Minds are ready for a revolution

The Times, Inter//face

www.the-times.co.uk

30^th December 1998

Now we need the imagination to reinvent the world, says Uri Geller

Suspend your disbelief for a moment. Imagine what would happen if an alien spacecraft really did crash to earth. Allow yourself to picture our most brilliant scientists, fragments of machinery from another world cradled in their hands.

Would the world change? Would we suddenly project ourselves to the stars, exceed the speed of light, communicate with other races, create peace around the planet?

No. The world would have gained another secret, another mystery, that is all. We have new technology, but our minds have not adapted to it. That will be the challenge of 1999.

Advertisers selling desktop PCs and mobile phones have grasped this. They were busy this month teaching us to accept their products outside the context of business or education. Cute little mobiles were gift-wrapped in gold boxes like Belgian chocolates, and computers with enough power to create Hollywood blockbuster animations were sold as luminous blue plastic decorations for coffee tables.

We already have the technical know-how to reinvent the world. What we need now is the imagination. It is fantastic to be on the brink of a new Millennium, because our minds are being prepared for change. We are more ready to cope with innovation.

This combination – new Millennium, new Science – has already delivered the World Wide Web, a communications network that will become more powerful and influential than television. The web means anyone can publish anything – around the world, free speech is going to be a reality.

The web means an archive in every home – even where books are burned and writers are hanged, millions of newspaper reports can be accessed. The web means a new kind of democracy is being born.

Two major changes to our mind-sets were forced by the web in 1998. Electronic journalism joined print and TV reporting as a grown-up channel for news, as the Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky scandal, and the Louise Woodward judgment and the Starr transcripts were posted online.

Free software became big business too, as three Israeli coders sold their ICQ set-up to America Online for over $400 million. Users who want to see if their friends are online can download the ICQ program for nothing, just leaving their e-mail address on a database.

Just about everyone who uses the web regularly as a chat forum has collected a copy – AOL paid so highly, not to own the rights to this useful gadget, but to gain access to a very specialised, PC-literate customer base.

These trends will gather pace next year. People will subscribe to e-mail discussion groups, digests and reading lists, as naturally as they learn to tune in to a TV channel each week for a favourite show.

Free web-mail means friends will use each other’s modems as casually as they borrow their phones. Internet cafes seemed bizarre a few years ago – in 1999 BT is planning to put touch-sensitive web screens in public booths, like phone boxes.

Free software will have serious economic implications. Already the free operating system Linux is being used on seven million PCs. Linux is ‘open source’ – users get access to every line of code, so everyone can write their own improvements and share them with the other 6,999,999.

Try doing that with Windows 98 – Bill Gates wishes he could, because seven million Beta testers means Linux is a smart, bug-free platform.

Leaked memos show Microsoft has real concerns about the open source movement. If this massive army of unpaid software developers is not stopped, Linux could soon be the best OS in the world. And it’s free. So who will want to pay for an inferior product?

Enough of the crystal ball. Forget the future and have some fun testing your psi powers at http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e8926506/epsi.htm

Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]

6^th January 1999

Disc-shaped source of psychic secrets

Paranormal sleuth Tom Howell has sidestepped the web’s worst limitation – endless waits for big files – by creating an audio-video version of his site on CD-Rom.

His in-depth survey of parapsychology throughout history is attractive, with clean graphics and clear layout. Fast-loading resolutions are used for hundreds of illustrations, including many reproductions of rare photos.

But the clinching evidence for psi-power, the videos of poltergeist activity or UFOs or psychokinesis under lab conditions, is absent. And that’s for technical reasons – big video files cause countless crashes, not just for web-browsers but on servers too.

If you have a few hours to spare and you want to test this out, visit any promotional site for a Hollywood blockbuster and try downloading the video clips. By the time you’ve successfully acquired the plug-ins your PC needs, debugged them, watched a 4Mb file dribble in through your modem and viewed 30 seconds of speckly stamp-sized reproduction from a Cinemascope spectacular – you get the point. It would be quicker to drive to the multiplex, view the whole show and go for pizza afterwards.

Putting video onto a website is even more frustrating. Don’t ever ask me about my nightmare with the live UriCam – it’s too mind-bending.

However, I believe better browsers, faster connections and smarter compression will solve these problems, maybe before the end of this year. But there is an instant solution – CD-rom. A website recorded onto CD-Rom can be instantly accessed, complete with as many high-res videos, audio clips, full-screen pictures and graphics tricks as are required.

Heavyweight publications such as the Encyclopedia Britannica have been using the dual CD-web format for some time, but their emphasis has always been on the CD package. At £125, Britannica on disc is a great investment and far cheaper than buying all the books – but it’s still a lot of cash for most people.

Tom Howell has turned the formula on its head. His website comes first, and it features a vast amount of information, including the complete prophecies of Nostradamus, the 25,000-word US government UFO study, Project Blue Book, and a 30-page report on one New York woman’s abduction by aliens.

For most people, this site at http://psychicinvestigator.com contains more than enough information.

But real enthusiasts who want the videos can order Tom’s CD for $12.25 inc p&p from: Tom Howell Productions, Room 9LL, 1000 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington DC 20036.

13^th January 1999

See beyond the hype

‘Increase your memory-power 1,000 per cent! Make $$$ while you sleep! Enjoy endless good luck with this authentic Egyptian scarab locket! Learn surveillance secrets the government tried to ban!’

I am a sucker for dubious ads. The back pages of UFO magazines and US supermarket tabloids are full of mysterious possibilities waiting to be explored … such as, ‘What happens if I send $99.95 to a box number in Michigan?’

A series of e-mails from someone called Jim Francis of Australian Lateral Concepts lured me to http://lateralthinking.com/

Jim calls it as a shopping mall for alternative ideas – and one of his best is to give half of the product away for nothing.

The editor of a newsletter on innovation and creativity for businessmen, Jim promises to teach readers how to make millions from zero capital, fill their lives with enthusiasm and energy, beat cash-flow slumps, attain deep relaxation in three minutes and boost web-page traffic by 10,000 per cent.

This is a brash approach, even by Australian standards, but a series of articles on business applications for psi-power show some genuine credentials beneath the gloss. For anyone interested in techniques for spying on rival businesses or getting a sneak preview of this summer’s exam papers, the mall’s focus on remote viewing is a good starting point.

If the idea of projecting your mind into someone else’s office sounds like an out-take from Star Trek, bear in mind that the CIA and the KGB both ran remote viewing operations at the height of the Cold War. It seems the mind can pry into places even satellite lenses cannot see.

There are also inspiring hints on positive thinking, a guide to kicking yourself out of a rut, and a mind-boggling description of the Hieronymous machine, an electronic dowsing gadget with a piece of card in place of the circuit board.

Jim’s ideas on cash-for-nothing are less enticing – most of the approaches he recommends are going to demand plenty of business ability. His key discovery, called subjective communication, involves influencing strangers’ minds with positive thoughts. “Become popular! Attract the opposite sex! Get thousands of web-surfers browsing your site!”

This sounds intriguing – but Jim wants $49.95 before he will reveal the secret. And that’s where I turn back to the supermarket tabloids.

20^th January 1999

The world’s oldest science is a hot topic on the Net

This is weird. Decide for yourself whether it means anything. I had dinner on Saturday night with a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who discussed the history of paranormal research and told me of Isaac Newton’s reputation as an alchemist.

