PK Parties By: Jack Houck PK Parties are events, somewhat unusual events, where people gather together to learn how to perform PK. PK stands for psychokinesis, or mind over matter! PK Parties work the best when people have fun and generate a lot of emotion, much like a party. Thus, I named them PK Parties. The purpose of this paper is to give information about the PK Parties, give their history, and provide all you need to learn how to perform PK yourself --- even give PK Parties yourself. Over 8500 people have attended my PK Parties as of May 1988. About 85% of them have at least had what I call the "kindergarten," metal bending experience. These parties are really not about metal bending. They are about learning how to use the power of your mind. Metal is a very useful feedback mechanism. Performing PK is really simple; we do it all the time. Often people are not aware how they can use their PK ability. There are some aspects of learning this technique that can help a lot of people in their daily lives. I am an aeronautical and astronautical engineer. I taught aircraft structures at the University of Michigan. I now work for a very large aerospace company in Southern California, managing an advanced research group. Unfortunately, my work with the company is not nearly as advanced as the information I am including in this paper. All of my work in PK and other areas of parapsychology is done on my own time, as an independent researcher. My interest in paranormal phenomena began in the mid-1970's when I learned about remote viewing by reading an article in the IEEE Spectruml written by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. They were employed by Stanford Research Institute (SRI) International at that time. "Remote viewing" is a name given to clairvoyance by these SRI researchers in order to give this phenomenon a more scientific sounding name. Remote viewing permits people to perceive things at a remote site, without using their physical senses. That is an anomaly in our current formal science, just as is PK. Our current science does not have an explanation for these phenomena. I was very skeptical about remote viewing when I was first exposed to the idea. However, I did continue to read about it and finally met Puthoff and Targ at SRI. They suggested that I run my own experiments in remote viewing. That idea appealed to me, so I found a women who seemed to be able to perceive things at remote locations and I asked her to participate in some experiments. These experiments worked, much to my amazement. A few years later, I wrote a conceptual model2 of how the brain and mind might interact with nature in an attempt to explain remote viewing. In trying to put together a model to explain these phenomena, I had to stretch my scientific background. Even though current physics works very well for most scientific applications, it does not go far enough to explain paranormal phenomena. By the end of the 1970's, I had conducted enough remote viewing experiments until I personally was convinced that that phenomenon was real. I wrote this model and was challenged to test it. I accepted that challenge as the standard scientific approach wherein people postulate a model, test its predictions, and if it doesn't work, fix it. I had heard of some PK experimental results that had suggested time shifts, much like the time shifts that I had noted in the remote viewing data. In remote viewing, when a person sends his mind out to a remote place, he does not necessarily get the information from that remote place at the current, what we call, time. Sometimes people get information from another time, like four, or even forty years ago. That is a real problem to understand --- where is that information stored? In part of my model I suggest that when you send your mind out to a point in space, the mind sweeps in time. I recognize that there are a lot of other models about time. As an engineer, it is very difficult to throw out time. Learning how the mind accesses stored information from some other time, which can sometimes be in the future, is a real important accomplishment. What I found was that the mind seems to lock onto the time of a peak emotional event at that remote place. One time I had a remote viewer go to the latitude and longitude coordinates where there was a sunken ship. There it was, sitting with half of it above the ocean, rusting with lots of seagulls sitting on it. The remote viewer described a scene that had a lot of excitement --- people running around, explosions occurring, and generally a lot of panic --- while the ship was sinking. That, of course, was the peak emotional event at that point in space. I used to say that if you want some paranormal phenomenon to happen at the current time, then you deliberately create a peak emotional event. In remote viewing, viewers use meditation techniques, while being very quiet, to remove the mental noise. At PK Parties we do just the opposite. We create as much noise and as much excitement as we possibly can, and hope that this becomes the biggest peak emotional event that has ever occurred at that place at anytime. In effect, all the people in the group have their minds lock onto the present time, and we get the paranormal events happening consistently. To test this idea, in January 1981, I decided to have a party wherein people could learn how to perform psychokinesis. Severin Dahlen, a metallurgist, came into my office a week before the first