthew Manning?'
Dear Mr Bander, some weeks ago, I wrote you a letter, with the request, if you wanted to ask to Matthew Manning, if he wants to trace for me clairvoyantly, if Mr Manning does see the same thing as Mr Roesink my Dutch clairvoyant the 21 of June of this year, containing that I had fallen victim of a parapsychological spying-plot of the C.I.A. in the framework of which had been killed, 3 persons, namely one in England one in the South of France and one in Holland, according to the visions of Mr Roe-sink ...
Colin Smythe replied: 'I'm afraid that Matthew Manning is not prepared to do the sort of thing you want him to do: I should have thought that one of the well-known Dutch mediums we read about so much over here would be of much greater help to you than Matthew could be.'
Letters continued to come, asking me for help. He sent them by registered post, and twice he enclosed a photo of himself. We assumed that Bloemendal was just another crank. Eventually he became such a nuisance that Colin Smythe dispatched a letter back to the Chief of Police in Amsterdam, with the observation that Matthew Manning and his publishers had better things to do than look after the welfare of Dutch citizens.
Bloemendal went out of my head, until I was in Holland myself, when he cropped up again. The Dutch scientists asked very late at night if I would try a psychometry experiment, which was utterly different from the work I'd been doing with them hitherto. Peter inquired further. An envelope was waved in front of him. It contained, they said, documentary material connected with a person they would like to learn more about.
Quite willingly, they showed Peter the contents. The envelope and whatever was inside were to be placed in another envelope, sealed, and then given to me to hold, in the laboratory: I was to speak of the impressions I gained thereby. In the first envelope was one of the letters from Bloemendal, and a photograph similar, Peter could have sworn, to the one Colin had returned with a letter six months previously. On my behalf Peter refused my being embroiled in any such experiment.
There was a constant trickle of visitors, all through 1975, to the Van Duren offices. They appeared unannounced, bringing gadgets and instruments, hoping for a word with me, for a demonstration, for a bit of excitement. They usually went away disappointed, or with their gadgets broken, or both. Most
were harmless; some bona fide, if impetuous academics; others parapsychology buffs. In August, Jules Schoolenaar, a director of Gottmer, the Dutch publishers of The Link, and his son Lex were in England for a holiday. On their last day, Mr Schoolenaar said he had reason to believe the CIA and, perhaps, a Marxist element might be rather too alert to my existence and abilities. He was worried about 'interference'. He didn't elaborate, but simply gave us a list of four names; if contacted by any of the four, and he thought it likely we would be, we mustn't have a thing to do with them. They lived in Holland, he understood, and, without assuming it to be a fact, believed they were actively employed there by the Central Intelligence Agency. He was giving his advice as a friend.
Mr Schoolenaar and Lex left Heathrow at 4pm for Amsterdam. The plane could not have crossed the
Channel before the telephone rang. Leslie answered. It was a person-to-person call for Peter Bander.
'Who is calling?' asked Leslie.
After a pause the operator gave a name, which was the first name on Schoolenaar's list.
Leslie told the operator, 'Mr Bander isn't here.'
The man agreed to speak to Leslie. He said he wanted to meet me in London the following day. He
knew Peter Bander and I were not long back from the States.
Leslie said I was not in Gerrards Cross, or London, and that neither I nor Peter could meet him.
'One question,' said the man; 'can you tell me if Matthew Manning was approached by a Mr Marcel
Bloemendal in San Francisco or Los Angeles?'
Leslie made some non-commital reply.
Next day the man rang again. I was in the office and very nearly answered.
He said he was at Heathrow on his way to the States, but he had a few hours to spare; could he take a
taxi and come to Gerrards Cross?
'You'd be wasting your money and your time,' said Leslie. He again pretended neither I nor Peter was
there.
'Is Matthew Manning working with the Amsterdam police?' asked the man.
'No,' said Leslie. 'Try the Salvation Army missing persons bureau with a quid.'
The man didn't lose his temper. He repeated that he was hoping to trace a missing person with the help
of 'a good psychic'. He pressed a forwarding address in Florida upon Leslie, in case we changed our
minds and 'cooperated'.
To be fair to the Dutch, their police do have a tradition of enlisting the help of clairvoyants.
On another occasion two men came to the office and asked if they could borrow a Kirlian machine. Peter let them have a broken one. They wanted to examine it to detect the fault they were sure caused the machine to collapse; thus they would expose the fraudulent explanation which attributed it to Matthew Manning's psychokinetic power.
In a couple of days they brought it back in tiny pieces. They had taken it apart with such a vengeance they hadn't known how to put it together.
It is surely very natural to start thinking and speaking about the personae who seem to express themselves through my automatic writing as if they had entity and identity. When a series of messages appears, signed by one name, when that name 'communicates' often and with recognizable character, in handwriting peculiar only to itself, then the individual becomes quite seductively real, a bit like the characters a novelist might live with while writing a book, or the invented companions of an imaginative child. But I can't believe, until it is proved to me otherwise, that the Thomas Penn who signs the medical diagnoses I make through automatic writing, a high percentage of which are correct, on nothing more than a birthdate, is a spirit communicator; I think he is a creation of my subconscious mind.
In Toronto a group of psychic researchers from the New Horizons organization have invented someone they called Philip. They persevered for two years, attempting to communicate with this 'spirit', but without luck. Gradually acquiring psychic abilities, the group now produces all kinds of phenomena in their sessions with 'Philip' - from table-rapping to poltergeist manifestations such as the time a table pursued a visiting journalist round the room and pinned him to a wall. No single member is indispensable. No one had previous psychic experience worthy of attention. Philip was never a human being, dead or alive.
To speak of spirits communicating is to use a terminology which smacks of seances and quack mediums and which might well be calculated to make any rational person reject out of hand the very idea, even, of survival.
Between the autumn of 1974 and the spring of 1976, I received in automatic writing some messages which seem, to the fair-minded, miracle-minded and sceptical, to present evidence for a form of survival after death.
I was trying to do automatic drawing for the television people in Munich: suddenly my hand moved right across the page and incoherent words asked in a childish handwriting for help. I tore off the sheet, crumpled it, and dropped it in the waste bin. I began again the drawing which had been interrupted. It was unfortunate that I was working under what were clearly vexatious conditions; I thought the strain was too much for my unconscious brain to cope with.
When the same thing happened the next morning: an urgent interruption from someone who signed himself Graham, it was really embarrassing. My onlookers from TeleContact assumed that I was manufacturing an excuse for not being able to produce automatic drawing, and that I was pretending to be psychically interfered with. I retreated to my hotel, feeling confused. Graham was semi-literate. He wrote in a strange jumble of transposed and inverted letters, with much mis-spelling.
Peter made a sensible, constructive suggestion: I should give Graham the chance he obviously needed to come through. I went alone to my room and concentrated, sitting at my paper with a pen in my hand. In less than a minute I had more writing. I usually write a great deal faster in automatic writing than I would in my ordinary handwriting, but this was most laborious. Quite pathetic.
The message included four names, one of which, for Peter, had some meaning. In order to protect the anonymity of all those concerned, and to save Graham's relations and friends any distress, I shall substitute fictitious names in his story.
If one name was known to Peter, the message in other respects was incomprehensible. 'I want Christopher,' the quaint script said, 'I don't want James.' No doubt there are umpteen Christophers in the world; the only Christopher with whom Peter was acquainted was a close friend of his, Monsignor Christopher Dell. But Monsignor Dell's second Christian name was James, Christopher James Dell: how, wondered Peter, could this Graham want Christopher and not James, since they were one and the same person?
The two other names, I believe, because I no longer have a copy of the message, were Donald and Catherine. We couldn't ignore or fail to interpret Graham's urgency and anguish. Peter telephoned Monsignor Dell from Munich. The call, incidentally, must have been listened in to, presumably within the hotel, as information reached a German newspaper by morning and was made to seem a minor sensation, though Peter spoke so guardedly and Monsignor Dell likewise, that the actual gist of the conversation eluded the snooper.
'Do you know someone called Graham?' Peter inquired. 'And could a Catherine and a Donald be connected with this Graham? Matthew has been getting automatic writings ...'
Monsignor Dell answered yes to everything. He was extremely anxious to see me the instant we arrived back in England.
There were two further messages, while I was still in Germany, five in all now. One was long and difficult to decipher, but about a page and a half of it contained several apparently concrete statements with the four names confusedly recurring. It was as if the extreme anxiety and emotion had affected the script, which was worse than ever.
Monsignor Dell, who is the kindest, most warm-hearted and generous man, was excited by these automatic writings when I came to visit him, and no less by their implications.
The Graham he knew had died eight weeks beforehand of cancer, aged 28, and was quickly confirmed as the personality behind the writings. Various indisputable facts were associated with his life and death.
Graham's closest friend, whom I shall call Donald, had been working as some kind of assistant to Monsignor Dell, and during the last few years Graham had spent a considerable amount of his time there, visiting and staying.
When Graham was dying, he cried out for Monsignor Dell; but the Monsignor was abroad and couldn't reach him. 'I want Christopher,' said Graham, repeatedly, 'I want Christopher.'
Instead another priest, who lived in the same house as the Monsignor, a Father James Higgins, was sent for. It so happened, and I think one may make the observation without prejudice because it was neither justified or anything more than an irrational whim, that Graham had taken an enormous dislike to Father Higgins. Two hours after Graham died, Father Higgins stood beside his bed. 'I want Christopher, I don't want James,' the message I received from Graham said with emphatic simplicity.
Graham had, some months before his death, come to a social function, stayed the night and naturally gone with everyone else on that Sunday morning to the chapel. He was not a Catholic. He longed to take communion.
It seemed to Graham that Monsignor Dell, whom he knew to be enlightened and compassionate, would allow this to happen.
Graham afterwards had the impression, which grew to be obsessive, that a nun who was serving at the altar, Sister Catherine, had somehow influenced the Monsignor to deny the mortally ill young man the sacrament, because Graham in fact was excluded.
Graham's impression may not have been rational. He wanted to become a Roman Catholic. He had wanted this for a very long time. He was thwarted, he believed, by two particular people; Father Higgins and Sister Catherine; so the circumstances of the Sunday mass, when he knelt in the chapel yet was not called, added to the animosity he was feeling. He must anyway have been in an emotional frame of mind. He blamed Father Higgins and Sister Catherine for his spiritual disappointment.
In the messages received by me in automatic writing, Graham was torn between anger and contrition.
Monsignor Dell and I were alone in a room at Peter's residence for two hours, and willingly I agreed to try to get more writing from Graham; I covered three full pages. Monsignor Dell kept these as he kept most of the Graham messages. I have no idea what the three pages revealed. I never have conscious awareness of what is automatically written: I have to read it through to find out.
I was always very much in the dark about Graham. It was thought by those concerned, Monsignor Dell and Peter Bander, that I should not be party to any information which might subvert my unconscious or affect the authenticity of the messages, and therefore I should know as little as possible. It is only now, more than two and a half years later, that I am able to piece together the background. Although I have continued to receive communications from Graham, they are infrequent. He seems infinitely less anguished, almost content; peaceful.
It would be unrealistic to deny that when Graham died he was extremely unhappy, and to those with him his desire to articulate and convey something urgent was painfully evident.
But then it seems that Graham heard conversation and was aware of events occurring in his presence up to three hours after he was pronounced to be clinically dead.
Certain psychics and mystics have claimed in the past, and claim still to have the gift of seeing the spirit depart from the body. The spirit may be described variously as the aura, bioplasma, or wraith, according to historical date, country of origin and fashion. It's a phenomenon which has been recounted in metaphorical terms since biblical times. A white silvery shape or cloud emerges from the soft part, that which was soft in infancy, of the skull, and hovers overhead connected by a thin thread: when this snaps, finally, the spirit is gone, the body is a corpse. In other words, death may not occur quite at the moment we assume it to. Lyall Watson in his book The Romeo Error makes a lucid argument for this supposition, based on scientific evidence which weighs in heavily behind a theory that may not be cranky at all.
However one regards speculative jumps in science before the merely theoretical becomes accepted and established, it is a bit devastating to believe, as I think one must, that some essence of Graham's consciousness was alive after his death. If there had been no more messages, 'I want Christopher, I don't want James' could be explained away as emanating from a wish conceived and expressed before his dying; and it was sheer coincidence that Father Higgins did appear in person.
Yet I had never met Graham, I didn't know he existed; I didn't know he was ill, or had died; I'd never heard of Father Higgins and Sister Catherine, and I had absolutely no intimation of Graham's own personal grief.
The handwriting itself was a puzzle, and Monsignor Dell undertook the delicate task of approaching Graham's family. At this stage he was unwilling to commit himself to making any kind of assumption or judgement, and he didn't tell Peter explicitly where the enquiries would lead him. He had first searched for a specimen of Graham's handwriting, but found just a postcard from Spain, written by somebody else and signed: Graham. The signature looked uncannily similar to the signature obtained in automatic writing, but it was inadequate; six letters including a duplication of a. And there was the clumsy forming of words, the weird ineptness, the childishness. The Munich trip had been tiring: could this have caused a physical distortion in my automatic writing?
The mind boggles at the potentially embarrassing conversation Monsignor Dell could have been in for with Graham's mother and family. He had to explain about me and about my automatic writing, and though it's a relatively common phenomenon it's not a thing people in general are familiar with, even if they recall poor Mrs W.B. Yeats toiling at it night after night to entertain her husband. He would have had the difficult business of indicating that some discarnate personality, easily identified as Graham, had, it seemed, survived his death, and was communicating through me.
Most Westerners are intensely disturbed at the mere suggestion of an existence after death: devout Christians, in particular, react with an emotion akin to revulsion in spite of giving lip service to it in their religious beliefs. It may not be the 'life' they had in mind.
Graham's mother responded with thankfulness. The writing, she said, was Graham's; that was how he had always written; in adulthood he had gone to great lengths getting others to write for him, as with the postcard from Spain, in an effort to conceal a disability: he was dyslexic. When the writing was compared with some of Graham's old school-books, the mistakes and unformed characters were identical, said Monsignor Dell, to those in the automatic writings.
These schoolbooks cannot be submitted to a graphologist for forensic examination. I accept this. I have given my word not to abuse the confidence, nor the privacy, of Graham's family.
Meanwhile, Peter Bander and I returned to Germany for the series of experiments with Professor Bender. And again on occasions when I was attempting to do automatic writing, there were messages from Graham. In the interview he gave to the German magazine Esotera Professor Bender observes that the automatic writing was done in full view of the television cameras.
Christopher Christopher absolve me prayers and the flowrs fo Graham. I want forgiveness for my lack of lat James and Catherine come for me. Did you find my money in the Bank It doesnt matter now I dont need it †
The word lat is uninterpretable, I think. It might be tact. The sign of the cross accompanies most messages from Graham.
Professor Bender noted the 'astonishing orthographic mistakes' and attributed the 'released motivation' to Peter's friendship with Monsignor Dell, for, in his view, the automatic writing stemmed from my subconscious alone.
'Did you find my money in the Bank': did Graham listen to talk about money, a house, and several other material possessions of his by people who discussed this over his corpse three hours after his death?
The early messages had been exclusively concerned with his wish for Christopher to come, and his distress at the presence at his deathbed of those for whom he was able to feel no sympathy or liking, and whom he sensed disliked him. The tone of his communication was as direct and uncomplicated as a child's. And do the dying not enter that state of child-like innocence, in senility it is second childhood, even if they are young as was Graham?
On Friday, 2 May 1975, I was in Amsterdam. The day had been set aside by the Dutch publishers for interviews with science correspondents, at the Marriott Hotel where we were staying. There was one journalist whom I liked particularly, Lode Willems of Knack magazine, a Flemish and Dutch weekly published in Belgium. He did not ask run-of-the-mill questions as other journalists tend to ask, and we went into detail over the work I was doing. I demonstrated automatic writing for him, at which point some more journalists gathered round. I did a Thomas Penn, then there was a message from Graham.
We subsequently collected signed statements from two witnesses beside Lode Willems and Jules Schoolenaar, my publisher, as to the precise time of this event. Jules Schoolenaar and Peter made it an hour earlier than Lode Willems; a curiosity which is probably accounted for by Willems having arrived at 10 am for an 11 am appointment.
'Blanket out your mind and let anybody come through,' Willems had suggested, and it was on his pad that I tried. He kept the sheet of paper as, he said, a memento. To Lode Willems, Graham was just a name. I copied the message. Graham was writing about something and someone new.
This is Graham plese tell Mother Ruth to not worry over that money of mine. Ruth all my love Graham †
Mother Ruth, who was Mother Ruth? Peter was mystified. The next day we returned to London. Monsignor Dell had telephoned Gerrards Cross and left a request that we should phone him back if there had been 'anything of interest'; he hoped the trip to Holland was successful. Peter rang him up and the Graham message, read to him on the phone, made Monsignor Dell ask that I should drive to his home straight away, and bring the original with me. I didn't have it, Lode Willems had kept it as a memento ... and to the Monsignor's way of thinking a journalist was clutching something rather private.
On that same day in May, when I was with the journalists at the Marriott Hotel, Monsignor Dell had been visited unexpectedly by a friend of his whom Graham called Mother Ruth. It was Graham's birthday, could a mass be said for him?
At eleven o'clock I was doing automatic writing in Amsterdam and a mass was being said in Graham's memory in England; I received at that moment a message from Graham, sending Mother Ruth his love.
Graham had not known her for long, but latterly he had spent holidays and periods of convalescence at her house; she would persuade him to rest or swallow his medicine, saying, 'Now you listen to Mother.' They were very much attached to each other.
Graham's preoccupation with his money and the proper bestowal of his material possessions slowly diminished in the continuing messages. By now, his close friend Donald was working for a Colonel Anderson in London. Donald lived with the Colonel, who also had connections with Graham's family Donald had often been mentioned in the messages; he was with Graham as he died, and Graham was concerned, always, for Donald, but now in the summer of 1975 Graham seemed aware that circumstances had changed for Donald. It was as if he were watching over Donald. One evening, at Monsignor Dell's residence, I tried to get automatic writing from Graham. Donald was there.
This is Graham, tell Donald to go to the New Forest again. He knows why. I've seen him ther in the Church. I see his flowrs there for me.
More followed, but it would be unfair on the people concerned to print it; Graham is endearingly uncomplimentary sometimes - he loves and he loathes; automatic writing is no respecter of feelings and persons.
Donald had made the journey to a country churchyard in Hampshire, where Graham's grave was, taking flowers. Flowers had a special significance for Graham, obviously.
Donald began to cry. One cannot underestimate the terrific emotional charge these messages contained for Graham's friends and relations. Graham was communicating; Donald could not help but cry.
Somebody else who was present that evening had a tape recorder running. The tape was played back. We could hear Monsignor Dell picking up the fresh sheet which I had just finished, and the realization of what Graham had said striking Donald. Donald cried. Then a voice on the tape, not an easy voice to distinguish, seemed to be saying, 'Weep no more' We played it back again and again, and after twelve or thirteen repetitions it vanished. Peter heard it, the owner of the tape recorder heard it, Donald heard it, I heard it; the only one who didn't hear it was Monsignor Dell.
In any discussion of the paranormal, and faced with a sustained psychic manifestation like that of Graham, when our empirical knowledge is, it seems, threatened by the inexplicable, by a void in the everyday life we call reality, it invariably happens that the actual achievement, no matter what, becomes entangled - and thereby somehow undermined - in the attempted explanation. The result, or achievement, is a fact: the explanation is not, it's distinctly nebulous, and should not be allowed to lessen that fact.
It may sound simple to say that people don't agree and in disagreeing reinforce a closed, dogmatic part of their minds, but an open mind is Utopia; we are in a territory where subjective response and experience cannot fail to affect our objectivity and attitudes; we may even feel deceived by the evidence of our eyes. It is as if the conscious mind scrambles to block off that void, that black hole of unknowing. I think scientists and laymen alike are instinctively selective; facts are absorbed, opinions formed, the explanation is stretched and distorted like a sock to fit notions of reality and consciousness. If the human brain did not screen out millions of unneeded and unwanted impressions, sensory and neurological, as well as the paranormally received, we should in all probability go mad.
To argue against a theory of survival in Graham's case would be to suggest that I was able to pick up, telepathically, emotions and information of astonishing complexity, from a set of characters of whose existence I was, to begin with, unaware. I would then have had to reconstruct this information, recreating Graham out of the fragments of second-hand memory.
Graham died several weeks before the first automatic writing appeared. Monsignor Dell was an extremely tenuous link, by no means the powerful catalyst Professor Bender almost certainly was in my tuning in to his daughter.
If I had managed to acquire even subconsciously that much information about Graham, how did I reproduce his handwriting when, from the chagrin it caused him, he concealed his dyslexia and Monsignor Dell knew nothing of it. It's feasible, I suppose, with a degree of imagination, to accept the premise that if I am able to produce automatic drawings faithful to sketches, paintings, drawings, and etchings I have never seen, by some kind of psychokinetic scanning I could have received Graham's handwriting in this same manner. It seems rather far-fetched.
And no less amazing is how was I 'found', in Munich: my acquaintance with Monsignor Dell then becomes too odd a coincidence, though presumably there aren't so many psychics around. One could persist in dismissing everything as coincidence, but I am not prepared to.
Donald, at the time of his visit to the churchyard in Hampshire, now expected automatic writings; he had been emotionally provoked and stimulated by them: did he unconsciously send me a telepathic signal, leaving me no unconscious alternative but to come up with the feedback about flowers and the grave?
The simplest explanation is the most difficult, maybe, to swallow, especially to anyone prejudiced against the idea of survival. Graham did 'hear' the conversation in his room two or three hours after he died; he was worried about his money in the bank, and about a house; he did 'see' Mother Ruth ask for a mass to be said on his birthday, and was grateful and loving; he saw Donald at the churchyard, and the flowers; he was anxious on Donald's behalf, for his future and his health; he has been sharing the innermost thoughts of those people he once cherished and, remarkably, of those for whom his feelings were less warm; he wished at one time urgently to communicate, and communicate he did, through the only means available, someone who could and would relay his messages: me. It's a conundrum.
Or ... I might suggest that on the evidence of the psychokinetic energy already observed to be a force of considerable magnitude, a PSI energy acts as a kind of beam which I transmit but do not have full control over. This might explain, for example, the randomness of automatic drawings; I pick up a Durer, a Leonardo da Vinci, a Picasso, from here, from there, from an unpublished source, an obscure vault of a museum, but why? Has the beam alighted on a Goya etching because I am not psychically directing it, as I would if using psychokinesis to affect a compass needle? My ability to transmit in telepathy experiments is far greater than my ability to receive: could that be the tiny clue?
