Chapter 12: Surprising Developments

May, 27-28 1985

[Now, we really wondered what Joshua wanted to tell us.]

“The old goat can be totally tactless and as subtle as a ‘Louisville Slugger’.” Ann smirked.

“I’m really sorry, I hope you can forgive me.” Joshua groused. “I DO have some things I want to ask you that REALLY are sensitive and I didn’t want you to feel inhibited by having others who don’t understand sitting around.”

“Well, you definitely got our attention and maybe it’s a good thing.” I said, “Are we really the ONLY ones with this ability?”

“OH YES! Make no mistake. None of my colleagues have ever even HINTED that anyone like you kids existed, and believe me, they would have told me. We ran literally thousands of tests on college campuses all around the country, offering huge amounts of money to anyone who could display any ESP or clairvoyant abilities. When our program started, in 1961, the cold war was really heating up and the spy community was totally behind the idea of possibly getting agents who could communicate telepathically. Initially, we received a 2-million-dollar grant that funded our study.

“The first year, we found 20 people who scored fairly high on our aptitude test, one was exceptional. Unfortunately, he wasn’t with us long. He got assigned to the CIA and we never heard from him again. Most of the rest were clairvoyants, who could sense what others were thinking or foresaw future events. The few who we thought were telepathic, which is what we were REALLY looking for, weren’t very reliable. We, myself included, believed that ESP could be ‘learned’ if we could only find subjects who were good enough and open enough to somehow teach others how to focus their thoughts.

“As time went on, it was like we were searching for a needle in hundreds of haystacks! The best we had left were the 3 guys that I told you about earlier, who were CV’s. [Clairvoyants] We worked tirelessly, trying to get them to bond with each other. The thing was, they were all men and they didn’t even seem to LIKE each other very much. By 1966, the ‘agency’ was losing patience with us, since we had very little to show for all their money. We had one more, big push, recruiting ANYONE that even showed slight ability, and we were starting to try to ‘teach’ select agents that showed even marginal aptitude. That’s when some of my ‘less scrupulous’ colleagues tried using drugs to ‘enhance’ our subject’s abilities. THAT failed miserably, and resulted in several deaths, similar to the start of the Firestarter Movie. We also tried expanding our testing to look for ANY paranormal abilities that the government might find ‘useful’.

“I want to try something. I have always felt that there were many things the mind could do, if a person was able to ‘tap into’ the right part of their brain. I think of it as ‘Mind over Matter’, I believe it is real. I’ve just never found the right people.”

Joshua took 5 pencils out of his bag and put them on the table. He told us to focus on the pencils and just imagine that we were picking them up with our fingers.

After about five minutes of staring at one, I started feeling it was useless. Then, just as I was about to give up, the pencil began slowly moving around on the table! I took a deep breath and focused and just imagined picking it up with my fingers. The pencil began to lift itself off the table! As I watched it go higher and higher, I kept imagining that it didn’t weigh anything and that it was just floating. It stayed there for about 45 seconds, but, when I blinked it fell back to the table.

I was astonished! Joshua was astounded. Greg, Jamie and Mary kept trying, but even after 10 minutes their pencils never moved.

Then, all of a sudden, a pencil flew across the room. Everyone in the room gasped! I glared at my brother. He was grinning like a fool.

As Joshua looked around I said, “UM, my brother seems to be having fun with this!”

He looked at Bob, flabbergasted, then said, “You’re Charlie’s brother right? Do that again.” Bob took Jamie’s pencil and sent it flying across the room.

Joshua pulled out a Webster’s dictionary, the big hardbound edition, and put it on the table. Then he asked Bob if he could move it.

My brother has a way of being cocky. “Where do you want me to put it?” He asked, boldly.

Joshua smirked, “Over there on the coffee table.”

The next thing we knew, the dictionary floated over and set down gently, dead in the middle of the coffee table! This time I had to catch Joshua to keep him from falling on the floor. Even Ann was gasping. “Oh MY!”

Joshua was trying to catch his breath. “OH ... MY ... GOD! ... I was RIGHT! It IS possible! Bob, how thirsty are you right now?”

“Very! Thirstier than I was earlier tonight.”

Jamie handed bottles of Gatorade to Bob and me.

Joshua asked me how I was. After gulping down several quick mouthfuls, I belched, before saying, “Better now, but yeah, thirstier than I was earlier.”

“Okay, well, Jeez, I REALLY want to do some more tests and check some things. Is there ANY WAY I could get you guys to come over to my house tomorrow or Thursday? I have a ton of equipment in my basement that I need to use. I could get a U-Haul and bring it over, but I’d rather not.”

Bob said, ‘I don’t have anything pressing tomorrow.”

“We don’t start work till Monday, so I could go tomorrow, how about it guys?” I added.