PK Party and said that he knew how to teach people to bend metal with their minds. He had been working with children at the University of California - Irvine. They had a little boy who could stare at a key and burn a hole through it. Since I was about to have this PK Party, I asked Severin if he would help at the party by giving the metal bending instructions. The instructions he gave at that first PK Party are identical to those still given at PK Parties. I gathered 21 people in my home in Huntington Beach, California. Basically, half of them were people I met through the remote viewing research who were interested in psychic types of things. The other half were members of a tennis club I belong to, and they didn't know much about using their minds. I had stopped at the Sears Company hardware department on the way home that night and purchased a 5/ 16" steel rod that I could not bend with all my strength. I said to myself, "Boy, if that gets bent, I will be impressed." At the first PK Party, we were sitting in a circle and I had passed out my grandparents antique silverware --- it has all been dedicated to science now. There was a lot of giggling and laughter because I do not think people believed that this was really going to happen. I don't think that I thought it was going to happen either. However, I was testing this conceptual model and had to follow through with the experiment. All of a sudden a fourteen-year-old boy had the fork he was holding begin to have the head slowly fall over. He started screaming and yelling; he jumped up out of his chair. That got everyone's attention so that everyone in the room saw the fork bending over. As I looked around the room, everyone's eyes were huge as they stared at this boy's fork. I like to call this an instant, belief system change. All of a sudden, other people found that the silverware they were holding became soft in their hands. They later described it as if the metal became a little warm and felt like putty in their hands. It seems to lose its structure for a few seconds. The metal stays soft for between five and thirty seconds. Here they were, finding what is normally nice hard silverware becoming soft and structureless in their hands. Most of the people in the room then began to wildly bend up the silverware. They were screaming and yelling, and this was a real peak emotional event occurring in my living room. In the middle of all this pandemonium I reached back to my dining room table and grabbed the big steel rod, handed it to the fourteen-year-old boy and said, "Bend this!!" He looked at me and said "I can't do that." Then I said "Don't ever say can't --- that is like putting a block in your mind." He agreed to try and started rubbing his hand up and down the steel rod. After about five minutes I again heard him yelling. He was jumping up and down in the middle of the living room. With no more force than simply moving his hands while holding the rod over his head, he bent that rod into a 270 degree turn. The next day I rushed over to the Sears store and bought all the rest of the rods that size in their bin and took them into the laboratory. We had the head metallurgist try to physically bend one of the similar rods. He was a big man, about 200 lbs. He was not able to bend the rod until he finally bent it over his knee, using all his might --- red faced and all. Seeing the difference between the young man doing it with no apparent effort at the PK Party, and the big metallurgist using a tremendous effort to bend it physically, really impressed me. There were only two people at the first PK Party who did not achieve what I now call "kindergarten bending." One was a lady who had told a friend of hers that she did not see any sense in bending silverware. It was as if she put up a mental block. The other person who did not bend was so busy analyzing what was going on that he didn't succeed either. When we do kindergarten bending at the PK Parties, what we are really looking for is to find the moment when the metal gets soft and loses its structure in your hands. You may feel heat coming out of the metal. It often feels like it changes consistency. When you feel the moment that it gets soft, you push on it a little. I named this process "warm forming." I use that term to make it sound more scientific, as Puthoff and Targ called clairvoyance "remote viewing." I call this warm forming because when the silverware feels a little warm, you form it. In kindergarten, you use two hands and apply about one tenth the pressure necessary to bend the silverware physically. Almost everyone can bend silverware physically. However, in kindergarten metal bending we are using both hands, so that you will learn to find the time when the metal loses its structure, gets soft, and becomes a little warm. Then you will be aware of the difference between what it takes to bend the metal physically and with PK. After we do kindergarten bending, we move into "high school" bending where we do things beyond physical strength. At the beginning of PK Parties I always talk about the history of PK Parties and show examples of bent up flatware and silverware. Many forks are mangled beyond recognition, with the tines twisted all around. Spoons are also shown that have their handles twisted around many times. Some people like to call this stuff "psychic artwork." It is not really good for much except that some find that putting it on their desk at work gives their boss a