B O A R D M E M B E R I N T E R V I E W On Parapsychology with Dr. Ronald Crowley Dr. Ronald Crowley received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from USC in 1967. He has been a professor of theoretical physics and mathematics at CalState Fullerton since 1965. His specialty is in the science education and computer science departments, as well as in the liberal arts studies program. He has also been a visiting associate professor of theoretical physics for six out of the last eight years at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Crowley was the winner of CalState Fullerton's Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award, 1970. Dr. Crowley was co-developer of the Discovery Center which is a traveling experiential museum modeled after the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, where he spent several weeks working. Dr. Crowley also teaches a course at Calstate Fullerton entitled "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" which investigates various paranormal phenomena and other fields which have questionable scientific validity. Dr. Crowley has done an in-depth study of the field of parapsychology and has investigated many psychics. His special areas of expertise are biorhythms, biocosmic energy, orgone energy, UFOs, Kirlian auras and Kirlian photography, out-of-body and near-death experiences, and faith healing. Dr. Crowley also listed as a scientific and technical consultant to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. SCS: Dr. Crowley, how would a relativistic astrophysicist like yourself get interested in the field of parapsychology? CROWLEY: My field deals with things that have extremely unusual properties, such as black holes. You get into the center of one and time comes to rest. Space and time can interchange roles and you pass through. It convinced me that the universe is certainly a more interesting place than most of us experience it to be. Because of this I began an exhaustive study of the paranormal to see if it had a place in this unusual universe. I attended faith healings and seances, conducted ESP tests, hooked up electrodes to plants, and duplicated other experiments in which researchers have claimed positive results. I soon became convinced that none of it worked. For instance, I don't think there is any evidence whatsoever to support ESP. It's just wishful thinking that there was such a thing. People are easily deceived by the anecdotal information that they receive. They can't filter out the fact that they have a thousand misses and one hit. What they do is forget the misses and keep the hit. SCS: Do you have any area of the paranormal that you particularly dislike? CROWLEY: None at all. I don't take offense at someone who believes in faith healing or any of these other beliefs. That doesn't bother me at all. They are misguided. I don't even take offense at a lot of the people who perpetrate these things. There are certainly a lot of frauds; however, I have met many, many people who truly believe they're doing something. I've met faith healers who are absolutely convinced that they have faith healing capabilities. I've met astrologers who really believe that they're doing something real in manipulating this mathematical data, and have an ability to predict people's lives. So, I don't think it is possible to fault someone like that when they are convinced that they are doing good. Although there are many frauds, I am not so much after them as I am interested in helping people learn how not to be taken in by them. I don't hold any strong animosity toward anyone. I don't have an axe to grind. SCS: You have investigated the work of many well-known parapsychologists. Can you tell us any interesting anecdotes about their work? CROWLEY: Yes. I've had a number of interesting experiences. So many of the people that I have come into contact with do not realize that they are totally outside of their domain. Some of the most interesting one are quite well-known, like Dr. Thelma Moss. SCS: Can you tell us about her? CROWLEY: I went with a friend of mine, to visit her laboratory at UCLA. Listening to her was an interesting experience. She happened to believe in the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and orgone energy. She had taken the time to build an orgone energy box. An orgone energy box is made of layers of organic and inorganic materials, basically, something like cotton and steel, things of that nature. The idea is that the organic material traps the orgone energy, the Elan Vital, in the box. She proceeded to show me that if you stuck a compass inside the box it would no longer point north. That was fascinating to her, that there was something mysterious about this box that would screw up compasses. It was interesting to me that she didn't realize that metal objects attract compasses. She also pointed out that there were regions in the box which would produce no preferred orientation of the compass. What I found in my three to three- and-a-half hour visit with her was that she was overloaded with these experiences. She had no idea of why things were happening; however, they were blatantly obvious to anyone who really knew science or physics. SCS: Can you tell us about her famous phantom leaf effect with her Kirlian Photography apparatus? CROWLEY: She was saying that in Kirlian Photography, when they pulled the leaf away