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While watching the latest big screen blockbuster from Marvel or DC Comics, have you ever wondered if you have superpowers, like ESP or psychokinesis?

Anyone who's witnessed the double slit experiment—which demonstrates that light behaves differently depending on how we observe it—can appreciate that in some (spooky) way we don't yet understand some of the most fundamental aspects of reality, especially the role of consciousness in the physical world.

A younger generation of scientists are changing their perception of the world, and many owe their boldness to the path forged by Dr. Dean Radin, who worked with the research staff at Princeton University's PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) Lab; in advanced R&D at Bell Labs; and at SRI International on Stargate, the US government's top-secret psychic espionage program. He's also given invited talks at DARPA, the US Navy's Strategic Studies Group, and the Army's Special Operations Command.

Currently Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Associated Distinguished Professor of Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Dr. Radin has been engaged in research on the frontiers of consciousness for 40 years, producing over 90 peer-reviewed papers describing experiments that will blow your mind.

Dr. Radin is currently prepping for the annual convention for the Parapsychological Association (PA), where he serves as president, from Aug. 2-5 in Petaluma. There, leading scientists from around the world will present their latest research on psi phenomena, including precognition, remote viewing, and psychokinesis. This year's keynote will be Dr. Jacques F. Vallee, an unexplained aerial phenomena researcher who Steven Spielberg used as the real-life model for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

We talked to Dr. Radin by phone from his office in Northern California. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Having researched your work for this story, I felt as if I'd tumbled down the rabbit hole after Alice.

It took me about 10 years of running my own experimental studies, and reading the literature, to get from skeptical that anything "psi" was real, to being able to consider the possibility that some of it might be real. It took another 20 years to convince myself it represents an important element of reality that the majority of people have experienced first-hand, but paradoxically that science has almost completely ignored.

As it's often misunderstood, can you define parapsychology for us?

Parapsychology involves the application of standard scientific and scholarly methods to a class of commonly reported, but not yet fully understood phenomena associated with human experiences. I base my assessment about the reality of these phenomena on the fact that what we call telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinetic effects have all been independently repeated in labs around the world, and reported in peer-reviewed journals.

There's been some discussion in Silicon Valley recently about the distinction between brain-machine interfaces providing "synthetic telepathy," as in Elon Musk's Neuralink and stroke rehab interfaces I've tried versus actual telepathy.

The former is a technical advancement based entirely on existing scientific principles in the neurosciences, and increasingly being discussed as plausible by Silicon Valley types who are interested in the "telepathic" brain-machine interface control with self-driving cars, or within social media virtual spaces. It's entirely different from real telepathy, which refers to mind-to-mind connections independent of distance, and not mediated by electromagnetic or other known signals. When better understood, it is likely to lead to major breakthroughs in many scientific disciplines (physics, psychology, psychophysiology, etc).

Your main thesis, running through all your books, but particularly Supernormal and your latest Real Magic, is that the material world, as defined by today's science, is not all there is. You suggest that consciousness lies underneath, or before, what we currently call physics, chemistry, and biology.

This position is what a philosopher would call "idealism." In a nutshell, the scientific worldview, called materialism, can be expressed as "everything is made of matter, including mind." By contrast, the worldview of idealism is the exact opposite: "everything is made of mind, including matter." I think that idealism is a better fit to explaining psi phenomena than materialism, but it doesn't make sense to dismiss materialism because it's just been too successful. So I've put a spin on idealism that does not negate materialism, but rather expands it to become more inclusive and comprehensive.

What was the first experiment you did?

When I was at Bell Labs, it was the biggest research lab in the world at the time, and we worked on pretty large projects, so had to wait for other people's results, which gave me 20 percent of my time to do what I wanted. That's how I was able to embark on experiments around psi. In 1982, I took a business trip to San Antonio and met with Dr. Helmut Schmidt, who gave me one of his random number generators—I still have it in my garage. The randomness was based on the timing between decays of radioactive particles. The device used in the experiment consisted of a circle of lights that flashed in sequence clockwise, then every time a radioactive particle was detected the direction of the flashes would reverse and go counterclockwise.

The instruction to the subject was to, just with the mind, and with intention, make the lights continue to flash in a clockwise direction as much as possible. I tried to replicate Dr. Schmidt's experiments, and I was astonished to find that it actually worked. It was the first time that I was able to see first-hand that that what I had been reading about in the journals was not due to some sort of mistake, or just made up, but real.

What was your reaction when you saw the RNG respond to human intention?

Holy smoke, there's something going on here.

At SRI International, famous for creating the AI precursor to Siri, you were a scientist on a project conducting highly classified research on psychic phenomena for various US government agencies. Is there anything you can say about that time, especially as some materials have now been declassified from this era?

From the 1970s to 1990s, the United States and the Soviet Union each maintained highly classified programs of psi research for a purely pragmatic reason—remote viewing (perception through space and time) provided useful information available from no other sources. In December 1979, a 94-page classified report was issued by the US Army—and declassified in 2003 by a Freedom of Information Act—that described one of the classified programs codenamed Grill Flame. Its review committee consisted of nine scientists selected both for their recognized expertise and for their lack of bias either for or against the idea of psi. They concluded that: "On balance, the committee has indeed been persuaded that there is some probability that affects attributed to the remote viewing phenomena exist." In 1984, I was recruited for this program. In 1985 I took a one-year leave of absence from Bell Labs and was "read in" on Grill Flame.

