August 31, 1973: Psychic science, circa-1973

60 Minutes Rewind Who among us hasn't had the unsettling experience of thinking about someone when suddenly the phone rings and that person is calling? Or how many times have we heard about a friend who wakes up in the middle of the night with a premonition, sometimes tragic, that later comes true? These psychic phenomena and others like them are increasingly the object of scientific research in the United States and around the world. 60 Minutes set out to chronicle some of that research. In a research laboratory in Brooklyn, sliced ping-pong balls over a woman's eyes fill her vision with opaque light. All she can hear is the sound of waves crashing against the shore. In a room next door, a man is suspended in a contraption called the witch's cradle, his eyes covered, his earphones playing constant static. These two are clearing their minds. They are going through something called sensory deprivation, preparing them for an ESP experience. In the Soviet Union, a film tells of a Russian woman who claims she can move objects across a table without touching them by means of psychokinesis, the energy that pours out of her fingertips, a phenomenon that defies the laws of physics. Are these things real? Laboratory-controlled telepathy? Psychic power that can move physical objects? Real or not, they are part of a growing scientific interest in psychic phenomena. I'm going to disconnect now, Tom. If you accept the theory that humans can communicate at an extrasensory level, why rule out a whole other order of living things, like plants? I'm changing frequency. This is the hypothesis of Marcel Vogel of IBM in California. Vogel spends his days at IBM as a hard scientist, but after hours and on weekends, he tries to communicate by psychic force with the plant world. The plant in question is a rather worn split philodendron, which Vogel has hooked up to a polygraph machine. The morning we filmed this, Vogel observed while one of his colleagues, who claim psychic power, took a trip inside the plant itself. In the psychic world, this is sometimes referred to as out-of-body experience. Now, as we are one with the plant, let us now look at the cell structure that is present in the stem of the plant. All right, I'm in the leaf. Let me get down into the stem. Okay, I'm in the stem. Fine, now look at the wall cells in the stem and describe what you are now seeing. All right, I started out more toward the center of the stem. Now what I'll do is I'll just go back up into the leaf. There I am. I'm in the leaf now. All right, I'm out. Back up into the leaf. During the trip, Vogel monitors the polygraph to note the philodendron's reaction to the strange visitor. Now what I'm going to do is generate energy out to the plant. Let's see what happens. Here it goes. That's a response. It's in me. The exciting thing is that the plant is not connected to either one of us but is now a very sensitive monitor of the forces that are within us. It's dark. Vogel and his associates believe that plants react to psychic forces around them in a way that can be measured by scientific instruments. An independent research organization in California known as the Stanford Research Institute contracted to study psychic phenomena under laboratory conditions. Last fall, they spent several weeks with a 25-year-old Israeli psychic named Uri Geller and they cataloged a series of remarkable feats. He went through a series of experiments but either my skepticism or the presence of two cameras had a negative effect. Although he claims to be able to start broken watches by passing his hand over them, he couldn't start the one we brought with us. But just two days ago in a demonstration, they bought me five watches and I fixed all of them. Really? Geller asked me to draw a letter while his back was turned. I drew the letter L and then he drew something similar. Later, while we were not filming, he psychically bent a knife which was on the table. He had not been willing to try this while the cameras were rolling. He asked me to draw an object while he was out of the room and he tried to read my mind to tell me what it was. Okay, I'm gonna put two things that appeared in my mind and if I'm wrong you show me what. The first thing that when I asked is it a part of a man, the first thing appeared to me was something like this, like this, like this, like this and then and then when you kept repeating the the word a bee appeared in my mind and I might be completely wrong again I'm saying it to you and then and then this changed to another. Okay, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. This changed to some sort of a a bird or or something. I'm wrong? You're right. I'm right? Thanks God. The fact is that in this field that has been plagued with frauds and charlatans, many serious people at many prestigious centers of learning in this country and abroad are spending their time investigating further in this provocative field of study. The amount of foolproof repeatable scientific data so far has been negligible but the work continues and the interest grows.