| Music Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot
The story behind the world’s biggest telepathy
experiment
Andy Roberts
In December 2000 parapsychologist Richard Wiseman announced he
was going to conduct the “world’s largest telepathy
experiment” in London. Unfortunately Wiseman’s experiment,
using up to 100 telepathic ‘senders’ fell well short
of the much more fortean approach taken by a group of parapsychologists
and musicians towards the end of the psychedelic era in America.
The real ‘world’s largest telepathy experiment’
actually took place in February 1971 at Port Chester in New York
State. Far from being conducted in the psychically arid test conditions
of a laboratory it was hosted by the world’s strangest rock
and roll band, The Grateful Dead. The Dead themselves are no strangers
to fortean phenomena and the synchronicities surrounding their
gigs at the Great Pyramid of Giza and percussionist Micky Hart’s
encounter with a cursed human skull drum are the stuff of legend.
Unarguably at the cutting edge of genuinely psychedelic music,
and all that entails, the Grateful Dead were forged in the crucible
of 1960s American West Coast acid culture, playing to huge crowds
where band and audience were under the influence of the purest
psychedelics. Their music to this day both encompasses and surpasses
all contemporary and historical forms, leading one critic to define
their oeuvre as “music beyond idiom”. Accounts of
the sheer power generated at a Grateful Dead gig are legion, band
and followers believing that when they are playing at full throttle
a temporary psychedelic psychic ‘church’ is created
in which musicians and celebrants are joined in wholly communion,
becoming a single entity with one mind.
Micky Hart puts this succinctly, “Our main focus was the
idea of group mind. We saw the Grateful Dead as a group mind and
one in which were able to share with the audience. We were able
to take an image and project it into the audience and send it
to receptive receivers.” With this kind of belief it was
only a matter of time before the parapsychological fraternity
became seriously interested in the Grateful Dead.
The link came in the form of parapsychologist and author Stanley
Krippner, at that time director of the Maimondes Dream Laboratory
in Brooklyn, New York. Krippner had been working at the far edges
of parapsychology for several years and since 1964 had been involved
in testing the hypothesis “that sleeping subjects are able
to incorporate aspects of randomly selected target stimuli into
their dreams”. Krippner was also a Dead fan and had used
their music in previous ESP experiments. The Grateful Dead’s
biographer, Dennis McNally, described Krippner’s entry into
the Dead’s world as, “Stanley Krippner was yet another
of the fascinating people the Dead had attracted, a distinguished
psychologist who was comfortable with the rational study of ‘fuzzy’
things like ESP, or psychedelics, or both together.”
Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist, and Micky
Hart first met Stanley Krippner at a party in 1970. McNally recalls,
“Eventually Krippner found himself in conversation with
Garcia, who wondered about the potential interaction of various
altered states of consciousness, for instance sleep and the psychedelic
state, and whether or not that could aid sensitivity to ESP. Their
conversation yielded the Dream Experiment, which was deemed worthy
of publication in a formal, academically refereed journal of psychology.”
Krippner initially conducted a smaller version of the Port Chester
experiments, in which ESP, hundreds of people, rock music and
psychedelics were brought together. This took place at a Holy
Modal Rounders concert on March 15th 1970 where five volunteer
telepathy ‘receivers’ were selected for the experiment.
Each receiver was told the geographical location of the concert
and asked to ‘tune in’ at midnight, when certain images
would be telepathically projected by the audience. The receivers
were situated at random locations within a 100 mile radius of
the concert venue. The target images chosen to be projected was
‘birds’ and a sequence of appropriate moving images
and transparencies was prepared by the psychedelic light show
operator Jean Mayo. These consisted of a film about eagles whilst
the slides depicted photographs of various birds, together with
key symbols such as the Egyptian hieroglyph for bird and phrases
such as ‘Think birds’ and ‘fly high’.
One crucial slide sequence showed a mythological phoenix appearing
and disappearing in flames.