Mary, Greg and Jamie all said they wanted to go. Greg asked, “You probably really only want Charlie and Bob, right?”

Joshua said emphatically, “NO! You guys ALL have abilities that I’m wanting to test and evaluate, just because you couldn’t levitate the pencils doesn’t make you any less important! While, what Bob and Charlie did was EXTRAORDINARY, all of you seem to feed off of each other. Yes, I’ll want to explore their levitational abilities too, but, the kinds of things I want to test have more to do with physiology and brain function. I have two EEG machines that I want to track your brain function with while you’re communicating with each other, if that’s alright with you?”

“Like ‘lab rats’? I chuckled.

“No, well, yes I guess. I see your point, but please understand, I spent 15 years studying people who were all really trying hard to do what YOU all can do naturally! Levitation and psychokinesis wasn’t even on our radar! You said you want to understand what’s going on. I DON’T KNOW what’s going on! I need to run some tests on you that I feel might answer that question, but we’re all in unchartered territory here. Yes, I have theories and some experience, but I need more information.

“I’m a scientist and need to validate my findings with data that I can ONLY get from you. I promise the EEG test doesn’t hurt at all. I’ll connect several small electrodes to your scalp in certain exact spots to record your brain function while you perform some exercises. Both using your abilities and just thinking normally. I do have the tests I gave many of my subjects from before to compare them to. I’ll have to figure out a way to try and measure your dehydration factor, too. That’s something I’ve NEVER experienced with ANY of my other subjects. Right now, I’m going to be using untested ‘theories’ that I’ve come up with. You guys may well end up ‘debunking’ some or all of them.”

“That sounds like you’re going to have to spend a lot of time with us. How long do you think this will take?” Mary asked.

“Not as long as you might think. Tomorrow will be a long day, because the EEG tests will take some time since I only have 2 machines now. But, since your abilities AREN’T in doubt, it’s a matter of ‘HOW’ not ‘IF’. Now I can really zero in on the data I get. At some point, I’ll want to try and push your skills to new levels, but for now, I just need to observe what you do so I can better understand it. You guys are actually setting a new ‘baseline’ that we’ll all work off.”

Ann added, “After tonight, he’s already got enough new data to keep him busy for weeks! After tomorrow’s EEG’s, nobody is liable to see him for a month. That’s WITHOUT even THINKING about the levitation! THAT’S a whole ‘nother separate deal.”

I asked, “Would you mind if I try to get Bob to show me how he moved that book?”

“No, GO FOR IT! Look, just because I may not be around, I DON’T want you to wait to try things. That’s the beauty of my no longer doubting you. I’ll just want you to try to explain everything to me whenever we get together. I already regret not having Bob standing on a scale when he picked up that book!” (He saw our puzzled looks.)

“To see if his body absorbed any of the weight of the book! THOSE are the kinds of tests that I need to perform.”

NOW I understood where Joshua was coming from. Ideas like that would never have occurred to me. Joshua told us that he had two extremely accurate scales at his house. That was indeed one of the experiments he wanted to conduct with Bob and I. He told us that tomorrow he was going to focus mostly on our communication abilities. He said that he would run some tests on Bob and I while the others were getting their EEG’s taken.

Jamie explained that EEG stood for Electronic Encephalogram and would indeed not hurt at all. She told us that a lot of psychiatric patients take them as they would reveal abnormal brain function. I wondered how ‘abnormal’ ours would be?

“I think Ann and I should get going.” Joshua said, adding, “I have a lot of things I need to get ready for tomorrow. I’m glad that your friends WEREN’T here to witness the levitation. I don’t want to tell you what to do, but if it were me, I wouldn’t tell your friends anything about it. For right now anyway, they really don’t have a ‘need to know’.”

We planned to be over at Joshua’s house in Loves Park, about 45 miles from here, around 10:30 AM. The five of us mentally discussed whether or not we should tell our neighbors about our ability to move things. The general consensus was that we should withhold that information until they absolutely had to know. We told Bob he could stay with us for the night and he thought that would be a good idea.

Mary flashed that he could sleep with us.

I flashed back that we should wait a while before we got THAT intimate with him. We both looked at Bob and it was apparent our conversation had been private.

Mary announced, “I’ll get Bob some bedding out of the closet and he can pull out the hide a bed from the couch.”

Both Mary and Jamie gave Bob a very nice ‘good night kiss’ as we headed off to our bedrooms to go to sleep. Mary and I decided to just cuddle tonight.

I told her I was somewhat concerned that I wasn’t horny at all. She reminded me that I wasn’t horny last night either and wondered if we shouldn’t say something to Joshua about this possibly being another one of those ‘consequence’ things. I flashed Greg to see if he was asleep yet. He and Jamie both flashed back saying they were ‘busy’, which more or less answered my question. I flashed I’d talk to them in the morning and Mary and I quickly fell asleep in each other’s arms.