Or, perhaps, Graham did not survive his bodily death, but the resonance of his dying, the anguish and longing, the passion was so strong, so vital, at the time, that I was tuned to it like a moth in the blaze of a lamp. I have been subconsciously perpetuating it, constructing a wealth of accurate detail around it acquired through a complicated mixture of telepathy and clairvoyance, guesswork and very sophisticated perception.
It is not, therefore, that spirits surviving death communicate through psychics and others - one does not have to be psychic to see a ghost, necessarily - in what we think of as the present, but rather that we are reaching back to an essence of their historical existence, whether it be eight years or eight hundred, or eight weeks.
If I believe in survival, Graham makes me believe. It may one day be scientifically acknowledged that the human spirit, whatever remains of the human personality, survives discarnate, but equipped to communicate with the still mortal in the ordinary, humdrum, and reasoning fashion we as yet find unacceptable if not reserved solely for ourselves.
What I'm saying is that many people would reject the authenticity of Graham's messages purely because they expect 'spirits' not to think and feel and speak as we do, reacting to events occurring in our reality, with the same kind of continuing consciousness.
'Oh, it's only the subconscious ...' How often that's said; only the subconscious. Professor Bender and others attribute the phenomenon of automatic writing and drawing to the subconscious; I may not entirely agree; but he is not being dismissive, as so many who say that are. The human mind is an amazing organ, and the way it works, the interaction of the conscious and unconscious through memory, for example, ought to be fascinating. Memory seems to run from one to the other like a little kid between two gangs. Memory hasn't yet been located in the brain; we know what parts deal with sight, hearing, motory functions, and so on, but not memory; recent research has shown that it may to some degree be cellular in origin, not totally cerebral. Oddly enough, non-scientists, ordinary people, have a minimum of respect for the workings of their own brains, for the computer-like abilities still no more than hinted at. The scientists in Toronto estimated we use 15 per cent of our brains, or rather, you do; I might use, they said, 17 per cent or 18 per cent of mine.
I don't deny for a moment that my subconscious is involved in automatic writing and drawing. But the question is: from where, directly or indirectly, does it acquire its information? The unconscious mind's ability to reproduce the work of artists it had 'seen' by the normal faculty, and had memorized, would alone be pretty startling. I have no doubt, though, that I have made automatic drawings of artists' work I have not seen, and drawings incorporating methods and idiosyncrasies of certain artists, of which, I think, I couldn't possibly have known.
My automatic drawings vary in quality. I have no artistic ability in my conscious self, nor have I ever, even as a child, appeared to have been able to draw and paint with the least competence. I have to state this to allay the suspicion that I'm perpetrating a clever fraud. My parents, teachers and friends have all had to testify to it: I'm hopelessly bad at drawing.
The art historian, Professor Malcolm Easton, of the University of Hull, was consulted early on by Colin Smythe over the Aubrey Beardsley drawings I'd done, two of which were to be illustrations in The Link. Malcolm Easton is an authority on Beardsley, having written a definitive book on him: commenting on one of the two black and white ink drawings, he wrote:
I think this is remarkable in that (as far as I know) it doesn't imitate any particular Beardsley drawing. If you want the nearest things, then the dwarf with the cloven hoof may have been suggested by The Scarlet Pastorale (Reade, 1967, 384). The dwarf's costume has a vague likeness to that of the creature in the bookplate for Pollitt (471). The peacock, however, is very close to the bird in a Morte d'Arthur chapter heading (126). The woman is a wonderful mixture of almost everything from a Messalina to a ...? Where your young man departs from Beardsley - as in the flying bird - he is quite uninspired: otherwise, it's a very extraordinary pastiche.
In July 1976, Professor Easton wrote to us again. A collection of drawings thought to be forgeries of Beardsley had been unearthed, and my automatic drawings had come forcibly to his mind. It may be that they reproduced these forgeries.
When, in the autumn of 1974, I was doing the David Frost show on television, I had no idea that Colin had consulted Professor Easton, or indeed that he and Peter Bander had - been in touch with any art expert. David Frost asked me beforehand if an expert had examined the automatic drawings: I said, in good faith, no. It resulted in Frost assembling his own, which turned out to be splendid for me.
On the programme, after my former headmaster at Oakham, Mr Buchanan, had related how I was a boy who, though perhaps artistic, lacked the ability to draw and paint, a director of Sotheby's stepped onto the stage.
The programme was being recorded in front of a large audience at the Collegiate Theatre. Half an hour before we started, David Frost took him to look at the automatic drawings, which were arranged behind a curtain.
He told Frost that he felt no one could have copied the style of so many artists; he didn't wish to be asked if he would accept any of the drawings as genuine; he selected two Picassos which he believed might pass in 'different circumstances', one in black ink, one in colour.
During the programme, he repeated his bewilderment: 'I would have thought they were done by someone with great skill. They are very clever.' It was saying something and nothing; but I guess he was being cautious.
The most striking, aesthetically successful and accomplished of my automatic drawings are those, it seems reasonable to claim, which contain a lot of precise detail; the Durers, portrait sketches in particular; the so far anonymous drawings in colour of birds; things for which naturalistic accuracy is vital. I use ink, pencil, coloured felt pens, whatever is to hand, but I don't paint in oils. If the medium used by the original artist was different, if I am making a drawing derived from what, somewhere, is actually an etching, the drawing may not be as satisfactory as one for which my hand has automatically identified the correct, and necessarily available, medium: this can be obvious before the original has been located, if it's located at all.
Publication of The Link, with its many illustrations, drew attention to my automatic drawings, eliciting a response both personal and public.
Pans Match printed an article with a sensational statement by the Belgian art expert Dr Lambert Jageneau. The head of a woman, reproduced in The Link above the caption Henri Matisse?, was, in his opinion, definitely from a Matisse - it was Matisse - though he was fairly certain he had never laid eyes upon it. Matisse, said Jageneau, had confided to his dealer that he was incorporating a number of codes in his work, to prevent fakes appearing as authentic after his death. Dr Jageneau pointed out that in the mouth of my female head - lying sideways, at the right-hand side of the lips, was the letter M: and indeed, once one has been shown it, it's quite easy to see there.
Dr Jageneau was also interested by a chalk drawing of a sitting monkey, sadly pensive, clutching with a hand the chain attached to its collar. Jageneau had the tiny initials near the bottom right-hand corner magnified; he deduced that it was from the work of Lucas Cranach.
Colin Smythe received a letter from Mr Robert Needham FRSA, of Wilmslow in Cheshire: The size of the original is 406 X 300 mm & was done in black, brown, red & yellow chalk by Roelant Savery, born Courtrai 1576 & died (having lost his reason) at Utrecht in 1639 - he was a painter & etcher. Up to 1939 the picture was in Rijksprentenkabinet, in Amsterdam. He was one of the first to favour the type of picture known as an 'animal piece'. It is a symbolic picture of poor Savery.
Peter Bander replied, thanking Mr Needham for writing about the Monkey Seated of Savery, and quoting Jageneau's opinion.
The original ... is signed in the bottom left corner & one can make out the R.S. for Roelant Savery. I am sorry about contradicting the good Doctor Jageneau. Mind, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) occupied himself with a great deal of animal painting & drawing - he was the court painter at Wittenberg & often accompanied the hunts for realistic effects. I would be interested to know if poor Savery's chalk drawing survived the last war.
If Savery's drawing had survived the war ...? In May 1975, when I was in Amsterdam myself, I was invited to the Rijksprentenkabinet, the print room of the Rijks Museum, where the Savery drawing was brought out; and I stared at the little monkey.
My automatic drawing was not, under careful scrutiny, faithful to the original in every single respect: the perspectives of the ground line are such that in my drawing it looks lower, though by comparing where it passes behind the body of the monkey, one realizes it is only marginally so; the links of the chain in my drawing are rounder and made more distinct; there are some insignificant divergences in the fur. And what, I had to ask myself, were the initials of Lucas Cranach doing, in the right of my drawing; why were the initials of Roelant Savery missing from the extreme left-hand bottom corner?
Curiously, this was an automatic drawing in chalk - black, brown, red, yellow, corresponding to the Savery; I had never used chalk before, and haven't since.
Twice, in automatic drawing, I have become so depressed by the subject matter that, as I described in The Link, I couldn't go on, and in spite of trying several times to finish, slowed to a stop, assuming, too, that the compulsion to draw had left me.
A hideously mutilated, naked man gazed back over his shoulder; his mouth was agape with small spiky teeth; his hair was on end; and a long arrow transfixed his body to a gaunt, leafless tree. An owl, wings outstretched and with unnaturally huge ears, perched on the man's shoulder; dangling by the tail from its beak was a dead mouse. The owl's wings were more like a butterfly's; heavy, but kind of double. It had round eyes.
It was a nightmare scene; an ass sat prominently to one side; a minute figure had been hanged in the distance; in a pool of water two toothy heads indicated that two men were drowning.
The man's arm was chopped off close to the shoulder. The stump dripped blood yet resembled wood with a central artery of pith; the blood might then have been sawdust; it mingled with the blood from the wound in his back.
It was signed very neatly by Goya, with these lines of French: Le renard preche aux poulets et quand on parle du loup, on en voit la queue. Il n'est point de roses dans epines. The fox is preaching to the chickens and when you speak of the wolf, you see him turn tail. There are no roses among thorns.
This automatic drawing was used for a London Weekend Television programme. Their Goya expert, if I remember, identified seven separate features from the artist's work. The owl and the ass are obsessive images.
The drawing should be compared to the etching Esto es peor in the series, The Disasters of War. The man's body is transfixed upwards by a branch of the tree; the amputation is very similar but doesn't have the pith-like centre; the blood isn't suggestive of sawdust. The expression on his face is the same.
In the second instance, I finished the drawing itself but some wording which appeared at the top left-hand corner of it trailed off in the fifth line. I knew I couldn't go on, although at a glance there would be no reason to think the writing was unfinished, because it was illegible and unintelligible. I called this the Hanging Man. A figure in long dress-like clothes, pointed shoes, and a skull cap, with his hands evidently tied behind his back, was suspended by his neck from a rope; he was dead.
All attempts to find the original failed. Mr Needham wondered if the wording was Old English; someone else suggested Latin.
Out of the blue, I had a letter from a lady in London, and shortly afterwards, which was very generous of her, a copy of a book: Lorenzo the Magnificent by Hugh Ross Williamson, published in 1974, more than two years after I'd done the drawing. She had been reading The Link one day, she said, and by sheer coincidence, the next had bought Lorenzo the Magnificent - and there was my Hanging Man, the sketch by Leonardo da Vinci of the hanging of Bernardo Bandini on 28 December 1478, a Pazzi conspirator, who murdered Giuliano de' Medici. The details of his clothes, the position of the feet, the inclination of the head, I had got these almost exactly. The writing went on for another six lines. Again, as soon as one knows, it's so obvious: it is mirror writing, in medieval Italian. The original is in the Musee Bonnati, in Bayonne.
Professor Bender's idea that automatic drawings are a creative expression of the subconscious is a bit belied by the fact that my automatic drawings are not creative as far as I personally am concerned, that is to say, they do not give expression to my own personality, emotions, private imagery, hopes, fears. They give every appearance of being an automatic reproduction of visual information acquired by an as yet unidentified scanning mechanism, or, may we not forget, by direct influence of discarnate artists. They are photographic, except in one strange sense: the unconscious interprets the material; it has to understand what it sees, perhaps, and in picking up it occasionally misunderstands. With the Goya, for example, it gets the figure transfixed, but cannot grasp that the figure is pierced bodily by the tree's branch - that is something it cannot conceive of - so it substitutes the next most feasible thing, an arrow.
I can often produce automatic drawing at will. It makes a spectacular contribution to a television show. But rather than embark during the programme on a drawing which might take up to two hours, I take several along with me and, whenever something of the sort is required, demonstrate automatic writing.
It might be supposed, if you think I'm reproducing drawings I must have seen once, that I have spent my life turning the pages of piles of art books. This is not so. If I had seen for a second - and it just is not possible - and unconsciously registered each and every one of the original drawings, then the unconscious would be a staggeringly brilliant instrument; and it would imply that if I gain access to my unconscious by psychic means, everyone possesses this power of retention.
I know I couldn't have seen the originals, any more than I've seen Arabic scripts and other foreign language items.
Automatic writing and drawing is nothing new. Automatic writing, especially, has been done in some quantity, certainly during this and the 19th centuries, and probably earlier when psychic phenomena tended to be described in somewhat different terms. People who have made no claim to any other psychic gift have done automatic writing. Drawing is more unusual. I hope it's not unduly immodest of me to say that my automatic drawings are so numerous, fluent, and yes, accomplished, that it's hard to find their equal. I suspect there isn't one, but it would be foolish to suggest there hasn't been ample evidence from researchers all over the world that information, pictorial or otherwise, is paranormally received in a way which seems inexplicable. In America, a young woman was able to speak in ancient Egyptian: a learned academic laboured for hours to compose questions to put to her, in a language of which there is no spoken record; she replied with the greatest of ease, disposing of his questions in a matter of minutes.
I don't believe one can choose any single explanation of automatic writing and drawing. It's like a tap from which one can make either hot or cold water flow. Maybe there are indications of a paranormal 'seeing', but it's more than that: manifestation of a mental power, a receiving and a reaching out, unknown, and difficult to guess at.
I made two programmes with David Frost, one for television, the Frost Interview on BBC 2, and one for LBC radio, in October 1974; and I did quite a few other television and radio programmes, all coinciding with publication of The Link.
I didn't know much about David Frost; we haven't got television at home; and I was rather in awe of him. It didn't take me long to realize that he-was as apprehensive of me as I of him, if not more so.
By the time the programme was being recorded, I felt fairly confident, whereas he seemed unnerved. We had met the day before, at Claridges, for tea and to discuss what I could do.
Peter Bander had brought Kirlian equipment, of which Frost was in total ignorance, never having heard of Kirlian photographs.
Aura Electronics had built a special machine for me that I couldn't blow up; designed to prevent from happening the kind of thing Mr M.H.J. Th. van der Veer, their managing director and head of research, describes in a statement made to the press after a visit to investigate: What we have seen in England and the results of our experiments are so crazy that we would certainly not have believed them if we had been told about them by anyone else.
The machine which has been put out of operation by Mr Manning within ten seconds has been subjected to the most intensive post-mortem. We can state categorically that the young man is able to produce an energy which cancels out 35,000 volts.
As a matter of fact, we observed the strangest and certainly a unique phenomenon: at one point it appeared as if he was absorbing the entire 35,000 volts from the machine, the next moment he seemed to force an even stronger energy into the machine which caused it to break down.
We have carried out extensive tests with over one thousand machines in the last few years. Nothing like this has ever happened, and our consulting engineers in the electronics factory testify that in order to produce a similar effect on the Kirlian machine as was done by Mr Manning the most sophisticated electronic equipment is needed.
Today I fully concur with Prof. Dr Douglas Dean in his statement that Matthew's psychic energy is absolutely unique.
In other words, I drew energy out of the machine, threw back more than I took out and the machine collapsed. I did this to rather too many Kirlian machines for it to be economical.
Aura Electronics therefore made one with a cut-out mechanism, saving 68 pounds worth of equipment from being broken irrepairably, fuses from being blown, and studio recording apparatus from catastrophe.
The machine carries up to 38,000 volts: if I put in more voltage than I take out, or amplify it, it cuts out automatically - returning to normal use after five minutes.
For some extraordinary reason, we were having tea, our discussion, and the demonstration of Kirlian photography, bang in the middle of the ballroom, which was the most suitable place, apparently, for Claridges to plug in the machine.
Peter prepared to take a photograph of David Frost's fingertips with the alternative to a black bag, a Film X30. Made by Phillips, this is a film in a plastic sachet with a self-developing solution, from which negatives, not prints, emerge.
Peter explained how he would take first a control exposure: David Frost could relax with his fingers at the top of the film. Then Frost had to move his fingers down the film, and concentrate as hard as he possibly could. The poor chap concentrated with all his might and main.
Peter took a photograph of my fingertips: at rest and switched on. And we developed both films. One pulls a green tab, waits thirty seconds, then a red tab, another wait of thirty seconds; one cuts the sachet open and plunges it in water; the chemicals wash out, and there's the negative.
Variations can occur in Kirlian photography according to the frequency and the pressure. To avoid fluctuations in the latter one takes a series under pressure checked as constant, by placing the machine on scales. But no variation can account for my ability to narrow my energy to a pinpoint, or to push it right out so that the photo is a white crystal tone, blank all over; or in colour, to make reds and yellows and special blue effects: I'm told I use the Kirlian machine for either a positive or a negative charge.
David Frost wasn't using it for anything; his 'concentrating' fingertips were the same as his non-concentrating coronas. I had made a great blotted-out area of energy. Perhaps he'd resigned himself, when he saw his own, to the thought that no one could concentrate in the middle of Claridges' ballroom: he was not taken aback. From that moment, his wariness of me was increased; but he was also convinced the programme would be good.
At the Collegiate Theatre, the BBC had four outside broadcast units, each with its crew of engineers. There were no fewer than twenty electronics experts. David Frost, the embodiment of the ultra-experienced television presenter, had gathered from his senior researcher that I might have a peculiar effect on their equipment.
I was sitting with David Frost in his dressing room when the producer went on stage to warm up the audience. The BBC, he assured them, had taken every precaution to cope with any disruption of the sound recording and other equipment which might be caused by their guest, Matthew Manning. That audience was not small: 550 people, and vulnerable to suggestion. Their expectations were immediately raised; and as I made my entrance, the first coincidence occurred. The earphones of the sound technicians began to make a horrible howling noise.
David Frost turned to me and opened his mouth to start the interview: the entire sound system of all four units packed up. Television Centre called a halt. The programme was due to go out in two hours' time. They asked for a re-start, but the same thing happened again. Highly inconvenient.
The audience was restless, and from the balcony, where some of the researchers were, there was a yell: 'Matthew, for goodness' sake stop it. You're ruining our programme!' I wasn't doing anything I was aware of.
In public I may be more tense than I would be in a quiet laboratory: I try to do my best, to answer the questions, and to cooperate; but inevitably, even with me consciously willing everything to run smoothly, spin-offs occur. Was it me, or was it the audience? I think the audience had a terrific amplifying power, taking whatever psychic energy was coming from me and sending it on with a boost, equal to their mixture of apprehension and desire that things should go wrong.
Time was short. Frost had the task of getting the show off the ground and transmitted to Television Centre. At the third attempt the visual monitors behaved oddly; a fourth start, with only five minutes to spare between the end of the programme and final transmission, and we were okay; though many viewers later complained about disturbances in reception.
The newspapers were not slow to respond to the situation obvious on the television screen: 'Matthew Manning reduced David Frost, in front of millions, to incredulity and confusion,' said one. 'Television's tough wily interviewer, usually always in control, could only mutter "That's extraordinary, really extraordinary".'
Other papers were mildly caustic too. An Australian magazine went further: David Frost, it informed its readers, had been 'reduced to a gibbering jelly by a teenager'.
Ironically, it wasn't true then that I had a reputation for affecting electrical equipment: the producer had mis-read his briefing. I'm not sure it was me who was tense; I know someone else was - the tough wily interviewer.
In November 1975 I took part in a radio link-up with Jimmy Young: while he was talking to me, his show blacked out for three and a half minutes. Jimmy was appropriately 'flabbergasted', and so, I daresay, were his millions of housewives.
On 4 December I recorded an interview with Brian Inglis for Nationwide: they decided to use two film monitors - that may be standard practice, but they said it was in case I made one break down. I thought they were joking. They phoned the next day: one monitor had collapsed, hadn't it been lucky they'd filmed on two!
These spin-offs are, I believe, basically poltergeist, except that if it can affect the electrics at a big department store it's a pretty hefty poltergeist. But it may be a hefty poltergeist because of the numbers of people around; and I act as a catalyst. Had I been in the store on my own I doubt if I could have done it. Not that I was trying.
It was in Spain. I went to Spain to give a lecture; and I took the chance, while there, to do some promotion for the Spanish edition of The Link. Leslie Hayward came with me.
It had been arranged that I should do a signing session at this large Madrid store. A crowd had been waiting for me and when I arrived, they shouted and seemed to be not wholly amiable since they expected me to send chairs flying through the air and other such things, and felt cheated, perhaps, that I didn't. Leslie says I was irritated.
The electrical circuit of the seven-storey shop abruptly quit: the escalators with gaping customers halfway up them were halted; the background music cut out; there were no lights; the till registers jammed. It was pandemonium.
Then a few fluorescent emergency lights dimly illuminated the ground floor. The fuses were checked; none had blown. All was in working order, though it didn't work.
A television crew which was supposed to have been covering the signing of books had been using the store's electricity supply. Leaving the manager to cope, they eventually asked me to step outside for an interview, where they could hitch up their equipment to a mobile generator.
As I passed over the threshold, the lights flashed on, the escalators continued on their journey. The electrical system at least was in business once more.
The television cameraman, to his delight, caught the jet of a fountain as it sprang to life - drenching the spot, incidentally, they had chosen for the interview. I was amused, and could return to signing books without any awkward consequences.
The first time I experienced a spin-off from that kind of emotional pique, it was on a smaller scale. Gert Ludemann had wanted an interview the very second, it seemed, I'd flown home from Toronto. Because I was exhausted, I didn't want to give it.
Peter said, 'You'll have to, out of the kindness of your heart - the man's come all the way from London.'
I thought his argument a trifle illogical, as London was a great deal nearer Gerrards Cross than Toronto was, but I complied.
After Gert Ludemann had asked a few questions, he thought he would play back his tape; there was nothing on it He said, 'It can't have been working properly...' He borrowed a second tape recorder, selected another new cassette and inserted it. The interview was resumed. After five more minutes he played it back. It was recording normally. He said, 'It seems to be working now.' The interview was concluded.
As he was leaving, I said to Peter, 'He'll be back for another interview.'
A few hours passed.
Gert Ludemann telephoned Peter. 'That interview I did with Matthew ...' he said.
'Well, what about it ...?' said Peter.
'It has vanished. All that's left on the tape is me saying "It seems to be working now"; the rest is wiped clean.'
Gert Ludemann had to come back for another interview: this he wrote down in longhand.