new perception of what they can do; or putting it on your mantle creates many hours of discussion; or it may be made into wind chimes. If you are into the healing arts, it is useful to put some of this bent up silverware around where you do the healing because people come in, see the bent silverware, and ask about it. This gives you an opportunity to talk about PK --- mind over matter, and their belief that you might be able to help heal them begins to grow. This then makes it much easier to help them be healed. Obviously, if you can bend metal, you should be able to heal bones, skin, etc. Kindergarten PK is always fun because it lets you go home with a bunch of pieces of bent up trophies. Kindergarten is where we all start at the PK Parties. Sometimes people bring ridiculous things to the party like crow bars, heavy chains, etc. They are really into challenging and fundamentally are not interested in experiencing the phenomena themselves. I insist that we all start with kindergarten because once you feel the moment when the metal gets soft in your own hands, then you are aware that you did it. I really want to teach people how to do it. I am not into demonstrating. At the parties everyone gets to see plenty of people bending metal. Once you learn how to do this, then achieving goals and doing other important things in your life is much easier. PK can even be used for the little things. Once a lady wrote that she was able to bend a curtain rod into the correct shape for her room. Another man called to say that he had taken a nut off a bolt from the bottom of his car with his hand after he remembered the PK --- he had broken all his normal tools on that nut before remembering. When you are bending the kindergarten silverware, if you were simply to bend it over, the head of the fork or spoon would stop when it hits the handle. To go on and wrap the head around the handle many times, you need to pull the head off to the side so that it misses the handle as you form it. It only stays soft for between 5 and 30 seconds, so it is important to really go at it for the few seconds that the metal is soft and has lost its structure. Also, you will feel the metal "freeze" or reharden. The grain boundaries resolidify and the result is that the soft metal abruptly gets hard again --- and you are aware that you have successfully PKed it. Sometimes, while you are doing kindergarten bending, you find that there is some guy looking over your shoulder saying, "AH, you are just bending it physically." That really doesn't help you at all. So I suggest using a little technique that I developed to shut down the interference from the skeptics. You simply get a big smile on your face, look at the skeptic, and shout "SHUT UP!" I really don't want the skeptics to get in the way. I want you to learn how to do the PK and have lots of fun in the process. High school bending is when you bend something that is not possible with normal physical strength. People who graduate from high school bending earn a "Certified Warm Former" badge at my PK Parties. I used to give people a certified warm former badge after they graduated from kindergarten bending, but I found myself punching out so many badges that I changed the requirement to get the badge after graduating from "high school" bending. At the conventions where I give PK Parties, it is always fun to see the people wearing their badges the day after the party while carrying around their bent up silverware and the more significantly bent material. During my PK Party lecture I always show examples of high school bending. These are metal rods, typically 3/8" extruded aluminum rods, that have been formed into odd shapes, and steel rods, up to a half inch, that have been bent. Small ladies can bend the 1/2" rods. I even have some old fashioned hacksaw blades that have been formed into spirals. Usually, if too much physical force is applied to the old fashioned hacksaw blades, they break in multiple pieces because they are so brittle. At the PK Parties the hacksaw blades become pliable, annealed, in a similar process to when the silverware gets soft. I think that the dislocations in the grain boundaries of the metal act as transducers to some unknown form of energy. The mind establishes a link between this energy source and energy is dumped into the grain boundaries. The energy has nowhere to go so it turns into heat. This is the same process that happens with known energy that gets dumped inside of another material as with neutrons, x-rays, and microwaves. This heat melts the grain boundaries, and the metal feels like it has lost its structure because the grains inside the metal slip with respect to each other. The heat is transferred away from the grain boundaries by normal conduction, and eventually the "freezing" point of the metal is reached and the metal becomes hard again. The reason that the metal only feels warm is that the grain boundaries are very small compared to the size of the grains in the metal. The thermal conductivity of the metal also plays a role in that stainless steel has a very low thermal conductivity, which allows a metal bender to have more time to find the moment when the metal is soft. Metals like copper and silver have very high thermal conductivity and it is hard to find the moment when they become soft. Instead, that metal becomes very hot, and as people continue to PK it, the overall temperature of the metal increases until the people have to drop the