On my fax machine when I arrived home was a message from an Internet friend, Dennis Hauck, announcing the launch of his online alchemy lab. In its encyclopaedic array of background facts, I discovered a mind-bending essay on Isaac Newton.

The greatest scientist in history, who discovered the laws of gravity and motion and spectra, would work till dawn for nights on end in his locked laboratory, deciphering the 3,500-year-old secrets of alchemy.

His translation of its key text, the alchemist’s Bible called the Emerald Tablet, is still one of the best versions available.

Hauck, who edits an e-mail digest of paranormal news, has created one of the most stunning web archives I have ever seen. From the clear, inspiring definition of alchemy as a system for purifying the mind, to the arcane and mystifying details of its occult philosophy, Hauck has all of the information under control.

The research, writing and artwork must have taken thousands of hours.

Go to www.alchemylab.com and choose the sun symbol.

This ‘male’ alchemical symbol arranges the information in a logical, left-brain way that downloads quickly. An index, overview and search engine appear in frames.

When you’ve found your way around, return to the homepage and chose the ‘female’ moon symbol, for an intuitive, right-brain approach.

No index here – instead a Renaissance engraving gradually appears (it’s 385k, and Hauck advises you to meditate while you wait). Every detail in the engraving links to something in the laboratory – a sumptuous ilustration, a historical essay, a biography, a n extract of text.

It will take weeks to digest everything here, but for new converts the journey will not end at the lab.

About 200 alchemy links are provided – the world’s most ancient science appears to be one of the web’s hottest topics. And why not? Netscape and AOL have agreed a $4.2 billion merger, which is real alchemy – turning a virtual universe into gold.

27^th January 1999

Truth is in reverse

During a hardline speech on fighting Islamic threats to world peace, President Clinton appeared to make an extraordinary admission: “I am a snake-oil terrorist.”

The words are clear, though he spoke in a sing-song tone unlike his usual drawl … and they were audible only when the tape was played backwards.

Reverse speech is one of the most fought-over phenomena in parapsychology. Do we mouth inverted phrases and sentences subconsciously as we talk? Australian businessman David John Oates believes so, and he presents hundreds of examples at www.reversespeech.com

Talking backwards first became big news in the Sixties, when fans played one of the tracks on the Beatles’ White Album backwards and heard what appeared to be: “Paul’s dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him,”

Twenty years later, a US jury heard heavy-metal band Judas Priest’s album tracks played backwards as they tried to decide whether reversed incantations had led two troubled teenagers into a suicide pact.

Oates shows reverse speech doesn’t have to be negative. My favourite example was located in Martin Luther King’s cry of “Free at last!” Turned around, the speech became, “And I’m the Lord’s guest! Say our name, say our name.”

Mike Tyson, after biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear, said invertedly: “I’m not brave. Here I am, rubber duck (boxing slang for ‘punch drunk’).” John Lennon, after the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein’s death, said: “Can’t be Beatles now.”

It’s obvious that, since language is made up of a limited palatte of sounds, words will appear randomly when the sounds are played backwards, forwards or sideways. What’s weird is how those ‘random’ words so often seem relevant.

Oates claims to hear them every five to ten seconds in an average tape, and thinks they tell intuitive truths – not what the brain wants to say, but what it believes. He wants to see reverse speech become part of the criminal evidence system, and revised his opinion that OJ Simpson had been framed after hearing some blood-curdling confessions reversed in OJ’s interviews.

“I totally understand skepticism,” admits Oates. “It took me four years to be convinced about this, but it is true. After 14 years of work, I have more than ample proof to prove it to any skeptic. I think this discovery will change the entire course of civilization in time.”

Read that aloud, play it backwards and make up your own mind.

3^rd February 1999

Alien takeaway

If Las Vegas is your kind of town, if Liberace and Abba are your soundtracks, make contact with Aleena Diamond’s Close Encounters site at http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Lair/7180/ It is part of the Alien Abduction Webring.

Unlike other sites in the group, Diamond wants to mimic the bug-eyed confusion that grips humans after eight hours of biology experiments on board a starship from Sirius.

First the banner rises from a rippling lake, and a night sky begins to flash and twinkle. A massive star explodes in a billow of flame, and a Gray alien’s insect-like face stares into yours.

Neon green links pulse – follow the one marked ‘Fun’ and an electric organ plays John Lennon’s Imagine while a Space Invaders game downloads and rows of stars vibrate in rainbow colours.

Diamond comes from Las Vegas – and would probably be hopelessly homesick anywhere else – but beneath the kitsch and glitz of her pages lies a serious purpose – to help people who believe they may have been an alien abduction victim.

Alien abductions are scientifically impossible. So what – science has always been wrong about a lot of things, and what matters is belief. Anyone who believes they may have had direct contact with non-human, intelligent beings will need information. It’s essential to measure memories and perceptions against other people’s experiences. A half-remembered ‘abduction’ could be just a case of night-time indigestion. Or, if key facts match what thousands of others have reported, it could be something far more sinister.

Diamond lists dozens of crucial indicators, from false pregnancies to problems with electrical items, from tiny but inexplicable injuries to missing jewelry, from bizarrely frightening dreams about babies to phobias about doctors.

She supplies detailed abduction accounts and links to other resources – there are 34 sites in the webring. Be careful not to get carried away.

If all the revolving lights get too spangly for you, go to http://www3.mcps.k12.md.us/users/rsfay/magic/index.html and see if you can discover how this simple card trick seems to read your mind.

10^th February 1999

The most lavish fantasy since the Hitler Diaries has appeared online. The mass of painting, poetry, interviews and music at the wingmakers website may be a vast piece of art, or a sophisticated bid to spoof the New Agers. Unless it really is a message from humans 750 years into the future.

The ‘journalist’ who set up the site calls herself Anne. No second name, no email address, no identity: Anne claims her source is a top-level government leak and she could put his life and her own at risk by revealing her background.

The artworks, she says, come from an underground cave system in the New Mexico desert, where scientists from the US National Security Agency discovered 23 chambers filled with images and digitally encoded data.

The pictures are vast swirls of colour, decorated with pictograms similar to the stick figures of Aboriginal Dreamtime wall paintings. The music is hypnotic and soothing, with a pulse that matches a resting heartbeat. The philosophy could be computer-generated: “The Sovereign Integral is the fullest expression of the entity model within the time-space universes”.

The most extraordinary elements are the interviews with ‘Dr Anderson,’ a defector from the CIA-linked Advance Contact Intelligence Organisation who Anne believes is now in hiding – or 6ft underground.

His descriptions of time travel technology are thought-provoking and fun, like the concept of Blank Slate Technology which can send FBI men back to key points in history to avert revolutions and financial crashes.

The verbatim transcripts run to more than 30,000 words. Another 30,000 fill out the site notes, including a glossary of WingMaker jargon such as Genetic Mind and Sovereign Integral Network (SIN). That wordcount matches the average detective thriller. The creator of these paintings has worked furiously to put them into an imaginary context – something which could only be done on the web.

Anyone who breaks new ground in art deserves recognition, and I searched hard for a hidden signature. The only trace was a copyright notice on the music files. The name was Mark Hempel – and sure enough, a check at www.whowhere.com revealed Mark Hempel has an address at [email protected].

