MYSTERY WIRE — Does psychic ability run in families? A scientific team spent years trying to find out if psychic traits are genetic and are passed down from one generation to the next.
“Every culture in the world has folklore, about families where people seem to be psychic,” said Dr. Dean Radin, one of the world’s premier investigators of psychic abilities and Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). “So that would suggest that there is an element of the talent that is able to be inherited. That in turn suggests that there are genetics involved.”
Along with his work at IONS, Dr. Radin is also an Associated Distinguished Professor of Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). He has degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Radin has been researching consciousness for more than 30 years, even while working on advanced research and development at AT&T Bell Laboratories and GTE Laboratories.
READ: More than 100 academic articles by Dr. Dean Radin that are published in peer reviewed journals
During those years and earlier, the U.S. government funded programs to investigate and exploit psychic abilities, including the CIA’s work on creating psychic spies known as remote viewers.
Other governments did the same, notably Russia and China. Researchers came to believe that most humans have some level of psychic ability and that a small number of individuals qualify as psychic superstars.
Dr. Radin and his colleagues set out to see if these abilities are stronger in some family bloodlines. The team was genuinely surprised by what they found.
“What we originally thought is that we would find that there would be differences in a positive direction and a sense we’d find mutations in the psychics as compared to the controls. But actually, it’s the other way around,” Dr. Radin told Mystery Wire. “There are also variants out there, there are mutations. And so the subset that we found in our control group, who never reported any psychic abilities, and no one in their family ever did, they are the mutants.”
The study began with 3,000 people being interviewed and asked about their personal psychic experiences. Out of the original 3,000 people only 13 “were reasonably sure” they had psychic abilities while 13 said they absolutely did not. “As it turned out, the 13 people we ended up with were all women,” according to Dr. Radin. “It was very difficult to find 13 women who’d never recorded anything psychic, or that no one in her family did. That’s what took a long time. So for each of the individuals, we got their DNA, ran the full genome, and then did a variety of bioinformatics type tests on it to compare the DNA and find out are there any differences? Well, as it turned out, we found some differences.”
Religion turned out to be a common denominator for the group that lacked psychic ability.
“It turns out that there is a place in the world where there is the variant, which means that there is a deficit of people who are highly psychic … the Holy Roman Empire plus or minus a couple of countries,” Dr. Radin said. “That’s like the density of where Christianity came from, and where it evolved … So why would Christianity be associated with a deficit of these kinds of abilities, and then we thought, Oh, the Inquisition. The Inquisition, which went on for a couple of 100 years, was finding people, some of whom probably were talented psychically, and getting rid of them. So this was a gigantic genetics test in historical terms, that if you begin to target people and get rid of them who have some talent, including a whole bunch of other people who are undoubtedly captured in the net, you can actually see the result eventually, as we can see now through genetic analysis, so that was kind of surprising.”
- Scientist spends years proving psychic phenomena are real
- Previous Mystery Wire interview with Dr. Dean Radin
Dr. Radin and his colleagues are currently trying to raise money for a much larger study. He said the costs of gene research have fallen dramatically in recent years and should be able to do a study on a bigger group of people in the future.
Dr. Radin is also a published author. His most recent book is titled “Real Magic.” He said the book shows that one of the reasons why these phenomena are considered strange, is because we come from a worldview where we don’t consider it real. He said humanity currently has “a materialistic worldview, which is really good, except when it comes to consciousness. So three or 400 years of materialism, 10s of 1000s of years of esoteric worldview, which is very different and where things like UFOs and magic, and all the rest of it is perfectly normal. So I wrote the book to point out that we’re using a relatively new way of viewing the world and there are other ways of viewing it as well.”
George Knapp
Dr. Dean Raden, great to talk to you after quite a while.
Dean Radin
Good to be on your show.
George Knapp
I was trying to think you know, you were here in Las Vegas for a while, the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at UNLV, how long ago was that? And how long have you been working at quantifying psychic abilities?
Dean Radin
Well, it was the mid 90s actually didn’t have the chair, I was working in the Harry Reid Center. I’ve been working at this now for almost four decades. So, which seems kind of frightening to me that it’s been for decades. But that’s what happens.
