Col. Corso, still perplexed...

originally posted by: vance
What do you folks think when it comes to motive?

One thing is for sure. The guy was a spook. A lifelong member of the military intelligence community. So it wouldn't surprise me that because of his vague connection with Roswell he might have been brought in to do one last disinformation job before he passed away. He's the perfect guy, really. Comes up with a lot of unverifiable stuff, then dies not long afterwards so nobody can try to trip him up.

The ultimate motive? To keep people focused on little gray aliens rather than the Nazis performing weird post-war rocket experiments with child cadavers (or whatever).

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: Tangerine

The question is did it work with people who didn't know they were supposed to be being hypnotised?

That was sort of the point. You had to practice doing snap inductions on random folk you encountered.

eta: it wasn't the sort of thing where you walked up and said "Hi, I'm taking this NLP class and I'd like to try to hypnotize you", it was more like walking up to someone and giving them the babble or sticking out your hand to shake and then doing a pattern breaker, impromptu and on the spot with a tight time limit.

The story as I originally heard it involved one student being chastised for leaving a trail of still-entranced random people in a subway, one of them had been robbed.

So you didn't personally participate and don't know if it actually worked.

originally posted by: Tangerine
So you didn't personally participate and don't know if it actually worked.

I knew some of the guys taking the class. Personally, I'd rather pick locks, if there's a limited number of "extracurricular" stuff you can take.

Also, you have to be very VERY competent with the primary language your target speaks. If you were doing this in the US, I'd be great. You want to do snap inductions on Farsi speakers, you need someone else entirely.

eta: I don't know if they still teach, but at one time they taught surprise induction as a moderately expensive class anyone could take. There were some prerequisites. But if I wanted to take something oddball, I think I'd have probably gone for a Jack Houck class just for the quirkiness level.

originally posted by: Bedlam
But if I wanted to take something oddball, I think I'd have probably gone for a Jack Houck class just for the quirkiness level.

I worked a little bit with Houck and Alan Vaughn long ago trying to work the bugs out of a computerized PK program they were developing. I was coming up with some insanely high correlations by being able to properly guess what letter would come up "randomly" in a computer program. Turned out that the letters weren't being generated as randomly as possible, since the random number generator in the computer wasn't really generating random numbers. After working with the program a while, I was able to recognize the pattern. Once he fixed the problem, my amazing PK ability went right down the toilet. I did have an amazing ability to recognize patterns in the program though, so I guess that's something.

Never got to go to a spoon bending party. That would have been fun.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
Never got to go to a spoon bending party. That would have been fun.

Traditionally, I suck at things that require psychic ability. I'm probably the only person in the world that cannot do remote viewing AT ALL.

Given a deck of Zener cards and a long run, I will test worse than just guessing.

There was only one thing I ever had any luck with, and I was VERY good at it, but it's a questionably useful skill that's probably more a function of observation and subconscious pattern matching than anything psychic.

That said, I always wanted to find the time to go to a spoon party, if nothing else to find that I was the only human who couldn't do it at all. Has anyone picked up the torch now that Jack has passed?