Getting ESPecially Spooky with Loyd Auerbach
Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. There is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe, plumbing a ride on the omnibus of art. And the misty corridors of time, and in those corridors, I see figures. Strange figures.
AP Strange:Welcome back, my friends, to the AP Strange Show. I am your host, AP Strange, and we've got a heck of a show for you. And today's show is brought to you by Rent A Poltergeist. Looking to mix things up at your next party and add a little excitement? Or perhaps you're just lonely at home and you want a short term companionship from an otherworldly entity or source of psi energy?
AP Strange:Rent a Poltergeist is there for you for all of your, short term paranormal needs. There are longer rental situations if you want them. But, if you if you just want that experience and you just wanna get it, have that down on your resume, your your rapport with the paranormal world, look them up. Renttherentthepoltergeist.com. And a, the the it's a it's a good sponsor to have for today's guest because, today's guest, I'm very excited to introduce.
AP Strange:He is a parapsychologist, the director of the office of paranormal investigations, teacher. He's a mentalist performing as professor paranormal, chocolatier, author of many books, and you've probably seen him on TV or heard him on the radio. An early influence of mine, somebody that I am kinda honored to have on the show. Please welcome Lloyd Auerbach. How are you doing, Lloyd?
Loyd Auerbach:Thank you very much for having me. I'm doing good. Doing good.
AP Strange:That's great. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:I I I don't know about renting a poltergeist. I definitely would rent a rent a ghost. You know? There is always ghosts r us. So Yeah.
AP Strange:Well, you know, that's a that's a that's a great point. I mean, of course, poltergeist activity is generally short lived, but it doesn't doesn't seem that way when you're experiencing it.
Loyd Auerbach:Right. Yeah.
AP Strange:I do have some some firsthand experience with that. So, Yeah. Let's see. Where to start today?
Loyd Auerbach:You wanted to start with meddleism? Yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah. So like I said in the intro, this is one of the things I really appreciate about you, aside from the paranormal investigation broadly and and the sense of humor you bring to it. You're you're performing as performing mentalism as professor Porte, paranormal. This is something I've been interest interested in for the last couple years increasingly is is mentalism, as it's used in paranormal investigation. So I didn't know if you wanted to, like, speak to the insights that you kinda glean from Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I got into magic, magic and minimalism. I mean, I love magic as a kid.
Loyd Auerbach:I'm I actually went to see the amazing Kreskin when I was a teenager at Carnegie Hall. Yeah. Got to meet him because my uncle had had him on a radio show. And, you know, love watching him. This was the era of Doug Henning, so he was
AP Strange:Oh, yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:In the place. But I also watched people like Tony Slidini on the Dick Cavett Show. Just some really amazing magicians out there. I I just never really did magic at all or had any intention other than those kids' magic things when I was when I was much, much younger. But in grad school, we had a course taught by a local magician, which covered psychic fraud, but also approached, you know, the the principles of minimalism, the basics of magic, things like that.
Loyd Auerbach:And I was bartending in my way through grad school, so magic seemed to be a really good thing for me to do behind the bar to make extra tips, and it was, actually. Not as good as making balloon animals. I have to say that. But
AP Strange:Okay.
Loyd Auerbach:But but it did it did work really well. And then, I joined a local magic group here in the Bay Area before I moved back to New York for a couple years, and then went back to New York and joined a magic group there. And the magicians I I worked with in this club, and it was a chapter of the Society of American Magicians in New York in the Westchester County area, they were great. I mean, we were hard on each other to to hone our performances and our performing personas. And we ended up performing, at a couple of low like, a regular show at a couple local restaurants, and then I ended up performing, doing comedy magic at a couple of comedy clubs in Westchester, came back out to California, did some more work at in comedy clubs.
Loyd Auerbach:So I was mainly doing comedy magic, but keeping up on mentalism as much as possible. And then two of my especially one, I should say, really, it was mainly one of my mentors in parapsychology, Marcello Truzzi, who was a member of the psychic entertainers association, convinced me that if my colleagues in parapsychology are gonna take me seriously, I gotta really move wholly into mentalism and not be doing comedy magic anymore. So he actually he actually tried to convince me to be a a very serious do a serious act, but, honestly, I just couldn't do serious. So professor Paranormal came about, inspired inspired by Doctor Science.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, I've got I've got two things with that. But the the the the mentalism is important, but, comedy is important. And this is this is something I hammer on a lot where I'm always like, you gotta have a lighthearted attitude with a lot of this stuff. So
Loyd Auerbach:Actually, doing investigations. Honest you know, I've talked to so many people in the amateur ghost hunting world. We've had more stuff happen in in our cases because we have a lighthearted approach. I mean, think of it. If there's a ghost there or some activity there, don't you want that ghost to like you?
Loyd Auerbach:So that when you ask them to do something, they do it. So, yeah, it's really more about that. And as far as what mentalism has given me and magic's given me doing investigations is as a parapsychologist, when we do investigations, the first thing we have to do is eliminate all the normal explanations, the nonparanormal explanations. And a lot of that is just simply people coming to wrong conclusions be because of their biases in perception. So Right.
Loyd Auerbach:I have learned an enormous amount from being a mental especially from performing magic and mentalism. That's given me real insight into being able to pick those things out much more easily. So I'm not even just thinking outside the box. I'm, like, in the next block and with ideas, you know, looking at different things, and it helps a lot.
AP Strange:Yeah. And I and I and I mean, you you're hardly the only one that's, like, Harry Price was was, kind of in that tradition as well. Harry Carrington
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Karen Harry Carrington. Harry Carrington was actually a performer. Harry Price didn't really perform much.
AP Strange:But he knew the tricks.
Loyd Auerbach:He knew the tricks. And we've had other people in the field like Arthur Hastings and Ed Cox and others who actually were knowledgeable. Marcello Trudy, very knowledgeable about things. But one of the things that I did learn, was that performing is much more you know, when you perform and you you really get a feel for what the how people react to things. And you could see how people are interpreting things in their perceptions.
Loyd Auerbach:You don't get that from reading books and learning tricks unless you perform them for people. So there's kind of a second level. And I had a lot I had a conversation with Daryl Bem, who's a social social psychologist at Cornell and actually a parapsychologist, and he's a mentalist performing mentalist as well. And it's really interesting to see you know, to talk to folks who are either in the sciences and psychology who are also performers, and there really is some extra you get from performing, whether it's card tricks or other things or metalism.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, I don't do much performance. I have done tricks for people, you know, a little bit. She's good. A little bit trying the trying out the close-up stuff.
AP Strange:And I have to say, like, some of that feels like you're actually doing some kind of magic when you do it if when you pull it off. Like, I don't think people realize, like, forcing a card, just the regular old card force when you pull it off. If you read that in the book, you're like, that would never work. You know?
Loyd Auerbach:There's a there's a lot. You know? I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of, instruction stuff that comes with with new tricks, are videos, so people can actually see how they perform because, yeah, there's stuff you re I mean, if you read Korinda's thirteen steps to mentalism, which is, like, the bible of mentalism. There's stuff in there. It's like, I don't see how that's gonna work.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah. But it does. I mean, it really does when you perform it.
AP Strange:Yeah. So the first time I ever successfully forced a card like that, it was like I almost gave it away because I was like, you took the card I wanted it to take. Like, how did how did that work? You
Loyd Auerbach:know? Right.
AP Strange:But it it's, it's it's a great feeling. I don't know if you've ever read, Dunninger's book on thought.
Loyd Auerbach:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've I've got I've got, the what's on your mind, that
AP Strange:one? I I think so.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. I mean, I have I've yeah. I have that one. I have his book, How to Make a Ghost Walk, and I've got some other stuff. And my you know, I haven't talked to him in a while, but, a friend of mine was, like, the lead Joe Atmore.
Loyd Auerbach:He's kinda like the Dunninger expert.
AP Strange:And Oh, wow.