George Knapp
In general, though, you can now say looking at your body of work, psychic abilities, psychic phenomena are quantifiable are demonstrable. You can prove, even if it’s in cases where the measurement is slight, that there is something to measure.
Dean Radin
Yeah, we don’t like to use proof, the word proof in science, we only use proof when it comes to logic and alcohol. So what we can say then is that we have various degrees of confidence in the phenomena that we study. So we have extremely high degrees of confidence that the basic categories of psychic phenomena are real. And we have that confidence because we’re able to do studies in the laboratory that are repeatable in multiple laboratories.
George Knapp
And it takes courage to do this. I mean, you catch heat, right?
Dean Radin
Well, it takes courage to do anything that’s on the leading edge, not just in science, but as you well know, in politics, and everywhere else, you’re doing something on the leading edge that will be considered controversial. And the status quo doesn’t like controversy. So for myself, I don’t think of it as courage as much as simply following where my curiosity leads.
George Knapp
And from the time when you started to now, the things that you have documented, and books that you have written papers that you’ve had published, have you seen it nudge a little bit? Have you seen at least a general movement toward acceptability from your science colleagues?
Dean Radin
Well, I would say, in one sense, yes. And that 30 to 40 years ago, almost no one was studying consciousness from a scientific perspective. philosophers have been studying it for 3000 years, but to have neuroscientists and now physicists and others who are looking at consciousness as a topic of interest, that has definitely increased. And it’s undeniable that when you start looking at consciousness, you start running into strange anomalies. Well, some of those anomalies have to do with what we call a psychic phenomena. And so you may not find too much public acknowledgement of interest, but on a private scale. Absolutely. It is increasing.
George Knapp
Consciousness, kind of a buzzword now, it’s dribbled out into the public, though people are arguing about it on Twitter now. It’s sort of, that I would say is progress. But people don’t always equate consciousness with psychic abilities. Although you’ve sort of been on that path for a long time. Can we even define what consciousness is? Does science know what it is?
Dean Radin
Well, that’s part of the problem. science does not know what consciousness is, it doesn’t know from where it arises. Although in neurosciences, it is assumed to arise from the brain, even though no one has any idea how that can be. An anesthesiologist would say they can turn it on and off. And apparently they do. But that still doesn’t tell us what it is. And so my interest in it is in the broad scale, every time you look at where anomalies arise in every area of science, that’s providing a really important clue about the topic that you’re studying. So I’m interested in the idea of consciousness as awareness, self awareness, and just awareness in general. And what does it tell us when somebody can be aware of something which is not within reach of the ordinary senses, or worse is in the future? So there’s good evidence that that is possible. Well, how is that possible? That’s what keeps my attention on this topic.
George Knapp
It seems like in general anomalies is how science progresses. When you see something that doesn’t fit with your general understanding of X phenomena or X topic matter. You see something that stands out, that’s how you make progress, isn’t it?
Dean Radin
That is the way the progress is made. And it is also completely predictable that people won’t like it. That is the status quo doesn’t like it at all. And even Schopenhauer, the German philosopher said many years ago that when something new comes along something novel, The very first reaction is that’s impossible. The second reaction is, well, maybe it’s possible, but it’s so weak that it doesn’t really matter. And the third reaction is, oh, I thought of it first.
George Knapp
Are you able to get papers published? I know you’re a member of SSE (Society for Scientific Exploration), and some other organizations that are far more open to these kinds of subject matter. Are you able to get a paper like we’re gonna talk about with the genetics get published in general science publications?
Dean Radin
Well, I would say more mainstream publications. So the answer is, yes, it’s not just myself, but my colleagues, the two or three dozen of us around the world who were active in this area, we’re slowly beginning to penetrate the mainstream. And as usual, this is largely because the older we get, the younger the editors of the journals become, because they’re typically in the middle of their career or the beginning of their career. And some of the prejudices from the past that prevented publication in mainstream journals are beginning to go away. So it’s partially a combination of what you said before the consciousness is no longer a taboo word, combined with strangeness within quantum mechanics which is suggesting that the nature of physical reality is not what we were thinking it was, and it’s much more compatible than with the idea that some aspects of our experience are not just locked inside your head.