The site doesn’t carry any links and it is not part of a web ring, so Mark’s audience is unlikely to be large, but it’s great to see the worldwide web inspiring weird new work.

The poetry on the site is the clearest indication of hoaxing – if mankind is still composing grunge like that in 2749AD, we should just drop the bomb now.

24^th February 1999

It is not only the Millennium Bug that’s around the corner. According to the Jewish calendar, next year is 5760 Anno Mundi, counting from the Creation. And in Judaism’s most mystical scriptures, the Kaballah, 5760 is predicted to be catastrophic for mankind.

Rabbi Avraham Ben Mordechai warned 350 years ago: “The spirit of impurity will be removed from the Earth.” The book Gallei Razaya predicts 5760 will mark the end of the ‘gilgul’ – the process of reincarnation. In other words, TEOTWAWKI … The End Of The World As We Know It.

Maybe it’s time to learn about the Kabbalah. Madonna thinks so. So do Barbra Streisand, Liz Taylor, Roseanne and Sandra Bernhard. Guru to the stars is a 65-year-old rabbi named Rav Philip Berg, whose mission is online at www.kabbalah.com

This is a professional site. Berg acts like God’s advertising executive, and these pages are a showcase. As the first, quickfire images and questions download, he is already triggering emotional responses. The heading “spiritual energy” erupts in an orange nuclear blast. “Origins of humanity” flashes on and off with an unborn baby. “Immortality” is the logo above the face of Elvis.

There’s humour, too. Click on the line, “But I heard that Kabbalah could make you crazy,” and a list of modern nightmares scrolls up – racism, traffic jams, Monica Lewinsky. If that’s sane, he says, let’s get crazy.

Berg avoids New Age vagueness, and follows the Deepak Chopra method of focusing on agony-column issues: Why is there suffering and evil in our midst? he asks. Why do our prayers go unanswered? How I can live a more rewarding life? How come bad guys get away with everything?

The site-map looks like a 19th century astronomy diagram, emphasising Kabbalah’s connection to astrology. Explore and the graphics just get better – a hypnotic image of Einstein, icons that mix Tarot with television, send-ups of Fifties Americana. Forget the mysticism – surf in if you want to learn about web design.

Berg is charismatic, and egotistical enough to feature a full-screen image of himself linked to Kabbalah soundbites. He has his enemies in the US have called his teachings sexist and accused his organisation of being a cult that charges sky-high prices for books.

His relentless emphasis on modern angles starts to grate as well. He includes the K Files, trying to make sense of DNA and quantum mechanics in Kabbalah terms. He tries to claim the patriarch Abraham as a Bronze Age gene scientist. Maybe that makes Moses the first spin doctor.

3^rd March 1999

It’s the joy of sects

I have been abducted by cults. For a week, I have been in the grip of the Branch Davidians. And the Snake Handlers, the Promise Keepers, the Order of the Solar Temple, the Knights of Columbus and the Church of the New Jerusalem. Praise be, hallellujah – I have been shown all the true ways of the Lord by Professor Jeffrey Hadden.

Hadden’s triple bill of religion websites may represent the most outstanding resource on the Internet. If I am ever challenged to name one essential service on the web which no other medium could offer, I’ll point to the professor’s Religious Freedom, Religious Broadcasting and New Religious Movements. It’s vast, it’s penetrating, it’s fascinating … and very weird.

Developed from Hadden’s sociology of religion courses at the University of Virginia, and maintained by his students, the sites provide investigations into dozens of sects, cults and churches. The interest is strictly academic – Hadden is not promoting any viewpoint or faith, and he criticises no one for their beliefs. One of the keystones is his conviction that any attempt to suppress religion is dangerous – no matter how kooky some cults are.

The simplest link is at www.relfreedom.org a site established last year to back his belief that we have to “tolerate deviant, and often troublesome, new religions … religion is the final line of defense against every form of tyranny”.

Hadden’s students have compiled profiles of around 125 groups, from the ancient traditions of Wicca to space age UFO cults. There is extensive coverage of Heaven’s Gate, whose 39 members all committed mass suicide on March 27, 1997, believing a spaceship in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp would take them to paradise. In the early Seventies, and again in San Diego just before the tragedy, Marshall Herff Applewhite, guru of Heaven’s Gate, tried to recruit me – reading their pages is chilling.

The profiles give brief histories of each movement and its leaders, with a condensed account of its beliefs and a collection of web links – sometimes dozens. This highlights another key factor in Hadden’s coverage, the astuteness of most cults and sects in using mass communications.

The third part of Hadden’s site investigates religious broadcasting. He is probably the world’s foremost authority on televangelists. At the beginning of this century, the first radio broadcast was religious – at the dawn of the new millennium, the world’s modems are buzzing with the Word of God.

Live TV and audio are available at the Toronto Blessing site, for example, letting web-users attend the church’s daily prayer meetings. It’s more dramatic than the average sermon – as Rodney Howard-Browne preaches, the congregation are seized with ‘holy laughter’, or compelled to make animal noises, to leap, weep, dance or even collapse in a dead faint.

10^th March 1999

Armageddon outa here

More than 100 disciples of the Brothers and Sisters of Red Death committed mass suicide in tsarist Russia, on November 13 1900. They were expecting the world to come to an end.

A century later we’re all still waiting for Armageddon. And it’s making a lot of people very nervous.

The two greatest prophets in history, Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce, both predicted Doomsday would fall in 1999. None of the other prophets, from Bede the Venerable to the Dami Mission minister and fraudster Lee Jang-Rim, agreed.

The ancient Mayan calendar stops abruptly in 2012, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics attracted massive publicity by warning that Comet Swift-Tuttle could hit Earth on April 14, 2126, with the explosive energy of 100 million tons of TNT – engulfing whole continents in flame and spilling a wall of water three miles high across the planet.

With so many cataclysms to choose from, the Apocalypse At A Glance pages could prove a life-saver, at http://conspire.com/apocalypse.html

The lists are not comprehensive – most of the predictions I’ve listed come from my own library. But authors Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen gleefully cover a lot of catastrophes.

But worryingly they include writer Richard Noone’s prophecy: “On May 5, 2000, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will be aligned with the Earth for the first time in 6,000 years. On that day the ice build-up at the South Pole will upset the Earth’s axis, sending trillions of tons of ice in the water sweeping over the surface of our planet.”

Other doomsayers, from astronomers Andrew Pike and John Gribbin to cult leader Richard Kieninger, also pinpoint May 5 next year. This is probably a career mistake – as millennium scholar Stephen O’Leary of the Universiy of Southern California points out, “The most successful millennial prophets remain ‘strategically ambiguous’. The prophets who do get specific tend to be the more marginal ones.”

Before the word does end, make time to explore the rest of Conspire.com, a sceptical look at the greatest conspiracy theories around. Mind control, presidential assassins, UFO cover-ups and the devious strategies of tobacco companies are all examined in depth, and with a lunatic sense of fun.

17^th March 1999

Fangs for the memory

The key to great horror films is sex. Sexual terror is at the core of Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. My ancestor Sigmund Freud woud have made a brilliant horror director.

The sexier the actress, the greater the terror – which is why Ingrid Pitt is my favourite horror star. The Hammer queen is chilling an online generation at www.pittofhorror.com

Pitt’s life began with a real horror: she is a Holocaust survivor, born Natasha Petrovana on a train headed for a Nazi concentration camp in 1943.

