The Eve of All Saint's Day better known as Halloween is almost upon us this week. It is a sad commentary on society when we remember to celebrate the demonic and forget the pure. Why do I bring this up?
This week I found myself in Durham
North Carolina, at
the International Association for
Near-Death Studies, Inc. They let me checkout their private
library once they figured I was not a flake chasing ghosts. No one in
these organizations have any interest and don't want to be bothered
by Ghost
Hunters et.al. I did not see my favorite book on the subject, for
those that are technically inclined,
is The
Ghost of 29
Megacycles
While Near Death Experience are interesting I was really here to visit the Rhine Research Center, that shares office space with IANDS, to discuss their research into Human Biofields. In 1930, academic research into the field of parapsychology began at Duke University and in 1935 the Duke Parapsychology Labs were established. Joseph B. Rhine led this department and provided a professional study of parapsychology in a university environment.
One of the projects fitting to Halloween is trying to verify the research of Dr. Duncan MacDougall whom in 1907 tried to figure out how much a Human Soul weighed at the time of death, by measuring the weight of the body immediately before and after death. There is also a bit of newer research in the 1980's. As the research center does not want to kill anyone/anything they are trying to weigh people that clam to be able to leave their bodies, and see if it changes when they come back. Regardless of what you may think of the experiment, it still offers technical challenges that need solved. How would you design a precision weigh scale that needed to measure a change of +/- 5 ounces? Load Cells, LVDTs, or something fittingly strange? There are interesting challenges of layout and power supply design as well.
I spent a good two hours taking to the Executive Director, John Kurth about their current line of research into Biofeilds, the reason for my visit.
I was a bit disappointed, as all they are using is a Photo-Multiplier Tube in the Ultra-Violet range. They get people that claim to be able to do Energy Healing and such. They put them in a double dark room, establish a base line. An empty room has about four photons per minute. With anyone, you for example, will be in the ten to forty photons per minute. Of the 150+ people that they have tried the test on, they have found ten that give repeatable results every time. Some people just give "spikes" of photons with no pattern to them. People that ask for feedback learn to make more photons. The best person puts out 600,000+ photons per minute consistently. The highest peak they ever saw was 1.2M but it was not repeatable.
The reason for my disappointment was they knew nothing about such things as Mitogenic Radiation, and could not tell me if their PM was made of Quartz or Glass, which is important. Mitogenetic Radiation is the force or specific energy that is supposedly given off by cells undergoing division. It may in turn stimulate the process of mitosis in other cells, better known as Gurvich Radiation, named after Alexander Gurwitsch. See also Otto Rahn Invisible Radiations of Organisms. V.P. Kaznacheyev work is summarized in The Excalibur Briefing. Kaznacheyev work has been more recently carried on by Michaylova in Novosibirsk, that explains the Quartz/Glass issue..
At any rate it was an interesting few hours. They have the largest library of PSI related books I've ever heard of, and that makes a visit worthwhile if you are in the area.
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