Loyd Auerbach:And we've, spent time together. I mean, he was a member of the Psychicenter tenures for a while. He's written a really good book on a couple of really good things on Dunninger. And, actually, at one point, we did a recreation of one of Dunninger's radio shows, and he put it he put it out as a DVD. So, Dunninger was, you know, incredibly knowledgeable.
Loyd Auerbach:There was many other folks at the time from the time period that the average person would never heard of because they never made it to radio or were were major performers. But I have a lot of I have a lot of the old stuff as well as, more recent stuff, obviously.
AP Strange:Yeah. I'm I'm kinda wondering, what your take on Dunninger is because he seems like kind of a believer with some of this stuff. Because I was reading, like, some of the mentalist stuff. I'm like, is he talking about Psy? You know?
AP Strange:And he's like, there's nothing really he he he's saying there's nothing supernatural about this. You're just simply projecting your thought to another person. Like, it's just transferring the thought.
Loyd Auerbach:You know? Well, you know, there's there's the explanation for the public
AP Strange:Right.
Loyd Auerbach:Conditions, and then there's what one might actually believe. Hard to say, because I I talked to Joe about whether or not Dunninger believed in ESP, and it seems like he had experiences. I mean, one of the things that's interesting about mentalism that's different than magic is that if you're on stage as a mentalist and something pops in your head, it's okay to say it. Even if it's completely wrong, nobody in the audience reacts to it because we know that ESP is not a % anyway. And, of course, the person could have gone to the bathroom.
Loyd Auerbach:So they weren't even Yeah. If a magician says or does something that doesn't work, people hold that magician to a much higher standard and say, well, that's a sucky magician. That magician's trick failed.
AP Strange:Right.
Loyd Auerbach:So we have a a a distinct advantage. With Dunninger, I know with Kreskin, he he see he people who knew him, truths he knew him, other people who might spoke to him years and years ago, there was some element that he would use whatever would pop up. But, of course, most of what he did was stuff that Dunninger did, which was kind of repackaged. And that's the case with a lot of mentalists is that some will go with what they have. They may let it in their own minds.
Loyd Auerbach:It could just be and I've talked to some of the guys in in the psychotherm cameras are are definitely disbelievers in ESP inside. Right. So they have other explanations. That's intuition. It's it's just something that creativity, whatever it is, they won't ever pin it down to ESP.
Loyd Auerbach:Others are like, yeah. You know, when stuff pops in my head, it just can't be intuition or creativity. It's it's legitimate stuff. And they're okay with it because they feel that when you're portraying that role on stage, you're allowing yourself to do those things. You're giving yourself permission, which which works.
AP Strange:Yeah. And and like like I was saying before, the one two punch with comedy, I think, allows you to do that too because you're opening yourself up.
Loyd Auerbach:Right. Yeah. Right. Yep. Sadly, metalism can be very, very dry, and you at least need to do it with a twinkle in your eye.
Loyd Auerbach:Otherwise, people get bored pretty easily pretty quickly.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. Unless you're, well, I mean, there have been some successful ones in recent years doing big things on there was that British guy. I can't remember.
Loyd Auerbach:Darren Brown?
AP Strange:Darren Brown. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. He still has a he still has a twinkle in his eye. Yeah. He still Yeah. It's like he's he's got something he knows that, you know, there's a way he's performing that because he was an actor primarily to start with.
Loyd Auerbach:So he really he he puts out that kinda energy that, I know something you don't. Wink, wink, nod, nod, you know, nudge, nudge kinda thing. Yeah. I think that's important, because it connects with people that way. You really do connect with people.
Loyd Auerbach:And whether it's comedy or just just playing humor, it's the same with the speaker. I was a public speaking coach. I've done a lot of public speaking coaching, and you need a little humor, but that doesn't mean telling jokes. Yeah. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Sometimes it's just
AP Strange:the way you carry yourself. Right. Yeah. Because, I I've never considered myself a comedian, but, if I goof while I'm talking, I I'll roll with it. You know?
AP Strange:So Yeah. I used to I used to host, like, open mics or or MC events and things like that. And people always would tell me I was funny afterward, and I'm like, I'm not really you know, I'm not going up there loaded with jokes or anything, but I I have kind of, like, a goofy affect when I'm in front of people, and I just roll
Loyd Auerbach:with it. Stuff occurs to you. And, you know, you if you're in the moment with an audience, you you know, stuff will occur Right. In that way. You know, back to Dunninger, I do wanna say, you know, Dunninger is very famous for that.
Loyd Auerbach:Although this is kind of there are variations of it. To those who believe no explanation is necessary, to those who disbelieve, who do not believe, no explanation is possible. And Yeah. That's always his attitude.
AP Strange:Did Trutzy kinda have a similar attitude to that?
Loyd Auerbach:He Trutzy was, he was, among other things, a skeptic, but he was a true skeptic, not the kind of skeptics who seem to wear the s on their chest in that way, what Marcello actually called pseudo skeptics. He was one of the founding members of the Committee for Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal Psychop in the seventies. He left after about a year when he realized that the majority of the people who started it or the board had an agenda to debunk, to say that all psy you know, everything was fake. So he actually was a friend to parapsychology in so many different ways. He really did, allow I mean, he actually was a proponent of psychics working with police, and he didn't even necessarily believe they were psychic.
Loyd Auerbach:He wrote a coauthored book a great book, if people can find it, called The Blue Sense with Arthur Lyon, who was a mystery writer. And Marchelle having conversations with him. So Marchelle's feeling was whether they're sigh or not, he thinks that the psychic detectives who work well, can look at evidence or a situation, and they see something in it that is different. In other words, they they see a missing piece. Like, they're looking at a jigsaw puzzle and they can infer what the missing pieces are.
Loyd Auerbach:Kinda like that current TV show, High Potential, that's on ABC right now.
AP Strange:Okay.
Loyd Auerbach:And to him, he he's like, okay. So they're wired differently. If they produce useful information, shouldn't the police use them? That's a simple question.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Doesn't matter if it's psychic or not. So that was his attitude. But he was always encouraging of researchers and doing better controls. He was encouraging for me to do investigations appropriately. So and, you know, he he knew a lot of mentalism.
Loyd Auerbach:He actually grew up in the circus and, kinda came from that performing background. Although, and he was very funny also, I should say.
AP Strange:Okay.
Loyd Auerbach:He was very funny.
AP Strange:Yeah. Because, it's funny because, Trudy was kind of a, synchronicity around setting up this show because I was reading through your book, and a friend of mine, a researcher, had been at the archives in in Michigan where the yeah. And he had copied a bunch of things, and he just hit me up and said, hey. Would you be interested in some scans here of the the truth c files that I got? And I was like, yeah.
AP Strange:Sure. Send them over. And then I see your reference to him in your book. And then I picked up a different book and was reading that for another show, and there was he appears a lot in that other book. So I was like, he's making himself known, I guess.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. I mean, he definitely was. And Yeah. I spent a lot of time talking to him on the phone. I mean, before his death, for years, actually.
Loyd Auerbach:I was on the phone with him at least once a week. Mainly because the place where I had my day job had an 800 number, so he called me all the time.
AP Strange:Yeah. Right. So, the well, he was he was in SCIOP at the same time as the amazing Randy.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. He was. Let let's just say that he and Randy didn't get along. I won't won't say anymore about that.
AP Strange:Okay. Yeah. You don't need to be belabor that point
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah.
AP Strange:With what we've already said.
Loyd Auerbach:But then again, I didn't get along with Randy either. So
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's you you kind of, picked on something that I I did wanna get into, which which is that pseudo skeptic kind of idea because Mhmm. As you say, like, skepticism is is necessary. You can't just be jumping at shadows and, wholesale believing, that there's a there's a pair you know, a parallel cause to everything that happens.
AP Strange:Right.