The audience were informed verbally that when these images appeared
they were to concentrate on them and ‘send’ them telepathically.
To create the strongest link between the target images, the power
of the music and the audience the images were projected during
the band’s performance of ‘If You Want to Be a Bird’.
This song was already fixed in the audience’s minds as it
had been featured in the 1969 cult film Easy Rider, during a sequence
in which Jack Nicholson looned around on the back of a motorcycle
whilst smoking a joint.
Midnight duly passed and the audience, high on music and drugs
and open to the potential of telepathic contact did their best
to project the chosen images into the collective unconscious.
The five receivers reported variously, ‘something mythological,
like a Griffin or a Phoenix’, ‘a snake’, ‘grapes’,
‘an embryo in flames growing into a tree’. The fifth
receiver was singer Richie Havens, who also reported seeing a
mythological creature like a Phoenix.
Was this experiment successful? Maybe. Interpreting a telepathy
experiment can be difficult because unless the images received
are exactly the same as the ones sent the results are open to
scepticism at best, ridicule at worst. However, at least two of
the images received appeared to be within acceptable parameters
and Krippner felt that with some important changes to the methodology
of the experiment he could improve the results.
Buoyed up by the apparent success of the Holy Modal Rounders experiment
Krippner planned something much more ambitious involving the Grateful
Dead. This was to take place at each gig of the Dead’s six
night run at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York State,
during February 1971.
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The Port Chester shows themselves have become legendary in
Deadhead circles as being fantastic examples of the transformative
and redemptive power of music. Listening to them you are aware
of a music being created which is truly ‘out there’,
an ideal backdrop against which to conduct a telepathy experiment.
Contrary to the somewhat shambolic psychedelic milieu in which
the Grateful Dead existed, the Port Chester experiments were
planned in some detail. In attempting to refine the methodology
used at the Holy Modal Rounders experiment, Krippner’s
team made some radical changes. It was decided to make the instructions
to the senders (the audience) much more specific, and also to
make them aware of the physical location of one of the receivers.
To insure against the possibility of the target images being
leaked, either consciously or unconsciously, they were to be
selected at random immediately prior to being shown to the senders.
For the Port Chester experiments just two receivers, Malcolm
Bessent and Felicia Parise, were chosen. Both were experienced
‘psychic sensitives’. For the duration of the experiment
Bessent was to be observed whilst under laboratory conditions,
sleeping at the Maimondes Dream Laboratory, forty five miles
away. Parise was to sleep in her flat where she would be telephoned
several times during the night and asked to describe the content
of her dreams.
The audiences on each night were told only about Bessent’s
involvement in the experiment. This was so that the Dream Laboratory
staff could monitor ‘intentionality’, i.e. whether
or not the senders’ knowledge of who was taking part and
where they were could affect results. In this case if intentionality
was relevant it would be expected for Bessent to have more success
in receiving the images than Parise. Conversely, if it was the
receiver whose subconscious mind reached out and located the
target images both senders could be expected to score equally
as well.
Krippner’s assistant, Ronnie Mastrian, was in the audience
at the Capitol Theatre and immediately prior to each gig selected
one of two envelopes by the flipping of a coin. Each envelope
contained a series of slides containing images which were to
be the focus of the evening’s experiment. The selected
transparencies were loaded into a projector and shown on the
stage backdrop. At 11.30pm when the concert was well under way,
the bemused and excited audience read the instruction slides;
“1) You are about to participate in an ESP experiment,
2) In a few seconds you will see a picture, 3) Try using your
ESP to ‘send’ this picture to Malcolm Bessent, 4)
He will try to dream about the picture. Try to send it to him,
5) Malcolm Bessent is now at the Maimondes dream laboratory
in Brooklyn”.
One of six randomly selected pictures was then projected onto
the stage backdrop for 15 minutes whilst the Grateful Dead played.
Unusually for the Dead there was no psychedelic light show at
any of the Port Chester gigs, thus making the projected images
the visual focus of the concert.