Though she is now a successful author, with her latest book of ghost stories about to be published, Pitt’s fame rests on her bodice-bursting horror flicks: Vampire Lovers, The House That Dripped Blood and the cult chiller, The Wicker Man.

They were not Award-winners – if Pitt ever got her hands on an Oscar, she would use it to bludgeon a vampire.

But Hammer fans are more ardent big spenders than the average moviegoer, and the Pitt website knows its market.

You can buy magazines, scripts, CDs, photos and all kinds of weird memorabilia. If you want to own Peter Cushing’s fangs or Christopher Lee’s stake, this could be the site.

It also offers the horror holiday of the year – a week by a lonely West Country beach, with Ingrid as the Mistress of Ceremonies, the chance to star in a mock-Hammer video, moonlight barbecues and a ritual Wicker Man blaze on the clifftop.

If you still thirst for blood, log onto the Hammer Web ring, with 12 more sites devoted to macabre movies. Most are swap-shops. The official studio site at www.hammerfilms.com offers more, with star interviews and archive material.

It’s worth visiting just for the Curse Of Frankenstein artwork – the definitive X-Certificate poster.

Don’t have nightmares …

24^th March 1999

Mind-reading pets

Pets are almost human. They understand everything we say. But can they read our thoughts?

Animal-lover Shari lives among the redwoods of California with the most remarkable collection of pets I’ve ever encountered. Her parrot has second sight, her dog is reincarnated and her cat performs psychic healings. Her llama is just a llama, but then I never heard of any llama with paranormal abilities.

It’s touching proof of her real love for animals that Shari can make you understand and even believe in her mystical menagerie. You’ll get a lump in your throat when you read her collection of diaries and stories at http://www.cyberark.com/animal/telepath.htm

Her tale of Rico, the dog who ran away, will touch a chord with anyone who has lost a pet. Since I was a boy, I’ve had a succession of dogs named Joker, and it’s easy to relate to Shari’s account of touring the Santa Cruz dogs’ homes, looking for a new Rico.

The aim of the site is to encourage pet-owners to use telepathy. Shari believes her pets respond to the visual images in her mind. When she deliberately focuses on a mental picture, animals can pick it up easily. Her experiences are echoed by site visitors, including a parrot-lover named Jane Hallander who describes a step-by-step method of establishing animal telepathy.

First, relax and clear your mind. Meditate, or listen to music – telepathy won’t work when your mind is cluttered. Show your pet a selection of toys. Choose one, and say its name firmly as you put it to the animal’s mouth.

Do this several times. Create a clear mental image of the toy every time you say the word. An intelligent animal will soon learn each toy’s name, and will pick it up on command.

The next stage involves pure telepathy. Don’t say the name of the object – just visualise it. Picture your pet choosing that toy. If the animal reacts – and Jane claims to have 100 per cent success with her telepathic parrot Jing – your pet can read your mind.

The site features pointers to books, tapes and workshops, but there’s also free assistance for novice telepaths.

31^st March 1999

“Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the web.”

Aleister Crowley, the most infamous occult magician of this century, who was rumoured to sacrifice children and conjure evil angels during his rituals, is becoming a cult figurehead on the web.

The whole of his writings on black magick (spelling is correct) are online, with virtual temples dedicated to his memory and occultists who boast they can match The Master in infamy.

Crowley’s own mother dubbed him ‘the Beast’. After a libel trial filled with lurid tales of devil-worship and drug abuse, the press labelled him “the wickedest man in the world”. Web-page tributes call him the “Great Teacher”.

He justified his orgies and taste for brutal sex with the dictum, “Love is the law, love under will.” In a book which he claimed was dictated by a spirit summoned through magick, Crowley declared, “Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law.” He made a religion of self-gratification – a taste which evidently appeals to many today.

His lust for sensation was believed by many to have reached its appalling nadir in 1918, when a young couple who had flirted with his cult were lured to an island apartment off New York. Crowley’s acolytes stripped and trussed them before killing both by hurling darts. The bodies were dumped in the harbour.

Dozens of links to modern magick-users and groups influenced by Crowley are featured at http://www.tgd.org/acf/

One of the Crowley site administrators is a 34-year-old from Los Angeles called David Cherubim. His pages state: “I am proud to say that I am the infamous Magician and Chief of the Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Order of the Antichristian Illuminati.”

Another site features the Ape of Thoth, a search engine and concordance of Crowley’s writings, some of which rival the Marquis de Sade’s in nauseating pornographic content. Because Crowley scorned publishers and printed his books himself, they have never been widely read – until now.

Crowley, who injected heroin all his life, paraded under the title Perdurabo – “I will endure”. More than half a century after his death, it appears his prediction has come true.

7^th April 1999

Armageddon Update

Television’s 24-hour news stations bring you events as they happen. The internet goes one better – American theoretical physicist Lambert Dolphin’s news service operates at prophecy level. Subscribe to End-Time-News and you can read the future.

Dolphin’s evangelical e-mail is just one among dozens of Bible prophecy sites. A Bible prophecy Web ring has been set up, but it merely skims the surface – helping you gaze into the millennium and beyond. There is prophecy software to download, a non-stop news ticker-tape for your website, three search engines, a library of downloadable books, hot links to every verse in the Bible and the most comprehensive list of news services on the web.

Even hardbitten atheists should bookmark Pastor Ron Griff’s pages at www.bible-prophecy.com for links to all the world’s major news suppliers, on TV, paper and radio.

The concept is simple: every prophecy from Genesis to Revelation is online and, as news breaks, events are measured against scripture to gauge how much closer we’re getting to Armageddon.

Griff and Dolphin are both full-volume Christians, who met over the net. Griff is senior pastor at Alta Loma’s Brethren in Christ church, and Dolphin, his fellow Californian, spent 30 years studying theoretical physics after graduating from Stanford University. What they are waiting for is the Second Coming and the era of peace and bliss called the Rapture.

Each day the main news story is matched to a biblical forecast. Trauma in Kosovo, for instance, was tied to verses from the gospels of Matthew and Luke, about “war, and rumours of war”.

More useful to Doubting Thomases are the mass of links to conventional news pages. Anyone looking for a wide-angle view on the Serbian crisis could pick up eye-witness reports, TV transcripts, White House and Downing Street briefings, newsgroup discussions and editorial comment. However, hacking your own trail through the web’s resources could consume many more hours.

14^th April 1999

Next time you’re enduring a ten-minute wait for a web page with more pictures than the Louvre, try this: Cut a square of paper, 3cm by 3cm. Fold it in half, open it, fold it the other way and open it again, so it is creased into four squares. Fold it corner to corner, open it, and fold it diagonally the other way. Pinch it together and you’ll have a star-like pyramid.

Stand a needle, point up, in a blob of Blu-tac on your desk and balance the paper pyramid on it like a hat. A light touch should send the pyramid spinning. Cup your hands round the little device, fingertips touching and palms just clear of the paper. Breathe gently. The paper will be motionless.

Will the pyramid to turn. Visualise the little white star spinning on the needle. Feel force flowing out of your palms and whirling like a vortex in the cupped space. Incredibly, around 60 per cent of Times readers will be able to make the pyramid turn by their psychic power. This is pure psychokinesis, in its simplest form. Results are rarely immediate, but usually occur two or three days after the first attempt.

