Precognition in Business Management

Professors Douglas Dean and John Mihalsky at the Newark College of Engineering PSl Communications Project have spent ten years testing the precognitive abilities of over 5,000 businessmen. They had heard numerous stories of how fortunes were made by men whose intuitive decisions seemed to defy all logical considerations. In one series of studies they looked at company presidents who had doubled their company's profits during the last five years. They found these individuals scored much higher in the precognitive tests than other executives. In fact, the ESP test seemed to be a much better indicator of executive success than other personality measurements. A number of companies have shown an interest in using this technique to screen applicants for management positions.

One of the interesting outcomes of the PSI Communications work with executives was the high percentage of subjects (about 80%) who openly acknowledged a belief in ESP. When questioned further, the businessmen admitted their belief was not based on either a familiarity with the scientific literature or an acquaintance with some psychics. These tough-minded individuals believed in ESP because they had seen it work in their own lives!

Another major endeavor in the business community is that of financial investments. Large investment companies typically spend millions of dollars in market research and investigation. In spite of all this effort, education and statistical science, major investment companies not infrequently fail to achieve results that equal the performance of the overall market.

In 1982, the St. Louis Business Journal conducted a special event with nineteen prominent stockbrokers and one psi practitioner, Mrs. Bevy Jaegers.

Each participant was asked to select five stocks whose value would increase over a six-month period. Mrs. Jaegers, who has no professional training in corporate analysis, outperformed eighteen of the nineteen experts. During the test period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell eight percent. Jaeger's stocks were up an average of 17.2 percent. The only stockbroker who bettered her attained an average of 17.4 percent. Sixteen of the stockbrokers chose stocks that lost their value.

Another psionic organization in the San Francisco Bay Area was Delphi Associates. This group was formed by Russell Targ and Keith Harary after leaving SRI International where they had been conducting remote viewing experiments, under government sponsorship, for several years.

In a unique pilot study, Harary was able to predict the movement of silver futures accurately for nine consecutive weeks. Actually, he did not predict the price changes directly, rather he was asked to describe an object or scene that he was to view the following week. The objects were randomly coded by the investigators to correlate with movements in the price of silver. The success of this study, even though subsequent tests failed to yield the same extraordinary results, enabled Targ and Harary to financially sustain their continued business and research activities for a period of time. The organization has since disbanded -- although not before Targ and Harary wrote a best-selling book describing their work, The Mind Race.

The applied psi activities of Uri Geller has been reported in business publications and in a biography which Geller co-authored with Guy Lyon Playfair. Geller, of course, achieved notoriety for his unusual work as a psychic entertaine. In retrospect, it's fair to say that, for better or worse, he influenced the field of psychokinesis research. The term "mini-Gellers" now refers to ostensibly talented macro-PK subjects that have been reported in over a dozen countries -- generally discovering their supposed talents after watching Uri Geller perform on television. However, for well over a decade, Geller has discontinued his work as a laboratory subject and has entered the world of psionics. News of Geller's more recent activities have surfaced in a national business publication, Forbes Magazine, in a profile article following up on an earlier story which appeared in the Wall Street Journal. I will quote some portions from that article:

Big businesses," he [Geller] says, "are beginning to listen to people who think they can deliver something with their sixth sense." Consider the possibilities? What if some enterprising outsider were to hire a psychic to abscond with the secrets of IBM's new 1000K RAM chip? Or, if a Boone Pickens has the power to compel a Gulf or Cities Service to bow to the terms of his latest merger offer? What if he knows what the stock market or the gold market or the bond market will do in the next week or next month or next year?

It was Val Duncan, the late chairman of Britain's Rio Tinto Zinc Corporation that made him [Geller] see the possibilities that business could offer. Duncan tested Geller's ability to find minerals on Majorca and later put him in touch with the chairman of South Africa's Anglo Transvaal Mining Company. The Chairman spread out a map and said, "Tell me what you feel." Geller said, "I feel something here." And years later Geller said the company found coal on the spot. "That's when I learned I could do this for very big companies and profit myself also. For seven years I have been doing this and nobody knows anything about it."

Several oil companies, for example, hired him to do some exploration. Acting as a sort of airborne divining rod, Geller targeted 11 prospects, four of which he says proved out. Geller doesn't charge fees, he claims. He relies on people to pay him what his service is worth. In this case a percentage royalty. "It's a little percentage," he says, "but in oil a little is a lot."

Which companies he has worked for Geller won't say. "They do not want their name to be linked to the psychic, to the paranormal." His only really public venture to date is his success in bringing together Japan's Aoki Corporagtion and the U.S. Tishman Reality in a $500 million hotel, condominium shopping development near Disney World in Florida. Both John Aoki and John Tishman were personal friends. But Geller claims to be more than a mere go-between. "My role is that I predict the success of the venture." That's where the power lies in being able to predict future success.

Public Safety

After a mine disaster in Wales, in which 144 people perished, researchers collected reports from individuals who claimed to have had premonitions of the event. Seventy-six reports were recieved. In twenty-four cases, the percipient had actually talked to another person about the premonition before the catastrophe. Twenty-five of the experiences were in dreams.

A study conducted by W. E. Cox indicates that precognition also operates on mass-awareness levels. Cox accumulated statistics on the numbers of passengers aboard 28 railroad trains which were involved in accidents. These figures were found to be significantly less than the number of passengers on the same trains one week before or a few days after the accident. People somehow avoided the accident-bound trains. There were also fewer passengers in damaged and derailed coaches than would have been expected according to the figures for non-accident days. Cox hypothesized that many potential passengers were aware of the oncoming tragedy, but not on a fully conscious level., 

Several practitioners, such as Alan Vaughan, have suggested the use of ESP for safety inspection of such complicated systems as the space shuttle, nuclear reactors, or oil pipelines.

About two months before the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June 1968, Alan Vaughan, then in Germany studying synchronicity at the Freiburg Institute for Border Areas of Psychology, began to develop a strong premonition that Kennedy would be assassinated.

The event, he felt, was part of a complex archetypal pattern which he was tuned into, involving the killings of both JFK and Martin Luther King. Many coincidences and dreams began to support Vaughan's theory. On April 29 and again on May 28, Vaughan wrote letters to parapsycholgists notifiying them of his premonition and hoping that Kennedy could be warned. His letter was received by Stanley Krippner at the Maimonides Hospital Medical Center on the morning of June 4. Subsequently, Vaughan's apparent precognitive abilities have been extensively tested.,

Ironically enough, at least three cases are on record regarding the accidental deaths of parapsychologists who did not heed the warnings of their psychic subjects. Perhaps the subjects had not sufficiently demonstrated their reliability in the past.