I’d like to say that I slept soundly, but I would be lying.

I had two dreams.

The first was about the two girls playing the piano in Joshua’s stereoscope. At one point I was holding the little blonde girl in my arms. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember much else about the dream. The other dream involved Mary and all I could remember was that she was in a dark place and I was trying to get her to come back to me. It was like she was lost.

***

In the morning, I asked Mary how she slept and she said, “great”. She put me in a quandary when she asked how I slept. I didn’t really want to tell her about the dream. I knew I was going to feel guilty, so I just told her, “not bad, I think I had a dream about those two girls in the stereoscope.”

Omitting the second dream sure made me feel like I was lying to her. Mary sensed I was hiding something. “Was there anything else?”

I took a deep breath and said, “Yes sweetheart, I dreamed that you were in a dark place and calling out to me to help find you, but I couldn’t.”

She looked at me with deep concern. “You had a nightmare about me?”

“I guess you could say that. I wish I could remember more, but I can’t.”

When we got down to the kitchen, Bob was already awake and Greg had fixed coffee. The five of us decided to stop for some breakfast at a little ‘Ma and Pa’ diner in Marengo, which was about halfway to Joshua’s house. We asked Bob if he wanted to ride with us, but he said no. He was thinking about stopping at his girlfriend’s house in Belvedere (halfway between Marengo and Loves Park, a suburb of Rockford, IL) on his way home. Breakfast was good and we got to Joshua’s house right at 10:30 AM.

Ann met us at the door with hugs, as she led us in. She said, “The old goat has been fluttering around like a chicken with his head cut off all morning! I swear that man’s in seventh heaven! He’s been making me crazy, but in a good way. I haven’t seen him this excited in 15 years.”

Ann led us downstairs to Joshua’s ‘man cave’. Their basement was finished and the part we were in looked like someone’s living room. When she opened the door into another room it looked like a cross between a small library and a barbershop, complete with two barber chairs and two weird looking machines that looked like polygraph machines. Jamie flashed that those were the EEG machines.

Joshua came out from behind a curtain and was smiling from ear to ear as he welcomed us and told us to have a seat. He wanted to get started with Bob and I getting hooked up to the EEG machines.

We sat in the two barber chairs and he reclined them slightly so we would be comfortable.

He asked if it would be all right if he shaved a few small spots on our head to put the pads for the electrodes. We were looking at him wondering how strange we’d look afterwards. He chuckled, “don’t worry, I’m going to pull your hair back and only shave tiny areas that won’t even show when I’m finished.

The girls were giggling and Mary said, “That’s good, because as you can see Charlie doesn’t have much hair to start with. The top of his mop is starting to drop!”

“AAArghhhh, VERY FUNNY!” I snarked.

After chuckling, Joshua and Ann each took a small mustache trimmer. A couple of minutes later, Bob and I were hooked up.

Joshua said, “The first thing I need to do is establish a baseline. I’m going to give each of you a simple book to read. It should only take you about five minutes.

“Afterwards, I’m going to ask Greg and the girls to mentally talk to you while Ann and I talk to you at the same time. What I mean is, while I’m talking to Charlie I want Mary to talk ‘behind my back’ commenting on what I’m talking to Charlie about. Jamie will do the same thing with Bob and Ann. Greg can chime in whenever he wants. Try and do your mental communications when Ann and I stop talking. I need to get a reading on what your brain is doing with audible communications and mental communications side-by-side. As well as simultaneous communications.”

He gave us each a book and told us to start. As we began reading to ourselves I could hear what sounded like pencils scratching on paper. We finished the book at almost the same time. Joshua had pulled up four chairs and he took a seat next to me with Mary outside of him. Ann took a seat next to Bob with Jamie next to her. He pulled a heavy curtain between Bob and I that created two small rooms. The conversation was just small talk. It was quite fun, as Mary, Greg and I were sometimes making jokes and other times being serious. When we finished, Joshua waited for Bob to finish and opened the curtain.

Joshua said, “Before I disconnect you two, I want you to do a little levitation for me so I can see what that looks like on the EEG.”

He took two plastic bowls that each contained five tennis balls and put one next to Bob and one next to me. He then took two shallow plastic pails and set them over by the door about four feet apart. He said, “When I say go, I want to see how fast you guys can put these five tennis balls into those pails over there. Get ready, get set, go!”

Before I could even turn my head to look at my balls, I saw Bobs entire bowl move over and set itself down in his pail.

Joshua broke out laughing, yelling, “stop, stop, STOP!”

He was still laughing when he put his face right in front of Bob’s and said, “I see I need to be MUCH more specific in my instructions!”

Bob smirked, “You SAID to see HOW FAST we could do it. You didn’t say we had to move them one at a time! Was that fast enough?”