The dividing line between mental and physical phenomena seems not to be merely flexible, but ambiguous: PSI energy is a little like particles which are both matter and waves, and which if fired at a screen with two holes, can pass through both without splitting.
The trouble with parapsychological terminology is that it has become antiquated. Words such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition, owe their definition chiefly to the work of Professor J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa at Duke University in the 1930s and 1940s. Categorization, when it means that something has to be one thing or the other but not an interaction of both, seems to me to be stultifying.
It was pretty clear that David Frost didn't want me to do a Thomas Penn diagnosis for himself; that didn't deter him from giving over almost a whole programme to Thomas Penn diagnoses. It was Frost who introduced him as Doctor Penn, many others following suit. I had always referred to him as Thomas Penn; neither I nor the automatic writings made any claim, formally, that he was a doctor; though his ease and familiarity with medical terminology, drugs, symptoms - allowing for the 19thcentury vocabulary - and not least his diagnostic ability may have made it a foregone conclusion.
Thomas Penn's popularity irked me slightly. Nothing fascinates people more than their own health, illnesses, diseases: we live in a hypochondriac society, a neurotic society. Thomas Penn diagnoses are simple, quick, either right or wrong, so they've made an impact on virtually every television and radio programme, here and abroad.
On such shows, I am usually provided with a quantity of birthdates, up to 20, sometimes 50, from which I pick a few at random.
I write the selected birthdate at the top of a fresh sheet of paper, in my ordinary handwriting; I blank out my mind very swiftly; and within about ten seconds my hand is starting to move.
In the media, the birthdates I'm given tend to be those of people without anything much wrong with them: the diagnoses are soon completed.
They are in a characteristic handwriting, a slanting, loopy script that a person unacquainted with it may find difficult to decipher; and signed Tho. Penn with a flourish at the bottom.
They are often very accurate. I've done many hundreds of Thomas Penn diagnoses, and no strict statistical analysis could have been made of all of them. At the moment, no scientist has come up with a controlled analysis on a proportion. But from experience, I'd guess the diagnoses are 85 per cent correct. These are mostly for people I don't know. People often deny at first that they suffer from whatever it is, especially if the diagnosis is done in public, only to approach me afterwards asking for the sheet containing it: it had been so accurate, they will say, they couldn't bear to admit it before an audience, or over the air. Such people should never supply their dates of birth, or be asked for them: if now I agree to do Thomas Penn diagnoses in public I make sure the persons concerned are aware that their birthdates may be used.
The BBC took pains to announce that a woman who had vehemently rejected her diagnosis during the Frost Interview had later confessed to David Frost it had been correct: she hadn't wanted her friends to know.
One diagnosis in the programme was a total miss; the person had nothing wrong with him at all, let alone what was described. Someone shouted from the audience, 'But that's my birthdate too, and the details are absolutely correct!'
On LBC with David Frost, I did a diagnosis which turned out to be from the birthdate of the station's well-known compere, Adrian Love. David Frost, eager to hear 'the patient's comment', summoned him in. Adrian Love confirmed at once that he suffered from vertigo, lumbago, chest trouble due to an allergy; but there was another ailment which he most certainly didn't have. He pondered about it for several days and then, just to be positive, took himself off for a medical check-up. He didn't really believe he had the other ailment, but ... His doctor examined him and found that he did.
Adrian Love is one of a number who have gone away to see their doctors after a Thomas Penn diagnosis has suggested something which doesn't seem to fit in an otherwise accurate picture. It niggles at their minds. It may be stupid, they think, to ignore it.
I don't know why Thomas Penn diagnoses work on birthdates. There's nothing astrological in it. They simply provide me with something to tune in by, to concentrate on.
Experience, again, has made me wary. In Munich, while we were setting up the television programme, a director said, 'Will you do a Thomas Penn diagnosis on me? I have something wrong with me. You can confirm it."
The diagnosis said he had an excess of sugar in his blood which was causing a breakdown of the muscles controlling his heart - or words to that effect.
'Fantastically correct!' he exclaimed. 'I knew it! Three days ago ... I'll tell you this ... three days ago I went to the hospital ... not even my wife knew ... to have them check my blood sugar. You sit here a minute or two - I'll telephone the hospital - and we'll see you're right.'
He telephoned the hospital. There was nothing wrong with him at all. It was his imagination. I'd picked that up from him telepathically.
The best diagnoses are done on people who genuinely want them, or in cases of real illness, rather than those done as a stunt. I do as many as I can. It's time-consuming. And if I'm working in a television studio, I have cameramen, lighting technicians, secretaries, all asking for Thomas Penn diagnoses: then it becomes too much.
After the David Frost shows, and other TV and radio appearances, I would receive deluges of sad letters. The more graphic the ailments described over the air, the larger the mailbag.
... I live alone, and the hospital doctors say that they can give me no more help, only a continuous supply of pain-killing pills. I cannot accept such a situation. I have no doubt that somehow I can be healed.
... Will you please help my beloved Eric? He was born on July 12th 1901. The Drs. have told him he has Cancer of the right lung - I can't get him to eat, altho' he is not in pain.
Inevitably, five thousand printed replies had to be dispatched in those self-addressed envelopes: I was unable to do any more Thomas Penn diagnoses, I was unable to help.
It may be unjust that a lot of perfectly hale and hearty cameramen went away clutching diagnoses, but there weren't five thousand of them.
... Sir Matthew Manning
I read in Belgium about your special possibility of knowing calming people ... I am really on the end of my hopes and pain. I think not you may be a matrimonial agency.
... I am wondering if you would be able to use your unusual powers and find out where my great great grandfather was bom. I think it was in Cornwall. If you cannot help me, then it will be one more avenue closed to me.
... please will you ask your Spirit Doctor to send a cure of this dread disease.
For a long time, I accepted that the origin of Thomas Penn was inside my head. I've gradually come to think of him as a force, an entity. I dislike using those words because they give the wrong impression, but what else is there? An entity which, perhaps, can see through people as if looking through glass, and communicates via my subconscious - the result is the written diagnosis.
I once tried to discover who Thomas Penn was; I asked in automatic writing. I wrote the question at the top of the page in my ordinary hand, and waited. I covered something like fourteen sheets in five minutes, mostly in wild scribble, not writing at all but spiralling lines with the odd word emerging. This was accompanied by, poltergeist disturbances in Peter's house and garden. Huge pots were tipped off walls and things hurled about, so I had to stop. I had written the following questions: Who are you? What is your real name? Are you a doctor? When did you live?
The answer: UPROAR.
A television viewer sent me a drawing she'd made after seeing a 'spirit' behind me: a rather pinched-looking, wispy-haired gentleman in 19th-century dress; elderly, undoubtedly benign.
Granada Television, for their documentary, invited an expert graphologist to take part, the Official Examiner of Handwriting and Documents at the Central Criminal Court, Miss Joan Cambridge.
In theory, a forensic examination of automatic writing might seem simpler to accomplish than the authentication by comparison to originals of automatic drawings. And if the handwritings should prove to be identical, it's much less feasible, in people's minds, that I could ever have seen the original handwriting. If whoever it is signing the automatic writing is a celebrity of some kind, like Bertrand Russell or Sir Stafford Cripps, and an example of writing can be obtained, the graphologist can state that the two are the same hand, or not. In automatic drawing, the expert's opinion has to be based on style and content. A graphologist's task is that much more precise.
Joan Cambridge watched while I did automatic writing; she was shown five different scripts, which had been done in the presence of independent witnesses previously: the programme schedule allowed her four minutes in which to discuss these, with an interviewer breathing down her neck, hoping to
pin her to a definitive statement; it was therefore generous of her to say as much as she did. I was
grateful.
The sample of Sir Stafford Cripps' own handwriting was a photocopy. It was written in 1935,
considerably earlier than the period to which my automatic writing apparently belonged. As it was a
copy, she couldn't say anything conclusive; she drew attention to the similarities between them; she
suggested that a letter written by Cripps nearer to his death would be more suitable for comparison.
She needed the original in order to examine the pressure points, pattern, characteristics and other
factors. If she'd had to swear in a witness box they were identical, she couldn't with a photocopy.
I think she was inferring, quietly but firmly, that the conditions in the studio and the materials
provided were inadequate.
She was personally amazed, she said, at the different scripts. It was not possible to fake five so
distinctly different handwritings: she was prepared to state this, although she'd not been able to
examine the pressure waves and so on.
As an observation, not intended as a scientific pronouncement, she said the number of characteristics
from the real Cripps handwriting far outweighed those from my own, in the automatic writing.
After publication of The Link, I had many letters, as I've mentioned, concerning its contents and
illustrations; and a proportion of them were to do with the identification of automatic writings quoted
in it.
I had included an extract from one in verse, and had suggested that it was a fragment; I'd often sensed
that I was picking up lines and phrases out of context, sometimes muddled with other messages.
Miss Rosemary Hayden sent me photocopies of two pages from a volume entitled The Shipwreck, by
William Falconer, published in 1796. She had recollected, on reading The Link, some lines from what
is obviously a lengthy narrative poem:
As some fell conqueror, frantic with success,
Sheds o'er the nations ruin and distress;
So, while the wat'ry wilderness he roams,
Incens'd to sevenfold rage the tempest foams;
And o'er the trembling pines, above, below,
Shrill thro' the cordage howls, with notes of woe.
Here again is the corresponding passage in automatic writ ing. The mental scanning process, if that is
what it is, did not follow the text to the precise last detail - unless I 'saw' Falconer's first draft; from
the divergences I don't somehow think so.
As some fell conqueror, frantic with success,
Sheds over the nation's ruin and distress;
So while the wat'ry wilderness he roamed,
Incens'd to sevenfold rage the foams;
And o'er the trembling pines, above, below,
Shrills through the cordage howls, with woe.
It was dated 1801. One can speculate for ever; might I have picked it up from a person living then
who had memorized it inaccurately?
And by what agency does the punctuation arrive correctly, while the meaning is fumbled: 'Sheds o'er
the nations ruin' is not the same as 'Sheds over the nation's ruin'; the omission of 'tempest' alters that
line; and the mistake in rendering 'Shrills' as a verb makes a nonsense there.
By looking with care at these kinds of deviation, one begins to have some idea of the subconscious
acrobatics involved.
I am quite certain I couldn't ever have read the book. There is no indication that it is rare; it was in its
ninth edition when Miss Hayden's father found it in a second-hand bookshop. All I can say is that it's
not the sort of book I would even flip through if I came across it, without wanting to criticize William
Falconer!
In the autumn of 1974 a very different notoriety was pursuing me. Offers were pouring in from
managers and impresarios who wished to 'handle' me.
One visualized me gracing the Albert Hall in London; another proposed a posh luncheon in the River
Room of the Savoy Hotel, with a charge of £25 per head, and a personal performance by me.
After the programme with Richard Baker, a gentleman in the record business tried to persuade me that
if I made a disc there was a vast teenage market waiting for me; it was immaterial whether or not I
could sing; all I had to do was to put myself into his capable hands.
These offers and their like were rejected.
Peter Bander received a telephone call one afternoon from the fashion editor of the Daily Mirror.
How, she wondered, could she get in touch with Matthew Manning? They wanted to photograph him.
'Matthew is not a model,' said Peter, 'he's a psychic.' She said, 'No, you've got it all wrong.'
'How could I have got it wrong? I don't know anything about it.'
'We are making a gift of a camera to each of the top models of the past twenty years, and asking them
to photograph for the Daily Mirror the man they most admire. Jean Shrimpton wants to photograph
Matthew Manning.'
Peter said he would consult me.
I thought it was a joke, so I asked him if he would phone back the Mirror and say that, as I didn't
really believe it could be true, I'd like to talk to Jean Shrimpton. Peter passed on my 'doubts', and
asked for Jean Shrimpton to call me that evening.
Sure enough, at eight o'clock, the telephone rang. I let Jean Shrimpton spend twenty minutes trying to
persuade me to be photographed by her.
'I'm not going to be taken in my underwear,' I said.
'It isn't like that ... You may keep your clothes on.' I'm afraid she was wasting her time.
I was now finding it difficult to go anywhere without being recognized.
I was driving home late at night when a policeman waved me down with his torch. I drew up. 'Good
evening, sir,' he said. 'Just a routine inspection.'
I'm accustomed to routine inspections: I have a fast sports car.
'Could I see your licence?' he said. I showed him my licence. He glanced at it, and drew in his breath.
'Good God!' he said. 'You're the bloke that does those weird things ... as long as I know who you are
... that's all right ... you can go.'
The University of Utrecht was, with the Freiburg Institute, one of the first academic bodies in Europe to sanction psychic research. The Chair of Parapsychology was held for many years by Professor Tenhaeff, a gentle old man close to retirement when I went to Amsterdam for a series of experiments supposed to have been conducted under the auspices of the parapsychology faculty of Utrecht, at the Study Centre for Experimental Parapsychology, SCEPP. Professor Tenhaeff is known, above all, for his work with the Dutch clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset.
From my point of view, and from the scientists', the whole visit was a total fiasco, though this was in no way the fault of Professor Tenhaeff.
Peter Bander and I flew to Amsterdam on 30 April 1975: on arrival we were taken straight to the home of my publisher, J.H. Gottmer, instead of to an expected meeting with the scientists. An intimation of trouble came by four in the afternoon, when we were told there had been 'a disagreement' at the laboratory. It later transpired that this disagreement was between Professor Tenhaeff, who had planned to watch the work being done, and the SCEPP people, Dr Bierman, Dr Houtkooper, and a Dr I. de Diana whom I never succeeded in identifying, and the science correspondents of various newspapers and magazines from Holland and Belgium. To start with, I gather, Professor Tenhaeff practically had the door slammed in his face; the science correspondents, too, were made to feel extremely unwelcome - Bierman and Houtkooper were somewhat over-emphatic in their desire to run the experiments with maximum privacy. They assumed that the science correspondents had appeared on the scene by prior arrangement with me. It wasn't so. The journalists had discovered independently where I was to be and if they'd received a tip-off it hadn't been from me.
'It was obvious that commercial interests played an important role for the subject,' Bierman and Houtkooper were to say. 'This caused the serious problem of keeping the press away from the experimental rooms.' One might have thought they were fending off a gaggle of gossip columnists.
I was taken to the laboratory at 9 pm, by then tired from travelling and hanging about, wondering what was happening. A compromise had been reached: the following day, the science correspondents and others, including Professor Tenhaeff if he chose to avail himself of the opportunity, were to be permitted to sit in a room on the second floor, where there was a closed circuit television monitor; I was to be several floors distant from them.
I sensed a very fraught atmosphere. Bierman and Houtkooper and their milling assistants made me immediately apprehensive. 'The subject on arrival was very tired,' they reported, omitting to mention that when I was finally conveyed into their clutches at nine o'clock that night to begin working, Dr Houtkooper spent an hour and a half trying to 'hook me up' to the electroencephalogram. I had once been attached, in Toronto, simultaneously to a machine with four electrodes; an experienced psychologist would need five minutes at the most. In the end, in desperation, Houtkooper used cow gum.
The journalists were shown around the laboratory and shoved out; I managed, meanwhile, to get Peter aside. I wanted him to determine exactly what Bierman and Houtkooper had in mind and what they were hoping to achieve. Could they reassure me that they weren't going to try to make me do experiments which hadn't generally been agreed on beforehand?
In fact, it was late that night that they slipped in a request for the psychometry experiment - the envelope containing the letter and photograph from Bloemendal.
With me incarcerated in the laboratory room, Peter confronted the scientists, extracting from them a statement of intent in what was no doubt for them the full glare of publicity. Having shut Matthew Manning into the laboratory, and everyone else out, everyone else was witness to the argument.
There was, by now, minimal understanding and a great deal of suspicion all round. No matter whose fault, a yawning gap, it seemed, existed between us, in relation to the basis and motivation for experiments. Bierman and Houtkooper made no secret of their main purpose in the work: they wished to test their equipment, repeating certain experiments done at Durham Institute, and incorporating their own methods developed at SCEPP.
'The idea has been that an outstanding subject,' they reiterated in their report, 'can be considered as a strong source of PSI-signals. Just as one calibrates and tests his equipment in let's say astronomy by using strong signals, we wanted to use M.M. in this way. We felt that, based on preliminary reports from the Toronto series, the present subject could be considered as producing a strong signal indeed.'
It was complete anathema to me. I hadn't realized, to put it mildly, that I would be used to test equipment; I thought they'd be using their equipment, more constructively, to test me; to evaluate PSI phenomena which might occur.
I am not the kind of psychic who can be brought into the laboratory to give off signals like a radio beacon, as if I were another machine, along with the rest of the apparatus. I haven't the temperament for it.
If there wasn't much empathy, if we established only the most frail working relationship, if there was no human understanding to draw on, there wasn't much that was human in their projected experiments either. But they, as they found a little to their cost, were 'using' a human being: me.
The work of psychics in the experimental field tends to fall roughly into two categories: work which is conducive to and requires a degree of creativity, imagination, individuality, subjectivity - and this is the sphere in which I am at my most motivated and willing; it's how I would imagine Gerard Croiset works also, and many others; and, secondly, the slogging away at the same ESP tests with the same symbols and colours and configurations; submitting to prolonged series of laboratory tests calculated to produce significant results by sheer not-to-be-ignored volume of hit and miss; a psychic such as Pavel Stepanek, the Czech, will have passed a substantial part of his life accumulating a statistical pattern which makes it difficult for anyone to deny the existence of ESP.
The latter type of work, so painstaking, and not immediately rewarding, has in the last twenty years done much to make parapsychology respectable; to convince the scientific community, in particular, that ESP can knuckle under and be investigated by quite orthodox scientific methods and criteria. But it's not for me.
Bierman and Houtkooper obviously belonged to the Schmidt school: Helmut Schmidt, now director of the Institute for Parapsychology at Duke University, the cradle of ESP testing in America, is the physicist who pioneered the idea of tests based on the prediction of the radioactive decay of inert matter, a process that theoretically is impossible to predict. Schmidt aims to eliminate human agency; he has long since substituted the computer for the humanly arranged card sequence, as was, of course, necessary, to avoid telepathy influencing the results.
There were three main experiments. The first dealt with a random number generator linked to a display screen which threw up in sequence either of two numbers, zero or one. I had to make my target number, whichever it was, zero or one, appear more often than it should by chance. On the screen was a line indicating more zeros, or more ones, to the left, or to the right. As the subject tries to influence the random number generator, he is either encouraged or discouraged.
I found the experiment very boring, and no results of any significance were obtained. The scientists noted a difference in the pattern of my pulse during control and experimental runs; so 'it might be concluded that the subject really did his best to influence the RNG'; which was handsome of them.
Bierman and Houtkooper didn't endear themselves to me, and with my attention wandering to the latter's frayed jeans and grubby plimsolls, I reached my own conclusions. I thought they were arrogant. They were young, in their twenties, and somehow ill at ease.
The next experiment was called a maze; again it involved a visual display panel, onto which was projected a maze from which I had to escape. The way out is visibly clear at a glance, but hidden barriers are randomly generated and it was these that I was supposed to foresee and therefore not try to go through the gates they blocked; I could tell the computer I wanted to move upwards, downwards, to the left, and to the right by pressing corresponding keys; and for each new game I got a newly randomized maze: what fun ... I might as well have been playing on a seaside pierhead. I didn't take to it. 'The results are not significant,' wrote Bierman and Houtkooper, not forgetting the mysterious I. de Diana.
The arrangements had partly been made by the Dutch publishers with Bierman and Houtkooper, whose hysterical misery at the least hint of publicity was therefore all the more surprising - they didn't want their name published, they didn't want the location to become known; I did enjoy, the following evening, on television, the introduction to a programme about me: 'At a university which wishes to remain anonymous, in Amsterdam, two scientists who wish to remain anonymous, namely Dr Bierman and Dr Houtkooper ...' But their treatment of Professor Tenhaeff was inexplicable.
The third experiment - the Conway-experiment - consisted of another display screen on which the computer generated a pattern of stars: every three seconds the pattern was 'refreshed and changed following a fixed algorithm'. I didn't find out who Conway was but his or its stars weren't at all thrilling.
That first night I walked out on them - and I had never walked out of experiments before; I pulled the electrodes from my head and left. I was asleep, having climbed into bed at one o'clock, when the phone rang: it was Peter and Jules Schoolenaar hoping to soothe me - they had just discovered I was missing from the laboratory; there would be no more arguments and problems. I said, 'If those people are going to mess around like that tomorrow, I'll blow their computer up for them!'
At midday Peter phoned me at the laboratory. A meeting with Professor Tenhaeff was fixed for soon after 2 pm at the hotel, to discuss the possibility of further experiments.
In the 'Conway-experiment', I was asked to keep the pattern 'alive', i.e. changing, or to 'kill' it. I was given the 'goal' - either of these - before the run, or during it. The pattern in due course would reach stability, and from thence an automatic end; by keeping it 'alive', I would be prolonging the natural course of events.
The large governing computer was situated on the second floor of the building; the journalists - who weren't the least intimidated by Dr Bierman's threats and demands for secrecy - were in the room, also on that floor, to which they had been allotted, with their television monitor. Marcel de Groot, the presenter of the Dutch television programme, and his team, were there; and they actually had a camera focused on the monitor; it was an opportune moment. Their eyes were glued to the screen.
They saw the computer making a kind of whirligig figure of eight, non-stop, going electronically mad. A few minutes later a distressed Dr Bierman arrived in their room. The computer, he said, was stuck in a loop.
A journalist asked him to put it in plain language.
Bierman said, 'The computer behaves like a dog that is biting its own tail and running round in circles.'
The probability of this occurring was P=.004 for the run, and estimated for the series at P=.028: in very plain language, it was so improbable as to be impossible.
The test had to be abandoned - at a highly convenient time for me to leave, in order to be punctual for my appointment with Professor Tenhaeff at the Merriott Hotel.
In attempting to explain the muddle of the two days, and especially of the first inauspicious evening, Bierman and Houtkooper told Peter Bander and the journalists that they'd not been given enough time to prepare their experiments; that they hadn't been able to study the scientific reports from elsewhere adequately, though these were submitted to Bierman two months in advance. They said they never wanted 'to test Matthew Manning' and again used the analogy of an astronomer scanning the sky: they were disappointed, and didn't conceal their disappointment, with the work. They had not got the results they expected.