metal or get burned. Sometimes so much energy gets dumped into the grain boundaries that the metal first melts, turns to liquid, and then turns to gas. When this occurs inside the metal, it can blow the metal apart and sometimes a PK metal bend is accompanied with a loud "pop." Some studies have shown that material is missing after being PKed3. If it had turned to gas and escaped in that form, then this is a possible explanation. If metal has some prestress in it and it is placed in an oven, the metal will curl up in order to relieve the stress. Metallurgists call this creep. Similarly, if the grain boundaries are temporarily softened using PK and the metal has some prestress in it, then the metal will change shape in order to relieve that stress and appear to bend spontaneously. We have run experiments4 where we have put hacksaw blades in the middle of a PK Party where the only people who knew that they were there were Severin Dahlen and myself. There was a control hacksaw blade at another home which came from the same package. All the blades were tested for their hardness before several PK Parties. The ones exposed in the PK Parties continued to get softer and the control never changed hardness. We think the annealing of these hacksaw blades occurred as a result of a field effect that was generated within the circle of people during their PK metal bending efforts. These hacksaw blades went from their super hardened state to a hardness level of annealed steel after exposure to four PK Parties. That was a significant experiment. You can imagine large groups getting together to do significant things. I don't tell the jail population about this. However, if ever the day comes that the convicts do begin to bend the bars, we have developed a method for manufacturing jail bars that are PK proof. One of the things we do in high school bending is buckle the bowls of silver plated spoons. These spoon bowls are part of a shell structure which makes them very difficult to buckle with physical force. I originally took a bunch of these spoons down to my tennis club and had some of the big jocks try to buckle the bowls. Not one buckled. That was when I was convinced that this is a difficult task to perform physically. However, at the PK Parties, a lot of people buckle the silver plated spoon bowls. This feat earns people a "Certified Warm Former" badge at my PK Parties. At many PK Parties, I have people sprout seeds in their hands. Once you have learned how to do the metal, you can sprout the seeds. It is a very similar process. Instead of using the command "bend," you use the command "sprout." I often use soy bean seeds and put them in water at the beginning of the party so that they have absorbed some moisture by the time people attempt to sprout them. Graduate school is where people hold the bottom of the handles of two dinner forks, one in each hand. You do not have to be a graduate of kindergarten to go to metal bending graduate school. It is best to start with forks that are perfectly normal, no twists, no uneven spacing between the tines; in other words, they look just like they were when brand new. This way you will be aware at the end of graduate school if they bent by themselves, spontaneously. Do not use the other hand to bend them in graduate school. The hope is that the forks have some stress put into them at the time of manufacture, and that when this is relieved the forks will bend by themselves. In graduate school we hold these forks, one in each hand, and command them to bend. It's kind of silly sitting around shouting at the forks. Often they bend. One time at a PK Party in downtown Los Angeles, there was a man staring intently at the fork in his right hand. From across the room, I saw the fork in his left hand bend over. He didn't see it. So I went over to him and said, "Did you see the fork in your left hand?" He turned his head to look at it and said, "Wow, how did that happen?" As he said that, the fork in his right hand bent over. He was really upset because he didn't get to see either one of them bend spontaneously. But the rest of us did. It is really convincing when you see the forks bend spontaneously. About 10% of the people who have attended PK Parties have reported that at least one of their graduate school forks has bent spontaneously. Many bend over so significantly that it is very obvious to the naked eye. It is like releasing a thought form. The thoughts cannot work to accomplish what you want when you hold onto them. But if you release a powerful thought form, then its information can set up the mind links to accomplish the goal --- in this case, transfer energy from some other dimension into the grain boundaries of the metal to help it bend. The technique for metal bending, or any other form of PK for that matter, has three simple steps. First, you connect your mind to what you want to affect by simply thinking about it. Just before I give you the final instructions, I will give you a specific technique for how to do this. There are many other techniques --- and they all work. You certainly are welcome to try other techniques on your own. At PK Parties, I like people to use my technique. We do this connecting between our mind and other things in our society all the time. In remote viewing, we teach people to send their minds out to remote places. For metal bending, we send our mind to the object or goal that we want to affect. When holding the metal, it is real easy to