Psychic Archeology

The use of psychics for archeological exploration has probably been the most extensively explored area of potential psi application. Its beginnings include the investigation of Glastonbury Abbey, perhaps England's old Christian ruin, by Frederick Bligh Bond. 

At the University of Toronto, Professor J. N. Emerson of the department of anthropology has reported on his use of psychic assistance in doing archeological field work. His friend, a psychic, George McMullen, has shown extraordinary ability to psychometrize artifacts and relate accurate details about the history and circumstances surrounding the object. George has also proven his usefulness in examining archeological sites before the digging begins. Just by walking over a site, he has been able to describe its age, the people who lived there, their dress, dwellings, economy and general behavior. He has also provided specific excavation guidance. Emerson estimated that George's clairvoyance is 80% accurate. Furthermore. Emerson has been able to achieve even greater degrees of accuracy by using teams of several psychics and evaluating their reports using a majority-vote technique.

In the Soviet Union, techniques of dowsing are applied to archeology. Chris Bird reports that the Russian anthropologist Pushnikov has successfully used psychic dowsers to probe the remains of the Borodino battlefield, seventy miles from Moscow, where the Russians battled Napoleon in 1812. Other Russian excavations utilized the talents of dowsers in probing the estate of the legendary Czar, Boris Gudenov.

The work of the Mobius Society is well known to the general public and the psychical research community. Stephan Schwartz began by looking at the role of psi in archeology. In his first book, The Secret Vaults of Time, he described a dozen cases in which archeologists have been successful in uncovering difficult to find locations and artifacts using psi methods. He then synthesized for himself a methodology, similar to the intuitive consensus method of Kautz, which relied on the overlapping judgments of a number of independent practitioners. He has successfully used this method in a number of explorations. One of these, off the California coast on Santa Catalina Island, was broadcast on television. His explorations in Egypt have been the subject of several publications and scientific presentations.

Following guidance obtained from interviews with psychic respondents, researchers from the Mobius Group; in Los Angeles initiated an underwater archeological project in the Carribean Sea. In September 1987, two respondents, Hella Hammid and Alan Vaughan were taken out in a small boat and within an hour had agreed on a site and dropped a buoy. The next morning divers noticed that a sequence of fire coral when viewed from one angle seemed unnaturally symmetrical. When one of the fire corals was chipped, it revealed what was later determined to be a bronze keel bolt. The buoy dropped by Vaughan and Hammid was approximately 10 feet from the site. Four weeks of excavation revealed an unusually intact wreck buried 3 to 5 feet beneath the eel grass and sand. Nothing was visible except the fire coral covered keel bolts and some ballast mixed with natural rock. It required substantial excavation to uncover the remains of a collapsed American armed merchant brig that sank in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

What are the odds of finding the wreck described by luck? There is no completely satisfactory statistical answer to this question. The Mobius researchers justify their approach:

Unlike a laboratory experiment with a known baseline, no absolute probability can be given in an archeological experiment; fieldwork applications of psi are inherently different from in-lab experiments. However, vigorous concurrent utilization of non-psi electronic location technologies can serve as field controls in a double or triple blind setting, producing results as significant, in the author's view, as low p values. For example, 85,000 shipwrecks identical to the one reported here could be fitted into just the Northern Consensus Zone, and under optimal conditions, it could take several months of magnetometer survey work to locate one such wreck. This wreck was psychically located, and the location verified, in less than five hours.

Psychic Police Work

The use of psychics by police for solving crimes goes back many decades. As early as 1914, the Frenchman W. de Kerler, calling himself a psycho-criminologist, demonstrated on many occasions, without any reward or publicity, his ability to solve crimes that baffled police. Some of his many alleged exploits have been recorded. In 1925, another case of clairvoyant detective work came to the attention of the German public. In this case, the psychic, August Drost, was on trial for fraud. The case resulted from an incident in which he had attempted, with little success, to help officials solve a burglary. During the trial, which lasted for several weeks, much of the testimony pointed toward Drost's successful ESP crime solving in other cases. He was acquitted and continued to practice his unorthodox detective work.

Another psychic detective, Janos Kele, worked for years in Hungary and Germany without ever accepting fees or rewards. His abilities were tested by Professor Hans Dreisch at Leipzig University who pronounced him a "classic clairvoyant." He was also successfully tested by Dr. Karlis Osis, then at Duke University. According to Dr. Stephen Szimon, a deputy police chief in Hungary, Kele averaged 80 per cent accuracy in the clues he provided for tracing missing persons.

Today in the United States, a number of police officials have publicly credited clairvoyants who have helped them with difficult investigations. One of the most prominent of these seers is Marinus B. Dykshorn, a Dutchman, whose autobiography is titled, My Passport Says Clairvoyant. Dykshorn's career spans three decades and three continents. He currently resides in the U.S. For his psychic detective work he has twice been made an associate member of the Sheriffs Association of North Carolina. In May, 1971, he received a commission from Louis B. Nunn, the governor of Kentucky as a Kentucky colonel, "in consideration of outstanding achievement." Dykshorn's book contains ten notarized affidavits from individuals who have received benefit from his clairvoyant abilities. It is particularly interesting to note in his book the difficulties that he had getting researchers interested in testing his abilities, well after his practical successes had been acclaimed.

A psychic who has established lasting relationships with police authorities is Irene F. Hughes of Chicago.