They showed, I think, naivety in the conception of their experiments with me: 'To validate the results of the experiments of the computer-type we prepared some more "classical" experiments', since they made no effort to fit the work to the subject. One of the things they thought up for me to do was based on what is known as psychic photography. For some years a remarkable phenomenon has been achieved by a former Chicago bell-hop, Ted Serios, and subsequently by a tiny handful of psychics, in thinking a recognizable image onto camera film - skyscrapers, mountains, a lake. It's a very idiosyncratic gift and not something I can do; so this experiment was a failure too. Yet they could have had ample choice among the effects I can produce.
They did some Kirlian photography, with the help of Ted van der Veer, from Aura Electronics; but the two SCEPP assistants disagreed with Mr van der Veer, the expert, on the evaluation technique.
They gave me a 'broken watch-test'. A few days beforehand a piece of paper had been inserted in a watch, blocking the mechanism; I was supposed to make the watch work, displacing the paper.
Dr Bierman and Dr Houtkooper had hoped I would do metal-bending - they didn't manage to discover I no longer did that kind of experiment until a week before I came to Amsterdam. 'M.M. didn't want to participate ...'
They seemed to be under the impression that I'd undertaken to emanate strong PSI-signals, whatever those are. 'He did not perform well', which was hardly surprising; it was a very aggravating situation. Anyway, I had been annoyed. I cannot speak for the computer.
The Tannoy crackled. This is your captain speaking. 'A set of false teeth has been found in the lavatory ...' The passengers of the Jumbo jet looked mildly astonished. 'The owner may claim them from the stewardess, and please will he or she do so?' I half rose in my seat. I waved an arm at the nearest member of the crew.
'Give them to the gentleman beside me here,' I called, 'I think they must be his.'
The gentleman beside me was Peter Bander. He was not, just at that moment, amused. Peter admits he is nervous when flying in my company, and I was, he assured himself as he recoiled with embarrassment, trying to cheer him up.
We were going to America, to make a coast-to-coast tour publicizing and promoting The Link: it was the summer of 1975. It probably sounds facetious but the whole trip was a bit like those teeth - funny, bizarre, and with a built-in bite. If something occurs which is utterly grim, one doesn't have to search far for little elements of farce.
Our American trip, in fact, was overshadowed, particularly for Peter, by a dream I had while we were staying in Chicago, at the Ambassador Hotel.
I awoke soon after daybreak on Friday 20 June. I vividly recollected standing on a road which crossed flat, marshy ground covered with low scrub. A large plane, a jet airliner, was coming in to land at the airport I knew lay ahead but which I couldn't see because of the scrub and trees. It passed over my head and I thought, it's too close to the ground, it's too low to make the runway, it's not flying high enough even to clear the clump of trees. I said to myself, it's pulling up over the trees, it'll have to. The plane did pull up, gradually climbing, but with the right wing tilted downwards. Then that right wing collided with a metal structure I assumed to be a pylon: there was a great bang, or flash, an explosion. I had a cut in my dream, as if it were a film. Next I was above the road, above the marshy land at a short distance from it, staring down at the crashed plane. I could hear as well as see. It was fizzing, like a damp firework. The aircraft was all broken, and debris had been scattered over a wide area, near the runway and across the marsh. I saw clouds of smoke, and dust: no fire.
There was another cut, and now streams of people on the road where I'd stood previously. They were wheeling trolleys and carrying stretchers and among them a voice said distinctly that everyone was dead.
I pondered upon this until about half past eight, when I went to Peter's room. He wasn't expecting me till ten, the time we had planned to meet. I am in the habit of telling Peter Bander of any extraordinary experience, and it had been no ordinary dream.
Let him describe in his own words how he felt. He was petrified.
I know when Matthew makes a prediction, one which is to come true, it has, for some odd reason, certain characteristics. A degree of detail, an absolute sureness on his part. And were we to be on that plane? If Matthew, a spectator, wasn't on it, was I? Instead of saying no, he said, 'No-o-o, I don't think so, I didn't see you.' He made me rather nervous. I believed implicitly on the one hand that whatever he predicted would happen. To be told, on the other hand, he hadn't seen me and didn't know whether I was on it ... So I said, if I'm on it, you ought to be on it. He said, 'Well, I'm not.' I had visions of us getting parted at an airport and I having to take a different plane.
It is only honest to admit that in such a situation - a dream is very personal - one fears first for one's own life, realizing the implications for others in due course. As Peter says, he isn't afraid of death, but he would prefer not to plunge to it in an air crash.
He made me draw an exact sketch, showing the angle of the plane's flight to the road, the position of the unseen runway and of the pylon, with the swampy ground. He sent me away to my room while he telephoned the American publishers of The Link, Holt, Rinehart & Winston in New York, whose publicity department was responsible for the arrangements of our tour. They couldn't have been more sympathetic and understanding; they accepted the validity of the matter at once; they offered to alter our schedule, change our flights, or to provide alternative transport; they made special credit facilities available in case we decided to throw everything into turmoil and ditch the arranged programme of journeys.
We continued according to plan, although Peter certainly didn't enjoy the freak weather conditions between Chicago and Minneapolis; the plane rose and fell and bumped in the most alarming fashion.
Back in Chicago, Peter had written two postcards, which he dispatched via the hotel letter box before the first of a string of appointments I had that day with a journalist at ten o'clock. Both postcards, sent to England, subsequently bore the clear postmark: Chicago Ill 20 Jun 1975. One was to Leslie Hayward. The datestamp is superimposed on the handwriting.
... Matthew told me this morning of a forthcoming plane crash - the plane would crash into pylons -but he felt for some reason we should probably not be on it. A bit worrying ...
Afterwards, when the whole incident was finally over, I was asked why, if I'd had this premonition, this precognitive dream, I didn't publicize it: steps might then have been taken, even tentatively, to avert the disaster. True, we had informed various people at Holt, Rinehart & Winston; several TV and radio presenters were told in confidence; not one of them betrayed that confidence; no one leaked the information. What could we have done? What were we supposed to do? My dream had supplied me with no hint of where the plane was to crash. There was no time, no date. And had I been able to identify an airport, would all flights have been cancelled simply because Matthew Manning had had an exceptionally vivid dream?
On the afternoon of Friday 20th Professor Walter Uphoff and his wife Dr Mary Jo Uphoff dropped by to visit us in Chicago on their way to a scientific congress from their home in Oregon where they had been up at dawn to pick strawberries as a gift for us. The Uphoffs were old friends since Colin Smythe had published a book of theirs.
Professor Uphoff brought with him his Kirlian photography equipment and as the Uphoffs are kind and sympathetic I was very happy to fall in with the suggestion that we should make use of the opportunity this presented.
Attached to the back of a Polaroid camera they had a photographer's black bag, similar to the one used by Professor Douglas Dean in Toronto. The plate of concealed film on which the fingertips would be placed was connected to a Tesla coil generating about 30,000 volts, with a timer set to create a high-energy field for two seconds.
'Using colour film, the average subject,' wrote the Uphoffs later, 'produces a ring or "corona" of blue and/or white flares around the finger tips to a depth usually an eighth to a quarter of an inch wide.
'With two exposures left in the camera, we proceeded to take photos of Matthew's fingers, held lightly on the film while Matthew "turned on". Only seeing the original print can convey the display of colour and formations on the photo.'
On the second photograph, a red band appeared down the middle, a sort of bright red carrot shape. They wondered if heat had affected the film. A brand new pack of film was inserted.
'... he was asked to see if he could produce colour at will,' the Uphoffs said of me. 'He chose red and was successful.'
The red 'bled' through to the following two sheets of film, and a photo of Dr Mary Jo's fingers, intended as a control, had the normal blue-white effect plus the 'bleed-through' from me.
They still had doubts about their film. Red also came into a photo of Professor Uphoff's fingers while I was operating the timer button. But when his wife operated the timer, the photo of his fingers was 'normal'. Between the control photos I brought back the red, and the final two photos of my fingers showed, they said, 'beautiful glowing colour effects': 'There is no question but that Kirlian photographs show differences in energy flowing through or from the body and Matthew's photos make a collection of extraordinary effects unlike anything we have seen.'
At one point - on the third photo of the new pack - they had asked me to try for a figure effect, which implies concentrating the energy to produce a specific pattern, a simple figuration such as a triangle. I can do this, I can produce a clear pattern, though not always completely as it is foreseen. The photograph in question has horizontal bars, bright yellow with white tips at the extremities, and on the second row there are three white circles on the bar. One side of this bar seems fractured, or actually in the process of disintegrating or exploding. There's a thick vertical bar - the red carrot shape; and three circles above the bars of a pale blue.
I believe that Kirlian photograph was sheer coincidence. It was, someone presently pointed out, remarkably like an aircraft coming in to land with its lights blazing. By then the Uphoffs, who knew nothing whatsoever of my dream, had bidden us a cheerful goodbye and gone on to their conference.
On 24 June we were in San Francisco. I had a television programme at seven in the morning and a two-hour radio show with Owen Spann at ten. It was a rush because union regulations kept me in the TV studio for some while after I'd finished there. I remember Peter inquiring, at the radio station, what the news was from England: was there a rail strike or had the dispute been settled? The newsreader promised to check the tickertape and let us know at eleven when he was due to read a bulletin.
At ten thirty-five, during the programme, which was of course going out live, a red light in the studio indicated that we were to be taken off the air: it was for a news flash. A Boeing 747 had crashed at New York Kennedy Airport, killing an estimated 122 people. The exact details weren't known, but a police observer had said that the plane had tilted to the right, hit a pylon and crashed to the ground.
Peter's postcards arrived in England a few hours before the disaster, the worst ever in America, occurred. The News of the World had a forensic examination made of the card addressed to Leslie; it was categorically stated that the writing was on it before the postmark.
Owen Spann, the programme presenter in San Francisco, was aware of the premonition and had no intention of mentioning it, but he was so shaken he let it slip out when the programme resumed after the news flash. And from then on, the press, in its coverage of me in America, was interested almost exclusively in the Kennedy Airport disaster and my premonition of it. Journalists persistently wanted to interview me on this sole topic. I refused to discuss it. I adamantly declined to be drawn into macabre sensationalizing.
If, in the days which intervened between the dream in Chicago and the actuality of the crash, I had not been as affected as Peter, it was because I was also extremely busy. Every minute was occupied with giving interviews, meeting journalists, appearing on television and radio, and I had hardly a moment to myself, hardly a chance to think. I was also convinced there was nothing I could say or do to avert the accident.
Earlier in the same year, 1975, I received an intimation of another tragedy. I had a dream, this time a recurring dream: it came five or six nights, separated by varying intervals, and each time more details were added, which is what Peter means by the degree of detail indicating how soon something is likely to happen after one of these distinctively special dreams. He had longer to consider the indications and implications. I was somewhere very dark. It was totally dark, yet elsewhere it was daylight. The atmosphere was thick and claustrophobic. An irresistible force had suddenly hit an immovable object. There appeared to be twisted metal ... screams ... people dead and dying ... and terribly mutilated. That was all I could say.
There were innumerable things I knew it was not. It wasn't an air crash. It wasn't a collision of two trains. A car in darkness, Peter said. No. An underground train crashing into another? A train crashing into buffers?
None of us had known there was any such thing as a deadend tunnel in the London underground. Shortly after I had dreamed this for the last time, an irresistible force, a tube train, was driven into an immovable object, a dead-end tunnel at Moorgate station.
Both these precognitive dreams, one might speculate, were the result, the effect preceding the cause, of great human anguish and pain. An anguish which generates energy that has the power to move backwards in time. Or in other words, the anguish of a disaster can be 'audible' before it occurs.
I don't believe I possess to any great extent the gift of precognition, nor do I have much personal interest in the future: automatic drawing and writing draw me to the past, and physical phenomena are always very much in the present. But being the age I am, I suppose I enjoy a minor preoccupation with my car, and the first occasion on which I had foreknowledge of an event was in 1975 when a recurring, waking dream gave me the strong impression that I should have an accident with my car. In the dream the car was white, whereas I drove a blue Mini of my father's. I knew I was going to have this accident at a roundabout, and that there would be another car travelling on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. I duly described the details to several friends; the dream ceased to recur; and by the time I bought a new car in October I'd forgotten it completely. I had chosen a white MGB GT. In due course the new car took me to Gerrards Cross. Peter said, with a studied casualness, 'You realize you are now driving the white car, so please go very carefully.'
I meekly accepted warnings from Peter and from friends who were with him not to drive fast, to wear my seat belt, and all manner of avuncular advice. I left Gerrards Cross for Cambridge at two in the afternoon.
At Rickmansworth there is a roundabout where the dual carriageway to Watford begins. About twenty yards beyond the roundabout a gap in the central reservation is marked on either side as a no-entry except for police and fire services; in emergencies police cars and fire engines can use the gap for a U-turn to reach the fire station and police station opposite the roundabout, saving the delay of an unnecessary half mile or so to the next roundabout.
As I approached this place my road was clear and I drove straight on and through the roundabout. Just then an empty taxi coming towards me swerved from the other side through the no-entry gap, instead of proceeding a fraction further and using the roundabout, and headed straight into my path at fairly high speed, not stopping or looking. The smash was simply unavoidable. I wasn't hurt but my new car was badly damaged.
The taxi driver wasn't hurt either, though from the state of our vehicles that seemed a miracle. The police were on the spot immediately, and from the police station I telephoned to Gerrards Cross. Peter's housekeeper thought she would contact him with the news that I'd had a car accident but was myself unscathed. Peter was at Heathrow seeing off his visitor. He has a short wave radio receiver, a little gadget carried in the pocket: a telephone call to the Post Office tower in London activates a bleep, provided the person carrying the receiver is within a certain radius; he then phones home or whatever the arrangement is. So Peter was bleeped in a crowded terminal building - the noise is loud enough to cause heads to turn - and he phoned home to find that the predicted event had happened. He made sure I was unharmed and returned to the friend he. was seeing away, who was likewise kindly concerned for my welfare.
Quite recently, I had a compelling hunch that someone - I had no idea whom - was to have an accident. It was a Saturday evening and I was going out, to a friend's house, where there were to be about fifteen of us altogether, some twenty miles from my home. I arrived at the party telling all my friends to drive with extra care and how I knew somebody would have an accident. I even went so far as to make a phone call to one chap who hadn't yet turned up. Taking heed, he drove over very carefully, without mishap. At the end of the evening, they all said, 'Ah, you're wrong again!'
It was a dark wet night, rain had been falling, and as I accelerated out of a roundabout, my car slid into a spin, spun three times, waltzing across a three-lane carriageway, and disappeared broadside through a fence.
I'd picked that accident up during the day, but it hadn't occurred to me that it was to be me who would be involved. I had assumed it was someone else, and I'd driven normally, not taking account of the wet road. But if something like that is going to happen, it's going to happen.
After the episode of the dream which was difficult not to think of as the premonition of the Moorgate disaster, Peter began to suspect that the premonitions and precognitive gifts I was apparently developing were unbalancing me. To reassure me lest I became neurotic about future disasters, he chose to demonstrate a theory of his postulating a hypothetical air crash. We were ourselves due to fly to the States the following week.
Peter sat down with me one afternoon and produced a graph, and to explain the reasoning behind it he drew a picture. He was, he said, reversing the method of age regression experiments. I was to imagine that the only unknown factor in predictions, as in age regression, when a subject under deep hypnosis is taken back through what appear to be previous lives, was time. He drew a hill, and around the hill there flowed a stream.
'You are on the bank, beside the river,' he said. 'You see a short length of the river, where it flows round the bend at your feet. But if you climb the hill, and look down, you can see the water which passed by you a few minutes ago when you were at the bottom of the hill, further downstream. Look the other way: you see water flowing towards you. By the time you reach the bottom of the hill again, and see the water that you watched coming pass you by, several things may have happened. A tree might have fallen into the river bed: it would not have been there when you looked from the top of the hill. A chasm might have opened in the river bed, and the water you saw has vanished into a hole. These are unlikely hypotheses. Much more probable are changes brought by human intervention. And the river is no longer an adequate example.'
Peter replaced the drawing with the diagram. It had five lines, each division representing a day. On these five days a numbers of events would be, barring major catastrophe, taking place.
'For example, on the fifth day from today, a flight is scheduled, London to New York. Already most of the passengers are booked on that flight. And although all kinds of things can go wrong - there may be fog, and the plane will be delayed; the pilot could have flu, and a stand-by steps in; there may be a mechanical fault or failure, and another plane is substituted for the original - it can be fairly assumed that this flight, fog permitting, will leave London for New York. There might be a general strike, I suppose, with all aircraft grounded. But the odds are very heavily in favour of the flight occurring on that particular day.'
As an exercise designed to convince us both that predestination and probability would leave intact our jet to America, I don't feel it was wildly successful. But I indicated that my anxiety had been dispelled. I was relieved and lulled.
It has been suggested that if I were to undergo deep trance hypnosis, I might, like an age regression subject, be led forward day by day until I showed knowledge of just such an event as an air crash. It's more than idle coincidence that a horrible disaster has an in-built emanation of emotive forces whereas an event of similar random inevitability, the discovery of oil in the North Sea, say, has not.
I have absolutely no intention of submitting myself to hypnosis, though. I am controlling my own psychic abilities and gifts, whatever gifts I possess, with my subconscious: if my subconscious were to be in another person's control, or if I lost control myself, I dare not think what could happen. I dislike intensely the notion of someone else controlling me or being able to manipulate me. I am unalterably opposed to hypnotism, in my own personal case. I am opting out of prediction.
As we came in to Philadelphia by one of those huge swing bridges, evidently a metal strut fractured while I was in the vicinity: when I reached the studio where I was to do a television show I was accused of having broken the bridge across the river in Philadelphia. A reputation for creating havoc in TV and broadcasting studios had gone before me in America, although as one interviewer put it, referring to what she called the 'Frost incident', David Frost being not entirely unknown in the States, 'surely such a thing can only happen in dear old England', at which point the sound system of the Today Programme went berserk for 45 seconds.
The Today Programme goes out live but is held in each time zone across America, so that in Chicago, where Professor Uphoff taped it an hour later, the same 45 seconds disturbance manifested itself, and again in the other time zones, at different hours of transmission. The millions of American viewers, longing for a 'happening', were perhaps generating PSI energy, contributing to produce a phenomenon for which I was merely the catalyst.
For another television company, that afternoon, I took part in a programme entitled To Tell the Truth; a kind of 'will the real Matthew Manning stand up?' A panel comprised of four celebrities was faced with three Matthew Mannings; two were English schoolboys holidaying in America, who had been raked in for the programme, and one was me. Each of us was asked questions; the panel then voted, the votes cast, it was hoped, identifying the real Matthew Manning. The two other boys were marvellous; their acting was gaining them votes while I was actually getting none. A panellist changed his mind, in order, he said, to differ from his fellow members, and plumped for me.
The large audience was buzzing with expectation. None of the panellists had read my book, nor ever seen a photo of me, nor watched me on television. But according to two people from Holt, who confided that they very much wanted something to occur, the audience was convinced it was about to witness if not the supernatural at least the highly unusual. I, on the other hand, was determined quite consciously to stop anything which might cause trouble in the studio. It seems funny occasionally, but no more than that. I had half an eye on other television companies becoming so wary of me they might not any longer be inclined to invite me onto their shows, and it was in my interest and everyone else's to promote my book as widely as possible.
I had been introduced by the compere as 'Matthew Manning Number Two', when a spotlight above my head exploded. The compere turned this into a joke. Later, when the real me was finally identified, there was pandemonium. Fragments of pop music and a babble of speech suddenly blared out through the equipment in the studio. But I thought these were coincidences. The same species of coincidence, maybe, as the professional magician who dogged me around six consecutive TV programmes.
The best known of the several magicians brought in, Milbourne Christopher, felt able to say that I was no showman. Not all magicians were so fair.
One television station scraped the barrel and organized a little man who tried desperately to upstage me and make himself the focal point of the interview. Neither producer nor interviewer could prevent him hogging the camera.
Til show you,' he told the audience, 'how this metal-bending is done.' He asked for a key.
I noticed that on one finger he wore a big ring. As he held the key in his hand - I wouldn't have had a big enough hand to do it - he levered the key under the ring, cupping his palm, and bent it successfully. Not content with achieving this once, he repeated his feat. I ignored the challenge to follow suit, and let him continue, until towards the end of the programme I said, 'If the camera will focus on your left hand ... right, will you remove the heavy metal ring you have on your finger, and bend the key in front of the camera ...' He threw a tantrum. I had 'given the trick away'. He had thought me just another magician, a trickster; and tricksters keep the secrets of their trade.
I also appeared on the Mike Douglas Shaw, which has an audience rating of 35 million. The format of the programme was one of those with which we are familiar here in Britain: Zsa Zsa Gabor went on first and then remained while I had my solo interview, joining in the general conversation that followed. Jack Palance was the third interviewee, and Roger Miller filled the singing spot.
Zsa Zsa Gabor had seen me on television in England; she was very intrigued by me, and she was interested in 'spooky' phenomena. I had been sitting there telling my story, when it was decided we should do a telepathy experiment. Roger Miller went to the far side of the studio. I was supposed to draw what he was drawing. I'm not particularly adept at receiving in telepathy. He made, in fact, a cartoon picture of a man's head in profile. I tried to concentrate. Zsa Zsa Gabor was breathing into the microphone, 'Isn't it frightening!' I picked up and drew on my piece of paper a simple full-face. Mike Douglas, thanking me for having taken part in the programme, fervently assured me that nobody had ever managed to keep Zsa Zsa Gabor quiet for so long: for twenty whole minutes she was gracefully dumb.
I liked the West Coast more than any other part of America, and it was in San Francisco that I first saw a dossier on my movements concocted by a press agency and sold to several newspapers in various countries. It was comprised of a few sheets of stencilled typewritten paper containing what were supposed 'facts' about me, things I had done, places I had been, people I was supposed to have met and been seen with. It was plain that for a number of weeks in the autumn of 1974, about eight months previously, I had been tailed by a person or persons who had put two and two together and got five. More than one observer must have been on duty on 2 November 1974: a report dealt with my journey to Cambridge and another with Peter Bander's to London Airport. Visitors to Peter's house were noted, especially the Apostolic Delegate His Excellency Archbishop Bruno B. Heim, and the Papal Nuncio to the EEC countries His Excellency Hyginus E. Cardinale. And the information, for example, for 18 October read thus: 'Matthew Manning and Peter Bander arrived in Bander's car at precisely 1900 hrs at the Apostolic Delegation where they stayed for 3 hrs and 20 minutes, leaving at
00.20 for Gerrards Cross.' But what was this all about?
I met Archbishop Heim and Archbishop Cardinale through Peter, and was generously included in a warm and personal acquaintance.
