The PK Man and the Space Intelligences- A Decade with Ted Owens 01

The PK Man and the Space Intelligences- A Decade with Ted Owens 01

Hello and welcome. This is Jeffrey Mishlove, host of Virtual You, and our conversation today is going to focus in on one of the most fascinating adventures of my entire life. We're going to explore the subject of contacting space intelligence. Contacting space intelligence, and this is an adventure and a research project in which I was engaged for over 10 years. Between 1976 and 1987, I was involved in the study of a most unusual individual, a man named Ted Owens, author of the book, Contacting Space People. Actually, How to Contact. Space People was the title of his book, a very obscure book published by Saucerian Press in 1969. How did I meet this man, and what were his powers?

The story will unfold over the coming hours of this edition of Virtual You, and it is a story about a most unusual man, a man larger than life, a man whose powers were of shamanistic proportions, although I regard him as something like an American folk hero, a Paul Bunyan or a Pecos Bill type. And I swear to you, everything that I am presenting in this program is true. You're going to hear things that are unbelievable, but they are true, and I have the documentation to prove it. The story of Ted Owens would be interesting if it were just another, oh wow, story. We could sit around the campfire and tell stories like this, but it has profound implications for our human potential, for our self-awareness.

And the story begins in 1976, when I was a graduate student at the University of California, at Berkeley studying parapsychology. And at that time, I was very interested in remote viewing, a clairvoyant procedure that was being developed at the Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI International, by two physicists there, Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, both of whom have become very prominent in the field of physics and in the field of parapsychology. Back in 1976, I went to visit them and learn about remote viewing, and it was at that time that they gave me their very extensive files on Ted Owens and encouraged me to follow his career and to initiate a research project of my own into the remarkable work that he was doing then, and I did.

And let me tell you, why they thought it was such an important case to follow. You see, Puthoff and Targ had achieved a lot of public prominence in the early 1970s for their research with the Israeli psychic Uri Geller. Now, Uri Geller, many of you will know, had achieved a lot of fame and notoriety because he ostensibly had psychokinetic powers, mind over matter powers. And he was bending spoons and stopping watches. And people would hear him on television or see him on television, and they would discover sometimes that spoons would start bending in their own homes. And actually, around the world, it was quite a phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands of people began reporting metal bending, spoon bending, simply from watching Uri Geller on television.

And people were holding spoon bending parties, and it even became a fad within the military. And it was quite exciting. Now, I knew about these things. I was in on it because I had sponsored Uri Geller's first major public appearance in the United States back in 1973 on the University of California campus at Berkeley. I was a graduate student and I was producing radio programs back then and organizing events like this. So I was kind of in the middle of all of this excitement. But put off, being serious scientists working at a major military-industrial think tank had by that time, by 76, become burnt out with the publicity and the controversy surrounding Uri Geller. Hopefully we'll spend another program and really go into depth about the Geller phenomenon, and perhaps we'll even have Uri Geller as a guest on this program.

He's been an acquaintance of mine now for over 25 years, and there are many interesting things that could be said about him. But for now, simply let me say that Puthoff and Targ didn't feel that they could handle another controversial psychic. So when Ted Owens contacted them and said, 'Why are you guys wasting your time with Uri Geller? I'm the world's greatest psychic.' Well, they felt they simply didn't want to get involved, and they ignored him. His contacts, however, went on for some time, over a period of weeks, months, perhaps even years, and he kept writing to them and badgering them to send him money to work as a research subject. And one day in February of 1976, Owen sent Puthoff and Targ a letter.

And his letter read, 'Look, you guys, just to prove to you that I am indeed the world's greatest psychic, I am going to end the drought that is now plaguing you in California.' And indeed, there was a very serious drought going on at that time. He said, 'I will make it rain and snow and sleet and hail. You will have all sorts of bizarre weather going on and there will be power blackouts and there will be UFO sightings. And your local newspaper is going to run a front-page story proclaiming that the drought is over.' And within three days, all of these things happened. I have the article that was published in the Palo Alto Times, the local newspaper down there near SRI, Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California.

And the article proclaims, 'Rare snowfall ends drought.' Of course, many of you listeners now are all over the country, so you may not appreciate that snow in the San Francisco area is a very rare phenomenon. Maybe once every 15 or 20 years do we get snow. So Puthoff and Targ were impressed, and they sent a postcard to Ted Owens congratulating him on his successful prediction. He immediately sent a letter back to them which said, in effect, 'Prediction hell no, I caused it.' And it was at that point, within a few weeks, I had visited S. R. I. I was meeting with Puthoff and Target, and it was then they said, 'Jeffrey, please take this case off of our hands. We don't know what to do.

