 It was my first term at university. I was burning the candle at both ends. I was really tired I joined the psychic research society just as you do something interesting We'd had a Ouija board session Which has been a daft thing to do and puts you in a bit of a funny state anyway I went back to a friend's room afterwards smoked a joint. This was 1970 and Well, we did that that wasn't unusual And listening to some music, which I think was probably Pink Floyd, but I'm not sure So there I am listening to a wonderful music sitting on the floor really tired a little bit stoned Not very much going down a tunnel. I was going down a dark tunnel towards the bright light The tunnel was made of trees, but it you know, I'd never heard of tunnel experiences The term near-death experience hadn't been invented, but there I was in retrospect. I can see going through the classic thing Down the tunnel out of the end suddenly. I'm on the ceiling looking down. There's my body down there There's my two friends over there. I'm on the ceiling looking down and I could see the mouth down there going I'm on the ceiling This is the real me. That's just a shell All those intuitions we have about being a spirit or soul or something inside the body that can leave us. Wow It's really true and then one of my friends said well, can you can you go move? You know and I went shooting off and I travel I mean, it's a long story to cut it very short I seemed to travel the world to fly over the sea and to become really I Was originally a sort of human shape But then I became other shapes and then I thought I got bit frightened and I thought I had to come back And I couldn't get back. I got back to the room, but I was so disoriented I tried to go inside the body and I went smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller I've never heard of any of these things they happen to people quite not commonly exactly But you know all over the times and places they've happened So I tried to get bigger so I got bigger and bigger and bigger and that led me to the classic experience mystical experience of oneness where Everything was was me and not me the concept of me made no sense time and space sort of There were time and space but not in the ordinary sense. We know at all I mean things happened but not within a me matrix like like we normally think of it and Then I was left at the end with a very powerful sense of wherever you go There's always something further and I came back saying that took me a couple of days to get Remotely back to normal and I had a very supportive friend who helped me You can imagine I was studying, you know cutting up rats brains to try and understand memory That's the sort of thing we did in those days long before the cognitive revolution and long before people were talking about Meditation and mindfulness or anything like that And there I was what's going on? So looking back I can understand why I leapt at paranormal explanations even though they're hopeless and don't get you anywhere Because how could I possibly understand it now the science is catching up But it's taken all those 44 years to make sense of what happened remotely obviously moving from that amazing out-of-body experience to studying paranormal psychology and and ultimately becoming a skeptic didn't happen overnight and Can you give us a sense for? how That path happened from moving to that experience to to where you are I suppose now Yeah, I struggled along that was the first year of my first term of my three-year degree So I and I loved studying the physiology and psychology But I kind of struggled along all the time with this in my mind I ran the Psychical Research Society at Oxford for the whole time I was there We did experiments with not just with we do boards but telepathy and clairvoyance and we went and visited haunted houses And we invited mediums to come and communicate with the dead with us And you know I did a lot of that as an undergraduate and then I was absolutely determined that I was going to become a Parapsychologist because by then I discovered there was this thing called Parapsychology that there were very few scientists out there in the world studying these things scientifically And that's what I wanted to do and my tutors said you know no way That's rubbish. You mustn't do that. I got a sensible PhD place studying rat brains, which I turned down And eventually I found a university that would let I had to pay my way got a job did a part-time PhD, which was really unusual in those days and Funded my way and worked my way through a PhD and designed all these experiments I'd got this grand theory of the Akashic records of the psychic field and the you know the phenomena out there that really memory is not in our Brain at all. It's all out there and that that's therefore when I get something telepathically from you It's really the same thing as memory lovely theory. I discovered two things one I wasn't original in this there are versions of that have been Bergson back in 1910 you know going way back and lots of them and secondly Doesn't work. I did experiment after experiment after experiment the first two or three experiments got little hints of what looked like ESP But as soon as I timed up the methods got the statistics right did the experiments well all the effects went away And I did dozens of experiments that showed no sign of any telepathy or clairvoyance or precognition or anything and So well, I thought well, but I still know tarot cards work by then I learned to read the tarot cards had my crystal ball And I'd learned you know I could stare into the crystal ball and see things and all this stuff So I believed in those and I had this extraordinary new experience So of course