She is the head of an organization called the Golden Path where she has taught classes in psychic subjects and tests students interested in developing their own psychic abilities. On the wall of her office, a plaque signed by three Chicago policemen expresses appreciation for the leads she has given in solving a number of cases. In one particular homicide case, Mrs. Hughes was able to provide police with the name and address of the murderer -- adding that the case would take a long time to solve. It was, in fact, almost three years before the fugitive was found. According to crime reporter Paul Tabori, she is credited by police in Illinois with having helped to solve no less than fifteen murder cases.

Other tested psychics who are known to have worked with police officials include Olaf Jonsson and Alex Tanous. Undoubtedly there are more who prefer to work quietly and without publicity. Police departments receive a regular stream of tips that allegedly come from psychic insights. Most of them simply do not prove useful. Nevertheless, this area deserves further exploration.

Paul Tabori writes of the Viennese Criminological Association meeting he attended in the early 1930s devoted to the question of "so-called occult phenomena" in police procedure and judicial investigation. Many learned academics voiced the opinion that clairvoyance, telepathy, and even hypnosis were too unreliable to be used with any advantage in police and judicial work. Equally insistent however were lawyers and police themselves who stated practice had proved the value of psi in certain investigations and that it was foolish to reject it simply because of experimental and theoretical difficulties.

Great caution must be exercised in evaluating psi claims related to crime investigation. Skeptical Dutch researcher, Piet Hein Hoebens, for example was able to find major loopholes in claims regarding the Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset -- "the Mozart of Psychic Sleuths." Newspapers throughout Europe acclaimed Croiset as a great psychic, at the time of his death in July 1980. This is particularly disturbing, since Croiset's abilities were attested to by W. H. C. Tenhaeff, a psi researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who had studied Croiset's alleged abilities for several decades.

Hoebens investigation strongly suggests either incredibly shoddy research or fraud on the part of Tenhaeff. 

With such a history, it is understandably risky for me to report psi crime investigations with which I am personally acquainted. Yet, for some years I have been monitoring Kathlyn Rhea, a psi practitioner now living in Novato, California.

Author of Mind Sense and The Psychic is You, she is well-known for her work with police departments., She has been active on well over 100 cases. 

One case in particular provides evidence that Kathlyn Rhea was directly instrumental in locating a missing body. I personally obtained complete corroboration from the law enforcement officials involved. The case occurred several years ago in Calavaras County, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada gold country. An elderly man, Mr. Russell Drummond, has been camping with his wife in the county. He was reported missing by his wife, after he left his campsite to use the latrine and never returned. 

The local county sheriff organized a search party of some 300 persons. However, after a two-week period of intensive combing through the adjacent areas, the searchers were unable to locate the body or any sign of what happened to Mr. Drummond. The sheriff therefore proclaimed that Drummond must have either left or been taken away from the county.

His wife was desperate at this point. Not only was she without her husband, but since his whereabouts was unknown she could not collect his pension or insurance.

Six months after the indicent, Mrs. Drummond contacted Kathlyn Rhea. Mrs. Rhea sat down using her normal methods, which involved no profound altered state of consciousness. She simply dictated into a cassette recorder her impressions of what had happened to Mr. Drummond. She described in detail, in a tape lasting 45 minutes, how he lost his sense of orientation and began wandering away from the campsite in an easterly direction. She described a gravel path near a small, chalet-like cottage, where there were trees and brush. There she described how he had a stroke and fell underneath one of the brush-like (madrone) trees in that area. She described still being under that brush, six months later, completely intact. This would be unusual for a body left in the woods for six months.

Mrs. Drummond took that tape to the new county sheriff, Claude Ballard, who had been elected during the intervening time. Based on his listening to the tape, Ballard acknowledged a general sense of the location described by Mrs. Rhea. He took his skeptical undersheriff with him to that potential site with the idea that if the location matched the description provided by Mrs. Rhea, he would then organize a new search party. In fact, her description was so accurate that Sheriff Ballard was able to walk immediately to the body and find it without any difficulty. According to undersheriff Fred Kern, the description provided by the tape cassette was 99 percent accurate.

Another case involving Kathlyn Rhea, which I have personally verified, involved the murder of an Ohio woman. Rhea was approach by a local detective for information on this case and she provided him with a detailed description of where the body could be found -- in the country, on a gravel road near a bridge. 

The case is full of several ironies. Based on this information, the detective, visited a site where he thought the body might be found and was not successful. Being somewhat ill and unable to search further, he provided Kathlyn Rhea's description to the police. Simultaneously, some local Boy Scouts uncovered the body at another location which matched Rhea's description in major details. The sheriff's department, which had assumed jurisdiction over the case, took note that an accurate description of the body's condition and location had been turned in by this detective prior to the body's discovery. They detained him as a suspect in the case.

Additional information developed by the detective, working with Kathlyn Rhea, was that the local police chief had actually committed this murder. Rhea suggested that fibers from her clothing would be found in his police cruiser. Acting on this tip, investigators searched the car and did find fibers. The police chief was convicted of the murder and is now serving time in prison.
 

Journalism and Investigative Reporting

Just as ESP can ostensibly be used in crime investigation, there is a suggestion that it can be useful to the investigative reporter. At least one popular account describes such activity.
 

History

Retrocognition is the apparent psi ability to clairvoyantly see past events. Many popular claims in this area are made in connection with ostensible reincarnation. In some instances of documented xenoglossy, individuals have been able to speak dialects of languages that have not been spoken for centuries. The most used application of this ability has been in connection with psychic archeology, in terms of interpreting the history of various artifacts through psychometry.