George Knapp
You know, it’s also true that science progresses, I guess, one funeral at a time. Famous saying, but it happens to be true.
Dean Radin
It is true. Yeah.
George Knapp
Let’s talk about this title of a paper I saw that you had written in the general subject matter being the genetics of psychic abilities, whether or not it runs in genetic lines and family lines, can you give me a general overview of why you started down this road and how you would even attempt to document something like that?
Dean Radin
Well, every culture in the world has folklore, about families where people seem to be psychic. So that would suggest that there is an element of the talent that is able to be inherited. That in turn suggests that there are genetics involved. So in the mid 90s, just before I came to UNLV at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, and one of the graduate students was doing her PhD on the heritability of Scottish Second Sight, because it was in Scotland. And so she did interviews with families who said that they had Second Sight, and was able to establish that it looked like there was something that was inherited. It wasn’t just that the family supported the idea, but there was some actual inheritance. So from then until very recently, we didn’t have the tools to be able to actually look at the genome and figure out if this was the case. So a few years ago, we decided to do an experiment we raised funding to do it. And were able to recruit 3000 people around the world, and then do structured interviews and tests to make sure that they were actually psychic from psychic families. And we narrowed it all down to 13 people who were reasonably sure, we indeed had psychic talent and came from psychic families. And so that took a while, it took much longer to find 13 people as controls, who never reported anything psychic, and did not have anybody in their family report anything psychic. As it turned out, the 13 people we ended up with were all women. And it was very difficult to find 13 women who’d never recorded anything psychic, or that no one in her family did. That’s what took a long time. So for each of the individuals, we got their DNA, ran the full genome, and then did a variety of bioinformatics type tests on it to compare the DNA and find out are there any differences? Well, as it turned out, we found some differences. We’re now raising funds to do a much larger study to confirm the results. But what we originally thought is that we would find that there would be differences in a positive direction and a sense we’d find mutations in the psychics as compared to the controls. But actually, it’s the other way around. What we found is that the overall population was called, from a genetics perspective, the wild type. Like we’re the average wild human out there. That’s how most people are. But there are also variants out there, there are mutations. And so the subset that we found in our control group, who never reported any psychic abilities, and no wonder family ever did, they are the mutants. They’re the ones who are not the wild types. And so what we found also is that, as you probably know, there’s like two general categories of DNA. There’s the coding portion, which is pretty small. And then there’s a much, much larger portion which doesn’t code for protein. And for a long time, we thought this non coding part of DNA, we call it junk DNA, because we didn’t know what it was for. Well, now we’re beginning to learn what it’s for. It’s basically, among other things, epigenetic switches that turn on aspects of genes. So it turns out that the sequence that we found in the control group was part of an intron sequence, non coding sequence of DNA, which apparently, either doesn’t allow somebody to be psychic, because it’s not turning on certain genes, or we don’t know yet. But there’s something different about them than there is for the rest of us.
George Knapp
The bottom line of that is that most of us have some kind of psychic ability.
Dean Radin
Most of us have at least the potential for having psychic ability. Yeah.
George Knapp
I was curious, what occurred to me is what might happen in your study, and I was just guessing is the 13 control, people might end up having some indication of psychic abilities, whether they had ever had it or not, whether they reported it or not.
Dean Radin
It’s possible, although as we usually find in the laboratory, unless somebody is naturally very talented, and you ask them, did you ever have anything psychic happening? Most people will say yes. They might report just some spontaneous, something that happened, they’ll say, Oh, yes, there’s one time something weird happened, that they don’t think of themselves as psychic, as compared to this control group, which are extremely skeptical about psychic phenomena, because no one they know and nor themselves have ever had these kinds of things. So they would look at the rest of us and say those people are off the rocker because they’re talking about things that don’t happen. What they mean, of course, is don’t happen to themselves.
George Knapp
Of these subjects who were not the control group, are you able to track back family stories, lore? Are there witches in some of their family background, or seers or some notorious person in the family tree that had remarkable abilities along these lines?
