On Tuesday, October 19, 1999, Fox Family will air "Exploring the Unknown," featuring segments on:

--The Full Moon (do more crimes and weird things happen during a full moon because of some mysterious tidal force, or do more crimes happen during a full moon because criminals can see better at night, or do crimes and weird things not differ in frequency during a full moon but us pattern-seeking animals think they do because of a misperception of patterns?)

--Nostradamus: James "The Amazing" Randi and a folklorist scholar reveal the real meaning behind Nostradamus' alleged prophecies.

--Magnet therapy: Is it possible that magnets worn around one's waist, wrists, ankles, etc., can really heal illness and improve golf games? No likely.

--Remote Viewing: a special two-part segment (both airing during this one hour) in which your erstwhile skeptical correspondent learns how to remote view photographs in sealed envelopes and then puts a world-class remote viewer to the test. Stay tuned for a remarkable lesson in the power of believers to rationalize their misses.

For this segment I attended a seminar on how to remote view. We were instructed to open our minds and try to visualize the object in the photograph in the sealed envelope sitting on the podium at the front of the room. Our teacher gave us several sheets of paper to help us guide our remote viewing. I let my mind wander (and wonder) all over the place. Since a bunch of the adjectives on the sheets (there to give us a guide to how to describe the object) had sexual overtones, I let my mind flow in that direction until, about about 30 minutes of making drawing after dd lots of people looking at the statue, and for some reason Hyde Park in London came to mind, so that is where I ended up (although had we ended the session earlier or later it would have been something completely different and in a different location). There were a dozen students. Everyone drew all sorts of different things, all drawing lots and lots of straight lines, wiggly lines, and curvy lines (what else?) One person drew stonehenge and actually wrote "stonehenge" on his page. Well, lo and behold, the target was stonehenge. So of course everyone was very excited about this, until I found out that the guy who remote viewed stonehenge was the teacher's good friend who had driven with him from Reno to San Francisco that morning for the class! So when this teacher asks me how I could possibly explain how his student got Stonehenge, I said "Oh, well, let's see, perhaps you told him?!"

Of course, when we used an image in a sealed envelope that I brought with me, no one came even close to getting it, but that didn't stop them from claiming hits once I revealed it. The two star remote viewers spent an hour trying to get their minds into that envelope, and between the two of them they drew dozens and dozens of objects. Because the instructions this guy sent me on how to select a target read very much like some mentalism books I have read on how to get your mark to say what you want them to say, instead of selecting the Empire State Building or the Pyramids (which almost everyone picks, or something similar), I chose a photograph of galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that is on my wall (that I used in the last page of my new book, How We Believe, as an example of spiritual iconography for us nonbelievers) since there is no way that a drawing could be rationalized to being close to it if it looked anything like a building (which is what they almost always draw).

So, before I revealed it, we had the remote viewers tell us what they thought it was. Well, immediately the excuses started: it was late in the day, they were tired, and, my favorite one, my skeptical energies had prevented their subtle energies from penetrating the envelope! But before I revealed the image, I explained to them what they were going to do: they would go through all their drawings and try to find the one of the dozens that most closely fit. This, I explained, is called "mining the data," after the fact and is not allowed in science (they claim this is a hard science). Amazingly they said that is PRECISELY what they do and that is, in fact, how remote viewing works. I explained that that is correct, but that means it is not remote viewing at all, but nothing more than after the fact rationalization. Sure enough, the moment I showed them the Hubble photograph they started bleeting about how they had been getting vortices of energy, swirling motions, etc. They one of them tried to pull the rabbit out of the hat: of her countless structures she had drawn, one was of a cylinder. So she claimed that she had remote viewed the telescope itself! It was great. I was almost on the floor laughing! But she was serious.

You'll see all this on Tuesday night.

I also want to call your attention to a show that airs Monday, October 18 on A & E called CELEBRITY CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, as part of A & E's Investigative Reports hotsted by Bill Kurtis. The piece is by Kevin Barry, an excellent documentary producer who has done a lot of work for A & E, the History Channel, etc., and they interview Astronaut Gordon Cooper, actor Dennis Weaver, CEO Joe Firmage, and skeptic yours truly. They asked me what is my opinion of celebrities who endorse UFO claims. I said something to the effect that celebrities are people who are well known for their well-knownness, famous for their famousity, small statues on giant pedestals, and that their opinions on subjects outside of their domain (which is everything but the ability to memorize sentences and repeat them into a camera) are worthless. But in our screwed up, upside down culture, these are the very people whose opinions the masses most seem to trust. Screwy, very screwy.

The show airs on the east coast at 9pm and 1am, and on the west coast at 6pm and 10pm.

I thought you might enjoy this interesting letter I received from a Christian who does not believe in immortality:

"I am a Christian who believes that God did not endow man with an immortal soul. The Bible does not support this theology which has been taught in the Christian religion since the 4th century. The immortality of the soul is actually a Greco-Roman concept. I am on a mission to enlighten my brethren about this issue. I have written an indepth article on the subject, but I would like to use materials from learned men, Christian as well as non-Christians. I would like to include your material in my publication. It is not my intent, nor is it the intent of our Church, the Greater Broward Church of Christ, website:
www.ambassador-ministries.org for profit."

Now that's an interesting position to take. If one does not accept the immortality of the soul, what would be the point of believing in God?