2005 DPE Reports

February 2005 Department of Phenomenal Evidence Report
By The Revs. Tom and Lisa Butler, NST

Transfiguration Mediumship: In October the Department of Phenomenal Evidence received a Physical Phenomena affidavit for the Rev. Richard P. Schoeller from the Summerland Church of Light, in Hauppauge, NY. Richard was serving The Memorial Spiritualist Church in Norfolk, Virginia and had put together a Saturday workshop on Trance and Transfiguration.

Twenty-two people attended the workshop and had the pleasure of seeing The Reverend Joseph Merrill (right) transfigure over Richard’s features. Several sitters confirmed that it was Rev. Merrill and that as he came through he was seen smiling and laughing. Another transfigured personality was also confirmed. One of the sitters had her father come through. The Physical Phenomena Affidavit was signed by eight witnesses.

Talks by the Dalai Lama: The Dalai Lama has inspired millions of people from around the world with his teachings on peace and religious harmony. Now some of his talks have been made available by Beliefnet at www.beliefnet.com/story/152/story_15260_1.html. Just a couple of the titles that are available are, “Religion is not necessary for happiness” and, “The whole world is one body.”

Prayer Research Facing Critics: An article in the New York Times by Benedict Carey talks about the Government financing of intercessory prayer research which began in the mid-1990s. Critics are expressing indignation that the federal government has contributed $2.3 million for prayer research in the past four years. They say the government should not spend taxpayer money to study something that has nothing to do with science.

Dr Richard J McNalley a psychologist at Harvard is quoted as saying, “Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science, it is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money.”

Prayer researchers, many themselves believers in prayer’s healing powers, say scientists do not need to know how a treatment or intervention works before testing it. From the New York Times “Can prayers Heal? Critics Say Studies Go Past Science’s Reach, by Benedict Carey, www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/health/10prayer.html

More on the Girl with X-Ray Vision: Last month, we reported about tests carried out through the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), an organization of professional skeptics, on Nataha Demkina a seventeen year old Russian Girl who claims to see inside people’s bodies. Now we learn from Victor Zammit, that the designers of the experiment, shown in a documentary on the Discovery Channel, “falsely represented to the viewers that they were the world’s ‘top’ objective, impartially unencumbered ‘scientists’ and that Natasha would be subjected to legitimate ‘scientific scrutiny.’ Throughout the documentary this claim was repeated to the extent that the average viewer would accept that Natasha was tested by professional scientists of top caliber who had nothing to gain, nothing to lose.” Instead the experiment was designed by Andrew Skolnick a debunking journalist who is a close associate to the extreme skeptic James Randi. Skolnick was assisted by two fellow debunkers who are psychologists.

They asked Natasha to identify which patients had had which operations five out of seven tries. Natasha fails because she only got four out of seven correct. Zammit writes, “The odds of scoring four out of seven by chance, in the experiment that they had designed, was one in fifty. Whereas the experimenters state Natasha ‘failed’ the test, other statisticians state that Natasha’s results were significant. Recent experiments on telepathy conducted by a British scientist with a team from 20/20 Productions were hailed as a success when the odds against chance as an explanation were one in nineteen. It also has to be remembered that Natasha scored an amazing five out of six in the first test.”

From: www.victorzammit.com/articles/natashacansue.html

Psychic Detective: Court TV is airing the show, Psychic Detective, on Wednesday evenings. An interesting story that will likely run in February 2005 is about a police officer who was caught running a con scheme that cheated a man out of $40,000. He then disappeared. Police detective, William Knowles, searched endlessly for his fellow officer but only reached dead ends. Knowles read an article about a psychic who worked with police, and having nothing to lose, says that he made contact.

Knowles said that when he arrived at the psychic’s office the psychic turned down the lights and stretched out on the sofa. Knowles remembers the psychic’s chest heaving and felt that the man was in a trance. He and his partner had difficulty suppressing their laughter until the psychic had visions of palm trees, a horse farm in Arizona and a college campus. Knowles knew that the wanted man had relatives in Arizona and all turned out just as the Psychic envisioned them and the wanted man was finally convicted for the crime.

From: About.com and News-Timeslive.com “‘Psychic Detective’ looks at Bethel cop’s capture” by Robin DeMerrell

Prayer and Dreams lead to Crash Site: In October, a Seattle seventeen year old, Laura Hatch, was found in her wrecked car after being missing for eight days. There had been no police search as the police had felt she was a runaway. The parents had hired a private investigator and had organized 200 people in a search for their daughter who had last been seen at a party. Sha Nohr, a fellow church member and mother of a friend of the missing girl, said that she had several vivid dreams of a wooded area with the message, “Keep going, keep going,” on Saturday night. She woke up on Sunday with an urgent need to look for Hatch. She, along with her daughter, drove to the area. Along the way, she asked the lost girl to speak out to them. Something drew them to a part of a country road. They stopped and Nohr climbed over a concrete barrier and went one hundred feet down a steep, densely vegetated embankment where the wreck was found. Hatch was treated for severe dehydration, broken ribs, a broken leg and facial injuries. From: “Teen is Found Alive After Eight Days,” Associated Press, October 11, 2004

Guardian Angel saves NASCAR Legend: Dale Earnhardt Jr. was engulfed in flames in July of 2004 after he lost control of the car he was driving and hit a wall. Earnhardt asked about the person who had helped him out of the car but was told that no one had helped. He was quoted as saying, “That’s strange because I swear somebody…had me underneath…my arms and was carrying me out of the car.” Dale Earnhardt, Jr’s father died in a crash at the Daytona 500 but Dale feels that it was his father who saved his life.

From: “I see by the Papers” by Phyllis Galde, Fate, October 2004.

Injured Dog goes to the Hospital: In Milwaukee, Wisconsin an eight-month old boxer was hit by a car. The dog limped to St. Francis Hospital, made it through two sets of doors, and collapsed at the registration desk. St Francis, as many of you know, is the Catholic patron saint of animals. The dog was rushed to a veterinary clinic and made a full recovery. You may remember a similar instance in 2003, in which a dog was injured by a truck and took itself to a veterinarian’s office six miles across town. From: “I see by the Papers” by Phyllis Galde Fate October 2004

Writing Off Bad Health: Research done by Chad Burton (Southern Methodist University) and Laura King (University of Missouri) shows that writing about your positive experiences could benefit your health. The two researchers recruited ninety students to participate in a writing exercise for twenty minutes a day over a three day period.

Half the students wrote about intensely positive experiences that they had. Their instructions were taken from the founder of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow (1908-70), the first line reading, “Think of the most wonderful experiences in your life, happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture...” The other half of the students wrote about mundane things, their plans for the day, their shoes or bedroom contents.

For the three months before the exercise there was no difference in visits to the health center between the two groups. But in the three months following the writing exercise, the mundane-writing students made significantly more health-centre visits than the positive-writing group.