be aware where the object is located. It's hard to miss. In remote PK, the biggest challenge is to get the mind to connect with what the people want to affect. At least in the PK Parties I have people hold the metal so that they get a good mind connection. The second step is what I call the command. If you imagine your mind connecting to the object, then we simply send this command over that mind link. The command step is something we all do. During a PK Party we shout at the metal. We do this to make the goal clear to our minds. You do not really need to shout. However, I like to do that as a way of getting a group all working together and, if you will, to start getting the peak emotional event. Get the energy going. People get excited. Everyone together shouting at the metal is not only fun, it works. I, personally, had a very hard time shouting at the metal in the early days of the PK Parties because it just wasn't scientific and it is like assigning some consciousness to the metal. Tough idea to accept with our current understanding of physics. However, at the PK Parties, we just let go of our inhibitions and everyone shouts the command "BEND" at the metal. It is really the goal that we want that we are using as the command. It is easy to act silly when you don't know everyone at the party. My next to the worst PK Party was for a group of nine Ph.D. physicists and their families at Los Alamos. All the wives and children bent silverware, but none of the physicists bent. It wasn't that they were physicists because many physicists have been to PK Parties and bent. But these scientists all worked together in a very closed environment and, in a sense, their subconsciouses would not allow them to deviate from the norm. The same phenomenon sometimes occurs between spouses at PK Parties. They are so linked and patterns established at the subconscious level that they do not allow each other to learn this new skill. For this reason, I suggest spouses not sit next to each other at PK Parties. The third step is what I call "letting go." Releasing. This is something that is not really taught in our society. At the PK Parties, many people learn this step. Sometimes people think that metal bending takes a lot of concentration, and that is not true. It takes a little bit of concentration, and then the command, and then letting go, letting it happen, releasing the thought. The reason I create lots of pandemonium during the PK Parties ---people shouting and screaming, people jumping up and down, wildly bending their silverware --- is to divert their attention --- distract them. When people are sitting there wondering why their fork or spoon is not bending, and they hear others shouting and celebrating, they look over to see what is happening, and that causes them to let go! The best thing you can do to help others bend using PK is to distract them by being silly and loud. I have seen so much PK happen when people finally let go or are distracted --- that's when it happens. This same technique can be used for healing yourself and others with PK --- mind over matter. At the end of my lectures at the PK Parties I always say, "If it is not good enough to learn that you can do almost anything, then I have two bonuses for coming to a PK Party." The first one is a stock market tip. PK Parties have become so popular all over the world that literally millions of people are learning to bend metal. Eldon Byrd went to Japan to put a PK Party on for national Japanese television. He gave the PK Party over the airways where the people at home could participate. They had TV cameras placed all over Tokyo and told the people to bring the things they bent out to the street so they could be photographed. The TV station estimated that between 6 and 20 million people came running out into the streets with bent up metal and chop sticks. It was wild. Certainly in Orange County, California, I think I have bought up all the old used silverware and flatware. The bonus stock market tip is to buy stock in silverware companies. The other bonus is that I teach people at the PK Parties how to use a dowser. A dowser is a very sensitive instrument that allows an individual to access remote information without being consciously aware of the information. It is usually some type of stick, rod, or pendulum that has something on the end that can easily move and respond to the slightest movement. A necklace or a fine string with a weight on the end can be used as a pendulum. The mind goes out and gets the information, brings it into the brain and into, what we call, the unconscious. The brain sends signals to the muscles in the arm, and those signals are carried to the muscles by the autonomic nervous system. The muscles in the arm twitch and this sensitive pendulum or dowsing rod moves. You can ask it to show you "yes." It will then move in some pattern. Mine usually goes clockwise. You can then ask it to show you "no," and it will usually move in the opposite direction. Once you have established a direction for yes and no, then you can use it to test the silverware to see "if it is willing to bend for you today." You simply touch the pendulum to a piece of silverware and then ask it, "Are you willing to bend for me today?" If it says yes, then you have a good subconscious connection with it, and it probably will get mangled up into a trophy for you when you do the metal bending. If it says no, then get another piece of stainless flatware for