We don't want to do anything, but somebody should look into it-a promising young graduate student like yourself who doesn't have a major career already on the line that could be ruined because of controversy and publicity.' So I looked into the case, and they gave me stacks and stacks, about six inches. Thick of their files, including many, many letters that they had received from Ted Owens documenting similar demonstrations. And it turned out, at that time, there was a magazine published in San Francisco called Psychic Magazine. It later became New Realities, and I think has subsequently gone out of business. Psychic Magazine published a little news clip. Puthoff and Targ had talked to James Shinoda Bolin, the editor. James Bolin, the editor.

His wife, Jean Shinoda Bolin, is the prominent Jungian therapist, the woman who wrote the books Goddesses and Every Woman, Gods and Every Man. But James Bolin was the publisher of Psychic Magazine at that time. He ran a little news story about this fellow, Ted Owens, who had successfully, apparently, ended the California drought. And Psychic Magazine went around the world, and it was read in England, because in 1976 there was a drought also going on in London, in England. It was so bad, in fact, that In some of the outlying towns away from London, the only water available had to be brought in by truck. And the British, that summer, were hosting a conference on parapsychology. I was attending it, and by coincidence, they had invited Ted Owens to attend the same event in the hope that he would also end the drought that was there.

That drought was so bad that when I came to London, my friends told me, Jeffrey, would you like to have your picture taken on the front page of the London Times? It's no problem. All you have to do is go down to Piccadilly Circus carrying an umbrella. People will think it's so strange. They'll take your picture and put it in the newspaper. There was just no rain at all. It was dry. But the day Ted Owens arrived in England, it began to rain and rain and rain and rain. And there were power blackouts that also shut down the whole London subway system. And within, I think, a matter of weeks, the London Times proclaimed that the drought was officially over. Within a short time.

Although when I first arrived in London, the newspaper headline said, 'No end in sight for the drought.' So I had now had two relatively convincing experiences that I could attest to in which Owens, in one way or another, seemed to be involved in suddenly and unexpectedly ending a drought. I didn't know whether he had caused these phenomena or had predicted these phenomena or whether it was a coincidence or whether perhaps it was simply a statistical fluke or maybe it wasn't even that. Maybe it was just happenstance. But my curiosity was aroused and I made a point of meeting Ted Owens. And we actually became good friends. He was a speaker at the London Parascience Conference held at Birkbeck College at the University of London, a very prestigious scientific institution, and many physicists and well-known scientists and writers were at that event when Ted Owens spoke.

He had a large white beard. He looked like Santa Claus, and he spoke in a very booming, articulate voice. He was a member of Mensa, the organization of people with high IQs. And yet there was something peculiar about this man. He came into the auditorium carrying a toy wagon. And stacked in that toy wagon, about two feet high, were piles and piles of paper. And he claimed that he was the agent of the UFOs. He was their ambassador, their emissary. Or they had empowered him by operating on his brain, and they had authorized him to perform miraculous feats to end the droughts and to do wonderful things for people on Earth in order to convince the people on Earth of his connection with the aliens and his powers. And frankly, the audience laughed at him. They couldn't take him seriously. It just seemed too absurd, too ridiculous. And that's where I stepped in. Because I stood up and talked about what I had observed and known about in California. And I became his friend. And what followed from that friendship I will present after these messages.

I'm Jeffrey Mishlove, host of Virtual You, back again talking about my adventures with Ted Owens and the space intelligences. In our first segment, I described how I met Ted Owens at the Parascience Conference in August 1976, Birkbeck College, University of London, and how he had already by then established a reputation for having extraordinary psychokinetic abilities. He even called himself PK Man, meaning the psychokinesis man, the man who had powers of mind over matter. And he also called himself the UFO Prophet. Now, when he stood up at the Parascience Conference to speak, people thought of him as being a highly inappropriate. And I have to say that that stigma followed him throughout his career. People thought that the man was an egotist, that he was brash.

And although he was brilliant, a member of Mensa, he really didn't have an advanced educational degree. More working-class in his vocabulary and his mentality, and he seemed very much out of place at a scientific gathering, talking in his booming voice about how he was the ambassador of the aliens. I mean, polite society was simply not ready for that in 1976, and I doubt if they're ready for that yet. But and then when he carried his toy wagon stacked high with papers, which he claimed documented his feats, well, the whole thing seemed almost like the man was psychotic. And I think there were people in that audience who were willing to dismiss him as a nutcase. And there were people in the audience who were willing to dismiss him simply as being an arrogant egotist.