Loyd Auerbach:Right. But on
AP Strange:the other hand, if you just exclude half the data to prove your point that it has a mundane reason behind it, that's not good either. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Or if you don't look at the data at all, which is the case for many neuroskeptics that make pronouncements about parapsychological research in the lab, and they never have looked at the data. In fact, sometimes they'll admit, well, you know, why would I look at that? It's impossible. And that's about as unscientific as you can get. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, because
Loyd Auerbach:there is the opposite end of that, which is something that you've brought up before. I've heard you talk about before, which is kind of the reality TV version of Everything is Demons. Everything is Demons. Everything's ghosts, shadow people, all of that. But, you know, the thing about reality TV, which I really my family's been in television since before I was born.
Loyd Auerbach:Right? Yeah. My uncle was a director of soap operas. I heard stories from him from the actors and actually talked to a couple of the actors in one of the soaps who actually had been approached on on, you know, on the street, and people were thinking they were the characters from the soapbox. In reality TV, reality TV is not reality.
Loyd Auerbach:It's unscripted, but that doesn't mean it's not directed or people are not told to repeat themselves or to do whatever they you know, what the the director says. And then they're completely edited to whatever the producers think is gonna get a rating, the appropriate rating. It's not and even documentaries have biases. So for people to believe what they see on TV is is actually what happens in reality as opposed to, you know, what's going on behind the scenes, is a shame. It really is a shame, and it spawned, you know, a cottage industry for a lot of people who are are doing, making devices for ghost hunters that don't do anything, or they they misrepresent them, or they're charging hundreds of dollars more than they than whatever they put together for them.
Loyd Auerbach:And it's all because people like the gizmos because the gizmos are are better television than the ghost story itself. The people take stories.
AP Strange:Yeah. Because, I mean, I kinda grew up with, unsolved mysteries and, for me, reruns of in in search of and sightings. So I remember seeing you on sightings, when I was younger. And to see, like, the reality TV version move in was always it was so disappointing to me when I was younger because I'm like, I I liked the way sightings did it in the early series seasons. That was really interesting.
AP Strange:Yeah. And it was still it
Loyd Auerbach:was still I mean, those shows still edited. You know? I I was not there for just five minutes. Yeah. But they did try as much as possible to portray things accurately or without saying you know, making wrong conclusions or jumping to conclusions for that matter.
AP Strange:Yeah. And, I mean, also, when you're on screen, you're not making these grand pronouncements of, like, well, ghosts always behave this way. And this is a sign that there's a ghost when the needle jumps like this on the device. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:There's no tech that detects ghosts. And the if ghosts are if ghosts are the are the are the spirits of deceased people, ghosts are people too. So to say that all ghosts do x is like to say all people do x, and that's absolutely not the case. We know that.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I mean, being that people who maybe have only a peripheral interest in this kind of stuff, are are unfortunately exposed to, like, pretty much ghosts or demons or hoax.
Loyd Auerbach:Mhmm.
AP Strange:It it's it's really refreshing to revisit your book, the paranormal case book you wrote because rereading that, I'm like, yeah. This is the stuff, man. This is the the more nuanced view of it where you're talking about how some things are really just PK effects, and you have your apparitional things, which is rare. And you're talking about how there could be, you know, survival of consciousness or could be psychic projection. But or it could be a combination of different factors.
AP Strange:So
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. And the combination actually is what happens quite a bit. And, you know, we don't have all the answers. So we're always looking for more information and more to understand what's actually going on. We don't just even though I have an idea of what the models are that we work from and the definitions we work from, those could change as we as science in general learns more about consciousness.
Loyd Auerbach:That actually could change what we're doing. But parapsychologists have been doing research in and out of the lab on the subject matter, these experiences, because we have to start with human experiences. We can't start with a spooky building and walking in with equipment without a ghost story. I mean, how do you know there's a ghost there? How do you know there's anything there?
Loyd Auerbach:Because their equipment tells them there is, but which really is nothing. We have to we have mysteries to solve about human experience, and we change you know, individual cases can change as we get more information or get further into cases. But overall, there's more and more that we can learn, with more people doing things the right way as opposed to just simply following what they blindly following what they see on TV. Right. I mean, EVPs don't give us any information about what a ghost is, how they work, why they're there, all it doesn't do anything.
Loyd Auerbach:Even if they were genuine, which most of them are not, they're mostly interpretive, they're beside the fact that there's a chance that the human operator is causing those unconsciously from PK versus a ghost doing it that way. We haven't learned anything from EVPs.
AP Strange:Right. Right.
Loyd Auerbach:And we we need to do more to figure out what's actually happening. And, again, it comes back to for apparitions comes back to what is consciousness in some respects.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. And and kind of how how that PK works as well because the other half of this is photography. I mean, you have the audio with the EVPs, but then there's photography as well. Right.
AP Strange:And, I found it really interesting reading your book that you're saying the ghost isn't actually there. Usually, it's projecting its image into your mind and causing you to see it psychically.
Loyd Auerbach:Right. So Otherwise, everybody would see it. I mean, you know, if ghosts were actually visual, not only will we have a lot more pictures of ghosts, but, everybody would see it, you know, see the see the apparition. And that's definitely not the case.
AP Strange:Yeah. So one of the things you wrote was that there's, like, a psychical imprint on the film when you do capture something. That's a possibility. Right?
Loyd Auerbach:Right. So if we give an example of Ted Sirios in the nineteen sixties and into the seventies, who was researched, worked with by Jewel Eisenbud Mhmm. Sirios extensively could put imagery on Polaroid film Yeah. With hypokinesis. Others have been able to affect film and affect we have a lot of data that people can affect electronic devices.
Loyd Auerbach:And so the idea is that if if a ghost doesn't have a physical, it's not reflecting light or giving off light, which is the only thing a camera can take a picture of, then there has to be some impact on the actual recording medium, the film, the camera itself, maybe the processor for, a digital camera. And that in that intention or that kind of effect would technically if it's coming from a mind, that's automatically psychokinesis, whether it comes from a deceased person or a living person for that matter.
AP Strange:Okay. Because that's kinda what I was gonna ask because, like, in the age of smartphones, do you think it's possible to project psychically into an image with the device?
Loyd Auerbach:Possible. But, you know, we do have cases of people whose whose phones are are really behaving bizarrely because they're under stress. So so think of it as a poltergeist case, but it's directed at their smartphone and other devices. I mean, there's we call those human machine interactions. And we know from laboratory research in that area back in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and also work with random number generators and random event generators and other devices since the sixties that we can unconsciously affect things.
Loyd Auerbach:In the eighties, I talked to people in Silicon Valley who, because of some things going on with my Apple two c computer and a particular program that led me to, call customer cert you know, customer support at a software company, and they said, well, I can't do that. It's like, okay. Well, it is doing that. No. It can't do that.
Loyd Auerbach:This is a simple program. It can't do that. And I was under a lot of I was under a time crunch. I was really stressed out. And then the conversation turned to the guy asking me, so did this start because you're really stressed?
Loyd Auerbach:I mean, you sound stressed now, but were you stressed out before you started? And I said, well, yeah. I I'm under a time pressure right now. He said, alright. I want you to turn off the computer.
Loyd Auerbach:Take a step back, go take a walk around the block, let yourself calm down, and then come back. And here's my direct number. You can call me back. Yeah. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:We ended up in this lengthy conversation, and then I ended up talking to other people in hardware and software that the mood of the operator, the stress level of the operator affects devices, computer programs, computers, all of that. And that's straight out of the work that Bob Morris did on human machine interactions.
AP Strange:So Yeah. That's that's amazing.
Loyd Auerbach:I mean, it's I got there's a guy I'm talking to who, is having problems with his iPhone, and he's he actually works for a company that works with Apple, and they haven't been able to figure out what the hell is happening with his iPhone. But it seems to be more paranormal activity, you know, really weird stuff that nobody seems to be able to explain
AP Strange:at all. Wow. Yeah. We're on new frontiers of, paranormal investigation. That stuff because Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. I mean I mean, I can say that one of the weirdest things that happened to me, I was working for a while in the nineties with a man named Martin Caden, who, Marty was, creator. He wrote a book called Cyborg, which became the $6,000,000 man. He was a science and science fiction writer. He's a consultant to NASA.