Dean Radin
We could do that, but we did not. It’s simply a matter of the effort involved. So it took a long time, took many months to be able to find the final 13. And 13 is a very small number to do any kind of study with. And it was completely a matter of how much money it costs to run the genome. So when we did this, it was about $1,000 to run each genome. And so you can see how quickly the amount of money starts exploding. Well, even since we’ve done that a couple years ago, when we first got the data, you can now get it for like $250, or even $300. So the cost is rapidly dropping. So in our next round, we hope to get 100 in the psychic group and 100 match controls at far less cost than we were originally working with. In fact, now, it is more expensive to do the analysis than it is to actually get the genome.
George Knapp
What was the biggest surprise for you, that was the biggest surprise that it took so long to find the 13 in the control group.
Dean Radin
That was one. The other is that we saw any difference at all, in such a small group, because that suggests that there’s actually quite a big difference. And the other surprise was one of our people on the paper is interested in the sociology of genetic research. And through that you’re able to track historically, where people who have different kinds of genetic makeups, where they lived. So it turns out, he just did it as an analysis, basically an exploratory analysis, where in the world do you find people who have this particular variant that we found. And it turns out that there is a place in the world where there has the variant, which means that there is a deficit of people who are highly psychic, it turns out that in at least within the socio genetics world, that it is associated with Christianity. This means the Holy Roman Empire plus or minus a couple of countries. That’s like the density of where Christianity came from, and where it evolved. And so we’re thinking of that. So why would Christianity be associated with a deficit of these kinds of abilities, and then we thought, Oh, the Inquisition. The Inquisition, which went on for a couple of 100 years was finding people, some of whom probably were talented psychically, and getting rid of them. So this was a gigantic genetics test in historical terms, that if you begin to target people and get rid of them who have some talent, including a whole bunch of other people who are undoubtedly captured in the net, you can actually see the result eventually, as we can see now through genetic analysis, so that was kind of surprising.
George Knapp
This is an impossible question for you to answer given all that you have done. Lab experiments to sort of measure these abilities. Can you give our listeners, our viewers some kind of an idea of the experiments that you have done, that are solid, that show a range of abilities for people that they might not otherwise assume that they have, what we would call psychic abilities?
Dean Radin
Are you asking the kinds of abilities?
George Knapp
Yes. The kinds of abilities and how to quantify the statistical difference between the people you document this with and the general population?
Dean Radin
Well, I guess I’ll describe one experiment we did. We’ve done it repeatedly now and it seems to work. So if you talk to professional chefs, oftentimes, they will say, if you ask them privately, does it make a difference about the mood and emotions within the kitchen? as to how people respond to the meal? Many that I’ve spoken to say, yeah, there’s something about the intentions of the cooks and what’s in the emotions in the kitchen that people respond to differently. So this gave rise to a series of experiments that first began with, actually, I did it myself, at the Institute of noetic Sciences, but later it turned into a whole series. And this had to do with could you intentionally imprint and thereby change food or beverages in a way that people would later be able to detect? And so the way we did it was, my colleague in Taiwan knows a Buddhist temple. And in many Buddhist temples, the senior monks are essentially professional meditators, what their job, basically is to meditate a lot, and then do things with it. So we asked them to imprint into water, a blessing, the blessing would, the initial blessing was the water would be used later to make oolong tea in Taiwan. And so a big batch of oolong tea was made, some of it was set aside with the water that was blessed, and the other was set aside with the same water but that was not blessed. The Blessing was that anybody who drank the tea would have an improved mood. So we did an experiment where we recorded people’s mood. As they drank this tea over the course of a week, we saw a significant difference in the direction of having the blessed tea made a difference, their mood was improved under double blind conditions. So people were drinking the same tea out of the same little bottles, but not know what they were drinking, and yet their mood was better. And this is a classic gold standard type of controlled experiment. So from that the next step was well, mood is a subjective response, even though you can measure it and their standardized ways of measuring it. I wonder if there’s an objective effect. So we used a little plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, which is in the mustard family. So it’s got a little weed. And a little weed is interesting because its genome was sequenced before the human genome. And it turns out that like most living creatures around the world have very similar DNA. So if this plant has a disease that’s genetically based it has an analogue in humans. So the plants are used for studying genetic diseases without using humans for it. So, it