And there were people in the audience willing to dismiss it largely because they were incapable of integrating what he was saying. And that was the difficulty throughout his whole career. Befriended him by standing up for him at that meeting and telling people what I personally was aware of with regard to ending the drought in February 1976 in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I think the audience quieted down a little bit and they began to listen to him. And after that talk, Ted Owens came up to me and I was doing radio interviews at the time and I actually interviewed him for my program on KPFA radio in Berkeley. I had a tape recorder with me then and we became friends and we were talking and he noticed that I had a little ceramic pin that I wore on my jacket.

It was given to me by my girlfriend back then before I left for Europe. And it was a picture of what I took to be the planet Saturn with a rainbow behind it, a lovely New Age kind of design. And Ted Owens looked at that and he said to me, you know, that's the rainbow UFO. He said, do you know that every day I meditate on the rainbow UFO? He said, Jeffrey, I'd really love it if you would make a gift to me of that pin. It would mean so much to me. And gosh, I thought, wait a second, that's from my girlfriend. But there was Ted Owens, the UFO prophet, asking for it. And I did. I took it off my jacket and gave it to him.

My relationship with my girlfriend really didn't last too much longer. But that's the way of things. Sometimes Ted Owens and I became friends. Good friends. Now he showed me his files, his toy wagon full of files, and I had some already at home that had been given to me by Putoff and Targ at SRI International. And as I looked through the many, many documents illustrating instances where he produced a wide variety of phenomenon. Lightning strikes and weather changes, heat waves and cold waves and hurricane controls and tornado controls and UFO appearances. I found in the files a letter from Dr. Max Vogel, who was the director of education for MENSA, the organization of people with high IQs.

And that letter said that Ted Owens had, in 1973, promised Fogel he would produce a UFO sighting within a certain radius, a hundred mile radius of Norfolk, Virginia, where Owens lived in that area. He lived actually in Cape Charles, Virginia. And Fogel said, yes, and a UFO appeared. It was seen by policemen. It was reported in the local newspaper in Chase City, Virginia, where the policemen chased it. And there was an interesting coincidence. The police dispatcher who first reported the sighting was a woman named Marion Owen. And it seemed as if oftentimes in these demonstrations there would be a person named Owen or Owens involved. That was another scene. Signature of the space intelligences and it suggested that they had powers outside of our own dimension of time and space that enabled them to create meaningful coincidences.

John Lilly, author of many books, Center of the Cyclone was one of his excellent books, or Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer. John Lilly, the great pioneer explorer of consciousness, often called this kind of a force ECHO, meaning Earth Coincidence Control. Some sort of intelligence that operates outside of the normal three dimensions of space and time that we experience. So I asked Ted Owens if he would produce a similar demonstration for me in the San Francisco area where I lived. Could he make a UFO appear like that and be seen visibly by reliable witnesses? And he told me he would do that. He would make a UFO appear in front of many, hundreds, he said, of reliable witnesses. It will be well attested. It will be photographed. He said, you can count on the photograph being published on the front page of one of your local newspapers. And the story of that demonstration will be presented next after these messages.

Well, when I got back to San Francisco, I pursued the question with Owens of his demonstration, and he set it up with me in November of 1976 as follows. He said, 'I will cause a UFO to appear, and it will happen within 90 days, and it will happen within a 100-mile radius of San Francisco.' In fact, he said, 'I'll cause multiple UFO appearances, but one in particular will be seen by very reliable witnesses.' The photograph will be published on the front page of a local newspaper. And that's how you'll know it'll be my signature. And other things happened as well. He said there will be power blackouts. That's also one of his signatures. Well, in December 1976, it occurred. Pretty much.

On schedule, December 12th, as I recall, in Sonoma State College, a small college campus about 50 miles north of San Francisco. The art department, on a clear December day, was sponsoring a live demonstration of an unusual art form, aerial artwork, a pilot, who was an artist, was flying his aircraft over the campus. He had smoke trailing out the back of his plane, and he was creating loop-de-loops and other designs in the air. And this was the demonstration. Hundreds of students were outside looking up at the sky. Some of them had video cameras. This is in the days before camcorders, but they were recording it, and there were photographs being taken. Many faculty members were out there. The pilot of this airplane was named Steve Poleski, and he was a visiting professor of art from Syracuse University.