Archbishop Hyginus Eugene Cardinale is the senior Vatican diplomat in Western Europe. At the time he was Papal Nuncio to Belgium, Luxembourg and the EEC. He's an American born in Italy. It's universally accepted that he has an absolutely brilliant mind; 'quick and astute', says Peter, 'a judge of character as I have very very rarely seen'. He was Pope John XXIII's Head of Protocol and is now nicknamed 'celestial troubleshooter' by the press, though there's a more facetious joke in circulation -it's rumoured that he has a hot-line to God the Father and that he can even bypass the Son. What else should I write about him? The point is that Archbishop Cardinale has stated unambiguously, in public, that he believes 'the extraordinary gifts which Matthew Manning possesses come from God, and don't necessarily originate in his brain ..." He had known me for a year.
Archbishop Bruno Heim, Apostolic Delegate to the United Kingdom, formerly Nuncio to the Scandinavian countries, is as frequent a visitor to Gerrards Cross as Peter and I are to the Apostolic Delegation in Wimbledon. I hope it may not be presumptuous if I, who have no religious beliefs or faith, describe Archbishop Heim as a man of transparent goodness with a loving compassion for all humanity.
I once did a Thomas Penn diagnosis on a date of birth Peter gave me for Archbishop Heim. The day and the month were correct, but the year had been confused with that of Archbishop Cardinale. However, this was the diagnosis:
Here we have a case of neuralgic pain along the course of the sciatic nerve which is inflamed. In addition to pain there is a numbness and tingling, which is giving way to a wasting of the muscles. The pain tends to be parxoysmal [paroxysmal] and varies greatly in degree. Muscular twitching may occur and there will be over-secretion. Obviously tonics and even temperature etc. will help.
Quinine and gelsemium should be taken with salicylates, iodides or substances of the antipysin group.
The Archbishop denied any such symptoms; it was totally wrong, he protested indignantly. Six months later he sheepishly admitted that he had just been to his doctor in Harley Street. He had been prescribed the exact modern equivalent of the drugs Thomas Penn had mentioned.
The news story which broke on 13 July in the New of the World, on my return from America, was not unconnected with Thomas Penn. An article by Alan Whittaker began: 'Mystery surrounds the visit of two top Vatican emissaries to Britain's leading psychic, 19-year-old Matthew Manning ...'
It was, really, old hat, but embarrassing nonetheless for everyone concerned.
I certainly count Alan Whittaker as a 'friendly' journalist, and he has several times come to see me, and written stories on me. He was only doing his job. Apparently the News of the World had acquired the dossier, or a copy, which was shown me in San Francisco; and its arrival in the office coincided with a report from a Vatican 'stringer'. A 'stringer' is a person who works inside an organization, in this case the Vatican, and subsidizes his salary by selling gossip. The report speculated on the seriousness of Pope Paul VI's health and possibility of abdication. Pope Paul was 77, and for two years there had been persistent rumours about his illness. No pope has abdicated since Celestine V in 1294.
The stringer asserted that Pope Paul had collapsed: '... although carrying out duties with his customary zeal and devotion, [he has] suffered a serious attack of fatigue and has disappeared from public view. A bevy of helpers assisted him in taking robes off and helped to revive him ...'
Alan Whittaker thought carefully, and made an interesting connection, so that when he was ostensibly interviewing me about my premonition of the Kennedy Airport disaster, he slipped in a casual question: was the visit to Gerrards Cross of the two Vatican diplomats in November anything to do with Thomas Penn diagnoses? An inspired guess, maybe.
A factual error occurred in Alan Whittaker's subsequent article, because I misunderstood him. He asked how many birthdates I'd been given for diagnoses. I thought he meant in America. I was reported as saying that I'd been given about fifty birthdates by Archbishop Heim and Archbishop Cardinale.
I was as noncommittal as I could be. I didn't know what to say when confronted with it. But at no time did I tell Alan Whittaker I had done a diagnosis for the Pope. The inference was made entirely by him. With the newspaperman's proverbial 'nose', he had followed up his interview with me by a phone call to the Apostolic Delegation.
Archbishop Heim, who tends to quake a bit with the press, well aware of how one's words can be slanted or opinions misrepresented in any media, answered a question he hadn't been asked, much to Alan Whittaker's glee:
Monsignor Heim told me: 'It is true that Archbishop Cardinale and I met Matthew Manning but we didn't consult him about the Pope's health. If you say so, it would seriously embarrass me and I would have to deny it.' When I pointed out that the Pope's health was never discussed but that a list of birthdates had been produced for diagnosis, Monsignor Heim said: 'There was a list, but I didn't produce it.'
'The whole thing was a private matter and I am very concerned that it has come to your attention.'
Archbishop Heim was so shaken he issued a statement in the Catholic Herald, the official mouthpiece of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain. Interviewed by Michael Duggan, in a front-page article on 18 July, he said: 'It is absolutely unthinkable that the Vatican should consult Matthew Manning or should give orders to consult him.' Archbishop Cardinale had visited Peter Bander at Gerrards Cross on 2 November 1974 over the publication of a book.
Michael Duggan elaborated on the personal friendships between Archbishop Heim, Archbishop Cardinale, and Peter Bander, and quoted Peter as 'incensed', which was a very truncated version of what he'd actually said. Peter had been furious that Archbishop Cardinale and Archbishop Heim should have their names plastered across the News of the World - and in a rather vulgar style too: THE PSYCHIC AND THE MEN FROM THE VATICAN read the banner headline, and involved publicly in what ought to have been a non-event.
NO 'PSYCHIC CONSULTATION' SAYS ARCHBISHOP replied the Catholic Herald, artlessly placing the article in a box beside POPE ON SAINTS, an account of Pope Paul's open-air address to an audience of 50,000. The Pope was speaking of 'these extraordinary phenomena which characterize exceptional men and women among the many whom the Church has raised to the honour of the altar' and 'those who merit sainthood because of miracles and char-isms ...'
As no concrete evidence could be extracted from anybody, the whole thing might have faded away. But Tord Wallstrom, of the Swedish magazine Hemmets Journal, stepped into his office after a month's holiday in London, and found a message waiting for him: Friedrich Jurgenson wished to give an interview about Matthew Manning. Jurgenson had also returned to Sweden after a stay in England, and the hospitality he'd been enjoying was that of the Apostolic Delegate.
Friedrich Jurgenson is the distinguished-looking silvery-haired Swede who discovered the electronic voice phenomenon later made famous by Konstantin Raudive. Although not a Catholic, Jurgenson was permitted to make a documentary film about Pope Paul, and, presumably for this work, was created a Papal Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great, one of the highest honours the Vatican can bestow upon those who have rendered valuable service to the Holy See. Jurgenson is a television and film director by profession: for the last ten years or so the electronic voice phenomenon has been his ardent hobby.
In his interview with Tord Wallstrom he was somewhat indiscreet. 'It would not be honest to keep quiet about the facts and one should not be timorous,' he told Wallstrom.
'The Catholic Church,' he said, referring to parapsychological experiments conducted at the Apostolic Delegation - with Matthew Manning, 'is open to these phenomena, and why shouldn't that be so? Why should not the Church be interested in evidence for life after death?'
Tord Wallstrom wrote:
What kind of experiments were done in the presence of the Papal Nuncio, I asked Jurgenson.
-It was something fantastic ... Archbishop Heim was very impressed.
But did Matthew also make any Thomas Penn diagnoses?
-Not at that particular time, Jurgenson said. But on the request of the Papal Nuncio he has done those before. Among others he made one for the Pope ... I don't know the result and I don't know anything about the actual health of the Pope ...
-There is, Jurgenson suggests, nothing sensational in this. The Catholic Church is in close contact with parapsychological research and arranges every year a conference about these questions. This conference always takes place in Germany. Among the participants is a Roman Catholic priest who receives messages from former Popes with the electronic voice phenomenon.
Tord Wallstrom shut the door behind Friedrich Jurgenson and immediately phoned me. He had seen me only a week before and I hadn't mentioned Jurgenson's name or anything remotely connected with his rigmarole.
Had I ever done a diagnosis for the Pope? Did I deny what Jurgenson had said?
'I can't deny I've met Mr Jurgenson, and at Archbishop Heim's house, indeed photographs were taken of the occasion.' I remembered that Jurgenson had brought a camera himself and wanted to film Archbishop Heim with me, which was singularly inappropriate and neither of us agreed.
Wallstrom reports our conversation went thus:
But on the 2nd of November, when you met the Archbishops, you are said to have done four diagnoses?
-I can only say that I did perhaps four diagnoses on that day, and several more since then.
Did you ever do a diagnosis for the Pope?
-All I am prepared to say is that I once did a diagnosis for the birthdate 26th September 1897 - if you look it up, you will find that this happens to be the birthday of the Pope, and I daresay some other people.
And who gave you that date?
-I cannot remember, Matthew said, and I really prefer not to talk about the matter.
And so, in Hemmets Journal, while Jurgenson trumpeted, 'I was personally present when Matthew was invited to the residence of the Archbishop, and I have been with Archbishop Heim to the home of Peter Bander ...' Tord Wallstrom added:
Mr Jurgenson feels that there was 'nothing sensational in this'. Obviously he is wrong: why do the principal parties not speak up with equal candour and frankness? All right - 'official' or unofficial, it is quite clear that the men from the Vatican have consulted Matthew, or better through Matthew the mysterious doctor from the realm beyond, Thomas Penn. And it is also fairly clear that the health of the Pope concerned them.
No - whatever the diagnosis said, only they and Matthew know and of course Thomas Penn himself. Perhaps Matthew would like to do a diagnosis of the Pope now. After all, there are hundreds of millions of Catholics in the world who are very interested in the health of their Pontiff.
But in fact, Tord Wallstrom sat on it for a week, thinking Jurgenson's assertions were a trifle tricky to publish. The magazine's archive department then received the press cuttings of the News of the World from London; the story was blown wide open; and in Sweden, Jurgenson had given second option to a rival magazine. Hemmets Journal published; and the strange little tale was syndicated around the world. Journalists have since never failed to ask me if I diagnosed for the Pope - I, or Thomas Penn. I have been dodging the question.
As I recall, Archbishop Heim telephoned me on the day or the day before he and Archbishop Cardinale were coming to lunch at Peter's house on 2 November. Would I do some Thomas Penn diagnoses? He gave me a short list of four or five birthdates, one of which was 26 September 1897. The diagnosis for this was unusually long. Peter, whose own books include The Prophecies of St Malachy and St Columbkille, which incorporate short biographical sketches of popes from 1143 to the present day, thought he recognized it as the birthdate of Pope Paul VI. And it was, yet must be, as I have said, the birthdate of many other people as well.
Here we have a particularly worrying case of two illnesses together but both acting upon the same internal organs. This persons appears to be suffering from a condition known as Hodgkins disease and another condition which I would diagnose as Splenomegaly. This indicates that there is a great amount of trouble connected with both the spleen and the liver.
There is an enlargement of the spleen caused I feel by an infection in the blood; this requires surgery in my opinion.
However, the Hodgkins disease would seem to me to be far more worrying, as I see no cure for this, apart from perhaps arsenic. This is a rare illness which consists of an enlargement of the spleen and liver. This is getting progressively worse in this case.
I feel that there is also an infection of the blood which is caused by a growth on the liver: this produces shivering fits, sweating, fever, and great exhaustion after very little exertion.
It was signed: Tho. Penn.
Not so many weeks afterwards, Archbishop Heim, who had been well aware of my efforts to identify Thomas Penn as a real once-living person, suddenly provided me with a clue.
It was a hunch, he said. He'd been thinking. There were some details ... various peculiarities .... indicating that Thomas Penn might be a pseudonym, a pen name, for a celebrated 19th-century doctor, Thomas Hodgkin, who travelled all through Europe, treating some very prestigious patients. If I were to go to the Royal Society of Medicine in London, for instance, murmured Archbishop Heim, I might be able to obtain examples of Dr Hodgkin's handwriting, whereupon an expert such as Joan Cambridge could make a conclusive judgement.
I was dubious about walking into the Royal Society of Medicine and demanding Hodgkin's case notes; but I did approach the Society, and, in the event, they were most courteous to me. I was given a number of copies of post-mortems, believed to have been made by Dr Hodgkin in the 1850s, and written by him in a diary which was in the Society's possession.
Looking at the photocopies, I could see at once, even with my amateur and inexperienced eye, that the post-mortems had been written by two different people; there was no proof that either of them was Dr Hodgkin; none of the reports was signed, or initialled. A forensic examination couldn't be made on photocopies anyway.
The librarian at the Society kindly told me that there was, she thought, a portrait of Thomas Hodgkin hanging in the Gordon Museum at Guy's Hospital Medical School.
He sits bolt upright in a coat with a stiff, high neck, and a white cravat; he has bushy eyebrows and, in early middle-age, receding hair, with short side-whiskers; a full mouth; the suggestion of a double chin; and, if the painting is faithful, unusually small, feminine hands: Thomas Hodgkin, 1798-1866, by an unknown artist.
I gather Guy's Hospital Medical School has documents which might just possibly be made available to a forensic expert in due course.
Archbishop Heim had sent me on a curious trail. I am very grateful to him for his private interest in me and my affairs - he is unfailingly sympathetic and generous.
But naturally, the Apostolic Delegate cannot consult Matthew Manning, nor can the Church be formally aware of my existence. The Church, in continually applying the exhaustive reviews of the circumstances surrounding claims to sanctity, is not ignorant of psychic phenomena, far from it. And Prospero Lambertini, Pope Benedict XIV, who died in 1798, the year of Thomas Hodgkin's birth, may be counted as one of the great psychic investigators. But I think if I were a Roman Catholic, a practising Catholic, the Church might have tried to use her influence to quash and silence me.
In Peter Bander's words: 'The Church does not like apprentice saints, she prefers them to be in heaven rather than on earth. Those with extraordinary gifts may be raised to the honour of the altar after their deaths, but are inconvenient and a liability when alive.' I'm not for a minute inferring that I would, if were a Catholic, be lining myself up for sainthood.
Peter is thinking of people with unimpeachable piety such as the Italian monk, Padre Pio. 'It tends to cause too much hysteria, too much idolatry, when these people are around: if they are allowed to operate within the framework of the Church, they may appear to supersede her authority. The Church has always asserted herself in not permitting individuals, no matter what gifts they have, to stand out, by virtue of those extraordinary, charismatic gifts, from the organized body and structure in which each person is part of an integrated whole.
'If Matthew,' says Peter, 'were a Catholic, I'm sure he wouldn't have gone as far as he has; he would have been stopped; he could have been threatened with the penalty of excommunication. But he isn't a Catholic, he's an outsider looking in; and that is perfectly acceptable.'
Peter suggested one afternoon in March 1976 that I should settle down to some automatic writing in a room of his in which a crimson tapestry screen dominates the rather minimal furniture.
The screen is about six foot six inches tall, and has two panels two foot wide; it was made up from a much larger silk tapestry, which Pope John XXIII designed for himself, incorporating the coat of arms created for him by Archbishop Heim, whose heraldic skill and knowledge, incidentally, is second to none in the world. It stands at right angles beside the table and chair in this small room, and a plaque attached to its base identifies it as having been the personal tapestry of Pope John XXIII.
I was feeling a bit weary. I was not long back from my trip to Spain, and I'd been working hard at my typewriter for most of the morning.
Peter's first idea, actually, was that I needed a holiday and should visit a friend of mine in Wales. I thought instead that I should like to do some automatic writing, which I hadn't attempted for some while. At least, not quietly, out of the public eye.
Peter said, 'Perhaps you may even get some inspiration through the screen.'
For two tedious hours I tried to concentrate. I waited for my hand to begin to write, and nothing happened. Then I left the room for ten minutes or thereabouts, speaking briefly to Peter and to Leslie. I shut myself alone in the room again. Almost at once my hand, as I held it ready on the paper, moved, and four messages in different handwritings appeared: the top one was, 'You know we went through that wall like [a squiggle],' the squiggle being self-explanatory, perhaps. It was followed by four lines in Italian:
E meglio il cuor felice, che la borsa piena. Nella chiesa co' santi moto, moto, tanti cervelli conducono a Roma. Madra moto ventre John A†
A change to English, and the third script: 'Poor old man he wont do it. Needs a shot to get him through. Get away you'll lose your eyes.' At the bottom of the page there was another message.
Peter made a photocopy, masking the signature, of the Italian; and he took it to the Very Reverend Don Valente, of the Society of St Paul, who formerly had been Father Provincial here, at the Society's house in nearby Langley, Buckinghamshire. The Society of St Paul is a religious order which acts chiefly through the media, controlling most of the Catholic Church's radio and television stations, news agencies, printing and publishing all over the world. Father Valente had known Peter for several years and willingly translated: 'It is better to have a happy heart than a full purse. In the church with saints movement, movement, many brains lead to Rome. Mother (?) movement ...'
Father Valente was asked by Peter to comment on the 'style, use of language, grammar and spelling'. He wrote: 'The first sentence is a popular saying, grammatically correct. The second sentence is confused, but "many brains etc." is correct. The last three words don't make any sense.' He signed the translation, and initialled the photocopy, without further enquiry into its origin: Peter had vouchsafed no information whatsoever.
Whilst I was writing, my hand had grown weaker in the second sentence; the pressure was obviously lessened; the letters are less well formed; and in the third sentence, whatever it is that drives, or activates my hand, was petering out, returning with strength to write John. Ultimately, if this energy dies away, I find my hand lying quite still; I can't move it unless I move it myself.
It isn't always possible to have a definitive translation of automatic writings from a foreign language. There may be 'mistakes', which make words and even phrases tantalizingly open to interpretation. It has been pointed out to me that Father Valente has no hesitation in rendering 'conducono' as 'lead' - it couldn't be anything else - though the i is missing; 'conduciono'. I don't speak or understand Italian. But why, if a letter is missing in 'conducono', shouldn't the same thing have happened to 'moto'?
This slight mis-hearing or mis-seeing, which characterizes automatic writings in English too, must be a reflection of the manner in which the unconscious brain processes its material whether acquired from sources outside itself, or invented from a store; like a squirrel not being able to lay its paws on the right nuts.
Three days later, on 13 March, automatic writing produced a message that began with some uncertainty:
Da re
It tried again:
Da retta. Giovanni viva. Tutti quanti viva, tutti quanti. Por troppo. Dio per tutti. Giovanni.
Father Valente had left, Langley; in his place, Father Juvenale Pistone gladly gave Peter this translation: 'Take note. Giovanni hail (greetings?). Everybody hail (greetings?), everybody. Unfortunately. God for all.'
The handwriting was a different one. I thought the word 'quanti' was 'guanti', the Italian for gloves: the letter looked more like a g than a q.
Another sheet contained three lines of what was, apparently, unorthodox Latin:
Triumpho morte tam vita. Deum cole. Mors potius Communis. Pius
'... I exult in death as much as in life. To God heaven. The common death is the more powerful.'
Colin Smythe flew to Brussels on 20 March, to visit Archbishop Cardinale, carrying with him a copy of the first automatic writing shorn of its signature John, thus taking the opportunity of showing it to the Archbishop.
'How strange,' said Archbishop Cardinale; 'that proverb, e meglio il cuor felice che la borsa piena, was a great favourite of Pope John's. He used to say it often, when he was alive.'
9 - Keys across Stockholm
Three individual locks fastened the laboratory door at the Forskningscenter for Psykobiofysik. The Swedish experimenter Jan Fjellander was taking me to have lunch at his home, which was five kilometres away, on the other side of the city. We had spent the morning working and now he produced a fistful of keys. He locked the door.
When we reached his apartment he at once laid the bunch upon a small table in the hallway. Jan Fjellander was unhurried; the meal was followed by a chat over coffee in the sitting room; both of us having a chance to relax. At least an hour elapsed before we gathered our things together and prepared to return to the serious business of experiments in the controlled conditions of the laboratory ...
Jan Fjellander went automatically to collect his key-ring from the table. No doubt he always left it there from habit. The table was bare.
I think at first he assumed it was one of those tricks of memory which, though puzzling, are familiar. He felt through all his clothes, he searched the apartment with the blank stare of someone who knows his eyes are deceiving him; he ran out to his car and tipped the contents of the glove pockets onto the seats; he looked under the seats.
But he couldn't find them, and the schedule for the afternoon was being disrupted. To save any more delay he telephoned a colleague and asked him to meet us at the laboratory door with his duplicate set.
The door was still firmly locked when we got back, and the other researcher let us in. Then, to my own amazement, Jan Fjellander walked unhesitatingly straight across the room, opened the top drawer of a chest - what directed him with such certainty, I wondered afterwards - and there were his keys.
For days he seemed abstracted and thoughtful. He knew and I knew that his keys had travelled right through Stockholm from his hall table to the chest of drawers. The keys had de-materialized, as it were, and reappeared elsewhere. I don't imagine Jan Fjellander had ever experienced or expected to experience such a thing in his life. His brain told him it couldn't happen: his brain also told him that if experience is to be believed, it had happened. He was stunned.
It's probably a philosophical quibble, to say that the word 'de-materialization' is misleading, but since there is nothing to suggest that a translocated object dissolves, abandoning its material substance for the journey and growing it again like a mushroom, all that can be observed is that one moment it's here, another moment it's there. It cannot be invested with a purposive action of its own: to enquire what it did, and how it did it, in between those moments of time, is to see the phenomenon in terms of the material reality on which we base our reasoning, and thus starting from the wrong premise.
Teleportation, the carrying of objects by impulses consciously or unconsciously originating in the human brain, has been reported as an observable phenomenon in various parts of the world, however fantastic it may sound. Dr Lyall Watson describes it as an everyday occurrence among the psychic healers of the Philippines. In 'operations' on fully conscious patients these people are able to 'draw' from flesh and inner cavities of the body almost anything they deem appropriate, rusty nails, wire, twigs, plastic bags, birds' nests, tumours.
This is fine, the patient is cured, the complaint, whether it be tummy ache or cancer, ceases to exist. But the pieces of wire and so on certainly haven't been malingering in the abdomen or wherever, they are materialized from thin air; though most of us would consider that no disadvantage. The healers are adept at 'removing' pus and blood clots, shrinking varicose veins and haemorrhoids, treating appendicitis, and umpteen other ailments. The blood, pus, and lumps taken thus out of the patient's body may not be the actual stuff from the body, though the trouble vanishes within. In The Romeo Error, Lyall Watson writes:
In the operations I saw, I could never be certain that the body wall had been opened, but there was absolutely no doubt about the reality of the blood and tissue that appears on the surface ... But the gory mess in which the healers dabble so impressively does not always come from inside the patient's body.