also turns out that there are various mutations that are understood about this plant. And in particular, all living systems on earth have a protein called cryptochrome. So cryptochrome is interesting because it is a protein that is thought to have quantum properties. So we thought, okay, let’s get an Arabidopsis plant, that is a particular mutation where it over expresses cryptochrome, so when there’s blue light on it, the cryptochrome is activated, it overexpresses, it grows more. We thought, well, maybe that would be an interesting target, to use for intention, because we think there may be a relationship between observing quantum systems, in this case of protein, and the response to that system. So again, under double blind conditions, the Buddhist monks have treated water, they have the same water that is not treated, the seeds are grown into two water mediums. And then there’s a variety of different measures you can take. One of which is called a hypocotyl. So the hypocotyl is the point where the stem begins from the seed up to the beginning of the leaves. So if it’s short and fat, it means that it’s a healthy plant, because it’s not using all of its energy to try to reach the surface or turn upside down or something. So short fat hypocotyl, we did nine repetitions of the experiment and got extremely significant differences, terms of magnitude is only a matter of a couple of millimeters. But so many experiments in such precise results, we can tell there was a really significant difference in growth, better growth with the treated water or the blessed water. So then we just finished another series again, same Buddhist monks treating water control water, this time we used human stem cells. So human stem cells is a living system, it has cryptochrome in it, when a particular human stem cells are pragmatically important. Because you can use them, for example, they can be injected into a failing heart. And the stem cells will turn in to heart cells and actually repair the heart. So the problem with human stem cells is that they lose their pluripotency, or their stemness quality, the ability to turn into other cells, you can get them but they lose that ability, the shape shifting ability. So we wanted to see, could we make these cells proliferate more? Could they grow more? And also, would they maintain their stemness qualities? So that was the target in that case? And the short answer is yes, very significant difference, both in the growth of the cells and proliferation, and also in the way that they express to maintain the stemness qualities. So what we’re moving towards here, through a series of experiments is first of all, does it do anything? Does it matter if you mentally try to make water better? The answer is yes. And we see it in multiple ways. But beyond that, I’m now much more interested in why does it change? Like what’s happening in the water? What’s happening just in general, that’s becoming more interesting to me now.
George Knapp
And I know a lot of your colleagues, people we know in common, have done a lot of research into what is called remote viewing, you recently wrote a paper or were involved in an experiment about non local, the non local mind, I don’t know if that’s exactly the same as remote viewing. The public is generally aware of remote viewing and claims and abilities and government programs along those lines. Can you tell us about this recent paper you wrote that involves entangled photons? The non local mind? Is that the same as remote viewing? And what did you find out?
Dean Radin
Well, so remote viewing is the idea that your perception is not limited to your local space, like your brain. So non local mind is just a generic term used for the idea that our minds are not limited to space and time. It somehow transcends space and time. So when you do an experiment, involving mind matter interaction, it’s kind of like remote viewing, except that you’re interested in not simply in perceiving something at a distance, but whether the distant thing changes as a result. So all kinds of different targets have been used over the years, from individual photons, to random number generators, to cell cultures, to human behavior, all kinds of stuff. And in each case, we do see effects. So something about non local mind seems to affect the world at large. But all of those targets were local, in the sense that they were affecting a theme like a localized thing. We decided to look at this a little more carefully because of two kinds of weirdnesses that show up in this realm. One is that psychic phenomena are weird, considered weird, because of the non local factor, we feel usually pretty local. And yet, we apparently are able to transcend that. And the other weirdness is in quantum mechanics, in which the notion of nonlocality is central. So the question is, are these related or simply as some kind of a strange coincidence, I think they’re related to each other. So we did an experiment where the target of a non local mind was non local matter. And so the non local matter that we worked with was entangled photons. We wanted to see whether the strength of entanglement, entanglement is not simply there or not there, there’s a spectrum of entanglement. We wanted to see if the strength of entanglement could be modulated by the mind, non local mind. So we got a device that produces non local or entangled photons, about 1000 non local or entangled photons per second. 