If this whets your appetite for training your psi abilities, look at the free course of lessons offered by the Telepathic Research Center of Georgia at http://mentalpower.home.mindspring.com/

Tutor Gary Jennings has devised an entertaining series of exercises focused on the body’s energy field. The early stages teach basic telepathy and clairvoyance – seeing with your eyes shut. The ambitious programme for later lessons, not yet online, includes remote viewing, dream-sharing and astral travel, but the material currently available is enough for several weeks of experiments.

Most lessons are for two students. All psi ability is hampered by hostile or mocking companions, so it’s essential that your partner is positive. In the first test you close your eyes and hold out your palms while your partner traces a circle with a fingertip, a centimetre from your skin. You’ll be shocked by the tingling sensation. Lesson three (for lovers only) repeats this game, unclothed, using the whole body – naked Telepathy. It would make a great TV game show!

21^st April 1999

One of the strangest legal actions of the century, which provoked outrage in prime minister Winston Churchill, was the trial of a Scottish cleaning-woman and mother-of-six named Helen Duncan. In a wartime Old Bailey trial labelled a travesty of justice by the Law Society, she was accused of witchcraft for holding seances and was defended by senior academics, journalists and military men.

All swore Helen Duncan was a true spiritualist medium. But Whitehall feared that her seances would betray Britain’s greatest secret to the Nazis – the landing plans for D-Day. Mrs Duncan was declared a witch and jailed for nine months.

Churchill wrote angrily to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, calling the affair “obsolete tomfoolery”. Now a Web-based campaign for a posthumous pardon has won support from TV programmers, MPs and Britain’s spiritualists.

Writer Michael Colmer’s site at http://members.tripod.com/~helenduncan/ is now packed with newspaper stories about the trial. A detailed picture emerges of an uneducated Scottish working-class girl who rose to become a star medium.

Helen Duncan’s astounding talent was for materialisations. The dead did not merely speak at her seances – they walked. During the Old Bailey trial, retired Indian Army captain George Barnes told how the spirit of his grand-daughter had toddled across the room and spoken a few, babyish words to him. James Herries, chief reporter of the Scotsman and a Justice of the Peace, took the oath and declared Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, had materialised while Mrs Duncan was in trance.

Her uncanny knowledge in 1941 that HMS Barham had been sunk, despite a news blackout, spooked military intelligence, who watched her closely before having her arrested, at first on vagrancy charges, before the Allies finalised the Normandy landing blueprint.

For the rest of her life, Helen Duncan was hounded. She died five weeks after police burst into a seance while she was in a trance and tried to seize the ghostly apparitions. They failed, but the medium suffered two second-degree burns to her stomach – the classic effects of interruption when spirits are being made visible.

Uri Geller’s novel Dead Cold is published by Headline Feature at £9.99, Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]

28^th April 1999

Rapping to the reaper

In the politically explosive world of science, being psychic is often a short route to career oblivion. Even a belief in God is regarded with suspicion, as if a religious scientist will suddenly start proclaiming miracles in the laboratory.

But scientists are human too. They have unexpected glimpses of the paranormal, just like the rest of us. A powerful psychic experience, such as a crystal-clear premonition or a near-death voyage to the gates of the next world and back, can be life-changing. Professor Charles Tart, the renowned psychologist who coined the phrase “altered state of consciousness,” is challenging his colleagues to tell the truth about their paranormal experiences, at http://www.issc-taste.org/ His on-line journal Taste, The Archive of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences, gives scientists the option of anonymity as they relate their stories. Only scientists can contribute, ensuring a high standard of analysis and an archive of unique insights.

Within weeks, Taste has already gathered almost a dozen tales, including a deeply moving Antarctic experience from an atheist ecologist.

Calling herself Red Hong, the 34-year-old describes a journey over an ice mountain: “My mind was totally blank. After a while I realised that I had expanded. I was no longer a small discrete consciousness located in my head – I encompassed the whole valley. I was huge. I was part of everything – or rather everything was part of me. I was ancient and unbelievably powerful. It was wonderful.”

An anesthetist, Allan Smith, described a moment of cosmic understanding in intense detail: “There was no separation between myself and the rest of the universe … All words or discursive thinking had stopped and there were no discrete events to ‘happen’ – just a timeless, unitary state of being … I was certain that the universe was one whole and that it was benign and loving at its ground.”

Tart, who teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after 30 years in California, believes the most common life-changing encounter with our psychic side is the near-death experience, the classic account from car crash victims and surgery patients, where the soul seems to leave the body and encounter spirits of the dead.

Tart estimates 8,000,000 Americans have had near-death experiences: “They knew they had died, but they were still there. They went out of their ordinary, individual self and felt part of, shall we call it, ‘universal intelligence’ … much bigger than themselves. They knew things in an incredible new way, they understood the meaning of things, how things fit together.”

5^th May 1999

Angels and aliens are the flag-bearers of the New Age. Poltergeists are passé, hypnotism is for entertainers, but the fascination with beings from the heavens, or heaven itself, keeps building.

Television’s obsession with space people is set to continue – Steven Spielberg has announced he will produce a 20-hour mini-series focusing on alien abductions. ‘Taken’ is a sci-fi epic to be spread across ten days of TV scheduling next year, and insiders claim it will be the longest programme ever made. Centred on one man’s horrific encounters with aliens, the show will span 50 years, starting in New Mexico, 1947, where UFOlogists claim a spacecraft crash-landed and was captured by US intelligence agents.

One theory suggests aliens have been visiting Earth for centuries. We knew them as angels: higher intelligences which imparted wisdom and messages. The modern conception of an angel centres on love and protection – the opposite of predatory, emotionless aliens. These opposites could in fact be two sides of the same coin.

A century ago, the benevolent guardians who appeared unexpectedly in a radiant aura of love were seen as spirits of the dead. One typical story of modern-day angels would have been familiar to 19th century Spiritualists as a proof of life after death – a pregnant woman whose mother has recently died lies awake, grieving because her unborn child will never know its grandmother. The dead woman materialises at the foot of the bed, robed in light, and says softly: “Don’t be sad – your baby boy is with me in heaven, and as his guardian angel I shall look after him until it’s time for him to join you on Earth.” The mother-to-be tells all her friends that her baby will be a boy – and months later, she is proved right.

This lovely tale is one from dozens of true-life reports at http://angels-online.com/ where anyone may submit stories of angelic encounters for the five-year-old database. The collection is divided into dreams, miracles and spiritual awakenings, and it exists most of all as an inspiration.

Many feature children, and it is intriguing how many children accept the concept of a guardian angel without question. One of my favourite stories was submitted by a mother-of-two, who remembers being caught in a thunderstorm when she was five. As she stood transfixed with fear, in a field lashed by rain under a sky ripped by lightning, a woman with golden hair beckoned from the edge of the field. What impressed me was not simply that the girl was saved, but how completely her fear dissolved when the angel appeared. That must be the real miracle of angels – to help us rise above panic and cope with the crisis.

12^th May 1999

Rapid Web of lies

It’s easy to write a computer virus. No programming expertise is required – just fill an e-mail with lies and sign off with this plea: “Forward a copy of this letter to ten friends.” Within 24 hours your pack of untruths could be on a million hard-discs or more worldwide.

