Saturday, May 2, 2009

Need for Closure and ESP

During the months since my book Operation Blue Light: My Secret Life among Psychic Spies I was published in September of 2008 I have gotten e-mails from people who are either interested in my book or have read it. I want to answer these emails here rather in individually.

Without telling the story in detail let me just summarize. In my senior year of high school, and for a few years after that, my psychic ability grew. I started a trip down the rabbit hole when I took pity on some people I sensed were being used as subjects of experiments, probably in the Soviet Union. It seemed to me that the experiments were designed to develop and then control their psychic abilities. The psychics I was aware of were being trained to communicate with other psychics using a spoken language. As time passed I was drawn into psychic communication mostly with intelligence agents from the US, England, USSR. and the People’s Republic of China but also some amateur psychics. This came to a head during the summer of 1966. After a special phone call and because of an interview and some testing I describe in the last chapter I satisfied myself that — what I thought were communications, really were.

Most of the emails I get from readers are coming from amateurs who tell me they believe they are taking part in similar psychic communications to those I describe and they are being monitored by governmental groups today.

I know I was especially lucky because a fortunate set of circumstances and my ability to turn them to my advantage made it possible for me to eventually come face to face with agents from four branches of the US Federal government and a contact from the PRC. This all gave me closure and a degree of comfort that few others will probably ever have.

So it was that I dedicated Operation Blue Light: My Secret Life among Psychic Spies to “The causalities of the cold war’s psychic battlefields both foreign and domestic.” I think there are many whose daily activities have been distracted and whose lives were interrupted by some government’s efforts to identify psychics. But these psychics have no way to prove the reality of their psychic contacts. Still they are better off then the poor victims of “psychic training” efforts behind the iron curtain who were mostly mentally ground-up and liquidated.

Psychologists have found that individuals scoring high on the “need for closure” scale will use preliminary data to come to conclusions quickly. They are uncomfortable with ambiguity. People who have a low “need for closure” will take longer to come to a conclusioin and their solutions will be more creative. I would like to see some research that matches this “need for closure” with ESP test scores. It seems likely that psychics probably have a low “need or closure.” Many have lived on with questions about their abilities unresolved for long periods. .

So it is that I feel certain these psychics who have written me will be comfortable in their world of psychic impressions and not feel a great need for a conclusion. I fear that, if events had not given me the chance to close off that part of my life, I too may have continued living in some cloudy world. I would suggest and hope that those who are experieancing similar things would close off that part of their lives and move on as best they can. I realize that my suggestion may not be what they are looking for but I must suggest that they morn that lost part of their lives and move on.

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Chirumbolo, A., Livi, S., Mannetti, L., Pierro, A., Kruglanski, A. (2004) Effects of Need for Closure on Creativity in Small Group Interactions. European Journal of Personality, 18, 265-278.


Van Hiel, A., Mervielde, I. (2003) The Need for closure and the Spontaneous Use of Complex and Simple Cognitive Structures. The Journal of Social Psychology, 14, 559-568.