30 years ago, it would have cost $10 million to do this experiment because it’s not so easy to create entangled photons. Now it costs a few 10s of 1000s of dollars, because there’s a device that you can put on your desktop, which will actually do that. You’ll get entangled photons to work with. So we did an experiment where we gave people feedback, real time feedback about the strength of entanglement. And you can see on the graph, it kind of goes up and down. But we told people to try to make the graph go up, which would mean that the entanglement strength was increasing. And so they did the experiment, we did three experiments at ions, where I work noetic sciences, and then a colleague in France did the same experiment at his place. So final analysis was the three experiments we did at ions had extremely strong evidence. In fact, entanglement strength went up, when people were trying to make it go up, and under controlled conditions, it didn’t do anything just stay the same. My colleague in France did not get those results is resulted in work. The reason why this is important is that we of course, obviously you need to do follow up experiments and get other people to do this. But leading edge ideas when the physics now is asking the question about what what is space and time, and previously we thought, well, these are fundamentals, there simply there. Well, after Einstein, we see that they’re actually a relationship. Now, it’s beginning to be seen that space and time actually might emerge out of the property of entanglement, which means in quantum entanglement is more fundamental, even than relativistic physics. So space and time are created. If the mind can influence entanglement, it means that when we are targeting a system at a distance, we’re changing spacetime at that location. So it puts a new spin on the idea of why is it that mind matter, interaction effects work. Previously, it was thought that maybe we mentally can adjust the probabilities of events, that still may be true. But it may also now be true that we can mentally manipulate space time itself. If that is true, and we can confirm that through lots of many more studies, it would suggest that there’s some aspect of consciousness which actually is more fundamental in the physical world. We, not we I don’t mean humans, but some aspect of our awareness is somehow involved in the creation of physicality as we can perceive it.
George Knapp
Meaning that the universe is here for our benefit to observe it. Is it there without it, does that go in too far?
Dean Radin
Well, that’s asking a why question. We can’t answer the why question. But we can begin to answer the how question, which is, well, what is causing this structure to appear in the first place. So I make a distinction between consciousness with a little c, which is what I feel like it’s going on in there, and Consciousness with a big C, which is like a universal consciousness. So I think maybe, that our individual consciousness is part of a much larger consciousness, much larger consciousness would have, if these experiments are correct, and if the esoteric literature is correct, all of which says that there is a big C out there somehow, then somehow, we’re involved, at least in the participation of how the universe exists and how it unfolds.
George Knapp
I’m trying to remember from all the books and papers that I’ve read of yours over the years, whether you’ve ever documented or studied, precognition. I’m thinking of all the people who had claimed they had a sense of dread before, say 9/11, or people had fragments of dreams that later they thought was an indication that something really bad was coming. Anything along those lines that you’ve been able to document
Dean Radin
Well, so when I was at UNLV, one of the experiments I started I called presentment. So it was a very simple experiment where you sit somebody down in front of the computer, they look at a series of pictures, some of which are randomly, all of them are randomly selected, but some are very emotional, and some are very calm. And meanwhile, we’re recording physiology, recording heart rate, and skin conductance and that sort of thing. And in later years, also pupil dilation, and EEG and like the whole body. And the idea was that many people report a feeling of something that’s about to unfold. So they don’t know it. They don’t cognize it, but they feel it. That’s the word presentiment. And so figured if that were true, then maybe we would see a change in somebody’s physiology, before an emotional picture comes up. And that would be different than before a calm picture comes up. So we did a series of experiments, we got really good results, so good that my colleagues didn’t believe it. So they started doing their own replications and they were able to replicate it. So go forward 30 years almost. And there are now something like 48 experiments done by labs around the world and it’s very clear that it is a repeatable effect, that what we see is for different kinds of physiology, different time lengths. So if we’re looking at skin conductance, roughly three seconds in advance of some unpredictable event, you will begin to see a change in skin conductance, which is a reflection of sympathetic nervous activity. You see a change about one second for brain activity, you see a change of about seven or eight seconds in heart rate, in pupil dilation about two seconds. So the time length or the pre-stimulus period seems to reflect the way the physiology goes. So why is heart rate take longer? Well, because it takes a lot longer to respond to a stimulus, and skin conductance and all the other factors we’re seeing beforehand is almost like an echo, a pre-echo of what you see afterwards. So that’s a line of experiments, that, I didn’t really start them I picked them up after they had lain fallow for almost 20 years. And finally, the technology was good enough to be able to do it at a more refined form. And people have picked it up since then. And now it’s quite clear that there’s something going on.