When Malcolm Bessent had been observed to be engaged in REM
(Rapid Eye Movement) activity for ten minutes he was woken and
asked what he was dreaming. This took place several times throughout
the night. Felicia Parise was contacted by ‘phone at 90
minute intervals and her dreams recorded. On the following morning
both subjects were asked to add any details they had missed
together with any associations they attached to their dreams.
Their recollections were tape recorded and transcribed for use
by the evaluators.
At the end of the six show run the two evaluators were each
given the full transcripts of the receivers together with copies
of the images used. The evaluators, working independently of
each other, the telepathy receivers or Dream Laboratory staff,
were asked to read the tape transcripts. They then recorded
on a 100 point scale, any correspondences between the dream
recollections and the images projected during the experiment.
As with the Holy Modal Rounders’ experiment the results
were encouraging but open to wide interpretation. One example
of this dichotomy comes from the February 19th gig where a painting
called ‘The Seven Spinal Chakras’ was projected.
This showed a male in the yogic full lotus position, deep in
meditation, each chakra vividly illuminated. When Bessent was
awakened during this particular experiment he remembered dreaming
he was, “…very interested in…using natural
energy… thinking about rocket ships…an energy box
and …a spinal column”. This correspondence was classed
as a success, although sceptics may have their doubts.
Another debatable success came from the night of February 20th
when the surrealist painter Magritte’s ‘Philosophy
in the Boudoir’ was selected and projected. The painting
is of a headless woman in a transparent robe. This time Bessent
dreamed about a “little girl’s doll” which
Krippner believed demonstrated “a degree of correspondence”.
The Dream Laboratory’s report on the experiment noted:
“The average evaluation of the two judges was computed
for each pair of dream transcripts and target pictures. If coincidence,
rather than ESP, had been operating, the judges’ evaluation
of the correct transcript/target pairs would have been higher
than all other pairs one time out of six. For Miss Parise, one
correct pair obtained the highest rating. In the case of Mr
Bessent, the judges gave the highest score to the correct pairs
four times out of six….Thus, for Mr Bessent, the ESP hypothesis
is supported. Further, some support is given to the position
that the agents must know who the target is to be transmitted
to and where he is located for telepathy to occur.”
So, were the experiments a success? Krippner and his team certainly
thought so although sceptics and debunkers will snort derisively
at the lack of rigour in many parts of the experiment’s
design. And of course the results were open to interpretation
begging many questions, such as how clear and exact does a received
image have to correspond with the image projected; does the
whole dream have to correspond with the target image, and so
on. No-one said parapsychology was easy!
Other rock commentators doubted the psychedelic component of
the experiment. Former band manager Rock Scully, in his book
Living With The Dead expressed a jaundiced view of the event;
“The results turned out to be shady.…the Port Chester
audience is eighteen and nineteen year old kids who’ve
hopped over the border from Connecticut to get drunk and are
all screwed up on beer and hard liquor.” Hardly the blissed
out psychonauts of mid-60s San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury
who were the Dead’s original constituency.
In both design and organisational terms the Holy Modal Rounders
and Grateful Dead telepathy experiments probably weren’t
as rigorous as the parapsychological establishment would have
liked. But from a fortean angle the results are not really the
point. No. The point is that all concerned had the courage of
their convictions and strength of belief to attempt the manifestation
of a wild talent, involving over 6,000 people. These experiments
were, to date, the largest telepathy tests conducted outside
of laboratory conditions with over 2,000 people being involved
at each concert. They reflected a zeitgeist, rapidly fading
in our memories, in which it was believed the human subconscious
had limitless potential and could be linked and directed by
drugs, music and intent. Contrast that with the general drabness
of psychical research in the early 21st century! Now largely
forgotten, the world’s biggest telepathy experiment has
become just another footnote in the annals of both parapsychology
and rock and roll. Ah well, I guess you had to be there!
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