He was visiting Berkeley. And he was performing. I actually have the videotape of this event. And as he was doing his loop-de-loops around 3,000 feet above the Sonoma State College campus, a UFO appeared right in his airspace. He witnessed it from the air. He said it was about 15, 20 feet wide. And it just-it came out of nowhere. It was right there in his airspace, and it stayed there a few minutes and suddenly disappeared. And it was seen from the ground, and it was photographed. The photograph was published on the front page of one of our local papers, the Berkeley Gazette. And the videotape was actually shown on the Channel 9 Evening News, KQED-TV, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ted Owens had scored pretty much a direct hit.

And there were many other events that occurred during that demonstration. UFO abduction. Well, there was a UFO abduction. There was an earthquake. There were power blackouts and other things. So I felt that I now had enough cause to really launch a serious investigation of Ted Owens. I was willing at that point to restructure my graduate program, my doctoral degree program in parapsychology at Berkeley away from the study of remote viewing and make it a case study of Ted Owens. Little did I know in my naivety the kind of opposition that would develop. But I called together a meeting of leading UFO and parapsychology researchers. I put together a report documenting what I had done with Ted Owens and documenting many other dozens of cases in the records. And we had J.

Allen Hynek attending that meeting, the founder of the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Illinois. And we had Dr. James Harder there, who was the director of research for the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, one of the major UFO organizations at that time. I had many leading parapsychologists there. D. Scott Rogo, the author of about 20 books on UFO phenomenon and parapsychological phenomenon, attended the meeting. And I thought with this impressive group of people and this data that the time had come to launch a serious investigation to make a major breakthrough in our understanding of the phenomenon. And that with these powerful people there, something might be accomplished. But the tenor of the meeting went in a very different direction. Dr. J.

Allen Hynek stood up and said, 'I wouldn't touch Ted Owens with a 10-foot pole.' That man is exhibiting powers of the subconscious mind. They are erratic. They are crazy. They're even dangerous. I don't want to go near him. And other researchers said, you know, he wants to get money from us. That's what this is all about. And furthermore, what if we don't agree with him about certain things? What if we don't comply with all of his wishes? What will he do? People were afraid of Ted Owens. And perhaps they had good reason to be afraid of Ted Owens. He was not always the most pleasant of people. He was like an American folk hero. And if you looked at some of his documented demonstrations, many of the best ones, in fact, occurred when he would go into a city and announce that he was the UFO ambassador who had come to help people.

And he'd go into a local newspaper and they'd sort of laugh at him and say, 'Come on, get off of it.' And he'd say, 'Oh, you don't believe me? Well, I guess I'll have to teach you a lesson.' And sometimes very unpleasant things would happen. And I'll go into some of those, but unpleasant weather conditions or sometimes even individuals would get ill. Unpleasant things would happen to particular people who crossed horns with Ted Owens. And this was frightening to some of the researchers who I had brought together. And the upshot of it all was that in spite of the enormous potential of this phenomenon from a scientific point of view, nothing came of it. I was really encouraged to put aside this project and get back to my other studies in remote viewing, and indeed I did do that. I wanted to finish my doctoral degree, so I put aside my studies of Ted Owens. At least I was unable to raise funds to do anything serious, and it's unfortunate because he lived in a relatively impoverished condition in spite of his enormous talents. But many, many more things unfolded from our interactions, and I'll tell you about them after these messages.

Hello again, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove, host of Virtual You on Wisdom Radio, and I've been talking about my studies and investigations of a most unusual man, Ted Owens, the PK man, the UFO prophet, the man who taught me how to contact space intelligences, a man who was larger than life, somewhat like a Pecos Bill or a Paul Bunyan. I think of him as an American folk hero whose talents had shamanistic qualities of extraordinary proportions. One of the researchers to whom I had introduced Ted Owens was D. Scott Rogo. Scott, who was actually a distant cousin of mine, you see my mother's maiden name was Rogo, died in 1990, but this is now 1976 and 77, and he was the author of about 20 different books dealing with parapsychological phenomenon.

Well, by the time of his death, he had authored those books. I really, of all of the researchers who I attempted to interest in the Owens case, he became the most interested. In fact, he and I actually co-authored a book, still unpublished, about the Ted Owens case. And Scott, who was probably in his lifetime regarded as the single most knowledgeable person about the history of parapsychology and psychical research, told me that he thought that Ted Owens might just be the most powerful psychic in all of our history. He was the author, for example, of Parapsychology: A Century of Inquiry, one of the best historical books written in the field. And we're talking about some great psychics when you go back to the 19th century, people like D. D. Hume or Eusebio Palladino.