In one series of tests conducted by the Swiss psychiatrist Hans Naegeli, the blood samples taken during the operations failed to match any of the patients involved. Two of the three samples were identical and the third was not even human but apparently from a sheep - despite the fact that the nearest sheep to the Philippines may be those in Australia ...
... I have watched a number of operations under conditions so carefully controlled that there was no possibility of sleight-of-hand or of the tissue being prepared before the operation or concealed in any way - and yet it still appeared.
The Japanese parapsychologist Hiroshi Motoyama studied one of the most brilliant of the Philippine healers in his Tokyo laboratory, and found the man's physiology changed significantly while his power was 'switched on'. In particular it's worth noting that his brain waves registered in the high range alpha rhythm, whereas mine in Toronto showed a sudden increase in the low theta and delta frequencies.
Lyall Watson again:
The healers do not know what they are doing, and I cannot pretend that we are much the wiser for describing an extraordinary process in terms of something else we know next to nothing about, but I believe that what we have here is a tiny handhold on a new and other kind of reality. For a scientist like myself, the experience available in the Philippines is shattering. One's first reaction is to throw up all kinds of protective barriers and say, 'No! This is impossible. It cannot happen and therefore does not exist.' But it does happen and anyone can see it. No special equipment and no acts of faith are required, just a ticket to Manila.
Not every scientist is as free in his own mind as Dr Watson: this gift, which so informs his dispassionate, analytical approach, must have passed by those who, fearing their response is subjective, dig their heels in like mules with their faces set against water.
Jan Fjellander admitted he couldn't explain what had happened, but he didn't, he said, want to talk about it: and that is quite typical of scientists who experience personally something they cannot explain or rationalize. He couldn't have locked the laboratory without turning the keys in the locks from the outside; he knew he had left the key-ring on his table at home and that I had seen him do it; we saw they were gone; the laboratory door had to be unlocked to let us in; the keys in the top drawer of the chest were not a spare lot, they were the same keys, attached in the same order to the same ring.
I hadn't 'sent' the keys back to the laboratory. As with poltergeist phenomena, PK is released involuntarily, and perhaps poltergeist is a boisterous country cousin to teleportation anyway. I have often known objects to disappear and appear elsewhere in the same house, and I'm familiar with 'apports', the term used in psychical research for an object which turns up without human agency and which seems on many occasions to belong to an historical age, to a time different from one's own; but even I thought the incident of Jan Fjellander's keys rather remarkable.
Fjellander wrote in my diary, aptly, though of another spin-off effect: 'It seems typical that when doing experiments in parapsychology, the real interesting events will not occur in the experiment itself but rather somewhere else - somewhat off the concentration of the people involved.'
Sweden, in January 1976, was bitterly cold. I was there for a series of experiments with Dr Nils Olof Jacobson, well-known in Scandinavia for a best-selling book on the evidence for survival. He had devised much of the work to be done, an unusually varied and imaginative programme; his principal collaborator was Jan Fjellander, who was a social anthropologist. Jacobson himself was a psychiatrist, and he was more of a figure in the background. The series was sponsored by Hemmets Journal, a semi-glossy weekly, mainly as a result of the enthusiasm of one of the journalists on the staff, who was none other than Tord Wallstrom, whose feature articles about me had appeared regularly since publication of The Link. In return for footing the bill, bringing me over, paying my expenses, paying the cost of setting up the experiments, Hemmets Journal expected to have full, exclusive coverage then and of the scientists' findings later on.
Also, Swedish television were making a documentary. The evening before the producer and the director were due to meet me for the first time, they got together in the director's house. 'Well, what can this Matthew Manning do? I've heard so much about him, but what can he actually do?' said the director to the producer. There was a loud bang. The Director's fridge had exploded. 'That's the sort of thing Matthew Manning does,' said the producer, calmly.
The experiments were not confined to the Forsknings-center for Psykobiofysik. Soon after my arrival, I was taken to Gbteborg, to the Chalmers Tekniska Institut, where the physicist Georg Wikman had constructed a little apparatus with an electrostatic meter; I was to attempt to affect the electrostatic field; fluctuations would be registered on a graph. In my diary Georg Wikman drew a vivid diagram of the assembled components, including my disembodied eye, showing the distance it was from the black spot on which I focused my concentration. The experiment was done in a shielded room; floor, ceiling, and walls were lined with aluminium foil. The meter was adjusted to zero, although my movements settling into my chair caused an unavoidable electrostatic field at the very beginning.
The read-off contained eighteen measurements taken at intervals of 30 seconds: two thirds of the way through there was an abrupt jump from - 2.1 to - 9.2. 'It is to be noted,' wrote Wikman, 'that when this happened Matthew was holding his hands in the air and not moving his feet ... Whether this was a "paranormal" effect or not could not be concluded but the facts points in this direction' (his italics).
Back in Stockholm, Dr Jacobson had compiled a list of ten dates of birth corresponding to ten patients' names selected at random from a general hospital. Thomas Penn diagnoses had never before formed a basis for a controlled experiment, so I felt especially interested. As Jan Fjellander somewhat quaintly put it in my diary: 'M.M. were asked to get in contact with Dr Penn and ask him to give a diagnosis of each of these patients.'
I had to give a number at random to each name plus birthdate and the diagnoses when written carried only the numbers. The diagnoses, together with abbreviated case histories made by Dr Jacobson from hospital records, were to be handed over to a doctor or group of doctors otherwise unconnected with the experiment, whose task was to match diagnosis to case history; after this the original list of patients would be taken from the envelope I had sealed it in; and the numbers checked and cross-referenced. The results, I was told, would be analysed within two or three weeks.
Jan Fjellander added the remark, to his comment in the diary, that:
A weakness in this experiment was perhaps that the names of the patients were written on the same paper which, as M.M. stated after the session, made it difficult for him to concentrate on one patient only as the names of other patients were also seen. Therefore a diagnosis of Dr Penn which is assigned a number relative to a particular patient might actually relate to another patient probably the one above or below on the list.
During the Thomas Penn experiment a spin-off effect occurred. I was sitting at a table, with a pad of paper, and my pen; I had taken off my watch, placing it in front of me. For the benefit of the videotape camera, a large electric clock, with a very plain face, lay flat on the table beside my hands, so that by looking at the recording it could be seen exactly how long I'd taken to write each diagnosis. The whole list took about two and a half hours, but at the precise moment I began automatic writing, at 14.42hrs, eighteen minutes to three on the clock, its minute hand stopped; the second hand and the hour hand continued to move, therefore it was half an hour before anyone noticed.
The clock was dismantled, though no fault could be found, and when it was assembled again it worked perfectly. 'This has never occurred before with that clock,' wrote Jan Fjellander ...
However on the morning of 27 January I used this clock to be able to go and fetch M.M. in time for that day's session. I had only slept for about 3 hours and hoped that the time was not too much - every time I looked at the watch. Half an hour before I had to get up and get going the clock stopped again.
The same clock was used during automatic drawing and proved just as intransigent, stopping at '13min. past 1200 hrs', i.e. 15 minutes after I'd begun.
When this was discovered 1225 Matthew took the clock by the sides and concentrated on it to start. It did after roughly 1 minute. He moved the clock (held it by his hands) at the time.
Then I suggested he try to stop it again and I started to get the video ready. The clock stopped almost immediately at the suggestion.
Then the clock was put on the table Matthew did not touch it. He held his hand 2.5 cm above it. Before the video it started again.
A weakness in the experiment was that the face of the clock was not covered with glass. When the glass was on Matthew was too tired to continue at the moment. However I was sitting 1/2 to 1 m away from Matthew and the clock seeing from the side so that I could see the gap between the hand of Matthew and the face of the clock. It was never closer than 2 cm. This however is not clear from the video as it is viewing the clock from above.
The clock was then taken to a clock repairer.
I really had been more than 'too tired to continue', I felt exhausted and drained. I couldn't share the scientists' simple delight in what seemed to me a monotonous game. I had said, eventually, if they wanted me to stop the clock yet again, I'd have to do it by blowing the whole electrical circuit in the laboratory. Mercifully, we broke up for lunch. On our return, the videotape camera refused to work, and wouldn't function properly thereafter.
Later that day there was a loud bang which sounded as if it had come from the hallway of the house containing the laboratory, and all the lights went out. The scientists went to investigate the fuses and found that they had become molten in their ceramic cases. My jokes threatening to blow the electric circuits of the house were not thought very funny after that. I was an expensive visitor to the Forskningscenter for Psykobiofysik.
Dr Jacobson had devised a seed-growing test. It's pleasant doing something positive. Physical experiments tend always to be destructive: no one has ever asked me to fuse matter, for instance.
It was in line with the kind of work pioneered by Bernard Grad at McGill University in Canada, with the healer Oskar Estebany.
Estebany claims to heal by the 'laying on of hands'. By briefly holding the container of water with which an assistant would elsewhere water barley seeds damaged by deliberate exposure to heat (not damaged to the extent that germination was impossible), Estebany apparently caused the seeds to recover, germinate, and grow faster than seeds in a control group receiving ordinary water.
The idea of talking to plants has now penetrated the media and general consciousness: it seems either accepted with fervour, or tolerated as harmless mumbo jumbo. But a sophistication of that, the psychic healing of plants and even the prolonging of the appearance of life in a picked leaf or bud, is scientifically observable. Kirlian photography has its uses here.
Plants attached to a polygraph register 'distress' when threatened with amputation, or when other organisms in their 'hearing' are destroyed. Nevertheless, to say a plant fainted, or is neurotic, or has gone mad through being sat in a room with a terminal cancer case, is to interpret polygraph readings in the terms of human subjectivity, and to articulate the plant's genuine response, about which too little can be defined, with a subtle and emotive pathetic fallacy.
I was given three test tubes, each containing a grass seed which if kept under controlled and identical conditions grows at a known rate. One tube I wasn't allowed to touch at all. Of the other two, one I had to concentrate on, to think nasty things about the seeds, to energize them negatively; and one I had to concentrate on to make them feel healthy, to energize them positively.
The three test tubes were taken away by a scientist who was not involved in the experiments with me and who hadn't been present at the 'energizing' session. The tubes bore the code A, B, and C, which would be transferred to the three trays the contents were to be grown in, and not until the experiment was concluded would the seeds be identified.
Jan Fjellander signed himself in my diary as 'experiment-leader' - he was responsible for the conducting of the experiments. He was joined by a group of physicists: the Swedes wanted to repeat the nylon rod experiment done by Richard Mattuck and Scott Hill at Freiburg, with additional built-in safeguards. Jan Fjellander drew a diagram in the dairy.
There were two metal 'houses'; in one a transformer, fuse, and 12 watt light-bulb; in the other a photosensitive resistor, with a 9 volt DC circuit. The light beam was projected through a thick cardboard tube; it was neither visible from the outside, nor could it be interfered with physically, or by the table being jogged, as the metal houses and the tube were sealed together. The beam's anticipated constancy was monitored by a chart recorder onto a moving graph band. The experiment was filmed, with sound as well.
I concentrated at first on the light beam, which I had to imagine, since I couldn't see it and only knew it was there. In my mind, I passed my hand through the beam.
Nothing happened. The graph band spilled from the chart recorder with a straight line down its middle.
Suddenly there was an astonishing salvo of pinging, coming from, it seemed, inside the lamp house. Perhaps the noise distracted everyone's attention from the graph for a second or two. The pinging had been immediately followed by a neat V-shaped 'bump' appearing in the otherwise dead straight line of the band. This supposedly signified that the light beam had suffered severe distortion.
The pinging noises - which Fjellander described as 'a clicking sound' - were picked up very clearly by the video sound-recorder. They were extremely similar to the pinging I had heard during the peak of the poltergeist disturbances at home, and are a recognized characteristic of poltergeists. If the scientists couldn't locate the cause, they tried to establish at least-something, from a different angle and believed that in order to make that noise the pings had to be landing on a material substance: and there was the metal housing.
'After the session was over and we were to make a control run,' wrote Jan Fjellander, 'the device started to behave very strange.'
I stayed in my chair. I wasn't consciously influencing the beam or the graph. As far as I was aware, I was doing absolutely nothing but look on. Then it seemed that the apparatus was absorbing a large amount of energy. The house containing the photosensitive resistor began to hum. It wasn't a steady hum but 'came out and went up and down in a funny way'; and, as the tape recording confirmed, the metal house reverberated with more pinging noises and tappings, just as if some person were clicking his fingernails against the casing.
The physicists and electrical engineers were convinced that this hum was not, and could not be, a normal physical occurrence. It was traced to the electrical circuit, powered by a DC 9 volt battery. A hum can only occur, they said, when running a device from an AC current, such as the main electrical supply. It was an effect which could only be caused by a current in constant flux from AC to DC. An effect which could be achieved only with extra and much more complex equipment, which was obviously not being used; nor was any such equipment they muttered staring thoughtfully at me, in the vicinity.
There was a single, loud click, and the apparatus went dead. The fuse had blown. It was taken to bits and each component was carefully examined; apart from the fuse, there was nothing untoward; it was reassembled, found to be intact and working ordinarily.
Once more, I was invited to try. As I concentrated, the voltage was increasing until the fuse blew. New fuses were put in; the pattern was the same. I concentrated, the voltage increased, the fuse blew.
All in all, I thought, the trip to Sweden has been worthwhile and successful, for both the scientists and me; now I just have to fly home and wait for them to publish the results of their work with me, first in Hemmets Journal, then in a formal academic report.
I had a letter from Tord Wallstrom three weeks later. There was a tray of grass, he told me, 'growing like hell' in the seed-growing experiment; another wasn't growing, and the third was growing ordinarily.
In February, Hemmets Journal printed an article by him. Jan Fjellander had given Wallstrom an interim interview: far, far more was to come.
The article touched briefly and, by necessity, superficially, on the various experiments we had done; the light beam, and its spin-off, the disruption of the clock; the seed-growing; the Thomas Penn diagnoses, for which the analysis was still expected; the electrostatic field experiment in Goteborg; and some excellent Kirlian photography in connection with a leaf-healing experiment.
Fjellander didn't have the confidence, perhaps, to admit to the incident with the keys - confidence, that is, in his own reputation and face.
But Fjellander has said not one word since, he hasn't written or published anything.
I had gone to Stockholm on the understanding that the scientists would willingly publish their work fully. I can think of no reason why Jan Fjellander should have turned to stone; which he has, it seems. There shouldn't have been any problem over the perfectly unambiguous nature of the experiments, and while in Sweden, I'd got on well with everybody; everybody with me. But then Jan Fjellander decided to shut up like a clam no sooner than he'd smiled goodbye.
I'm left feeling disappointed, and resentful. Hemmets Journal, I gather, isn't too happy either.
But on a brighter note, still in Stockholm, with the backing of Hemmets Journal, I made a sortie into the air to take part in a mass telepathy experiment, which was quite amusing.
The Cessna hired by Hemmets Journal circled above the city of Stockholm. Down on the ground, in the streets, posters invited readers of the magazine and the general public to participate in a 'unique chance', a telepathy experiment with Matthew Manning. The poster displayed a big photo of me, and gave information which was also broadcast on television and radio, and advertised in the national newspapers, telling people what they had to do, where to send in their answers and so on.
At four o'clock in the afternoon of Sunday, 25 January, at an altitude of 450 metres, over the district of Marmaren, I started transmitting telepathically the first of three items: a 3-digit number I'd chosen at random - 482. The others followed at intervals of five minutes. People knew when I would be on the air but not the exact time I'd transmit, nor for how long, nor at what intervals; they knew there would be three categories. With the scientists, there was no synchronization of watches. Dr Jacobson simply stipulated that I should have three figures in my number.
The next item was a colour. I had chosen yellow, from a list of ten Dr Jacobson had supplied. Yellow, because I thought it was not a popular colour; apparently there is a colour preference scale - red, green, and blue are favourites; if you shut your eyes tight the colour you see is red - and probability is based on this, so by choosing yellow I reduced the hits attributable to chance. I had to think the colour, in abstract; not the word: yellow to me, gult to the Swedes.
A fish, finally. Armed with a symmetrical drawing I'd made beforehand, of a fish in profile - with a straight line for a mouth, an eye, and a large tail, as I concentrated I imagined fishes being shot out all over Sweden; I was propelling the stream of identical fish not into a vacuum, but from my mind into the minds of others, like flak.
Five hundred and seventy six people responded; not all that many, though lots more were presumed to have taken part and lost faith in themselves when it came to mailing off their results. But some wrote in from as far away as Finland.
According to the most simple probability calculation, there was a one in ten chance that each of the three digits would be guessed in the correct position, since nine numerals plus zero are available. To place the numbers in a correct sequence by guessing alone is like winning the football pools.
Needless to say, we are still waiting for the computer evaluation and statistical analysis. I was told that there were 'a few' answers with the three digits in order, 'many more' with two digits - a third of those who attempted the number, and not all 576 people did. The scientists were ready to confirm straight away that the percentage of correct and near-correct answers was quite definitely higher than it could be expected to be by chance.
Three in five of those who attempted the colour obtained yellow. But the highest proportion of hits and near-hits was with the fish.
Fish were sent in by people who didn't seem to have received either a colour or number; fish strikingly similar to mine. The shape, and shape of the tail had been picked up; and very much the idea, so that one person had drawn three fish-shaped birds in a row of descending size but with long pointed beaks corresponding to my fish's inverted mouth, and the idea of three too, like an overflow, from three items, a three digit number; three fishes in a row; and boats with fishermen on the sea, and figures catching fish; and less defined fishy images.
In all circumstances, in a telepathy experiment, I prefer to transmit. I find it almost impossible to pick up something someone has drawn in advance and sealed in an envelope - though the latter is irrelevant. To save myself from looking a complete idiot, if faced with being the receiver, I turn the situation around. I ask the other person to make a simple drawing; before he has had a chance even to think what he's going to draw, I transmit to him what I want him to do; he then draws it, never doubting he's thought of it himself; and I, with luck, can tell him what it is.
I travelled to Spain soon after returning from Sweden. A television presenter there had ready two sealed envelopes in his pocket, containing drawings; he asked me to reproduce them. I hadn't a clue. But he was happy, at my suggestion, to retreat to a corner of the studio, where, well hidden from me, in full view of the camera - I couldn't see it on the monitor - he obligingly drew the symbol I had just transmitted to him, more or less. I wanted him to draw a circle with a triangle above and he managed a circle with a square on top. He concentrated, very earnestly, as he had with his sealed envelopes, on transmitting this to me; I drew what I hoped I had transmitted to him, which therefore seemed a pretty near hit. He was delighted with his telepathic ability to transmit.
I had done much the same thing in America, of course, and on many other occasions.
At Madrid University, in an experiment with Professor Ramos and 78 of his students, I drew on my paper a circle with rays emanating from it: 17 students reproduced the drawing exactly; 13 drew a circle minus the rays; and there were borderline cases neither adequate enough to count as near-hits nor yet total misses. Thirty out of 78 students had picked it up, or an essential part of it; well beyond the bounds of probability, accepting also that the kind of symbol people expect to receive in such a test is limited.
Because I am psychic, it's generally assumed I am good at telepathy. If, by telepathy, one means the intentional transmitting and receiving of the simple diagrams, circle, square, oblong, triangle, and pictorial images, fish, sun, mountains, flower, which are the bread and butter of scientifically controlled experiments, I have not been in the habit of thinking myself particularly skilled or possessing any special aptitude. It's only recently, since taking part in experiments which have happened to be on a rather grander scale, that I feel I've begun to develop my power to transmit, and might be achieving something interesting. I used to think telepathy a mildly amusing game.
I did two experiments in Holland with Mr A.H. van der Linden, the science correspondent of de Telegraff. He was the sender - or supposed to be. I transmitted a cube with two rings inside it. He picked up both shapes but put the cube inside the two rings. The second time, Mr van der Linden was quicker off the mark and, before I could transmit what I wanted, had already thought of doing a round face, with elongated ovals for eyes, an upturned mouth in a single stroke, a downward stroke for the nose, and this he attached to a neck and shoulder-line. He concentrated on transmitting it to me.
The eyes came to me as circles. I had an impression of a larger, humped shape. I knew the circles were inside the rounded shape, somehow. And I received a distinct downward movement from what in fact were his shoulders. I was sure Mr van der Linden had drawn a Volkswagen Beetle. I drew it sideways on, with windows for eyes, or equally the wheels may have picked up the circular movement I had attributed to within the shape, although his head was so smoothly rounded I may have got it from there - anyway, the expression of Mr van der Linden's little man with its upturned smile, was conveyed surprisingly well by my little car. Beside it, I wrote Wheels Movement.
Also in Holland, with Mr Schoolenaar to transmit to me, I hurriedly sent him 'ship', having hesitated over whether it should be a sailing boat or a steamer; a sailing boat was easier to draw so I decided on a sailing boat; but too late, he'd started on a steamer. He drew his steamer. I drew my sailing boat.
I first had an inkling that receiving and transmitting were separate functions, with a clear difference between them other than the obvious superficial one, in Freiburg. Scott Hill and I made several attempts with him transmitting; I couldn't pick up anything. Then we switched; and he seemed able to pick up almost everything I sent him.
I had been avoiding, quite naturally, telepathy tests on television, having to demonstrate a psychic ability I didn't possess, but once I realized I could transmit to the transmitter, I felt confident enough to do it in public. But presenters who had a drawing in their pocket usually got the better of me.
There is an enormous advantage in making them be the receiver. In Sweden I had a television show with a presenter who was one of the least psychic people you could wish to meet, and he was sceptical too. I drew a yacht, which was easy to draw, and an easy shape to transmit. He drew it, the identical yacht, and in full view of the audience and cameras. I've never seen a man so surprised. If it's done like that, no one can accuse me of cheating, whereas if a television presenter or journalist does a drawing which I reproduce, he can say, ah well, you must have seen what I was drawing, or heard me drawing. If I do the drawing and the other person picks it up he can't accuse himself of cheating.
Telepathy arouses suspicions in people, when conducted with the type of symbols suitable for the evaluation of results, though those same people often accept in their daily lives a thought telepathy without question, without, perhaps, putting a name to it - and why should they? It's a very common sense. The baby is falling into the garden pond. I will phone Bertie, and at that moment, Bertie phones.