Loyd Auerbach:He an aviation expert, a well respected aviation and aerospace expert. He also wrote a book called Maroon, which became an Academy Award winning film in the sixties. And he was doing PK. I mean, he could do PK. And so we were doing work we were doing workshops together, after I had done some studies with him in Florida, and we were at one at the University of, Nebraska.
Loyd Auerbach:We had done some we were kinda starting out doing some workshop discussion of what he could do leading up to, actually teaching people to do some things. We had a group of a hundred and two people, including a lot of faculty members. And I had my at that point, it was a Mac PowerBook, so it's like the nineties. Right? Right.
Loyd Auerbach:And if you can imagine for a minute, the hard drive and the Mac PowerBook was 40 megs. Yeah. Tiny. I'm sitting in the I'm sitting in the back of the room taking notes, and his wife, Didi, is saying you're, you know, you really shouldn't be in this room with this computer. And I said, why?
Loyd Auerbach:Just, you know, he she said, just as a reminder, we don't have computers. He works on a typewriter because he hates computers. So I said, I'm not too worried about it. Well, couple minutes later, my computer crashes. And the hard drive's not working.
Loyd Auerbach:So I ran upstairs to my room. I had an external hard drive. It turned out I was it came back on, was able to transfer the information. As soon as I transferred everything to the ex external hard drive, which was also 40 megs, by the way, it crashed and died. And I sent it to Apple, and I get a callback from them that they were gonna fix it for free.
Loyd Auerbach:It was out of warranty. They were gonna replace the hard drive because they had never seen a hard drive burn out like that and not affect the rest of the
AP Strange:computer. Wow. So
Loyd Auerbach:don't bring your computers around people who hate them. That's all I can tell you. Right.
AP Strange:That's a that's a pretty intense p k. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Effectively. I told him about it. He just said, yeah. You shouldn't have the thing in the room with me.
Loyd Auerbach:You know? It wasn't Yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah. Now do you find that people that have PK with electronics, have have, the same kind of things moving on their own accord, or is it is it separate kinds of PK?
Loyd Auerbach:It can be set it can be very separate kinds of activity. Right. I've had cases in my colleague, John Kruth, who's the executive director of the Rhine Research Center, had a case of electron kind of an electronic poltergeist situation where where where things electronics were acting up, nothing else. I had a case in Westchester County Years ago where and we figured out I mean, it was the woman who was there. She was the poltergeist agent, and we could figure out the trigger and all that.
Loyd Auerbach:But she not only had, electronics acting weird, but her appliances in the kitchen, and it had this this was kind of a a little bit of a clue to what was going on, would actually turn on without being plugged in, with Star Wars being plugged in. And it was all relation to her reacting to the things her her husband was saying and doing at the time. So it's not just I mean, technically, obviously, a you know, she had a stand mixer. It wasn't plugged in. It was turning on.
Loyd Auerbach:That was moving, but not moving the way we think of it for a poltergeist case typically. So those kinds of things can happen. There can be cases where the major you know, poltergeist cases where the majority of things that happen are physical movements or that kind of physical activity, and then the electronics also have a problem. But in those cases, the electronics is not the the major piece of it. I haven't seen really cases where it's been the major thing is focused on electronics, and then you also have movement.
Loyd Auerbach:That's only in my experience.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, for me personally, I've had various PK effects plague me throughout my life, a lot less so in recent years. But, typically, it was always physical things. But, occasionally, there would be an electronic component because electronics would act up around me.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. You know, Robert Morris, who was, like, the one of the main people doing human these kind of human machine interaction bits of research in the seventies and eighties, had a great story that he told. He met a Xerox installer, a Xerox machine installer back this is the early eighties. You know? And those those copiers break down all the time.
Loyd Auerbach:You know? Even to this day, they break down all the time. And this guy had an impeccable record of, when he would when he was able to decide where in an office to put the Xerox machine, that machine never broke down. He had this record with the company. And it turned out that he would go and before deciding where to put it, he'd observe, like, from the background, he'd observe office interactions.
Loyd Auerbach:And he would put it where it had the the least chance of having anybody stressed out around it. So if there were issues interpersonal issues with people in the office, that's not where you put the machine. You put the machine where, you know, people are happy. So sometimes it ended up in where the coffee coffee maker was because you know, or the water cooler or things like that. But Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:That in itself is an indication that someone in technology recognized that people affect things without intending to.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty amazing. And, after your story about, about the computer frying during the Martin Caden talk, I'm wondering if there's, like, a secret file at Apple somewhere about sci effects. Mark You
Loyd Auerbach:know, that's a really good question that all the tech companies might actually have those secret files for all we know. You know? Just, and they probably won't you know, they're probably just collection of reports and and mysteries that they haven't solved. But and they may not label them as psychic. But, definitely, there are people who are interested in kind of how we affect devices ourselves.
Loyd Auerbach:You know, there are those people who can't wear a watch. You know? And whatever watch they put on it, it it just doesn't work. And Yeah. That may be an electromagnetic effect for some kinds of watches, but not all watches.
Loyd Auerbach:You know? Not wind up, like, you know, wind up, analog watches. And what's really interesting because I've I've met people who said who came to my lectures or something else, and they said, well, I can't wear a watch. It's I said, do you how are you feeling about I mean, are you ever consistently late to places? Do people tell you that you have a problem with time?
Loyd Auerbach:And every one of them says, yeah. I hate being on time. You know, I hate having to worry about, being held to a schedule. Well, that's a good psychological reason to not have a watch.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. They just kind of resent this reminder of time on their wrist all the time. So I just Right. Because that's the thing about PK is that it's just generally well, I mean, I guess with the recurring spontaneous psychokinesis that, I think that was William Roll that came up with that.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Bill Roll and and JG Pratt. Yeah.
AP Strange:Right. It's expressing something that you maybe don't don't, on the surface, recognize about yourself.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's very often psychological. You know, it's often stress related, but, it can be kind of an indicator of something that you know, a dislike or a frustration, things like that. We also have a certain percentage of cases that seem to be related to neurological issues too.
AP Strange:Oh, that's interesting.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. One study done by Rolle and Jerry Solfin, a number of years ago, and then Barry Taft has done some studies on this too, that about thirty percent of poltergeist agents have either actual epilepsy or they have some kind of epileptic form activity in their temporal lobes. So in other words, they have something going on in their brains. Right. Barry has told me stories, and, actually, Jerry Sullivan told me stories also about people who had epilepsy, who had the poltergeist activity happening.
Loyd Auerbach:And during the periods that they had the poltergeist activity, some of them went off their meds, their epilepsy meds, because they weren't having seizures. Uh-huh. So there was a there's a kind of, like, a hypothesis that maybe the poltergeist activity is the seizure, is the kind of expression of the seizure instead of being inside the brain that goes outside, or that there's some connection.
AP Strange:Yeah. Now that you mentioned it, I do recall reading something that Barry Taff wrote about that. But, yeah, that's actually really, super interesting. And and, I mean, stress is kinda similar. I mean, if you're if you're not you don't have the there's gotta be some kind of brain activity going on with stress that causes that to happen.
Loyd Auerbach:And stress can cause issues in your body. I mean, you know, when we're stressed out in our lives, we can have issues pop up in our health, our physical. So, you know, is that you know, it's often called, you know, psycho psychosomatic. You know, a psychosomatic illness is one that has an actual physiological something going on, but it's caused by psychological mindset or something psychological happening. And that's as opposed to hypochondria where you just make it up.
Loyd Auerbach:Right?
AP Strange:Right. Right.
Loyd Auerbach:So what's causing that ulcer for you if you're stressed out? I mean, that's a mind body, mind over matter effect. That's a forward PK. Just directed in. I'd rather have stuff flying around my house than have something to happen to my body, honestly.
AP Strange:Yeah. Well, unless you can control it because, like,
Loyd Auerbach:Oh, that's a different story.
