The Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

hands and make peace.
    There was something else he’d kept from them. Later that evening, as Alan and Stu slept in their hammocks, Ed silently pulled out what had been an ongoing experiment during the whole of his journey to and from the moon. Lately, he’d been dabbling in experiments in consciousness and extrasensory perception, spending time studying the work of Dr Joseph B. Rhine, a biologist who’d conducted many experiments on the extrasensory nature of human consciousness. Two of his newest friends were doctors who’d been conducting credible experiments on the nature of consciousness. Together they’d realized that Ed’s journey to the moon presented them with a unique opportunity to test whether human telepathy could be achieved at greater distances than it had in Dr Rhine’s laboratory. Here was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see if these sorts of communications could stretch well beyond any distances possible on earth.
    Forty-five minutes past the start of the sleep period, as he had done in the two days traveling to the moon, Ed pulled out a small flashlight and, on the paper on his clipboard, randomly copied numbers, each of which stood for one of Dr Rhine’s famous Zener symbols – square, circle, cross, star, and pair of wavy lines. He’d then concentrated intensely on them, methodically, one by one, attempting to ‘transmit’ his choices to his colleagues back home. As excited as he was about it, he kept the experiment to himself. Once he’d tried to have a discussion with Alan about the nature of consciousness, but he wasn’t really close to his boss and it wasn’t the sort of issue that burned in the others like it did in him. Some of the astronauts had thought about God while they were out in space, and everybody in the entire space program knew they were looking for something new about the way the universe worked. But if Alan and Stu had known that he was trying to transmit his thoughts to people on earth, they would have thought him more of an oddball than they did already.
    Ed finished the night’s experiment and would do another one the following evening. But after what had happened to him earlier, it hardly seemed necessary any more; he now had his own inner conviction that it was true. Human minds were connected to each other, just as they were connected to everything else in this world and every other world. The intuitive in him accepted that, but for the scientist in him it wasn’t enough. For the next 25 years he’d be looking to science to explain to him what on earth it was that had happened to him out there.
    Edgar Mitchell got home safely. No other physical exploration on earth could possibly compare with going to the moon. Within the next two years he left NASA when the last three lunar flights were canceled for lack of funds, and that was when the real journey began. Exploring inner space would prove infinitely longer and more difficult than landing on the moon or searching out Cone Crater.
    His little experiment with ESP was successful, suggesting that some form of communication defying all logic had taken place. Ed hadn’t been able to do all six experiments as planned and it took some time to match the four he’d managed with the six sessions of guessing which had been conducted on earth. But when the four sets of data Ed had amassed during the nine-day journey were finally matched with those of his six colleagues on earth, the correspondence between them was shown to be significant, with a one in 3000 probability that this was due to chance. 2 These results were in line with thousands of similar experiments conducted on earth by Rhine and his colleagues over the years.
    Edgar Mitchell’s lightning-bolt experience while in space had left hairline cracks in a great number of his belief systems. But what bothered Ed most about the experience he had in outer space was the current scientific explanation for biology and particularly consciousness, which now seemed impossibly