That must have required top level security clearance.

If you're familiar with security clearance acronyms, Grill Flame was TS-SCI [top secret, sensitive compartmented information]. This project was a "deep black" operation that required you to first get a top secret clearance, and then additional clearance to sign a special book to gain access. Much of the Grill Flame project is now in the public domain, but portions will probably remain classified because they involve details about specific missions. While inside SRI, where our project was housed within the Radiophysics Lab, I had the opportunity to see some very talented people do incredible things with their minds. We knew we were sitting on something very important to the future of science.

You are still one of the very few renowned scientists who are willing to speak publicly about experiments into psi.

Many scientists are understandably skeptical about psychic phenomena, but a fast growing subset across many disciplines are becoming more open as a result of paying attention to the empirical data and to increasingly persuasive arguments that consciousness is more important than previously thought.

For example, the American Psychologist is the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, the world's largest no-nonsense organization of academic psychologists. The May 2018 issue carried a major article on the evidence for parapsychological phenomena, and concluded based on 10 meta-analyses of over 1,000 published experiments that these phenomena are real. This article—along with others that are beginning to appear in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals—are making important inroads into past prejudices that prevented this line of research from being taken seriously.

Because you've faced a great deal of censure—or, worse, an alteration of the facts—from skeptics.

The bio of me on Wikipedia implies that no mainstream scientists take my research seriously. But that article fails to mention any of the many scientists who have endorsed my work, including two Nobel Laureates [Brian Josephson, PhD, Nobel Laureate in physics, and Kary Mullis, PhD, Nobel Laureate in chemistry], a program director from the National Science Foundation, president of the American Statistical Association, recipients of major awards from the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences, and many other prominent scientists and scholars?

There are many examples of distortions and flat-out errors in how psi research is portrayed, including in college textbooks. These biases have had a cumulative effect among academics for many generations. It has even influenced some journal editors to the point where they reject articles reporting positive psi experiments because they insist that such effects are literally impossible.

May we talk about Star Wars?

Of course.

Obi-Wan Kenobi said: "I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." This is an experiment you've actually done, do explain.

This idea was first encountered by noticing that during participation in engaging rituals like sports, meditation, or music, people sometimes reported a strange expansive feeling as though they had merged with the group's collective mind. Such moments are described as an energetic shift a feeling of electricity in the air or being "in the zone." We have done many experiments in the context of the Global Consciousness Project, which was started at Princeton University using electronic Random Number Generators. Then, in 2016, we switched to a new kind of RNG that we called a QNG—a quantum noise generator.

Can you explain how RNGs work?

Standard RNGs are designed to produce truly random bits in the form of zeros and ones. Many studies have suggested that when "collective mental coherence" intensifies it causes something like a "disturbance in the force" that can be detected as statistical changes in the outputs of the RNG. All RNGs of the commercial type are designed to produce high-quality random bits, which means the output should conform exactly like one would expect—statistically—from a random variable.

To ensure that the RNG outputs are reliably random, the "raw" random output is compared to an alternating sequence of 0s and 1s with an XOR gate (exclusive-or). This helps to make the output of the generator resistant to variations in circuit voltage, component temperature, proximity, and so on. That's why these RNGs are so useful in psi research. By using a highly reliable random source that is impervious to mundane influences, if we see the output deviate from chance in a psi research, then we have higher confidence that there's a real psi effect present. But the disadvantage of the RNG is that it's difficult to reverse engineer to find out what caused the deviation. You can't go backwards through the XOR and find out what happened.

Can you talk about your collaboration with Loren Carpenter, the co-founder of Pixar?

Loren is an exceptional "maker" type. When we were describing our frustrations using conventional RNGs, he came up with a new concept that we called a QNG. His system records the noise generated by a zener diode, the semiconductor component, in RNGs that produces the randomness through a process known as quantum tunneling. He made 32 of these QNG circuits, which sample noise 1,000 times a second. Loren has continually refined the design of the QNGs, with the latest version now the size of a 4-inch cube. It's more stable than the original version, and it also includes data from a suite of environmental sensors along with the random data.

Did the QNGs show a blip in space-time on the night of Nov. 8, 2016?

Yes. We ran the 32 QNGs starting a few days before the election, to four days afterwards, powered by a battery to the array, so it was completely off the grid. Data was collected in a quiet garage near George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch—we thought that would be an especially appropriate place to see if we could detect a disturbance in the force. We observed a clear deviation in randomness within minutes of when news outlets around the world were calling the election. The odds against the chance of observing a peak value of that magnitude, within an hour of the final results of the election, as compared to all of the data recorded before and after this event, was calculated at 6 million to one.

Have you published any peer-reviewed papers on this QNG experiment of 2016?

Not yet, no. The results of this experiment were reported for the first time in my book [Real Magic].

Finally, sticking with the force, do you believe everyone has some measure of psi ability?

Yes, based on what we see in laboratory tests, it appears that this type of ability is distributed as a normal population curve, just like sports or musical talent. Some people are extremely talented, but most of the rest of us will have a little ability, and then there are some on the other side of the curve who are "psi blind." Super performance in every domain is always very rare, and it's no different with psi. The evidence strongly indicates that these effects arise from the deep unconscious, and they tend appear most often spontaneously during non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as during meditation, while dreaming, under extremes of emotion or motivation, or under the influence of certain psychedelic compounds.