AP Strange:You do hear about llamas and stuff that are able to adjust their core body temperature or do fantastic things like that.
Loyd Auerbach:You know? So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
AP Strange:So some of that might come in handy. But, speaking of, of that, with the usefulness of of this these PK effects, We had spoken once before, and you you you mentioned what you called, stupid psychic tricks. I don't remember I don't know if you remember talking about this. But I
Loyd Auerbach:don't remember talking to you about that, but I have talked about it with others. Yeah. And I think, I just I'm trying to remember because when you mentioned that email, I was trying to remember what Joe McMonagle, who was the number one viewer of you know, for the Stargate program, the remote viewer. He had a stupid psychic trick, and I cannot remember for for my for the life of me what that was. And I wasn't able to get in touch with him to find out.
Loyd Auerbach:But I'll tell you what. Where this actually came up was when I was working years ago at the American Society for Psychical Research. And, we had a visiting researcher from Canada, from our university up in Canada by the name of Bernard Grad, who was doing psychic healing research with a particular healer. And, I worked in the education department at one and and we had talked a little bit when the lab, and he came into the education department and, to chat with me. And he slaps his key chain on the desk.
Loyd Auerbach:And at the end of the key chain, the key fob is this what looks like a black rock, but it's shaped with a point at the bottom. It's kinda tubular, and it's very hard, and and and it's got striations in it and such. And I say, what's that? He said, that is a mummified banana, Piece of a banana. I said, okay.
Loyd Auerbach:Then he says, the healer that I'm working with has one other talent. He can mummify bananas very quickly. No other fruit, just bananas. Oh, so you can only
AP Strange:do it to bananas.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. That is a stupid psychic trick. Sometimes stupid psychic tricks can be actually useful. Alex Tanis, who was our psychic at the ASPR, had, I would say, not a stupid psychic trick, but a kind of a useful psychic trick where I I would sometimes have to drive him to different parts of Manhattan. I wouldn't have to.
Loyd Auerbach:I I I volunteered to do that because I liked hanging around Alex and talking to him. And going back to the ASPR, which was a half a block off of, Central Park West on West 70 Third Street, so one way street going down. And there were rarely any parking spaces on the street because it was very, very busy area. And we would head up there, and he said, okay. Before we get there, let's turn down this street and let's go around a couple times around the block.
Loyd Auerbach:And at one point then, he'll say, okay. Now turn on Central Park West. Quick. Turn quick on West 70 Third Street. There's a space right in front.
Loyd Auerbach:Turn on to West 70 Street Third Street, and someone is pulling out from right in front of the ASPR. He had the ability to find parking spaces in New York City without any problem. That
AP Strange:one of
Loyd Auerbach:the that's one of the most useful talents I I ever could think of at that point in time.
AP Strange:See, that's something for somebody to pay for. People would pay for that psychic skill.
Loyd Auerbach:Right. That's right. Yeah. So they're they're the stupid psychic tricks and they're the sort of dumb but useful psychic tricks as well peep some people have. You know, bending bending silverware is not really anything more than a super psychic trick.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. I mean, it's kinda cool, though. I mean,
Loyd Auerbach:you you you I think mama buying bananas is pretty cool too.
AP Strange:It is cool. And, it's funny because I ended up coming across a case that, Nandor Fodor wrote about for Fate Magazine. It was called the goblin of the loaf. And it was this one family in England that just the woman kept baking little cakes, and then they come out in the morning and, like, half of it would be gone. And sometimes it would disappear before their eyes.
AP Strange:Like, it would just it was almost like it was being eaten from the inside.
Loyd Auerbach:Somebody But somebody was doing a stupid psychic trick to her stuff.
AP Strange:Yeah. Base basically. Yeah. The cakes every time she baked.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. You know, I keep on I really need to this is something I need to do and then before I die is start collecting these stupid psychic tricks and use other thing and just publish a book of those because I think that they that would be more fun, you know, with the too.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, I I would I would buy it for sure. It's because, I mean, I'm sure there's tons of those that people don't necessarily talk about. But Right. Right.
AP Strange:If you put out a call for them, I'm sure you'd get a lot of responses, especially from your colleagues.
Loyd Auerbach:You know, just thinking about the spoon bending thing, I would we a number of years ago, we had one of our Forever Family Foundation events in Durham, North Carolina with a conference, open to the public. And the foundation supports the work of of eventual spirit mediums in the family grieving process, but also supports research into survival of bodily death. And, while we were there, the because I was connected to the Rhine Center also. We went over to the Rhine with, I think four or five of the mediums were volunteering and did some ESP card test with them, just some some games. Then we did a little we did a kind of a mini spoon bending thing with them, and they were bending spoons pretty fast.
Loyd Auerbach:One of them, Laurel and Jackson, who's a well known medium, was bending them like crazy. In fact, she continued to bend them at the hotel. She continued to bend them in the restaurant we went to, after we closed the the conference, and I heard from her during the week that her husband was getting mad because if she was continuing to bend stuff at her house.
AP Strange:Now was she doing that on purpose, or were did she just
Loyd Auerbach:It just was coming through. It was just she was laughing, so she was it was so much fun for her to do that, and I think she still does it from time to time.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. That's that's pretty amazing because, I I mean, I've seen examples of it. I've seen pictures of it where sometimes these things are just bent in really improbable ways. Because, I mean, there is the magician's trick where you Oh, okay.
AP Strange:Your finger on it and and it it doesn't look like you're bending it, but, you know, Really? So
Loyd Auerbach:I mean, I I know the Secchia County Tennis Association has had some of the best metal benders in the world, as as, part of it. And the thing is that it's really interesting is that there's certain things you can't do with without significant preparation on on the the spoon or whatever and even something you can't do because of engineering issues like bending over the bowl of the spoon like that because of the structure of the spoon. Also and I've run spoon bending parties myself over the last ten years. But back in the eighties when Jack Houck, who was an aerospace engineer who came up with this whole idea of doing these kind of metal bending parties, He
AP Strange:he
Loyd Auerbach:had a metallurgist do slices of some of of the spoons that seem to flop over or have really weird shapes and compare them with others that were physically bent and found that there was a difference in the structures, that there was melting that happened on the inside on the structures, the crystal and structures of the metal, on the ones that seem to be paranormally belt bent. And there were fractures or crumpling on the structure when you physically bent something otherwise. So there was actually an internal difference that was actually happening. And that's probably is pretty interesting as well. I've also, when I've done them, I've made sure I had some spoons that were so cheap that if you bent it unless you spent a lot of time taking it really, really slowly, they're gonna snap.
AP Strange:Right.
Loyd Auerbach:And I'll test them first. People are still twisting them to all sorts of shapes. And at one of the events I had, there was a woman who joined us who was friends with one of my students. She was a stand up comic, and she had everybody laughing throughout the whole thing, which was great. And as we finish up, she says, hey.
Loyd Auerbach:Does anybody ever unbend these things? And so for the very first time, I had everybody yelling unbend at spoons and things, and she was straightening things out, which if you physically bend the spoon into a spiral, trying to straighten it out is next to impossible, especially without it snapping in some way. And she was still labored.
AP Strange:Wow. Now when you do this, is it always metal? It's only metal. Like like, if you use, like, a plastic,
Loyd Auerbach:I had actually, somebody I saw somebody bend actually a couple of plastic spoons. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That was, kinda crazy.
Loyd Auerbach:And I really I didn't have any, but I really wanted to see somebody bend a wooden spoon. That that would be cool. That would be very, very cool. Yeah. I had somebody once send me photographs.
Loyd Auerbach:He was doing PK at home, and they sent me photographs of a pencil that looked like was tied in a knot, you know, wooden pencil. I I didn't know if that was really a wooden pencil, if it was just something you know? So I really couldn't come up.
AP Strange:They used to sell those rubber pencils at, like, Gettysburg stores.
Loyd Auerbach:I know. Yeah. So I I I couldn't tell.