Chain letters are nothing new. In Denver in 1935, daily post-bags swelled by 160,000 letters when a send-a-dime scheme provoked rampant greed. You received a note from a friend, saying, “Send me a dime,” and you copied this note word for word and sent it to ten more friends. They all sent you dimes, so you got a dollar.

You sent your first friend another dime, and money flowed miraculously.

Associated Press reported on a “money-mad maelstrom,” with post office crushes of “society women, waitresses, college students, taxi drivers and hundreds of others”.

Denver witnessed another kind of madness last month when two students shot 13 people dead in a high school massacre. Within hours the first Littleton, Colorado, chain letters were multiplying across the internet.

“My name is Jayson Martin from Littleton, Colorado,” begins one. “Please Forward this to as many people as you can; let us all come together and pray that this tragedy ends soon. Thank you.”

This letter was followed up by researchers at the web-watching Mining Co organisation at www.miningco.com It appears no one named Jayson Martin lives in Littleton.

Other letters are sicker, more callous and more manipulative. “Send it out to EVERYONE!!!!” orders one e-mail. “If you or anyone can’t take 2 minutes to sign their name, they really have no heart … Just add your name to show that you care!” The murders of 13 people are being exploited in a futile game of name-collecting.

Instant copying for next to nothing makes e-mail the ideal medium for chains to replicate faster than microbes – splitting cells will simply double with each generation, whereas chain e-mails can multiply tenfold or twentyfold. An archive of some of the most virulent is stored at http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/7333/ If you find one you like – don’t send it to me.

19^th May 1999

Down the voodoo zoo

Welcome to the world’s weirdest zoo. Please do not feed the animals – they are on a special diet of sucked goat and human blood. This is the cryptozoo, where all the exhibits are unreal … or at least unproved.

Cryptozoology is the study of mystery creatures, from the beast of Exmoor to the Mongolian death worm and the Loch Ness monster to the mermaids of the Nile. Man has hunted them for centuries, but so far all have eluded capture. You can peer through the bars of the cages at http://www.parascope.com/en/cryptozoo/

The newest exhibit is perhaps the most terrifying, Puerto Rico’s chupacabra. First sighted in March 1995, the 4ft-high, batwinged humanoid with lidless red eyes and hooked claws feeds on farm animals – its name means goat-sucker. Witnesses called it a cross between a kangaroo and a gargoyle.

Word of it spread worldwide as TV crews stalked the island, and around 25 chupacabra websites sprang up. The hysteria spread, and one Arizona man called the police after sighting the creature in his living room. Investigators later proved the chupacabra had been one of his own children.

Mokele-mbembe means “one who stops the flow of rivers” in central Africa. Explorer Richard Greenwell, while searching for lowland gorillas, heard tales of a dinosaur-like creature that survived in riverside jungle caves. Sceptics say Mokele-Mbembe prints are really elephant spore.

Oceans and inland seas could harbour unknown monsters. Nessie has many cousins, especially in North America, where New England’s 109-mile Lake Champlain, Lake Okanagan in British Columbia and Mann Hill Beach, Massachusetts have reported sightings.

The exhibit I would most like to see on show is a Mongolian Almas, a mountain-dwelling humanoid sighted by explorers for 600 years. Soviet scientists investigated claims that at the turn of the century a captured Almas female called Zana had lived as a slave on a River Mokvi farm. Zana had several half-human children, who were cared for by villagers and grew up to raise families of their own – unruly, but strong and very musical. Their descendants survive today.

26^th May 1999

This is the face of Jesus, claims a nun named Anna Ali. She took the photograph during one of a series of divine visions spread over more than ten years.

The black-and-white picture, at http://web.frontier.net/Apparitions/OTEpict.GIF is faded, with areas of deep contrast, like a very early flash picture. It seems impossible to believe that a woman who has devoted her life to the church would forge such an image. Details of the camera, the film and the developing process are not given on her website, so we must accept the photo on faith – like any miracle.

Anna’s visions are not in monochrome. She describes how he appeared to her first, at Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo’s house in Rome: “He was enveloped in light, which was of the same hue of the sky when it is deeply blue. His presence illuminated the whole room. He wore a red tunic (the colour of blood), with wide sleeves. He has shining dark hair.”

A colour photo from the Holy Hill in Atlanta, Georgia, appears to show lilac light bursting from the torso of a marble statue of Mary. The picture is one of dozens of miracles reported by pilgrims who have assembled annually throughout the Nineties to witness visions and hear heavenly messages relayed by a housewife named Nancy Fowler.

Her online ministry, including thousands of words of advice, comfort, warning and admonition which Nancy believes are divinely inspired, is at http://www.conyers.org

Brain scans of Nancy during her inspirations reveal mental activity dropping to around 3hz – wave patterns normally seen only in very deep sleepers or coma victims. Yet similtaneous video evidence, according to author Ron Tesoriero, showed Nancy was awake and alert.

At the beginning of the scans, tests for electrical conductivity in her skin showed 1.5 to 1.7 millivolts, indicating high anxiety. These levels fell away to 0.2mv, a comfortably relaxed state, as soon as she began to pray. During one apparition, conductivity dropped to nil – usually a sign of brain death. Nancy, however, was clearly awake. A degree of ionised radiation was also registered.

2^nd June 1999

Forensic scientists have reconstructed a child’s face from an ancient Mexican skull which some researchers claim could have been an alien-human hybrid. The StarChild’s haunting features, eerily like the huge-eyed aliens described after UFO abduction cases, are online at www.AlienUFOart.com/Forensicfaces.htm

The misshapen skull is believed to belong to a girl of five or six, whose bones were found with her mother’s in a mineshaft south of Chihuahua, Mexico, around 1925. The child’s body was buried, with one hand thrust out of its shallow grave to grasp the mother’s hand. The skulls were found by a teenage girl, and handed to scientists.

More than 30 specialists, including university anthropologists, geneticists, radiologists and pathologists, and at least 15 psychics, have examined the relics. All agree the Indian mother was a healthy human. About the child – no one knows …

Using police techniques, forensic artist William McDonald reconstructed both faces. “I’ve never seen a skull like this,” he admitted. “It is so radically deformed or mutated that the temporal portions actually face forwards instead of off to the sides.” But some parts of the bone were missing – “I was forced to do a lot of measured guessing and not a small amount of ‘anomalous intuition’ in attempting to draw the Star Child’s face.”

McDonald favours the theory that the child was deformed, but adds the brain capacity exceeded an adult human’s by nearly 200cc. Water on the brain seems an unlikely explanation.

Fellow investigator Lloyd Pye agrees the conventional view must be that this tragic little girl was born with a horrible deformity. At www.Starchildproject.com he also advances the alien theory.

Shoshonean myths tell of beings from the heavens who descended to mate with Earth women. When the children were weaned, the Star Beings returned to harvest their semi-human crop. Such stories are repeated throughout Central and South America.

Pye believes DNA testing could prove the alien hybrid theory. Until funding can be raised, however, the world can only guess.

9^th June 1999

The Nikola Tesla Museum at Proleterskih Brigada 51 in Belgrade might no longer be standing. That information is a classified military secret. My repeated attempts to phone the curator, Professor Aleksandar Maranci, have failed – Belgrade is not taking calls.

