New York: St. Martin’s Press 2005. 284 pp.
3 pp. Suggested reading   $23.95

Nicely complementing Radin’s work, Sally Feather and Michael Schmicker have put together an excellent introduction to ESP for the reader interested in stories of people in many walks of life whose lives have been enriched with intuitive, telepathic, clairvoyant and precognitive awarenesses. Parents, children, couples, death, disasters, wartime experiences and spirit communications are richly sampled.

This is no ordinary collection of such stories. Sally Rhine feather is the daughter of Luisa Rhine, who gave credibility to ESP through her meticulous gathering of stories similar to the ones in this book, and J. B. Rhine, who was among the first scientists to develop and implement careful laboratory methods for studying ESP. Feather and Schmicker continue in this tradition of bringing readers materials that convincingly demonstrate many of the ways in which ESP is active in people’s lives.

These authors also provide helpful discussions on the research that historically and recently confirms beyond reasonable doubt that ESP exists. In many of the examples, they put the reported experiences in the context of this research.

Here is an impressive story of how ESP came into play when two children were in danger: 

    “Where’s Ruth!” 

    “A woman had to make a quick trip into town one morning and decided to leave her six-year-old daughter Ruth with a babysitter. She started out, drove downtown, but just as she got to the store she suddenly knew she had to go back home immediately. She sensed her daughter was in great danger. “Where’s Ruth?” she shouted to the babysitter as the car squealed into the driveway. “Oh, she’s playing with Ann,” the started babysitter replied. Ann was Ruth’s little six-year-old friend and neighbor. The mother rushed to Ann’s house. Again, “Where’s Ruth!” “I thought they were playing at your house,” replied the stunned mother. Without thinking, almost as if she were on automatic pilot, Ruth’s mom drove immediately down the street, over a railroad crossing, stopped, jumped out of her car, ran through a gate, up a hill and down to an old brick quarry, now filled with water. There at the edge of the water sat both children, taking off their shoes to go wading. The water was much too deep, the sides of the quarry too steep for them to crawl out of once they were in. She was just in time. “I hate to think of what would have happened if I had arrived a few minutes later,” the mother wrote. 

    “Neither child had ever been to the pond before. Ruth’s mother has no explanation of why she felt compelled to rush there instead of any number of other places in the neighborhood. Something more than reason was at work. “It was not so much a thought as an impelling message that drove me home and drove me to the pond immediately after.” She never questioned it or asked herself how she could know. She simply believed it and acted on it. This is how psychic intuitions work. This certainty is what makes them different from ordinary hunches or run-of-the-mill intuitions. Psychic intuitions nearly always send us running, to the right place, leaving reason and doubt behind. Four out of five (83 percent) psychic intuitions are accompanied by a strong sense of conviction that something is wrong and must be addressed immediately. This is considerably higher than any other form of ESP awareness. 

    Occasionally, the mother is not instantly consumed by emotional panic. Instead, the mother takes action automatically, without really thinking about it. The psychic warning remains just below consciousness but still proves effective.” (p. 66-67).

A final, brief chapter on understanding your ESP encourages readers to accept that this is a real phenomenon, reported by an estimated sixty-five million people in the US. Among other helpful observations is the fact that ESP is wrong a certain percent of the time. Though this is disconcerting, it should not be discouraging. This is simply the way ESP works.

Review by Daniel J Benor, MD, ABHM, IJHC Editor

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