In San Francisco, a newspaper editor who came himself to interview me was so enthusiastic after the 'exclusive' telepathy test he'd requested that he wrote: '... I was absolutely convinced that Matthew Manning was the real article and not just a clever stage magician who had been going around duping credulous scientists.'
He and I went to opposite ends of my sizeable hotel room. When he, as transmitter, began to draw, he couldn't make up his mind between a star with two points up and a star with one point up and did a tetrahedron instead. I linked in, evidently, to his indecision, and drew an inter-weaving of both types of star and two tetrahedrons. A second attempt produced a similar result: I drew what he meant to draw as well as what he did draw. His comment was curious: 'He had picked up two drawings which I intended to draw but which I did not commit to paper' (my italics).
I was glad to be able to convince him I wasn't a clever stage magician, and that no credulous scientist was duped.
I was involved once, from London, in a radio interview with an inane woman in Toronto. She hadn't read The Link, she didn't know a thing about me; her questions were the most ludicrous I have ever been asked; and we carried on like this for twenty minutes. After the fifth question I realized what I was in for, and answered yes, no, I don't know. I was supposed to be remaining polite, but, as I gathered later, I didn't, terribly. The programme's producer saw it was a mistake - fortunately it wasn't live; and it was cut. Now I should, of course, have transmitted to the poor lady some nice, intelligent questions; if I can transmit fishes, I don't see why I shouldn't transmit questions.
I have always regarded telepathy, even as a game, with perfect seriousness. But I don't think it's a psychic gift. One doesn't have to be psychic to be telepathic. And the more we are willing to recognize telepathy as it occurs in everyday life, as a part of it, as a natural sense, the more obvious and true that seems. Anyone can score in tests with Zener cards, and pictures of boats, though, as scientists' experiments have tended to show, the success rate falls with an increase in monotony, or because of other factors which haven't been established. Certain people score above average, and a few are very adept indeed.
Telepathy is easily dismissed by those who won't trust either scientific findings or the ephemeral proof of something which, in a non-experimental situation - their own experience - is provided by no more than coincidence. The paradox is that civilized man rushes upon the fruits of his 'irrational' perception and instinctively tidies them away like guilty secrets. Lately, however, telepathy has acquired cult status: let's hope the subject doesn't get shuffled aside like some harmless macrobiotic food of the mind.
I might speculate that my particular ability to transmit is merely a result of practice in intense concentration. I don't believe telepathy is a function of PSI. I don't have to dissociate myself from my surroundings; I have no feeling of energy being used: in producing psychokinetic phenomena I'm often aware of an energy passing out of me through my hands; it's a distinct sensation; and it's at these times the ramp function appears in the electroencephalograph; this is what is, in all likelihood, captured by the Kirlian photography.
I use a different technique for telepathy. I don't have to empty my mind nearly so much. I simply work on a shape, single-mindedly, with absolute but ordinary concentration. To generate PSI energy, on the other hand, I have to make my mind so blank that whatever it is can begin: the energy flows then, and I can do things with it. The utter blankness may not last more than a second. It depends: for a Thomas Penn diagnosis it's very rapid; to make a light beam distort it has to be longer and is harder for me to achieve.
The emptying of the mind for telepathy is a far shallower process. If I am receiving, I try to empty my mind and hold it empty for as long as I can. It's as if I have a kind of screen in the front of my head, on which I will see something flash very quickly. A bit like the eidetic image some perceive projected in front of them, except that mine is inside. The flash, usually what the other person is sending, comes so fast, in a split second, that unless I begin to write or draw immediately, I start thinking about it, and lose it.
The conscious mind intervenes and tries to turn what I see in that flash into something else. I wonder what it was, embellish it with suggestions. I might, for example, see a cube, and then I think, well, was that a cube or was it a house? The flash isn't only the prerogative of telepathy: it's the intuition I base all decisions on; and I can't recall any instance in which I've made a decision on that flash and found the decision to be a wrong one. I make up my mind quickly, without regret, ever.
I have discovered that if I am to transmit, the success rate will be much higher if I send a drawing I've prepared well beforehand. I should concentrate on it for a few minutes every day for, say, three weeks, so it becomes imprinted on my mind. In a long-distance telepathy experiment between Cambridge and Tokyo, I had a drawing of a rising sun, a semi-circle, with spokes which I'd treated precisely like that. I knew there would be twenty people waiting in Tokyo, and when the time came, I sat at home forcing it out of my mind into each of theirs. I imagined it floating into their heads. I concentrated on twenty people I couldn't see. I went to each of those twenty, attacking them with the rising sun; and squeezing it into them; then seven of the twenty drew rising suns, or semi-circles.
Pictorial images are possibly quite close to the 'thoughts' of primitive man. His thinking may have been a series of flashes, since he would have been without our logical reasoning. In telepathy we may be using a neglected area of the brain.
I think there might be correlations to be drawn between telepathy and automatic writing in the way the brain interprets information, its ability to absorb metaphor and movement, and the tiny mistakes it makes in spilling it out again. The mind is never lazy; it may have a will of its own.
On a day in March, 1976, when I was staying at Gerrards Cross with Peter, there was a telephone call from Japan.
A Mr Toshiya Nakaoka was enquiring whether or not I would be interested in coming to Japan to do a television programme. I immediately decided to accept. Intuitively, I knew I should go.
Toshiya Nakaoka, who is very well-known as a psychic researcher in Japan, would be organizing the whole trip: he flew to England to meet me, discuss it and what I might do for the programme.
I told him I could do automatic writing and drawing and so on. 'You may have one or two poltergeist effects,' I added, innocently. I explained how these things had happened while I was doing automatic writing, or during experiments, or simply taking part in a television show ...
He'd heard about the mass telepathy experiment in Sweden. He thought we might carry this a stage further: not only would it involve a number of people, it would be longdistance, between Cambridge and Tokyo.
At the end of June he brought a camera crew to my home. It was a Monday. The weather was baking hot, as it had been for weeks. I was to be filmed transmitting to twenty individuals in a Tokyo studio; they were to be filmed receiving.
These people were partitioned off from each other in little cubicles. I'm not sure if the analysis will show from which cubicles the hits and misses were obtained; a pattern of hits from next-door receivers would indicate some telepathy on the spot, reinforcing, as it were, the transmitted message.
Mr Nakaoka had, for the experiment, fifteen cards. Five were the traditional Zener cards depicting circle, square, cross, star and waves. Five were coloured, and five were numbered from one to five in Arabic numerals. From a shuffled pack, I was to choose five at random.
To communicate with the director and crew in Tokyo, Nakaoka kept a telephone line open for nearly four hours!
'I think you should warn them," I said, to ginger up the situation, 'to watch their electrical equipment.' He gave me an indulgent look. 'Don't forget I have a reputation ...'
'Oh, you won't be able,' he replied, 'to affect equipment in Tokyo. It's right round the other side of the world.'
But he delivered my warning all the same. Twenty minutes later Tokyo informed us there was a delay: a camera had gone 'out of action'.
All we could do in Cambridge was to wait: whatever was happening in Tokyo was evidently quite serious. The delay lasted an hour.
Having selected five cards, when we resumed, I did my best to transmit them. The experiment had to be counted a failure. The people were picking up absolutely nothing, we were told via the telephone. 'Let's do it my way,' I said.
I had my drawing, made well in advance, of a rising sun - a geometrical semi-circle with eight radiating lines. I concentrated on transmitting this to Tokyo.
One person drew an open umbrella, a semi-circle with spokes inside it, and a nice handle. The umbrella had a sharp point too, and above it a disembodied pair of lips. The number of spokes corresponded to my radiating lines.
Someone else drew an open umbrella. One man thought he had picked up a rising sun, or a sun of some kind, but felt that was so simple I wouldn't be sending it; he drew a sunflower instead. Several drew waving flags, the lines of flags, and lines in general - the feeling and movement of lines. Another arranged his spokes in a grille; another made his into jagged mountain peaks. One inspired artist managed a horse's head.
It wasn't until I arrived in Japan that I gathered what had caused the long delay. I spoke to the cameraman himself. The production team had been a bit nervous, and when Nakaoka reported what I'd said about the equipment, they became really jittery, expecting something to go wrong. There was a big camera with a hydraulic jack, one of those which goes up and down, and within three minutes a fuse operating the telescopic ascent blew. It had never done so before. They changed the fuse and assumed it was a coincidence. A couple of minutes passed. The second fuse blew, this time melting in the fuse case. They replaced it. It blew again, melting the main cable leading to it. The cable was made of a heavy duty plaited steel. There had been a sudden surge in the voltage. They replaced the camera. Nothing more untoward occurred.
After the recording was over, they examined the malfunctioning camera and found it worked perfectly. No fault could be traced.
Mr Nakaoka was very impressed by what he reckoned was psychokinesis around half the world. It may have been around half the world; more likely the PK energy was generated in Tokyo.
I flew to Japan on 28 June. Rather than have them pay me for the television show, I'd asked them to give me a holiday. I was taken straight to Kyoto, the ancient capital, for five days rest to get to know the people I would be working with, the producer, Nakaoka, and my interpreter. It was hoped that I'd do some automatic drawing and writing, which they would film for use on the programme.
To say that I liked Japan is to make a huge understatement. I took to it more than any other country I've been to. I thought the Japanese with whom I was in contact were marvellous, the kindest people I've worked with anywhere. They went out of their way to do things for me, to make me feel at ease, and to show me the kind of things they thought I'd like to see in Japan.
A tremendous rapport, therefore, was established between us, and it made a great difference to the television show. I've been accustomed to going cold into a studio and having to talk with people I've never met. Those five days, as well as being entertaining, were good for the programme.
I went Japanese: I found I preferred Japanese food to the Western food available; I ate raw fish, and seaweed, and raw eggs. Every day we set off sight-seeing at nine thirty from the hotel, visiting Japanese gardens, lakes, pavilions; once we made a journey into the mountains where, away from the dense areas of population, villagers live quite simply and primitively in bamboo huts; in the woods there were wild monkeys, and millions of butterflies. The countryside looked green, lush, not particularly colourful; it was spring in Japan, the best time to see it.
I was taken to a pearl farm and saw silk being woven and painted. In a delicate Kyoto garden, amongst flowering shrubs and water lilies and ornamental trees, I fed the fattest carp imaginable: they were up to three feet long. If you crouch beside the water and clap your hands, they rush for the food you give them, rubbing their bodies like tame dolphins against the stone of the lake's edge.
Japan seemed to me, in spite of its being such a busy, commercialized country, in spite of the bullet trains rocketing us between Tokyo and Kyoto and back after the five days, to be an exceedingly calm place. The calmness was pervasive everywhere. I didn't feel I was being shown isolated beauty spots and then had to shake off their atmosphere to adjust to an ordinary environment. Ugly or lovely, places felt the same. It was amazing.
At the temple of Daikaku Ji, at four in the afternoon, I sat at a table and chair which were specially brought in for me, as there are no tables and chairs in temples, to try to do automatic drawing. The temple was that of a sect of mystical Buddhism, Shingon-mikkyo Ji. It came as a surprise to me how many temples there are in Japan, belonging to a variety of Buddhist religious orders. They are plain buildings, usually made of wood, with a pagoda-style roof of shingle or bamboo, painted in fairly mute colours. You remove your shoes and go inside. Daikaku Ji was constructed around an inner courtyard, which was gravelled with a type of white quartz stone; out of this whiteness rise rocks. You contemplate the rocks and the white gravel; and you may see mountains rising above clouds, or islands from the sea. The metaphorical interpretation in terms of nature is beneficial for the soul. The interior of the temples was always decorative.
Toshiya Nakaoka supplied me with the date of death of several Japanese artists. I chose at random a date which was of a 17th-century Ukiyoe artist, Utamaro, apparently. Nakaoka wrote later:
Mr Manning has chosen Utamaro but he said, 'I cannot guarantee that I will get this person.'
Mr Manning has completed a drawing after 90 minutes and signed the signature which is incomprehensible. The style and signature of this drawing were of Oriental origin, but not Japanese. I presume that this drawing and its signature is of a Chinese artist.
I'd thought it was a portrait of a Japanese woman, but from her clothes, they said, she was Chinese.
It was half past five. Nakaoka suddenly produced one of those brushes they write with, and ink. To me, it was just a big paint brush with very fine bristles. They suggested I try automatic writing.
I was aware of having to dip the brush into the ink every so often: it was something different from the method I was used to. At the top there was a nonsensical message in English. It is a characteristic feature of my automatic writing, first there comes something silly, which seems to act as an opening up, unintelligible and unimportant. My hand, however, moved down, and I started writing squiggles -doodling, I thought The Japanese stared. I continued until the automatic writing was finished.
Toshiya Nakaoka and the others vaguely recognized it, they said. I don't remember how much there was; not all that much, I think. They took it away to the priest of the temple, who identified it as Bonji, an ancient Japanese script once used long ago in the Daikaku Ji temple by the monks. It would have to be transcribed and interpreted into modern Japanese, and into English for me. Nakaoka wrote:
Firstly we had a message in English, and after this he wrote several Bonji scripts in a state of what he expressed, 'the brush moves automatically'.
We must say that it is fairly astonishing that Mr Manning has done automatic handwriting in Bonji, for even Japanese people cannot easily write Bonji. The fact that what he has written is unmistakeably Bonji is proven by the Priest of Daikaku Ji.
Daikaku Ji, unlike some temples I visited, is very old: perhaps the spirit of meditation and prayer had intensified through the ages. I must have picked up something lingering there, or tuned in by it - to a language and script utterly beyond my knowledge.
I no longer remember accurately in which order I did the automatic drawings. One was of an elaborate bird, Indian, maybe, in style. Having been asked to do something oriental, I was consciously trying to think myself into wanting oriental drawings, at least to begin with; the atmosphere was so oriental in itself it would have been odd if I hadn't produced oriental drawings. But there was a portrait of a man signed by Daumier; two Durers, both clumps of vegetation, roots and plants. In my hotel room I did a Japanese-looking landscape - mountains, trees, rocks, a waterfall. It wasn't very good.
Here again he has answered our request that we wanted something Oriental and he was kind enough to try it. As a result a drawing of a scene in a wood block print style, with a signature that could be read 'Shin', was drawn.
Nakaoka concluded that it was Chinese in origin.
After the peace of Kyoto, we returned to Tokyo, to a curious schedule. The Japanese television people had the habit of working through half the night. We were organizing and arranging the programme: I would begin work at lunchtime, and not stop until three in the morning. They were incredibly efficient. It all had to run to an exact plan. They made for me, and for each of the participants, a book, divided into minutes, with a page per minute. The pages tell you what you're supposed to be doing during that minute. The programme was an hour and a half long, the book was 90 pages.
'Can't you do something else, other than automatic writing and drawing, for us?' they said.
I said, 'Well perhaps we'll have something happening in the studio. I tell you what: why not have a couple of telephones, we might get some people phoning in with things happening in their homes during the programme.' It was an absolute hunch on my part, pure speculation; I certainly didn't anticipate more than four or five calls being made.
As the day and time for the programme drew nearer, the Japanese became progressively jumpier. I was pushing them into a state of psychological nervousness. For some reason, as I was well aware, this facilitates the way for any psychic phenomena that are going to occur - in the sense, too, that they tend to slither in: and things happen more easily. I was being deliberately agitating: I knew it ought to have an effect.
They were so susceptible that by the end of the preparation period, they were begging me not to panic the audience; and when they instructed me solemnly not to make any 'threatening comments' while the programme was on the air, lest NET TV was sued for the damages they imagined might then occur outside the studio, I was sure I had them in the right frame of mind.
The programme, called the Wednesday Special, was due to go out live, from 7.30 until 9 pm. I arrived at the studio only to discover I'd left my fountain pen - which I would want for automatic writing -behind in my hotel room. One of the directors, a chap who had been looking after me, offered to fetch it. It would be on the table, I told him. I knew where I'd laid it down. I knew its precise position.
He took a taxi. After a while, there was a telephone call from him. No pen on the table, he said. No pen anywhere in the room. He'd searched high and low, removing every single object from the table.
The time was short. I had to have my pen, and I decided to go back to the hotel myself. Another producer and my interpreter hustled me into a second taxi. The interpreter entered the room ahead of us.
Lying there alone on the bare table was my fountain pen. Presumably it had de-materialized and materialized - like a dog behaving for its owner.
It completely blew the mind of the other fellow. They were all stunned. I was now convinced that something would happen on the programme.
Five minutes before the start, I noticed they had 25 telephones assembled in an adjacent studio, ready for the viewers' calls. 25!
In the first ten minutes, as ordained, I did an automatic drawing; it was a Durer. Japanese television presenters are known as MCs; there were two, a man and a woman. The man, Kiyoshi Kodama, began to ask me about apports, and my experience of poltergeist phenomena. I had taken with me a box packed with apports that had been appearing at home over the last few years. I produced these: an 18th- or 19th-century bread roll, rock hard; a snuffbox in the shape of a fish; some beads, a leaf fossil, various other items. Kiyoshi Kodama was saying, 'Oh, that didn't really happen, did it?" and 'It couldn't have ...'
I said, 'I expect such things might well happen tonight in viewers' homes ...'
Two minutes later, there was a phone call, on one of the 25 lines, from a woman the other end of Japan. She'd been watching television, she said, with two of her children, watching our programme, and a large glass ashtray which was sitting on a table in front of the television set, had suddenly split in half with a big bang. At this moment, Kiyoshi Kodama looked very excited. The message had been placed under his nose, distracting and then riveting his attention. Til phone this lady straight away,' he said.
The minute by minute schedule was in disorder. He dialled what he thought was the number given him; either his hand shook, or he felt confused; he dialled a wrong number and got somebody who hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about, and who found herself willy-nilly involved on a live television show.
When that was sorted out, he dialled the correct number. The woman was so frightened she was almost in tears, as she described her ordeal for the benefit of the viewers. I suppose for an ordinary person it's very strange to have an ashtray smash with a bang.
Instantly the lines were blocked with calls. The 25 lines continued to be jammed until the telephone fuses blew from being overloaded. Approximately twelve hundred calls were received. Details of several hundred were noted down before it became no longer practicable.
As far as I know, multi-phenomena are new in the history of psychic or poltergeist disturbances. I extracted from the list 216 of the most interesting reports. Mr Nakaoka, who took some of the calls himself, was determined to investigate the outstanding ones, and to obtain concrete facts, particularly from people who, he considered, must be reliable, at least by virtue of their occupations, qualifications, and the manner in which they recounted their experiences.
A Mr Taizo Ono, the 'executive of a company', as Nakaoka described him, living in Omiya-shi Saitama-ken, said that he and seven eyewitnesses saw a recently-opened packet of Lark brand cigarettes split into two halves by itself, as if cut with a knife.
An assistant professor of electronics at the University of Technology in Tokyo, a Mr Baba, who lived at Setagaya Tokyo, said that a picture hung above the television set moved like a pendulum, eventually swinging 180 degrees. The size of the frame was 80 x 90 cm.
One caller, a journalist, I think, was very sceptical. While the programme was on he placed three 10,000 yen notes, a sum roughly equivalent to £60, beneath his cigarette lighter, on a table in front of his television set. He held his camera in his hand and within a couple of minutes the money had burst spontaneously into flames. He lost 30,000 yen but gained some very odd film.
The Japanese seem often to arrange tables in front of their television sets; tables upon which they have laid ashtrays, glasses, ornaments, flowers, and vases, like little altar offerings.
There were a great many reports of drinking glasses shattering; glasses and bottles breaking as they were being drunk from, breaking in two at the stem, or simply falling apart; bottles splitting in half.
Fluorescent lights exploded; broken watches started again; watches which were working stopped; taps turned themselves on and water ran.
The programme continued regardless - it was going extremely well in chaos. Kiyoshi Kodama, and his lady master of ceremonies Yoko Nogiwa, were 'taking me through my story'. Then they showed a film of me doing automatic drawing in Kyoto.
Meanwhile, a bank in Tokyo, equipped with a burglar alarm which had worked for ten years without any kind of malfunction, one of those with an ultra-violet ray across the entrance, in fact two rays, had a visit from the police because the alarm had been activated. When the police checked the building they found all was normal, but no sooner had they left than the alarm sounded again, and again it was found to have been activated for no reason. There was nobody there. How could a bank's alarm system know I was appearing on television?
But viewers who didn't customarily watch the NET channel, viewers who were not even aware of my existence, were disconcerted when their televisions switched themselves to my programme. Their television sets forced them to watch me.
In Japan there are six television channels. The other five were suffering distortions and interference; NET carried on with impunity.
Ceiling lights and lamps changed colour from white to red; electricity was switched off; a young boy's pet insect vanished from its cage. Coke bottles tumbled off shelves; glasses spilt their liquid; a broken clock's hands moved from 5.30 to 2.50; a spoon bent as it was being pushed into someone's mouth; a guitar someone was playing fell into two pieces; stuffed birds and monkeys disappeared: it seemed as if chaos had broken out all over Japan.
To complement the bird whose leg fractured, another bird was similarly healed. A man whose college certificate was hanging on the wall beside his television set noticed midway through the programme that the print had vanished from it; the certificate, no doubt treasured, was blank.
Many things materialized: cigarettes, coins, dolls - dolls are common in Japan and are kept as a rule in glass cases; and even a boiled egg. A long-lost ring appeared on the table in front of the television set.
Car engines were turned on without keys in the ignition. Rice in a bowl jumped about. Paper tore in two. A lucky person found 10,000 yen on his sofa. A less fortunate person tried to take a photograph of the television picture but the Polaroid film disappeared from inside the camera.
Several televisions lost their colour: much more spectacularly, a tiny number claimed their black and white sets had changed to colour.
A boy of sixteen, who was pouring boiling water into a vacuum flask, peered into his flask and saw that the boiling water had turned to solid ice. A cupful of coffee went solid elsewhere. An antique Japanese vase worth £200 shattered; and there were literally hundreds of shatter-effects - apples, window panes, mugs; a model aeroplane began to fly on its own and disintegrated in pieces.
A dead goldfish was restored to life. I suspect that may have been a case of suspended animation.
One woman who phoned during the programme had been out to her garden and picked a rose very tightly in bud, which she'd put in a vase on the television set: it bloomed before her eyes, the petals opening to perfection. Another viewer's bamboo plant grew six inches.
It was difficult to say who was causing these things to happen; the people themselves, or me. They were not with me, as a studio audience is; they were miles away, the length and breadth of Japan. I believe a kind of psychic hysteria was released; reports of phenomena triggering off more phenomena.