all my tutors are wrong. They're close-minded scientists They don't realize there's more in the world in than in your philosophy all that stuff, you know And I stayed like that for quite a long time It was like it the world the truth the evidence was eating away at my beliefs And I had to drop that and drop that and then it's another corner and another corner to turn and drop that and then There came a point and I can remember it. It's one of those sort of flash bulb memories Although I could have invented it because we know the doubts about how memory works But there's some truth in it in any way that I was sat in a bath one day in my house in Guilford and I thought What if none of it's true and it was awful to then have to go through all I knew Over the next sort of weeks really and think is it possible that I was completely wrong That experience happened my memories of that are very clear They could be a bit distorted and I've selected bits and so on but I cannot deny the experience and I met loads of other people who had Extraordinary experiences to somehow those experiences have to be Valid meaningful life-changing experiences without there being Telepathy clairvoyance other worlds all of that stuff which after experiment after experiment I'd found art just isn't there and in a way the rest of my life has been that unfolding You know, I've had the jobs as a university lecturer and reader and now a visiting professor at Plymouth But most of the time I haven't had a job because you know, I would just want to I want to do my research I want to write my books. I went so I've sort of limped along kind of and made a life out of out of exploring these things Can you give us a sense for what one of these experiments might look like? So someone who's might not be familiar with the experimental method and so on if if you wanted to test for example Tarot cards or whether where whether one of these claims were true What would it look like? I mean, how would you do the experiment? I'll tell you about a Three very different approaches where I started was very lab-based straightforward tests of telepathy and clairvoyance So a simple example I would get I used to teach a parapsychology course to a lot of students at Surrey University So I'd have maybe a hundred of them in a lecture theater And we would have hidden targets in the room and they would sit there with a sheet and they'd have to you know On a time signal they'd have to think what the hidden target was and tick it off And then you do all the statistics and you compare it with how many correct you'd expect by chance And it always came out just what you'd expect by chance Those sort of experiments you can say well, that's not That's not telepathy in the real world in the real world. It happens between twins. It happens when people are in Special states of imagery or relaxation So I moved on from those to get people into special states to put them in the guns felled with great relaxation and White white noise and things over their eyes to get them to imagine things No better results A completely different kind of experiment you mentioned tarot now I'd become a competent not brilliant, but a competent tarot reader and people said things How did you know that that's a man? You know all that stuff. So I devised a method for doing the tarot reading into separate parts so that An assistant would sit down with the person Do all the laying out of the cards get them in the right frame of mine and so on get them to shuffle the cards lay them out So on and then send them away Give me the order of the cards I would get myself into the right frame of mind imagine that the person was there which they weren't and Do the reading to myself and then write it all down and do that for ten people and see can those people pick their own Reading out of the ten. No, they can't I'm trying all the time not to make it so artificial to try to make it more realistic and Finally, you mentioned out of the body experiences. I have for a very very long time in my house in Somerset I used to have targets in my house. I met this strange young man who ran a Astral projection group and a magazine and and so on and he said he came to visit me and we talked about all this stuff And he said if you put a Five-digit number in your house, I will come and visit and he said I have out of the body experiences spontaneously at night. I can't say when they're gonna happen But if you have that there all the time when I have one I will come and visit and he said cook me an apple crumble every so often and that will bring me That's my favorite thing. So I would do that too, you know, so this is not an artificial lab experiment This is an ongoing experiment now I had to put it where nobody could come and I didn't think he would but you know I had to make sure he couldn't look through the window I had to change the number every so often and for the first few months every Sunday evening I changed the number. I had a word chosen from one in 20 words I had a small object like a toothbrush or a penny or something and I stuck that on the wall So there were three possible things and every time I met someone else who had spontaneous out-of-the-body experiences I would explain that to them and say anytime you come In all those years when that target those targets were there. I had three people who wrote to me and said I've been to your house and I've seen it and none of them got it right Oh, really? One got one word right. Yeah, but you know that in that just appears in the in the noise And they were sure they'd seen it you see when you have an out-of-body experience It looks so vivid that you can't help but believe that you're actually seeing something physically there