| By Bob Weaver 2022
The curious mind flees in many directions, sometimes unstoppable, sometimes with consequences.
Just out of high school in 1958, that curiosity expanded to hypnosis and extra-sensory perception, those interests not necessarily related.
I was inspired by a hypnotist who came to Calhoun High School to perform.
I mail ordered a course from a master hypnotist named Powers, and began to study his portfolio, followed by some practice with family and friends and quickly learning that not all people were good subjects.
The course said that sharp folks with a good imagination were the best subjects.
Hypnotists do not have a weird control over their subjects, the actual process is done by the subject, responding to a calculated delivery of suggestions.
One of my first subjects was a Grantsville friend, who was a really sharp guy, he immediately responding by going into a trance and doing the basic tricks used by most hypnotists.
Sometime later, my first cousin Janet was visiting with her family in the Village of Hur, a bright and talented woman on which I used age regression, a process where you take people back in time to a specific situation, after which they recall finite details.
Janet was doing well until she broke into hysteria after recalling a traumatic event with a schoolmate, needless to say frightening everyone in the room, including me. We quickly brought her out of the trace.
Later, a friend in Spencer who went on to be a college professor, was subjected to suggestions that his upright body become rigid after which those attending lifted him, placing his head on one chair and his feet on another. Most hypnotists would then stand on his rigorous body, a state of catalepsy, to make the point. I don't think I did.
Another curiosity related to Extra Sensory Perception was pursued after reading the works of J. B. Rhine. Rhine founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University and the Journal of Parapsychology.
Despite a plethora of "reality" TV shows about such subjects, Rhine's lifelong work has failed to produce credentialed results.
A CB radio buddy in the 1950s would practice ESP using designated cards with symbols, me being the transmitter of the images. He appeared to beat the odds as the receptor, as did my oldest son. The experiments were far from being validated.
Since those early days, I gave up such curiosities, moving on to others like physic theories that the universe could be operating on dimensions beyond the known three.
As an aged man, experiencing such phenomenon as Unidentified Flying Objects and strange objects in my lifetime, I have remained somewhat skeptical.
While not a UFO cultist, I now believe in their mystical existence.
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