AP Strange:Sure you're familiar.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah. It it looked like a real pencil, you know, with the the lead and everything, but, you know, if I if I don't get to see it myself, I there's not not a lot I can say about it.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. I mean, it would be quite the trick.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. If I'm if there are things honestly, there are things that have happened that I've observed that if we could make those as magic tricks or mentalism tricks, there's a lot of money to be made in that world. In one of the the seance shows that I did with my friend Larry Lobig years ago. We had a show called seance fiction theater, and we performed it at a few a couple of few restaurants, two of which were haunted restaurants. So people places where there had been real real activity reported.
Loyd Auerbach:And at this one, the Moss Beach Distillery, which is one you'll find on my, you know, sightings of the Moss Beach Distillery, for example. Yeah. You went at the distillery. And for window dressing, you know, I had tarot cards and a crystal ball, and I had a I I had one of the plasma balls, you know, the lightning balls. I even have a little one up here behind me.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Alright. So that's on. It's giving off its its, its glow and the plasma the light the plasma lightning's happening throughout the whole thing. And as we're doing our thing, someone in the audience and we have few magicians in the audience actually that at that particular show, they're pointing.
Loyd Auerbach:They're look at the ball. We turn around and, you know, on these these things see if my battery's even on here. No. Batteries oh, there it is. You probably can't you can sort of tell it there.
Loyd Auerbach:Right?
AP Strange:Right. And when you put your
Loyd Auerbach:finger on it, you get that kind of effect. Right?
AP Strange:Yeah. For well, so this is an audio medium, but, for for listeners This
Loyd Auerbach:is I didn't realize we're just doing audio. So anyway so so basically with with these plasma balls, when you put your hand on of one of the big ones, you get the lightning hitting the glass around your hands. You get an outline of your hand. Right. And that's pretty cut that's you know, people can actually see that when they're using a real hand.
Loyd Auerbach:So what the guy pointed to when we look back, there was there were several, bits of lightning outlining a hand Mhmm. And it was moving around the globe. Yeah. Which is not possible with no one touching. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:We actually looked into because that you know, actually, I'll I'll I'll be real honest. We have these magicians come up to us afterwards who didn't believe there were ghosts there at all. Larry was a true skeptic. I have had my encounters at that place, but, couple of they would come up and say, well, how did you guys do that? And Larry looked at me and without batting an eye or missing a beat, he said, we can't tell you because we haven't decided if we wanna sell this yet or put this out to the public.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. And I realized when we talked about this is if we were able to duplicate, create that effect, we had a lot of we had an we had an a a good, audience to sell to. Right. Consumer base right off the bat. We could not we talked to people who knew about the construction of these things, who knew about static electricity, electromagnetism.
Loyd Auerbach:Nobody could figure out how to do that except for Yeah. The extensive mechanical thing that was not possible, really.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a a once in a lifetime thing too. That was the only time that happened with the plasma ball was That
Loyd Auerbach:is the only time. I I've taken the plasma ball to some investigations. Haven't had any any kind of that kind of interaction, but I think it was partly because of the setting that we had, and and the ghost. She's a little more playful.
AP Strange:Yeah. The Moss Beach Distillery Ghost was the blue lady, I guess. Right?
Loyd Auerbach:Originally called that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She hasn't worn blue clothing since the '19 or since '91 late ninety one.
AP Strange:Okay. But, yeah, she seemed like a really playful kind of spirit. Very playful. Yeah. Really funny how she would, I guess, she would smack people on the butt with a spatula.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. The people who came in for repairs during the day before the place opened would often get smacked in the butt with a spatula if they were bent over, or even a a couple of occasions with a frying pan, and and there was nobody else around. And so some of the folks were a little bit nervous about coming back a second time. Let's put it that way.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. It was kinda like prankster energy, I guess. It was Yeah. Yeah.
AP Strange:So I witnessed that same kind of effect when I worked at at a convenience store when I was younger. There was a there was a delivery guy that came in. It was a very busy time, and I saw him going to stock one of the shelves. And he had stopped in his tracks, and he was on his knees trying to stock something, and he stopped. And he's looking at it because the beef jerkies were all jumping off the hook one by one.
AP Strange:And I said to him, don't don't worry. That happens here all the time. And he Right. I never saw that delivery guy again. He took a different route after that, I think.
Loyd Auerbach:And on the USS Hornet, one of the things that that has happened, it still happens once in a while, is women on the USS Hornet Aircraft Carrier Museum get get goosed Yeah. By the sailor ghosts. So not a great location, but you know?
AP Strange:Right. It was a different time. Many different times, probably.
Loyd Auerbach:Yes. Many different times and especially guys from the forties. So gotta give you leeway.
AP Strange:Well, yeah. I mean, I guess, in that case, you had one of the commanding officers seem to come back.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. JJ Clark. Right. Jack Clark has been there and one of the few that's been identified because he was identifiable. And, you know, we've actually had to work through it's been a while, but we had a couple situations where one of the sailors was was bothering the receptionist for the foundation and working with at that point, he would he would retire as an admiral.
Loyd Auerbach:So admiral Clark, we work with, myself and a psychic, worked with admiral Clark to, let's just say, send down the chain of command that this guy shouldn't go anywhere near her. And without letting her know what we did, she called me to say to actually ask, what did you guys do? He's not coming, like, within 50 feet of me. So
AP Strange:Wow. Yeah. So it's a it's a dressing down in the afterlife for the advent.
Loyd Auerbach:Well, you know, they're almost all as far as we know, all of these guys, all the ghosts, all the apparitions that have been seen, been interacted with on the Hornet are former naval officers, noncommissioned officers, and sailors. That's what they were in life. They either served on the Hornet or, and have come back in that role as well, or served on another ship and have come back as well.
AP Strange:Yeah. And, I mean, I guess that sense of camaraderie and and Yeah. And, loyalty to the ship is kind of like the spirit of the ship itself as well.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah. I'd I'd think so. And, you know, the the docents, many of the docents in the past, I don't know where we are today with this. But when I started investigating in 1999, the major they only opened as a museum in '98.
Loyd Auerbach:A lot of docents were, like, in their in their eighties. And they had all you know, they they were people who they served aboard a ship. These are ex navy. They're navy veterans. And they were serving they were coming back to volunteer as docents because of their recollection of the time and supporting the ship and all of that.
Loyd Auerbach:And that seems to be what drew them back after death also.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because that's that's a strong, compelling force, you know, and that's, I I mean, I come from a family with a lot of people that served, and it's it's something that sticks with you for a lifetime. You know? You never really lose that pride, I guess.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah. So, I you had mentioned Martin Caden before. Mhmm. And you include in your book, what he wrote about a a ghost plane.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. So, I actually was at his place when Deke Slayton after Deke Slayton died. Deke Slayton was one of the from Mercury seven. He was kind of a command and control he was in control of, some of the command center for at at, at The Cape. Good friend of Marty's, and he passed away, in Texas.
Loyd Auerbach:He had a house in Texas. They also had residents in in Orange County, California. And this was, like, in I don't have the the the date exactly off top of my head, but I believe it was in June he died. He died early very early in the morning, and only Deac's wife, Bobby, and her daughter their daughter and the doctor at that time, you know, for several hours, knew that he passed away at home. So a few weeks later, Bobby Slayton gets this, letter that was forwarded to where she was in Texas from the FAA came from California.
Loyd Auerbach:That there was a noise complaint because, that airport, John Wayne Airport, actually has some serious noise restrictions before 7AM, even I think it's even before 8AM and after for certain jet certain types of aircraft. And the noise complaint was that Slaton's racing plane, he had a racing plane, which was registered with a number NX, NXO1, I think it was. But, anyway, the racing plane was originally, stocked stayed at that airport, and he would go out and fly it. Mhmm. Right?
Loyd Auerbach:At seven approximately 7AM, that plane starts revving its engine. It had a very, very large engine, very loud engine, which is why the noise complaint came. People saw it on the ground. They didn't see anybody near or they couldn't see in the cockpit who was there, but it's Revenant's engine. The prop's going for quite some time, and then eventually it takes off and heads towards the sun more or less.
