So let's lay it out and then look at what the evidence is for each of them.

Oh, okay.

Well, the parapsychologists use the word PSI as a way of having an overarching approach that includes both two main categories, extrasensory perception and on the one hand, in psychokinesis, on the other.

Extrasensory perception is often viewed as passive.

You're receiving distant information from elsewhere in the environment, not mediated by normal sensory channels.

And psychokinesis would be thought of as active, the power of human intention to affect distant events that are not mediated through the normal physical means of the body.

And then extrasensory perception can be subdivided into telepathy, meaning mind-to-mind communication versus clairvoyance, which would be an awareness of some object not mediated by another mind.

If it's so important, why is it so weak? Why is the data so weak?

you go ahead and introduce yourself, and maybe you can even talk about your life growing up and how it led you to pursue such an unusual career

path.

Sure.

My name is Jeffrey Mishlove.

I have a doctoral degree in parapsychology.

It was awarded from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980.

As far as I know, to this day, I have the only doctoral diploma that actually says parapsychology on it ever awarded anywhere in the world by an accredited university.

So Jeffrey, after you had your shared death experience, how did you feel about it? And you know, how did you change moving on after such a profoundly mystical experience?

So without further ado, uh, Jeffrey, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, and maybe you can even talk about your life growing up and how it led you to pursue such an unusual career path.

Sure.

My name is Jeffrey Mishlove.

I have a doctoral degree in parapsychology.

It was awarded from the University of California at Berkeley in nineteen eighty.

As far as I know, to this day, it-- I have the only doctoral diploma that actually says parapsychology on it ever awarded anywhere in the world by an accredited university.

But I have to qualify that right away to say there are probably two or three hundred people who have done doctoral-level research in the field of parapsychology.

So Jeffrey, after you had your shared death experience, how did you feel about it? And, you know, how did you change moving on after such a profoundly mystical experience?

Uh-huh.

And I was, I was a graduate student, so I figured I've gotta try and make this as scientific as possible, and I reached out to colleagues in San Diego, which is a city of comparable population, and said, uh, uh, we each sent out letters to all the law enforcement agencies within 100 miles to see if we could, uh, collect information about any UFO reports.

So there was, uh, first there was one, uh- Person in Concord, California, walking in the middle of the downtown streets at 4:00 AM, had no interest in UFOs, but claimed that he had been abducted right off of the street in downtown Concord, and, and we interviewed him.

It seemed legitimate enough.

He wasn't looking for publicity.

He filed a police report, et cetera.

And so I was on the phone once again with Owens talking about, you know, what was going on.

Well, I mean, what was the inspiration for the show? 'Cause I think it has a very interesting origin story.

You were.

From lo- from, as an undergraduate even, I, I was, uh, I did a senior honors thesis at the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate on the psychology of religious mysticism, and I went into it, to be honest, as a skeptic.

I thought, "These people who claim to be religious mystics, whatever that is, it's undoubtedly a form of psychopathology, and I'm going to...

That's what I'll write about.

That'll- I'll talk about the psychopathologies that make people believe they're having psychic and mystical experiences." And I started digging into the literature, and the more I dug into the literature, the more I became convinced that, uh, it was just the opposite, that these people were some of the most creative, successful, uh, people on the planet.

And, uh, at that point, I, I, I would- and I became aware of the research of J.B. Rhine and parapsychology and the, uh, studies of life after death going back to the 1880s.

And so it- and at the same time, in my senior year as an undergraduate, I was exposed to LSD and, uh, the whole, uh, psychedelic scene that was v- burgeoning at, at that time on college campuses, and it all fit together for me very naturally that, uh, LSD was a tool for, uh, exploring your own mind and, and that, uh, this, these mystical experiences were quite real.

Okay.