By nature, the Japanese may be emotionally suggestible, but from the phenomena observed it seems unlikely either that people were fraudulently contriving or that all could have been imagined. I can't see somebody burning 10,000 yen for fun and mischief. The voices we heard on the programme were tearful, frightened, upset. In a way, it was as if everyone had been taken unawares, defencelessly. I can't suppose they were each and every one longing for something to happen; not something specific. Though certain people, the television production team, for instance, obviously anticipated it; and dread isn't far from wanting.
The variety of effects, the astonishing quantity of manifestations, and the peculiar Japanese quality -the fragility of the objects affected, made a whole phenomenon in itself.
Japan, as a country, is generally sceptical of psychic things. It's also a very materialistic country. I saw an analogy between the symbolic materialism destroyed by the poltergeist and the reality of their perhaps suppressed desires. Money, valuables smashed, shattered, chopped in two. Western poltergeists are rarely destructive or so sensitively pointed, though they may be naughty, noisy, a nuisance perhaps. - At first I found it to be a country, if a country can express an attitude, which was wary of me; then, as if overwhelmed, much, much more believing. Journalists asked hostile questions when I arrived. They saw with their own eyes what I could do and flocked round, their minds changed.
As I was leaving the studio after the programme, there was a crowd at the main door of the building, reporters with notebooks, cameras and flashlights, and I remember wondering who could have attracted them? Who else was working there that evening in another studio? What celebrity? They'd seen the programme and were waiting for me. I had to give a press conference.
But I can't, on the other hand, guess what television station in this hemisphere would ever contemplate spending that amount of money bringing in a psychic for a one and a half hour show. True, television is very competitive in Japan. Wednesday Special usually has 10 per cent of the viewing figures. The previous week, they'd shown the fight between Muhammed Ali and the Japanese wrestler Inoki, for which they paid 600,000 dollars, pushing the viewing figure up to 16 per cent. The programme featuring me had 27 per cent, the all-channel record was, I think, 23| per cent, so it was a boost they must have been pleased with; and it didn't cost them 600,000 dollars either. I don't know what would happen, if anything, supposing I did such a programme in England - to the crockery, not the viewing figures.
Because of the incredible atmosphere in Japan, which I think I absorbed particularly well, absolutely everything I did worked. It's very unusual indeed to have such a success rate.
I'm fairly sure the splitting, the shatter-effect, is a phenomenon characteristic of Japan, or of the East. Maybe the Japanese are themselves split, schizophrenic. Their individual struggles to achieve, immersed and conforming, in the materialist society somehow contradict their inclination to sublimate individuality in another, spiritual togetherness.
However, not everything was broken or split.
And of course, it was on a subconscious level, the psychic hysteria, if that was what it was. I may be wrong, but it makes sense to me.
The poltergeist phenomena struck at the Japanese way of life - at delicate, pretty things, and I daresay ugly things too, no matter what symbolism you perceive.
During my remaining few days, I was taken around Tokyo: at night, out of the tourist areas, to eat sitting on the floor in restaurants where there were only Japanese. In one place I was asked to do a Thomas Penn diagnosis by a Geisha girl. There were two of them: they looked to me exactly like dolls. They danced alone, or with each other, with stylized movements. Their voices twittered, they smiled and giggled faintly, their faces were hidden behind paint and thick pancake.
Toshiya Nakaoka happened to be an expert on psychic photography, catching phenomena on film that may not be visible to the naked eye. With his Polaroid camera he took a series of photographs of me doing automatic drawing in my hotel room. There were thirteen photographs taken at timed intervals, with the camera range set on infinity. In the photographs of me actually engaged in automatic drawing a white blob appeared above my head; from whichever angle he took the photograph the blob remained positioned in the same place in relation to my head. In photographs taken as a control, when I was relaxed and doing nothing, no blob appeared. The camera was four to five feet away from me. It was checked and found to be functioning normally.
It's possible, no more than possible, to conclude that there are photographs of psychic energy emanating from me; and to recall that a white shape may also have hovered above the heads of those other well-known psychics, I mean men of an entirely different and holy complexion, the saints. The shape could have been the origin of the halo.
It cannot, at any rate, be explained.
I came home from Tokyo, halfway round the world, feeling invigorated and cheered.
In the last few years there has been an upsurge of public interest in parapsychology and psychic phenomena: to meet this interest there has been an equally large proliferation of books written on the subject for a popular readership.
Yet although many minor details have been filled in, we are not, it seems, really close to any major discovery or breakthrough in the field. A great many people are busy groping in the dark; we need an Einstein, and there isn't one.
The scientists involved are biologists and physicists, or physicians first, parapsychologists second, which is inevitable until more professorships in parapsychology are set up in academic institutions.
Possibly the most penetrating research has been done by those who have specialized in a particular aspect of PSI - phenomena in a limited field, such as the poltergeist and physical effects which Professor George Owen has made his life study. The drawbacks are obvious if, unlike George Owen, scientists then develop pet theories and squeeze as much as they can into these theories. They are not prepared to say anything which prejudices their hypotheses.
It's very human, but scientists may be more subjective than they would like to be thought. If evidence or confirmation is wanted, the phenomena most amenable to falling into line with that explanation attract more attention than those which will not.
The physicist and mathematician John Taylor, author of Superminds, appears to wish that physical phenomena like metal-bending should be explained on the basis of electromagnetism. Despite worldwide experimentation with Faraday cages and screening designed to eliminate electromagnetic waves in telepathy, Professor Taylor can still write, referring to the experiments made by Vasiliev in the Soviet Union: 'The detailed evidence ... has not convinced some western ESP researchers. Even if the conclusion were accepted, one should consider very carefully the efficiency of the lead and iron shielding. There is a wide range of types of electromagnetic radiation, depending on its wavelength ... A room perfectly shielded against electromagnetic radiation of one particular wavelength may not be as impervious to a different wavelength.'
It is difficult for some scientists to accept that there may be a physical energy other than the four known forces of nature, electromagnetism, radioactivity, gravity, and the force which holds subnuclear particles together inside atoms.
The suspicion that electromagnetism may lie at the root of psychokinesis is understandable, since, as John Taylor points out, 'there is already the evidence of extraordinary electrical and magnetic activity during these experiments on the movement of distant objects'. He cannot conclude that electromagnetism is the motive force: 'More experiments would be needed and unhappily they have not been done.'
However fairly an argument is presented, if the author admits to a bias, the reader may have the impression that the argument is as near as proven. It is not. No argument at all would make for a dull book.
John Taylor is absolutely correct, to my mind, on one thing: no sooner is a hypothesis tentatively suggested, or even confirmed by first experiments than it seems to be dropped, left hanging fire. Unlike the scraps of information gathered and fed to the general public by writers of popular science, the important material isn't communicated - scientists, I think, are miserly between themselves. And it is not just a case of justifiable caution. Reports which could be published aren't published; and if they are, the results contained therein are sometimes repeated by scientists elsewhere but not, in my experience, taken further. As a species, scientists have baffling habits, like lapsing into clam-like silences, and so on.
I don't believe I should be the one to make suggestions. But little or nothing has been done since the ramp function was discovered in Toronto. What would happen, for example, if the brainwave was fed over a period of time into a normal person's brain? Could lots of psychic people be produced all of a sudden, like yoghurt from a tiny live culture?
There is no science fiction in the fact of autism. The conventional therapy is slow. Children continue to suffer.
The attitude seems to be that psychic phenomena are demonstrated, gazed at helplessly, and that's it, that's as far as it goes. I think it's a very downbeat, pessimistic view. And as public interest grows, while answers aren't apparently forthcoming, there may be a hiatus in which the subject of parapsychology is exposed to exhaustion. People tend to stick to extremes of credulity and scepticism. In the absence of substantial new findings, parapsychology may reach a kind of dead-end, with public interest evaporating, and people becoming bored with it. I hope that doesn't happen.
There is, in Britain, what I would call an anti-success mechanism, which is set into operation following crazes about anything - the occult, Indian mysticism; and it can be applied to individuals. Having been once courted by the media, the victims of over-exposure can find themselves being shot down.
It may be tiresome to be recognized in the streets of Cambridge; it's much more serious and tedious to be blamed for the non-results of experiments which weren't watertight in the first place. It's not my job to devise watertight experiments; that's for the scientists to do: they, not I, should be accountable. It took me ages to realize it.
In a way, I am at the mercy of scientists who are concerned about their reputations. Professor Josephson may be totally unafraid to say exactly what he thinks - prepared to admit to the possibility of a fifth force of nature, that our idea of reality may have to change, that in not knowing all there is to know we may yet have more to understand, that psychokinetic phenomena do not fit within the scope of our present knowledge. But Professor Josephson is a very rare bird, among birds with atrophied wings.
I don't want to seem to be attacking John Taylor to the exclusion of his fellow scientists, but it happens I was having dinner with him one evening during 1976, and he told no end of stories which I'm quite sure he'll never publish - because they are, in his terms, inexplicable. If things are too fantastic, scientists, unless exceptionally open-minded, simply can't swallow them.
I saw this very clearly in Sweden. I may have been harsh on them, but I told those Swedish scientists they were probably wasting their time. In retrospect, I don't feel they were wasting their time, though if they baulk at publishing results, they were certainly wasting mine.
I find in parapsychology that one can become terribly depressed by being involved too deeply or too much. It's common to most people who go into the field. I, personally, am at one moment enthusiastic, at the next longing to get out of it. There are times when I feel I've had enough, that I'm fed up and no one is getting anywhere so I ought to be able to do something else, something better. It may be the same with teaching, or other similar jobs; I don't know. I spend weeks when I do little; then weeks when I'm soaked in it, working under pressure.
It always mystifies people that I frequently refuse to talk about myself as a psychic if I'm not engaged in experiments or in giving interviews to press and television.
I am not, actually, so self-absorbed that I either expect or wish to talk perpetually about myself and my psychic abilities. In the Minds of Millions is intended to be a record of the experiences shared with scientists, journalists, and people in the public eye - events, the veracity of which can be corroborated by those scientists and journalists and individuals; though they are free, of course, to interpret them in their own fashion and according to their own ideas. But my private life is not completely devoid of incident. I was once with a friend in a pub, and he went to the bar for a 5p token for the fruit machine. Then he told me to hold it while he pulled the handle. We hit the jackpot twelve times in succession, and emptied the machine. I'm allowed into the pub now provided I don't go near their fruit machine.
I could tell umpteen anecdotes, and I don't choose to: this is part of the self-criticism of which I was accused. By 'self-criticism' the pressmen meant, I think, an over-critical reticence and self-doubting; it's a feeling I've now shaken off. After working with scientists for a while, I began obsessively to tip the scales the other way when phenomena seemed too extraordinary; I searched for normal explanations, examining and criticizing myself so much that I was almost prevented from working properly. I want to remain as levelheaded as it's in my power to be, but it's not so easy. I try to keep back from that gap between an excitement in psychic phenomena which leads to exaggeration and inaccuracy, and the scepticism which denies that anything can amaze one. But I'm not infallible.
Phenomena are often manifested in such plenty and profusion around me: imagination has to be sorted from fact, supposition from belief. The element of surprise need no longer disturb me, dislodge my objective judgement. I don't claim to be correct in my assumptions - and it isn't really for me to evaluate things. But what I can do is to state unequivocally that things do happen, to feel how they happen and have happened: I am a psychic, not a researcher.
If people, including scientists, are faced with the inexplicable, they seem to have a sense of threat; they react emotionally. It blows their minds, in effect. It's as if they've received an injection of some paralysing chemical. Jan Fjellander, for instance, and the keys: he knew it had happened, but he was unable to talk or write about it; he simply looked the other way. It creates a sort of blank in people's conscious experience of their world.
Professor Bender is 'shattered' because there is psychic communication between his daughter and me. Ordinary people become angry and disturbed at the mere thought of it.
If you are not psychologically reared to absorb psychic phenomena, the experience must be a shock. Scientists make plans for experiments, I think, on the premise that nothing will happen. Their premise is shattered and it must rock the laboratory floor sometimes.
I have lived with psychic phenomena for much of my life, and the scientists have not. Particularly not the scientists who have jumped on the parapsychology band-waggon.
Bender, Tenhaeff and Owen have been working in the field for a great many years, and, in contrast to some others, they know what they're doing, they know what they're talking about, they understand what I'm talking about; to a certain extent, I suppose, they realize what makes me tick. I can say: I did this, and this, I know I did it; I saw it, others saw it; even if I cannot explain it.
Professor Bender understood the antipathy I developed towards metal-bending. In the Esotera interview, he said that I had 'over the last year developed an almost hostile attitude towards metal bending'. And Professor Owen wrote: 'We must stress that metal bending per se is not an activity which Matthew likes or sees any significance in. He practised this ability merely for the conference.'
Bending keys and spoons establishes no more than the fact that the metal they're made of can be bent, and without the molecular changes in structure which would occur if they were bent physically.
The journal of the New Horizons Research Foundation in June 1976 had a brief report by William Q. Wolfson MD: he describes how he made a neat little experiment which was qualified by a mistake:
At noon on 15 June 1975, I placed a piece of paper by my bedside with an old key upon it. The paper bore the names of the following highly potent physical mediums:
Ted Series, Uri Geller, Michael (sic) Manning, and Tracy Wolfson.
At 3 pm that afternoon nothing had happened. I noticed that there was an error and corrected the 'Michael' to 'Matthew'. Everyone went to dinner. Enclosed is the 3 pm photo. At 6 pm, on returning from dinner, the key was bent as in the other photograph. This concluded the experiment.
As you know I am sceptical whether the 'physical medium' does anything directly in psychokinetic events. That is to say does the real cause of such events reside in him or in some other entity? The happening of 15 June suggests the following question:
Who was the physical medium?
Was it Manning?
Was it Tracy, who was around but not directly involved ?
Was it I?
Is it possible to tell who the physical medium is?
Will it ever be possible to tell until and unless the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc can be ruled out?
And he goes on to ask:' Who therefore (or what) is it that actually "calls the tune"?'; or, as Eisenbud, the scientist who worked with Ted Series, had put it,' "Who's in the back of the store?"' (Wolfson's italics).
There is no real answer, only observable phenomena. In invoking my name, or anyone else's - but mine in the sense that the error drew attention to it - he might have inadvertently provided himself with the ignition with which his own brain could operate psychokinetically.
Professor Taylor suggests there may be no physical energy involved at all. I wonder if we should look at one of the most tiresome aspects of metal-bending: although it can be done at will, it cannot be stopped, necessarily, at will.
I was stuck in a car park in Cambridge purely because I'd had to wait in a queue for some time and so when I finally reached the automatic gate and put my 15p in the slot, I must have affected the mechanism; it jammed, trapping me and a good many others inside the multi-storey garage. That is one of the problems of being psychic, it's an occupational hazard!
But too often all that can be dealt with are observable phenomena. Lyall Watson, in his latest book, Gifts of Unknown Things, writes:
It is interesting to know that someone produces a special set of brainwave functions while bending a key, but I don't believe it means any more than the observation that his hands perspire while thinking about a special friend. The measurements are purely symptomatic and tell us absolutely nothing about the key, the girl or the relationship of either to that mind which seems to be at least in part responsible for their existence. Looking for physical explanations of mind is like attacking a piano with a sledgehammer to get at the concerto imprisoned inside. It is a lunatic endeavour.
The basic fallacy is that there must necessarily be some form of energy flow involved in all transactions. This may be totally untrue. I feel more comfortable with the kind of philosophical idealism that dispenses altogether with the idea of matter. Although this could be an equally extreme position, it seems likely to prove a more fruitful starting point for investigation of man - and the images he has of himself and of the world around him.
From viewpoints of considerable polarity, Lyall Watson and John Taylor, once away from his baby, electromagnetism, are suggesting the same possibility, in a very general form.
'Any totally materialistic interpretation of the universe,' says Dr Watson, 'cannot account for even the best-known properties of the brain such as memory, let alone those effects which have their basis in consciousness.'
It seems a common fault in psychic research that people tend to say the work others are doing is a waste of time. I'm guilty myself. John Taylor has said privately that he thinks the time I've spent with churchmen is a waste, and that he could have me better occupied. I don't see this. It's a rather different way of working - outside the laboratory set-up - but should that make it seem less worthwhile? The Catholic Church has an age-old experience of psychic matters. Archbishop Cardinale obviously does not feel that the evidence of my psychic abilities conflicts with his faith.
I may or may not be providing evidence for a life after death: if I am, I can't help it that the form and nature of the evidence doesn't suggest something so metaphysical it runs obligingly off into the abstract.
I've noticed an almost paranoic fear, when it comes to the possibility of survival, especially in scientists. In my conversation with John Taylor I put forward my opinion that something, some essence, did survive death: he laughed. He had to dismiss it. He couldn't consider it. It frightened him, I think. It is something which is beyond our understanding. I can think of other scientists who would show the same reaction.
John Taylor claims that the critics of his metal-bending experiments are prejudiced, closed in their minds. Over the question of survival, he appears equally limited himself.
If there is one incident in this whole story which might convince me of survival, it would have to be Graham's. I never knew him, but if this is proof of the survival of a discarnate human being, then Graham, since his death, may have achieved more than he had the opportunity to do in his lifetime. Many of those who knew him were people who thought they had already come to terms with death and with life after death; their outlook, they found, was changed, their entire philosophy turned upside down; they had perhaps been paying lip service to the idea of an existence after death, without any idea of what that existence might entail.
I understand that Graham's mother, sister, and family are now convinced he was communicating through me, and, unhappy though he was when he died, they feel comforted.
It may be, as Lyall Watson suggests in The Romeo Error, that whatever it is that survives the death of the body does not linger on for ever, but remains a while and then fades away.
I still believe that much points to the likelihood of there being in me, or from me, a very powerful active force, which is not always directed, and which picks up things at random. The automatic drawings and writings, my ability to transmit rather better than I can receive in telepathy, the result of the Bender experiment, the power of the psychokinetic spinoffs; all these indicate an active role. It's usual to think of the psychic entering a dissociated state and thus making himself or herself open and passive to whatever communication is going to come through. As far as I myself am concerned, I think it is otherwise. The reverse in fact. I think I am reaching out to some essence; an essence which I'm not even prepared to define as a discarnate entity. I am reaching out and capturing the expression of feeling.
By the nature of the world we live in, I, with my peculiar gifts, tend to be in a position of some isolation. In a different society, I might have been integrated and used within it. But in a country in Western Europe, I am an outsider.
If someone with strange abilities appears in a society, it seems either that he must prostitute his abilities for the advantage of those who control the organized society; or that, should he resist, attempts will be made to force him out, like a foreign body in a beehive. At school, which is, I suppose, a microcosm of society, I didn't fit, I was a peculiarity, and they tried to remove me. I'm no longer so sensitive to it, but I feel there is still that kind of pressure.
The security and intelligence services were perturbed over my telepathic and auralgraphic ability. Could I have picked up classified information, linked in to military or political secrets, and sold them to a less than friendly country? A psychic could, in theory, cause havoc with radar and missile installations. The connection is, as it were, of their making.
I am adamant that I won't have any part in it I shall not do anything, ever, remotely connected with military or intelligence interests.
It may be alarming that the matter can rest on my own personal ethics and disinclination: my sense of moral values is as unexotic as the next man's.
Telepathy may, before long, be accepted as hypnotism and acupuncture now are; and will not, perhaps, be considered a PSI function any more. It is surely as natural as tasting the food we eat, hearing the words we speak. Just as some have keener sight, more acute hearing, some have a greater aptitude for telepathy than others.
Joel Whitton has written: '... the incredible photographic and auralgraphic abilities of the unconscious mind should not be overlooked or underestimated.' It may be that my psychic gift in picking up information which I tap in automatic writing and drawing indicates that many people are unconsciously using their brains in the same way, if to a lesser degree, but without having access to it: yet is that so? How many people think of a word or phrase before it arrives in a letter? If they believe in ESP at all, they put it down to precognition. It may have been an infinitesimal hint of the kind of thing I do.
However, telepathy, if not a psychic gift, is a gift, especially if it has to be done to order, in front of cameras or under experimental conditions. It isn't always easy to concentrate. It takes practice. No one can play the piano without first learning to do so. To explain the technique in telepathy isn't easy either - but people are trying, and learning, to do it at will. It's probably a bit like a baby learning to walk, or to swim. It's a knack. Well, what else will people be learning?
As a psychic, I think I may have a conception of the world which is different from most other people's, but I don't exactly dwell on it. Being a psychic, working as a psychic, is principally a job. A job I needn't have done. I could have gone from school to university, and followed a normal career.
I don't think I was meant to. I had 'known' for as long as I could remember, since quite a small child, that I had something of importance to do. When I left school, I was asked by many people what occupation I intended to pursue. When I explained, they said, 'aren't you stupid' and 'it'll fall through' and 'you won't make a living, will you!' I still knew it would be all right. My father was worried, in the way fathers are, because he thought I'd end up a layabout. But from the moment the decision was taken, he gave me his support and encouragement absolutely. He had expressed his doubts, he then accepted the situation, and has never since questioned the wisdom of it.
I didn't realize, even so, how my abilities would develop in the next four years.
If there comes a time when I'm equally convinced I should stop, that I'm meant to stop, I shall stop. I'm not sure what it is, but I believe there's likely to be a reason for making people aware of psychic phenomena.
People are searching, turning to the unknown, to the paranormal; many are disillusioned with science and technology, sick of their everyday lives. The more widely I can show my view of reality, the better.
I'm accustomed to the paraphernalia of filming and television, to press interviews, to talking to scientists. I'm used to experiments. I shan't be disconcerted again as I was in Freiburg by the mixing of television and experiments: in Japan it worked very well. If I am in control I can tell them what I want filmed, and what I don't want; and I refuse to take part in any experiments for which a television company has the kind of direct financial responsibility that allows them to dictate events. I'm happy for experiments to be sponsored by a magazine because there's a better chance the results will be published.
There is something, I think, which guides me - I wouldn't call it fate, necessarily; something I have intuitive knowledge of; and which tells me what to do. I was meant to follow that intuition, just as I was meant to do this job. I think, maybe arrogantly, that I have to make people aware of things they mightn't otherwise have thought of for themselves; and to a large extent I succeed. I know very well that people wouldn't take as much notice of me if I were older. I'm young, so they sit in front of their televisions and watch me. If I were forty or fifty, they would be cynical and un-receptive, which would be a great pity. I was meant, it seems, to do my job now, at this particular time. And so I don't feel bothered by anything. If things are meant to happen, they will; and if things don't happen, there must be a good reason for it.