Loyd Auerbach:They lost it. K? Problem being two two fold. The main problem was at the time that they were people were seeing that plane, which was only a couple hours after Deac died, that physical plane was in an aircraft museum in Sparks, Nevada without the engine actually in the plane. Right.
Loyd Auerbach:And that plane was exactly the right color colors, you know, his own colors, the right registry, all of that that bit of it. The other thing was that nobody could figure out is if it was that kind of plane as a racing plane, somebody needed to kick start the prop. Now maybe nobody was looking, but nobody saw anybody kick start that prop. It was sitting out there on the run you know, near the runway, and suddenly the prop started up. So for somewhat, the the it would be the ultimate coincidence for somebody to build a replica of Dxplain, have it out there, but it with a different kind of engine that it didn't require the prop to have somebody kick start it, and to launch it and never be seen again only a couple hours after Deac died.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah.
AP Strange:That would
Loyd Auerbach:be one of the one I mean, one of the least likely coincidences ever, especially no one knew where the plane even came from because it wasn't they everybody, you know, it was not there. So
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing story, and it kinda raises questions. I mean, I guess, with with the apparition stuff, it it's not necessarily people think you die, and then you end up coming right back looking exactly how you did when you when you passed.
Loyd Auerbach:Which is actually not true anyway for for any Right. Operation. Yeah. You die at 95, you're gonna look like you're 30 most likely when you come show up to people. Right.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah.
AP Strange:And I mean, as you mentioned with with, the Moss Beach Distillery goes, like, you know, she always wore blue, but then she didn't anymore after a while. You know?
Loyd Auerbach:Because somebody advised her not how to how not to. Yeah.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. But but, yeah, this is all super interesting because then you could have things manifest like a ghost plane or a ghost tower. Yeah. I remember reading about a ghost double decker bus in in, I think in London in the seventies at one point.
Loyd Auerbach:Well and in some respects, the the most interesting thing is that the plane was seen on radar for a time. So it had a physical presence of some kind. So it was actually reflecting a radar ray you know, rays, and people could hear it, and, apparently, people recorded it. So, you know, it's it's kinda one of those things that maybe it was a physical plane, but that's really bizarre the most bizarre coincidence there could possibly be in that circumstance.
AP Strange:Yeah. Or it was just temporarily a physical plane. Right. Exactly. Yeah.
AP Strange:I mean, that's, that's really wild, because I don't know. Like, re rereading your book kind of got my wheels turning with a lot of this stuff because, one of one of your really well known cases is, the Black Knight of Petaluma, which is kind of the spirit that that seemed like it was a composite of different things that the younger person involved part of his imaginal life, I guess.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Although the the the mother was the one who actually was projecting that Yeah. Because of her concerns about him. Yeah. I mean, it didn't number one, it didn't react to anything.
Loyd Auerbach:It didn't seem to move the figure. And while it was connected to this woman's son, who was a juvenile delinquent, was actually in Juvy Hall by a bit of time, There was a teenage girl. His twin sister was there. She was 16, and stuff was moving around. So it seemed like a classic poltergeist with something else going on until we realized how much of it connected to the mother and her stress level about the son being a a juvenile delinquent and some issues with him.
Loyd Auerbach:As a kid, a younger kid, this got this son actually had, toy armor you know, toy shield and toy sword. We found these under the house.
AP Strange:So
Loyd Auerbach:there's some real connection there. And the black knight, a black a knight in black armor, you know, one of the things she remarked to me because this this was 1979, was that had she had this been before Star Wars came out, she really would have wondered about because she started seeing this, like, years before. Mhmm. But she said it looked like dark sort of like Darth Vader. Right.
Loyd Auerbach:And Lucas created Darth Vader. I mean, the whole design of Darth Vader is as a union archetype. The black knight is a union shadow archetype Yeah. In western consciousness and psychology. So it made sense that that thing looked like a black you know, like Darth Vader.
Loyd Auerbach:She didn't say that to us until we after after we started talking to her because she didn't wanna think us to think that that was where she got it from.
AP Strange:Yeah. And and, I mean, it's interesting as a case study because it's become very common with with a lot of people, especially younger investigators or people that just kind of, do research or write about these topics. The concept of, like, the tulpa that, you know Yeah. Because of John Kiel. So things well, I mean, he he he kinda brought it to, like, the parent, but talking about it in the Mothman Prophecies kinda brought it to a a an audience nowadays, I guess.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. And and the term the terms has been you tossed around within our field is just simply thought form.
AP Strange:Right.
Loyd Auerbach:You know, tulpa is a very specific it comes from the Tibetan belief
AP Strange:Yep.
Loyd Auerbach:That one individual can put enough mental energy who's talented that way to bring you know, to cause something to come into being that can then take on a life of its own. Right. There are other four other kinds of thought forms that are out there that are not necessarily visual. I actually had an experience back during the channeling days in the nineteen eighties, you know, when channeling was really popular, and people were channeling all sorts of entities. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Each of Atlanteans, aliens, dolphins, you know, you name it. They were channeling them. And we I was on a show locally with a panel of channels. So there were several channels channelers. And I was brought in act and John Klimo, who had written the book on channeling.
Loyd Auerbach:If you wanna find a great book, it's called channeling by John Klimo. But, I was brought in because I've done the show many times before, and they wanted me to kinda ask the rational questions about some of this stuff. And I was seated between, a woman who was channeling, like, a seventeenth century Irishman. Mhmm. And on the other side was
AP Strange:a woman
Loyd Auerbach:who said when she went into trance, she called herself Athena. She was channeling Athena. So she got she was very quiet. She didn't get a lot of she wasn't, like, over the top, and she was barely getting any airtime. During commercial, the commercial breaks as we're taping, I asked her, so are you Athena, the Greek goddess?
Loyd Auerbach:And the response was actually very interesting. She said, well, there really weren't any Greek gods. I am the thought form created by the belief in the spirit of wisdom that was called Athena.
AP Strange:Wow.
Loyd Auerbach:And I thought, okay. I can buy that. That that was almost you know, I really you know, it's not what I didn't say that that's really what it was, but, that was interesting. I mean, that was a really interesting response that's so different. It was so different than any of these other channels stuff channel or stuff.
AP Strange:Well, right. Yeah. I mean, this channeler stuff can be I mean, let's face it. It can be pretty goofy sometimes. Like
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah. And and, actually, the way we looked at it for the most part is it was for many of the channelers. When they were producing psychic information, it was likely this was some part of their, their personality was kinda think of it as a role play. So instead of being responsible for providing this information, their unconscious created a character to deliver the information so that anything that was problematic would be laid on the at the feet of the character, not at the channeler's feet.
Loyd Auerbach:Kinda like what you people do tarot card readings who may genuinely be psychic. They can blame it on the cards. Whatever they if they get delivered bad news, it's the cards. It's not me. It's the cards.
Loyd Auerbach:Right. And that avoids any sort of blowback later on also. And that certainly was the case with the woman who was channeling the seventeenth century Irish person, Irish woman, because as as she worked with John Klima, who is well aware of that whole model and worked with me, she realized that she really was the psychic, and she didn't need these characters anymore. So she ended up the characters went away because she didn't need she didn't need them. They weren't really necessarily external.
Loyd Auerbach:They were coming from within herself.
AP Strange:Yeah. That's really interesting because, I mean, classically, with with old seances and the spiritualist world, they always had, like, a control spirit that would Right.
Loyd Auerbach:Which which very well when there really was something going on, that control spirit may very well have been just simply part of their personality. Yeah.
AP Strange:Wow. Yeah. That's that's interesting. Because you can think of it in a lot of different ways. Like, if you're writing fiction, you're writing fictional characters, those characters are still an extension of you.
AP Strange:Right. And, they're allowing you to find things that, because you you do some fiction writing as well. Right?
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. I am a coauthor of a couple of paranormal mystery novels. One's is called, near death. The other is called afterlife. And we have a third one which will be out hopefully late this fall called Farsight.