But the virtual museum is online, a tribute to the genius of a Croatian engineer who tried to create unlimited energy, free for all: Nikola Tesla. Come face-to-face with the greatest inventor since Leonardo da Vinci at www.yurope.com/org/tesla.

Tesla’s brilliance may not be fully understood for centuries – in one experiment he proved the entire planet could be turned into a humming electric battery, generating limitless power and 130-ft bolts of lightning over his lab. But his weirdness was instantly recognised by all.

His brain was profoundly eidetic – with a 3D photographic memory, he could visualise objects in perfect detail. To test a generator, he did not have to build it: “I just let it run in my head,” he explained. He rarely constructed prototypes, he never drew blueprints so, to puzzled investors, Tesla seemed like a gabbling madman.

His visionary powers had another drawback. Tesla was hypersensitive, deafened by ticking clocks and kept awake by the pounding footsteps of passers-by. He could not bear to be touched and would tell people his fingers were disfigured by a lab accident rather than shake hands.

His inventions changed the world. He developed alternating current, the basis of the power grid – he would have been a billionaire, but he tore up his contract in a gesture of friendship to his backer, George Westinghouse. He created better turbines, better light-bulbs, better dynamos, better transformers. At 86, he died forgotten and penniless.

Intelligence sources claim that when the Communists examined Tesla’s writings, they discovered the basis of a low-frequency radio wave which could scramble the computers of fighter jets and blast balls of lightning into the sky. The US, too, is developing the concept, at its High Energy Research and Technology Facility in New Mexico. Even as his papers lie in the rubble of Belgrade, Nikola Tesla’s legacy could still change the course of history.

16^th June 1999

Those orbs are abnormal

Stunning photographs of unexplained lights floating through woodland outside New York have appeared online. UFO hunter Brian Williams claims to have over 15,000 digital pictures in his archive, and dozens of the best are on show at www.orbsite.com

These are not flying saucer snaps. Instead, these glowing balls of plasma, which Williams calls ‘orbs’, are small and insubstantial. There are no aliens, no landings, no messages – just weird lights that drift through the branches at Wanaque, New Jersey.

The images range from the simple, such as plain blue and red balls blurring in a night sky to more complex and beautiful images, such as the breath-taking effect of an orb, tangled in the bare twigs of an aspen.

Williams describes several orb types, including “black holes”, “arcs” and “red eyes”, which not only look but behave differently. Some are hard to spot, some streak like comets across the sky. He is convinced they are signs of alien technology, perhaps windows through which extraterrestrials watch Earth.

My own hunch links the orbs with what parapsychologists call “luminous phenomena”. Strange lights are one of the commonest by-products of spiritual agitation. Clouds of fire blazed over the crowds at revivalist meetings in 19th century Ireland, and preachers during the Welsh revival at the turn of this century were sometimes haloed by sparklets of light.

Floating balls of ethereal moonlight often materialise at seances, and many psychics see glowing bands of light around energetic and lively friends. My guess is Brian Williams is a natural psychic with an unusual gift for photographing the phenomena most people can only glimpse. His archive could prove essential evidence for paranormal physics.

[Stereo pairs would eliminate backscatter from water drops, flies etc]

23^rd June 1999

Visiting the Baba may be a miracle

The greatest Holy Man of the 20th century may be an orange-clad Hindu with hair like Huggy Bear and a gift for producing Rolexes from thin air.

Sai Baba is an unlikely deity, yet many of his followers believe he is, like Jesus, a human form of God. This is no fringe cult – at his southern India ashram, the Abode of Great Peace in Puttaparti, tens of thousands of pilgrims crowd to see him daily.

Where once a single bullock-cart track led to his home, there is now an airport, with a university nearby. At the hospital Sai Baba established, where all medical care is free, surgeons have performed open heart operations and kidney transplants.

His web presence is low key. Unlike the evangelising, convert-seeking churches of middle-America, whose websites feature live television and radio shows, only a little information and some prayers are available at http://www.sathyasai.org/

The official pages make it plain how wide his word has spread – they claim to connect 1,200 Sathya Sai Baba centres in 137 countries. For a fuller personal picture of the man born Sathyanarayana (Truth-of-God) Ratnakara Raju near Bangalore in 1926, go to a disciple’s site at http://people.delphi.com/bongiovanni/index.html

Bon Giovanni acknowledges that many people suspect Sai Baba of fakery. His reputation was built on a mountain of miracles, psychic phenomena that occured not daily or hourly but almost minute by minute. Food exists in never-ending abundance around him – bowls of steaming, scented curries pour from empty jugs, apples and mangoes are plucked from tamarind trees, sticky honey pours from his bare hands.

Other miracles seem more worldly. Rich rings, brand-name watches and golden plates are plucked from the sand under his feet. Water turns into petrol – a very 20th century take on a classic biblical miracle.

The rumours of fakery have never been proven, and many thousands have seen wonders that would defeat the best conjurors – two kilos of sacred vibuti ash, for instance, that poured from a split in the sole of Sai Baba’s right foot as he lay in trance.

If you have to see for yourself before you can believe, the only sure way may be a flight to Puttaparti. But you should have time to save up – Sai Baba has predicted he will die in 2020, aged 94.

30^th June 1999

Cannibalism is de rigueur in Y2K

Programmers in Seattle running a ‘deathpool’ – the blackly humorous betting syndicates which forecast celebrity demises and national disasters – are taking bets on the number of Americans who will die as a result of the Y2K bug. The low end of the spread is 18,000,000 corpses.

This bleak news comes from Tracy Fletcher’s daily round-up of Millennium meltdown news stories. The list can be emailed to you, but don’t subscribe unless you want a dozen or more tales of doom and destruction posted in your pigeonhole daily. You could also make y2ktoday.com your personalised homepage, tuned to provide the latest in oblivion alerts.

The lightest story I could find concerned the Amish, the US sect of anti-tech fundamentalists who have survived the 20th century without using electricity or TVs.

Their mail-order business is roaring, as survivalists bid to stockpile hand-operated Amish tools. One Manhattan woman, agreeing to spend $550 on an Amish flour mill to keep her fitted kitchen Y2K compliant, was horrified to discover the device did nothing but grind flour. “But where’s the bread?” she wailed.

Catastrophists meet daily at alt.y2k.end-of-the-world to outgloom each other with end-is-nigh prophecies. They needn’t bother – John Koehler’s homepage is the ultimate in pessimism. We are all going to die in a multiple nuclear meltdown. Even if a few of us survive – and John is heading to Tenerife for the New Year’s Eve.

Alert readers will perceive I am not too anxious about Y2K. Computers will certainly crash, much expense will be incurred, but I predict the world will not explode and the sun will not go out. I can be this confident because of Uri Geller’s Millennium Bug-Buster. This furry computer accessory, inspired by 20 years of research at Princeton University in New Jersey into psychokinesis and computers, will go on sale in the autumn. Users will be able to invoke psychic energy to beat the bug.

http://www.gate.net/~koehler/y2k001.html ultimate doom and gloom

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7404/index.htm hundreds of stories

http://www.y2ktoday.com personalised portalsite

http://forums.cosmoaccess.net/forum/survival/prep/ survivalists

7^th July 1999

Forget shock-jock Howard Stern. America’s most controversial talk-show host is Art Bell, right-wing crusader for the Home of the Weird, Land of the Bizarre.