George Knapp
One other topic I want to touch on. I know you are not a UFO guy, you keep abreast of it because of colleagues of yours are interested in it. Jacques Vallée, Eric Davis and others have commented and written about UFO events, and consciousness related activities. That there are also psychic phenomena associated when we see these things. We just interviewed a couple of guys who are summoners. They’re not Steven Greer disciples, they go out and they mentally focus on the sky and a pretty good percentage of the time, things appear. They’re not classic flying saucers, they are globs. Weird stuff. Are you at all interested in that? Are you up on that? Do you have any sort of central ideas or theories about consciousness as it relates to UFO events, and vice versa?
Dean Radin
Yeah, I’ve tracked the literature for a long time. And I know most of the main players in it, I guess I fall into the Jacques Vallée school here. And that I think what we’re dealing with, at least with some UFOs, is what amounts to an imaginal world. It’s the world that’s somehow halfway in between physics and psychology. And given all of the other studies that I’ve done on colleagues have done looking at the relationship between mind and matter, it seems as though if you’re really really want something to happen, focused intention, the likelihood that it’s going to happen simply increases. So if one vary with focused attention wants a blob of light to appear, and they do it a lot, and they have practice on it. And they have to have a little bit of talent, the likelihood that a blob of light is going to appear. The question is, well, is that in separate entity? Is it like a actual UFO? Is it an ET? What is that? Well, we don’t know what that is. But I do pay attention to these things. In fact, just Historically, the reason why I like the way that Jacques puts this is that people have been reporting these kinds of events forever. Basically. There’s even a website devoted to fairies, or the little people, where there’s hundreds and hundreds of reports. What’s interesting is, first of all, the reports seem real, you know, they’re these are not all being made up, people do see little things. They tend to see them in places where they expect to see them. So some of it is expectation, or, you know, our perceptions are driven by expectation. But I think some of it also is that the world is more flexible than we generally think. From a classical physics perspective, everything out there is solid, like nothing’s happening. Well, we know that space and time are flexible. In quantum mechanics, we know that there’s much more interconnectedness. And we thought, it has something to do with consciousness. So the idea that people are seeing things that are doing behavior that we don’t understand very well, it seems more mind like and machine like. To me, this begins to make a certain degree of sense. It’s as though we’re projecting out of our minds, all of it, including things that don’t make physical sense, because they weren’t starting from physicality in the first place. So, yeah, so that I mean, that’s my take on it. But ultimately, when people say, well, are the really the ETs and all the rest? I don’t know.
George Knapp
I would think it would be encouraging to some degree that suddenly, in the last couple of years, UFOs have become at least a little bit respectable in the media, in Congress. And I would hope that would spill over into what you do, as well.
Dean Radin
Well, I would hope so too. So you notice though, that the way that it’s spilling over is in terms of military threat, right? This is what makes people pay attention, there could be a threat. Well, that’s what gets the money going. I think most people involved in the UFO business, even ones interested in military threats, realize that some of this has to do with elements of the mind that we don’t understand very well. So yes, it would be very nice if some of that interest were to at least begin to entertain the possibility that consciousness is related in some way to these kinds of phenomena, and probably a whole array of other things as well.
George Knapp
Dean Radin, always great to talk to you. What’s your latest book, I want to give it a plug to our viewers who are interested in your work.
Dean Radin
My latest book is called Real Magic. And it’s looking at the whole range of esoteric lower, both east and west. And showing that one of the reasons why these phenomena are considered strange, is because we come from a worldview where it doesn’t admit it, right, we come from a materialistic worldview, which is really good, except when it comes to consciousness. So three or 400 years of materialism, 10s of 1000s of years of esoteric worldview, which is very different and where things like UFOs and magic, and all the rest of it is perfectly normal. So I wrote the book to point out that we’re using a relatively new way of viewing the world and there are other ways of viewing it as well.
George Knapp
Well, that’s a great read. I read it a couple of years ago when it came out. I highly recommend it. And you’re always welcome here or on Coast to Coast whenever you want to come back and have something new to talk about.
Dean Radin
Thank you.
George Knapp
Thanks, Dean.