Loyd Auerbach:It'll be yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I'll I'll tell you a quick story about a a famous fiction writer, fiction mostly fiction writer, but he was a magician too, a guy named Walter Gibson. So Yeah. Walter b Gibson was the ghostwriter for Houdini and Thurston and other people, in his youth.
Loyd Auerbach:He actually worked with Blackstone and a number of others. He also is the man who created the shadow, the pulp character. Right. And Yep. The radio character as well.
Loyd Auerbach:He was very interested in in, psychic things. And there's a lot of some of the shadow novels, have magic in them. Some of them have kind of, like, border on the psychic stuff as well. So there was a case back in the sixties, which Hans Holzer also investigated. But, among other things, there's a house in, in Greenwich Village.
Loyd Auerbach:It's, I think 12 Gay Street. It's still there. And it was originally a bigger house, and it was bisected. And people report people who are living in one half of the house now reported hearing and seeing people walking up and down nonexisting nonexistence stairs to apartments and having a party, which probably related back to when the because when the house was one full big house because that's where the stairwell was even though they didn't see a stairwell. Right?
Loyd Auerbach:So that's that repeat, residual haunting kind of thing. So upstairs in the upstairs apartment, it was reported that people were seeing, you know, in the in the semi darkness, If the room was not completely lit, they would see a figure in evening clothes kind of approaching them. And the way that this person was described, it was basically a description of Lamont Cranston from the shadow novels.
AP Strange:Right. Right.
Loyd Auerbach:And then it would morph into a shadow and disappear. So folks thought there's a figure there. So, Holzer I I don't care recall exactly exactly what Holzer said about that. I mean, he he did work out that was a imprint otherwise. Well, it turns out, that Walter Gibson lived there in that apartment.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:He lived there for the last couple years when he was finishing writing the last bunch of shadow novels. And I made the comment that, this was in a, like, a 1965 newspaper interview that when he wrote the shadow, he brought Lamont Cranston to life and the shadow to life in his own mind. He let them tell him the story. So he he posited that this was not just an imprint of not of somebody. It was an imprint of a thought form.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, that's
Loyd Auerbach:Fictional character comes to life. Yeah.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. That's amazing. And, that is something that's come up on the show before, the that, you know, fiction does isn't always just fiction. And and these ideas have to come from somewhere, and and and they have a spirit all their own in a lot of ways.
AP Strange:So
Loyd Auerbach:Well, that's right. But, you know, the greatest superpower we all have is our imagination Yeah. Our creativity, which is connected to psychic phenomena.
AP Strange:Yeah. I mean, I I would have to say so. It's, and it is kinda funny with the Houdini connection because this is kinda coming full circle is that, you know, Houdini famously debunked a lot of, a lot of a lot of spiritualists.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. He didn't start out doing that. He was after his mother died, he started going to medium after medium to try to connect connect with his act his mother because he was a mama's boy. No question. Right.
Loyd Auerbach:And he got turned off by all the font phonies he saw. So I I'm you know, we can't say for sure, but it sure looks like he got so mad because so many people were trying to get his endorsement by pretending to contact his mother that he went after them.
AP Strange:Right. And even well, even with that adversarial kind of thing after a while Yeah. A lot of spiritualists seem to believe that Houdini had superpowers.
Loyd Auerbach:And just Arthur Conan Doyle certainly are Arthur Conan Doyle had a friendship with him, apparently argued with Houdini even after Houdini explained how he did some of his illusions that Houdini was making that up, and, really, he was he had supernatural, you know, paranormal powers. Yeah. He wasn't the only one either, though.
AP Strange:I mean, I found a lot of Yeah. Because I'm kind of a Houdini nut at this point. And I guess, Walter Gibson's brother lived in my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. He was a teacher here, and, Gibson had delivered the draft of the Houdini on magic book
Loyd Auerbach:Mhmm.
AP Strange:To Worcester to his brother to give to Houdini because, he would do a when he was in town, he knew a lot of academics and would do presentations at, like, Holy Cross College Mhmm. And, Clark University and things like that. So, that's kinda cool. I got this local connection to him. But
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. Yeah. That is cool. You know, I I was fortunate to to talk to Gibson on the phone at length and then meet him in person because after I found out that he had done investigations in the fifties for the ASPR. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:That case you mentioned where recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis came out was was the Seaford Poltergeist case on Long Island. And, apparently, what Gibson told me was because I found something in our in the files back then that he was involved in that case, and he told me he was.
AP Strange:He
Loyd Auerbach:this stuff himself. There was another magician, Ormond McGill, who had told me the same thing too because I got to know Ormond before he died.
AP Strange:Oh, man. Yeah. Ormond McGill, that's one of my white whale books is his book on mentalism. I've looked for it. It's out of print, so it's kinda hard to get the
Loyd Auerbach:full book. There's also a book he did on on miracles
AP Strange:too. Yeah. I can find that one, but the the other one, I haven't been able to find an affordable copy yet. But that's that's on my list. So alright.
AP Strange:So, we've been talking for a bit now, and I don't wanna eat up too much of your time, but so start winding down. I do very much appreciate you taking the time to talk to me, though. This has been a lot of fun.
Loyd Auerbach:No. No. It's been a a different conversation than I normally had. I'm I'm on a podcast. I have to say that.
Loyd Auerbach:It's been good. Yeah. I've been really
AP Strange:That's that that's kinda what I shoot for is to talk about some fun stuff that maybe you don't get the chance to talk about as often. You know? But, so for my listeners, I I wanted to point out that you do live question and answer things I do. On Facebook regularly.
Loyd Auerbach:Not on Facebook. On YouTube. On YouTube, rather. Yeah.
AP Strange:But I used to do see. Okay. I always see the links on Facebook still, I guess, to the YouTube. Yeah. But Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:Yeah. So I do this every other Sunday night, session called ask professor of paranormal. It it it will be I'm not quite sure when you're gonna air this, but the next one's March 2, then March 16, then March 30. Get people through March, and then it'll be every two weeks through the May. And then I have to readjust because I'll be in an event in June that kinda pushes it back a week, and then it'll be two every two weeks for the rest of the year.
Loyd Auerbach:But folks can find, the links actually or when the upcoming shows are on the YouTube channel. If you especially if you subscribe, you get notifications. It's just youtube.com/@askprofessorparanormal. Just the whole thing spelled out. And then I do have a web a new web relatively new website, which is just simply loydhourback.com.
Loyd Auerbach:And, that includes some information about the show and and upcoming things as well, but a lot of other things. There's, actually sections of my paranormal casebook. That FAQ that's at the beginning of a paranormal casebook is actually up online as well. And I'll be adding, I'm just about to write a new blog, because I haven't really started blogging much there, but I'll be do blogging on that website as well. The key element to find that website is to remember that my name is spelled with one l.
AP Strange:Not Yeah. I was gonna say that for listeners, one l in Lloyd. Yeah. Was that your choice to change
Loyd Auerbach:Oh, no. No. No. You were It was my parents, and I got two different explanations.
AP Strange:Oh, okay.
Loyd Auerbach:My mother said it looked better. My father said it was just for the elephant, which is where my sense of humor comes from.
AP Strange:That is a classic dad joke. Yeah.
Loyd Auerbach:And he was pretty young when he came up with that too. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So those are the two places they can find me, but, also, you can follow me on on either x, which I'm still on, threads.
Loyd Auerbach:I'm on Blue Sky Social. Just simply at professor paranormal.
AP Strange:Okay. Excellent. So, yeah, definitely, listeners, go find Lloyd online and follow along and, take advantage of the Ask Professor Paranormal because
Loyd Auerbach:Please do. Yeah.
AP Strange:I'm I'm sitting here geeking out because I get to ask professors their paranormal things, but you can too. So Right. Alright. Thank you so much, Lloyd. Thanks for coming on the show.
Loyd Auerbach:You're very welcome. You. Very welcome. Take care.