Broadcasting coast-to-coast for up to five hours, six nights a week, before signing on to ham radio to keep the conspiracies flowing, Bell talks about the real taboo topics. That doesn’t mean sex or crime – everyone does those. Bell wants to hear about cattle mutilations, UFO cover-ups, ghost-hunters, apocalypse warnings, nightmare cults, spontaneous human combustion and black magic.

Once famous only for his place in the Guinness Book of World Records (continuous radio broadcast: 116 hours, 15 minutes) and for chartering a DC-8 to rescue 130 Saigon orphans as the Vietnam war ended, Bell is now America’s top night-time host, with a live show broadcast on more than 400 independent stations.

Dogged by controversy, including a family crisis which forced him off the air for several days and a $60 million law suit against two detractors, Bell makes addictive listening. Thousands of his audio files, from the shows beamed out of his home at Pahrump in the Nevada desert, can be accessed at www.artbell.com

Everything is here – the listings, the quotes, the critics, the wars of words, the hobby horses, the bosom buddies, the chat room, the studio cam, the message boards. It’s instant information overload, from a man whose delight in the technology of broadcasting sometimes threatens to eclipse his message.

For a sharper focus, turn to his contributor, the environmental activist Linda Moulton Howe, at http://earthfiles.com Regarded by Bell as the world’s top expert on bizarre animal slaughters and the rise in natural disasters, Howe is an Emmy award-winning TV producer of documentaries such as Strange Harvest, about cattle mutilation, and Sun-Kissed Poison, on LA’s smog.

Her newly-launched site is pared down to the latest reports of crop circles, UFO sightings and global warming build-up. Every feature is backed by her audio reports from the Art Bell shows. They load quickly and run in the background, allowing users to listen to the details while continuing to click.

No 14th July column.

21^st July 1999

Cure by e-mail?

Fancy a cup of coffee? You’ll soon be able to download a steaming cappuccino via e-mail if the science-shattering theories of French biologist Jacques Benveniste prove true.

Sadly, the froth will be missing, and you’ll have to imagine the dusting of chocolate. But the vital ingredient will be there in your in-box – caffeine.

Dr Benveniste, director of the Digital Biology Lab in Clamart, France, believes his team can sample and record the effects of drugs, antibodies and bacteria onto computer, like musicians sampling sounds. The biological ‘noises’ can be stored on disc, transmitted around the world, and replayed – and a human body will react in exactly the same way to e-drugs as it does to real drugs.

“The signature of a virus can be recorded and digitised using a computer sound card,” he says.

The implications for medicine are limitless. Rare serums will be sampled, copied a million-fold, and broadcast to every university and hospital on the planet. The digital fingerprint of every bio-reaction, from bee-stings to chemotherapy, will be stored on Zip cassettes in doctors’ surgeries everywhere.

Benveniste predicts this could be the scientific breakthrough that defines the 21st century. His peers disagree. Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific magazine, published his first findings more than a decade ago, but the editor later attacked Benveniste’s research, and the French government withdrew funding.

The revolutionary fought back. Earlier this year he addressed a heavyweight Cambridge gathering and his professional website presents a mass of evidence.

His theories developed from the discovery that diluted doses of medication could still be effective – even when diluted down to pure water, with no medicine remaining. Benveniste talks of “the memory of water” though the soundbite has laid him open to ridicule by sceptics, who claim he is trying to make a science of homeopathy.

The Frenchman retorts by challenging labs to try a simple test, applying a highly dilute solution of a harmless histamine to a rabbit’s skin. If his theory is right, the rabbit should benefit, even when the treatment is plain water.

Judge for yourself by visiting www.digibio.com

28^th July 1999

Feel the power of sacred sites online

Sit on the floor and breathe in, slowly and deeply. Feel all the air as it flows into your lungs. Hold the breath, and then gently blow it out.

Already you feel better. Do it again, and this time as you inhale imagine a solid shaft of light beaming out of the heavens and striking the crown of your head. As your chest fills with oxygen, your body fills with pure energy, pouring in through your mind. Hold the energy – then release it like a waterfall from the base of your spine as you breathe out, letting the shining force rush into the Earth. And breathe in again …

This beautiful meditation is taken from Martin Gray’s website at www.sacredsites.com Gray has led an extraordinary life and now, through the web, is pursuing an extraordinary ambition. The son of a US diplomat, he spent his early teens in India and journeyed through the mosques, temples and sacred caves with holy men as his guides. His twenties were spent as a monk in north India, before he returned to the States to launch a multi-million dollar travel company.

After a spiritual revelation on Easter Island, Gray sold his companies and devoted himself to 16 years of global adventure, photographing the planet’s most sacred places. At every stone circle, pyramid and holy mountain, Gray practised the meditation outlined above. He calls it ‘planetary acupuncture’.

The photographic record of his circumnavigation is extraordinary – and free. Dozens of high-res pictures are online, with full descriptions of each site, its aura, its history and its place in the real world-wide web – the one that links every human soul. These photos really are worth viewing.

Gray believes that truly sacred sites offer humans a special connection to the planet, and he is urging everyone to meditate at a holy place on January 1, 2000.

The circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, and the inexplicable Tor of Glastonbury, are not too remote. You will need more determination if you intend to see in the next 1,000 years at Ayers Rock, Lhasa in Tibet or Palenque in Mexico.

Martin Gray is a missionary. He writes: “I believe that there is a field of energy or presence of power at the sacred sites; that different sacred sites have different types of energies; and that these energies assist in the awakening and amplification of spiritual consciousness. I believe that it is important for people to physically journey to the power places and that people will intuitively know which sites to visit simply by experiencing the photographs and information I impart on my site.”

4^th August 1999

The ultimate getaway

If you want to moonwalk, blast off to explore the Artemis Society’s 3-D lunar base. The best bit of Java you ever saw lets your computer navigate across moon terrain, from a solar power station to the astronauts’ living quarters – you can even peep through the windows. http://www.asi.org/

Crew members are assembling a video antennae to send a live moon feed back to world’s internet, and a little robot buzzes round, collecting rocks. Mirrors are refracting kaleidoscopes of sunlight for solar power.

Above the southern horizon, the Earth is full. Hold your breath and raise your feet off the floor – it’s almost like being there.

But if you really want to take that Great Leap and follow Neil Armstrong, sign up with Artemis for their first tourist flight to the moon – scheduled to lift off from Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory, Australia, within the next two decades.

The society aims to make a profit. They estimate total start-up costs will be just under $1.5 billion, not an unusual sum for international mining companies like BP Amoco or Exxon, who regularly invest one billion dollars in a single deep-sea oil rig.

Net revenue from the first flight, including TV licencing and merchandising, could hit $5 billion – a serious profit margin. “In short,” boasts the Artemis prospectus, “we plan to pay for the initial stages of the project through shameless commercialism.”

Within 15 years of the initial launch, tourists could pay no more than the ticket price of a round-the-world adventure holiday, but with Artemis ’round-the-world’ will mean orbiting the planet 100 miles into space. The target is a two-week holiday on the moon for $20,000. Their design team expects passengers to enjoy first-class legroom, with the bonus that in zero gravity everyone will be floating around the cabin.

The idea sounds extreme, but sober costings are online and the society is looking for professional accountants to help draw up a business plan to woo backers. If you have a head for figures as well as heights, this could be your passport to the moon.

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