quickly, they would take a photo and nothing would happen. She was totally convinced that the leaves had an ethereal body as well as a physical body. That is the basis of the aura. She was having difficulty capturing this phantom leaf effect so she deduced that the ethereal body must be following the physical body. Pull the leaf away and the ethereal body goes with it. She needed some way of slowing down the ethereal body so that it wouldn't keep up with the physical body. SCS: How did she try to accomplish that? CROWLEY: She thought that she could drug the leaf. If she did this then the ethereal body would be slowed down and she could photograph it. She dipped the leaf in ether and then put it on a photographic plate. She pulled the leaf away and took a picture and got a nice aura of this phantom leaf. We, of course, know why, but she couldn't see that the moisture on the leaf accounted for the image of the phantom leaf. Moisture from the fingers also accounts for a lot of what we see in Kirlian Photography. She had many things along that line. I think she is oblivious to the real world. She is a very nice lady. I think that she just doesn't understand science at all. SCS: Why do parapsychologists get fooled by their own experiments? CROWLEY: I began to understand, in many ways, how easily a parapsychologist can get carried away when I did a replication of Puthoff and Targ's famous remote viewing experiment. The experiment is basically one in which you have an experimenter go off in a car with a random number generator. While he is out in the car the subject in the laboratory is drawing pictures of where he thinks the experimenter is going to be. After the drawing is done, the experimenter in the car punches the random number generator and picks out a card and finds out what location to go to, goes there and does whatever is on the card. You take the transcripts and the drawings and the take the descriptions of the locations to your judges. You then try to see if there are any correlations. One of the critical things is that you set up your protocol ahead of time. You establish what constitutes hits and what constitutes misses. You don't make any of the old mistakes that Rhine and others have done by shifting data around. You don't look at one ahead or one behind, unless you are going to take that into consideration in your statistics in advance. In one of the experiments we did, we used a successful person. According to Puthoff and Targ, that is one of the critical criteria; successful people are supposed to have more abilities than unsuccessful people. We had him describe one of these targets and he drew a Chinese-type bridge, like you would see in a Chinese garden, with a pond and ducks. When he drew that, the experimenter did not go to that location; the next day, however, he did. And so, when the judges examined the data they found that these two things matched up. Of course they were misses, as they had occurred on different days. At this point there is a very strong drive to change your rules. I can't tell you how strong a drive it is to shift your data by one or two in order to make a match and get positive results. You shouldn't change your rules in order to be successful in the middle of the experiment. It was an interesting experience for me to see how compelling this little coincidence can be in forcing you to want to change your rules. We did run a number of tests and all of them turned out to be on the chance level. This one turned out to be on the chance level as well. That kind of thing has been very educational for me. I think that everyone who dabbles in this field should try to do some of these experiments so that one can begin to understand the problems of the field. SCS: I hear that you also tried to replicate the work concerning emotions and sensitivity in plants. Can you tell us about that? CROWLEY: Yes, we attempted to replicate the experiments of Cleve Backster in talking with plants. Backster claimed that when he hooked up a plant to a polygraph that it reacted just like a human being. It would experience an emotional arousal, or something of that nature. One of the common problems with parapsychologists is that they are working at the limits of sensitivity in their instruments. If you look at the graphs you get from your polygraph equipment, you will find that it is doing things all the time, even if you don't have it hooked up to anything. If you hook it up to a plant, a quarter dollar, or a piece of styrofoam, you will find that the graph will produce the same kind of noise signal. These are just artifacts from the machine, as it's working at its limit of sensitivity. Doing the experiments yourself, you can see and begin to appreciate the kinds of things a lot of parapsychologists experience. You can understand why, if they are not careful experimenters, how they would be led to these false conclusions. If they have an emotional stake, or are getting any grant money, researchers need to get positive results in order to support their future experiments. SCS: Have you been disappointed that there have not been any positive results in all the careful research that has been done? CROWLEY: I was somewhat disappointed when I found out that none of the work done so far seemed to carry much weight. I keep looking. We may find something, someday. If we do, I'll be among the first to admit it. Up to now, it's been zip.