There are extraordinary things that have been reported in the history of this field, and I will, from time to time, talk about them on this program, Virtual You. Ted Owens was in a class of his own. Really, we're talking about earthquake control, hurricane control, volcanoes, tornadoes. The forces of nature seem to respond to his thoughts. One of my friends, the Jungian scholar, Dr. James Driscoll, felt that Owens was in touch with the archetypal energies of the Greek god Poseidon, the god of the sea, the god who whose thoughts were expressed in the elemental forces of earth, air, fire, and water. But Owens himself saw it a little differently. If we look at his life history, he knew from childhood that he had some unusual experiences.

When he went into the military in World War II, he was in the Navy. He describes, for example, both in his childhood and again in the Navy, there were moments when, like diving in the air from a diving board into a swimming pool, that he felt like he was suspended in midair for a while, and that people down below would see this and marvel at it. So while he was in the Navy, And producing effects like this from time to time and having other experiences, he wrote to J. B. Rhine, who was at Duke University, who had established a parapsychology laboratory there. And would you believe it, J. B. Rhine actually invited Owens to come to Duke University and work for him as a laboratory assistant. Rhine took an interest in Owens and his talents.

And Owens did. He enrolled as an undergraduate student at Duke University and he worked for J.B. Rhine and he became very close to J. B. and his wife Louisa Rhine. And at that time, he learned about the scientific research that was being undertaken at Duke University in the field of extrasensory perception. J. B. Rhine had established an international reputation for his work in card guessing and for his work in psychokinesis where he'd ask people to concentrate on dice. He had a machine that would throw dice and ask people to make certain faces of these die come face up. Owens, of course, was really working in a wilder way. In a less disciplined way with these phenomena.

He told me on one occasion he was in the office in the laboratory with Rhine and some of the research associates, and there was a scissors sitting on the table and he concentrated on that scissors and it levitated a few feet above the table. I tried to verify that event by talking to Dr. Rhine and his wife, and Of course, many decades later, nobody remembered it, but you know, they didn't really want to talk about Ted Owens either. I think they considered him an embarrassment. The Rhines had really, really struggled to make parapsychology a respectable scientific discipline, and it was an uphill struggle. Because the scientific community wasn't ready to accept even statistical, experimental, well-controlled proof of such a thing as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, let alone to think of someone of the likes of Ted Owens.

Until the mid-19 60s, in fact, 1969, before the American Association for the Advancement of Science granted recognition to the Parapsychological Association as an affiliate body to even recognize that they were doing valid science. And that was roughly about 40 years from the time that J. B. Rhine first initiated his research. So his struggles just to put parapsychology on the map prevented him from really appreciating not just Ted Owens, but many of the more far-out, more extraordinary, bizarre, remarkable, strange phenomenon in the parapsychological zoo, so to speak. But Ted Owens did get his training right there with the father of parapsychology, J. B. Rhine. He got married when he was an undergraduate student and left Duke University. And it was after that that he really began focusing his energies on controlling the weather. And he thought that he was in touch with the powers of nature when he observed that he could concentrate and cause clouds to move about or cause lightning to strike or cause storms to appear. I'll tell you more about his remarkable story after these messages.

Welcome back to Virtual You. I'm your host, Jeffrey Mishlove, and I've been talking about my encounters with the man who taught me how to contact space intelligences. It's really quite a dramatic tale, and one that I rarely tell because it is so bizarre. But there are many deep insights that I've gleaned from this story. And I'll be back at six and a half minutes after the hour for another hour in which I'll go into much more depth about the not only the phenomenon that I observed, but the metaphysical lessons associated with that. If you're interested in this program, Virtual You, on Wisdom Radio, you should know, if you don't already, that we're on every weekday evening at 8 p. m. Pacific Time, where I live here in California.

And if you live elsewhere, you have to adjust accordingly. On the East Coast, it would be 11 p. m. And I have a website, www. mishlove. com. That's my name, Jeffrey Mishlove, M-I-S-H-L-O-V-E. And if you go to that website, mishlove. com, you'll see links to many of my activities, many of my professional activities. associations and affiliations, and links that include the websites of all of my guests, past, present, and future. It's an incredible resource for those of you who really want to pursue in a deeper way the kind of self-exploration that is the keynote of this program, Virtual You. Now before we end, This hour, I should say some things about Ted Owens. He was a bizarre person. One might say that he had strange personality quirks, that he was even frightening and unpredictable and unpleasant and egotistical and sometimes paranoid and perhaps even psychotic. But he had an extraordinary gift. Not only the gift of producing miraculous phenomena, but there was a core to him that was very pure; a core to him that was in touch with an extraordinarily powerful spiritual essence. I want to let you know that because I'll be talking about that more when I return from our break at six and a half minutes after the hour. I'll be with you then.