your first metal bending experience. It may seem silly to do this, but it works. Metal bending works best in a group, as in a party of 15 or more people, especially for your first attempt. I estimate that about 50% of the people who are successful at the PK Parties can bend after the party. With practice, you can learn how to do it at anytime without the group. We try to create a peak emotional event at a PK Party. The bigger this peak emotional event, the better the results. When I am in different parts of the United States, I say "It's OK to do these things in California." Usually the people can relate to doing weird things in California, so I have them pretend that they are in California for the PK Party. It is important to act silly and have fun during the party. The PK Party is not really about bending metal, but allows you to experience things which you may not have believed possible, which in turn should help you reduce some of the artificial limits placed on your life. At the end of the PK Party I always take a picture of people with their bent up forks and spoons, and later send it to them so they will have a record of how happy they looked after the party with all of their bent material. Essentially, we use metal as the feedback mechanism for when you are achieving PK and it is important to use silverware that is "approved" for bending --- not some of the treasured family silverware. Some people have a big attachment to silverware and they may not be interested in bending silverware. They are usually the ones who ask me if it can be bent back. I suggest they put their reservations off to the next day and have some fun with old flatware that people have brought to be bent --- create some wild looking, mangled forks and spoons as artwork. At the parties I deliberately break the pattern of people listening to a lecture. People move around, talk and work with others during the bending part of the party. They have a lot of fun and create as much excitement and pandemonium as possible. In fact, the PK Parties break a lot of patterns. All people can learn the simple steps for applying PK. Once someone experiences the metal bending, or sometimes by just seeing someone else's fork or spoon bend spontaneously, a "belief switch" occurs in them which can be useful in opening up their belief that other things might also be possible. Get a group of people together, have lots of old silverware and stainless flatware available, typically four or five pieces per person. Have as many children over the age of five as possible. Younger than five, they tend to cry with all the shouting. Ask everyone to be willing to be real silly and, especially when they are bending the silverware, have them yell and scream so that others can see them --- many just naturally display a lot of emotion because having the PK experience is "different" and fun. You will be certain that PK works when you feel the fork or spoon that you are holding lose its structure, become warm and soft in your hands, at which time you can form it into any shape you wish. I have the people sit in a circle, often on the floor all around me, as I stand in the middle to give the final instructions. Give the instructions and you can have your own PK Party. The instructions I give are: "Get a point of concentration in your head. Focus it to a point. Then grab it, bring it down through your head, neck, shoulder, arm, hand, and put it into the silverware where you want it to bend." Then on the count of three, I have everyone shout the command "BEND" three times. Then I say "release it." This means letting go of the "thought form." Then people can test the silverware to feel when it becomes soft and pliable. After people have bent four or five pieces of stainless flatware in kindergarten bending, then have them try to buckle the bowl of silver-plated spoons. Do not use knives because they sometimes break and cut people. Similarly, glass and graphite pencils tend to explode, which are not good for your safety. Plastic utensils are great for children because they are cheap and can be used for the after PK Party urge to keep bending things. Once a lady had buckled five spoon bowls in a row, but complained about not being able to bend the plastic utensils. I simply told her that if she thought of a radio dial, bending metal was over on the left side, and to bend the plastic all she had to do was move the indicator over to the right side of the dial. Within five minutes she came back to show me a whole pile of bent up plastic utensils. After most people have achieved kindergarten bending and some have either buckled the spoon bowls or bent steel rods, then I have everyone go to graduate school. Give each of them two dinner forks which you are sure are straight, and then repeat the instructions for metal bending. It is absolutely amazing to watch the forks bend by themselves --- without touching with the other hand. References: Puthoff, H., and Targ, R., "A perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent research," Proceedings of the IEEE 64, 3 (March 1976) 329-354. Jack Houck, "Conceptual Model of Paranormal Phenomena," ARCHAEUS 1,1 (Winter 1983) 3. "Psychokinetic Interaction with Laboratory Grown Crystals," experiment conducted with Uri Geller June 13, 1975 (coparticipant: J. Mishlove) Psi Realite' June 1978, Vol. 7, Pg. 34, Paris, France. 4. Severin Dahlen, "Remote Annealing of High Carbon Steel Parts," ARCHAEUS, 5,1, (February-March 1986) 3.