Alex Tsakiris: Let me interject here. Do you recall what were some of the first instances of that that you bumped into that you really thought, ‘Wow, this is interesting,’ and then you followed it up and found that there weren’t good answers coming back?
Dr. Diane Powell: Yes. The first one happened when I was a teenager. A friend of mine traveled in the circus during the summer and invited me over to his house because the magician that he traveled with was there. He had talked very highly about him. His name was Jay Michelle and he did Houdini-like tricks, but when I met him he wanted to show me some other things that he could do. He had me stand across the room from him, which was about maybe 15 feet away. There was a bookshelf behind me with around 1,000 books. He said, “Pick any book out. Open it up to any page and as you’re reading it I’ll read it to you.”
And he did just that…. for several books and several pages. It blew my mind. When I asked him about it he said, “Oh, that’s just a magic trick. It’s just magic.”
I said, “Okay, okay. I guess it’s just magic.”
I asked my father about it and he said, “Well, there is this controversial topic called telepathy and that’s what it sounds like to me.”