Word: psychics
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Putting together a TIME cover can produce a spirited clash of viewpoints among writers, editors, correspondents and reporter-researchers - one that ultimately serves to balance and enhance the finished story. Such was the case in dealing with the complex and controversial subject of psychic phenomena. Los Angeles Correspondent Richard Duncan was particularly open in his approach. One day at U.C.L.A., Duncan submitted himself to Kirlian photography, a process for measuring psychic energy. Although there were too few exposures to prove or disprove anything to his satisfaction, Duncan was interested to see that the developed film of his fingertips showed blotchy...
Even more bizarre was the mysterious force that glitched TIME'S complex, computerized copy-processing system on closing night - at almost the precise moment that our psychic-phenomena story was fed into it. Against astronomical odds, both of the machines that print out TIME'S copy stopped working simultaneously. No sooner were the spirits exorcised and the machines back in operation than the IBM computer in effect swallowed the entire cover story; it developed a flaw in its programming that sent the copy circling endlessly through memory loops from which it could not be retrieved. Thirteen hours...
Associate Editor Stefan Kanfer, who wrote the cover story, managed to remain free of psychic interruption last week. "I got into this topic,'' he says, "through the back door - some would say front door - of magic and mentalism. There are many tricks with which one can duplicate paranormal phenomena." Indeed, Amateur Magician Kanfer astounded numerous TIME staffers last week by seeming to guess correctly, over the telephone, cards that had been pulled from a deck in Jaroff's office - which is one floor below Kanfer...
Hardly a person lives who can deny some such experience, some such seeming visitation from across the psychic frontier. For most of man's history, those intrusions were mainsprings of action, the very life of Greek epic and biblical saga, of medieval tale and Eastern chronicle. Modern science and psychology have learned to explain much of what was once inexplicable, but mysteries remain. The workings of the mind still resist rational analysis; reports of psychic phenomena persist. Are they all accident, illusion? Or are there other planes and dimensions of experience and memory? Could there be a paranormal world exempt...
Naturalism is the right style for McCleery: it lets him explore real people in recognizably human situations making it through their crises with little psychic hurt. An optimist himself, McCleery consciously intends to stress the comic and the positive in plays. The vividness intrinsic to naturalism allows him to make his points clearly, showing his audience the dynamic process through which his characters resolve their conflicts so favorably...