Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER THREE That afternoon I began to read through the documents on my desk. I tried to find out a little more about the Planetary Association and what kind of people were trying to revive Tesla's plans for worldwide power transmission. As I looked through the list of names I noticed that few of them were associated with a university or research institution. It seemed that PACE was composed of what could be called 'concerned individuals' rather than experts in science or engineering. Several of the addresses were Canadian and one of the names was that of a Canadian senator, but what struck me immediately were the names of Andrija Puharich and Marcel Vogel. Vogel's name rang a distant bell; I recalled that he had been involved in experiments on thought transference in plants. In the mid-sixties a man named Cleve Backster had been investigating polygraphs or 'lie detectors'. For amusement he connected one of the electrodes to the leaf of a plant in his laboratory and watched what happened when he watered the pot. One of the ways a lie detector works is to measure the resistance of the subject's skin, for even the smallest increase in sweating produces a drop in electrical resistance - water is a good conductor of electricity. As any student of electronics would have expected, the same thing happened when Backster watered his plant - the polygraph showed a deflection. But as Backster continued his experiments, he came to believe that plants experienced some primitive form of 'feeling' and respond just as animals do. When a plant was damaged, it seemed to feel pain. When other plants or animals in the room were harmed, the plant connected to the polygraph responded. Backster began to wonder if all life, from human down to the simplest vegetable, was part of a web of intercommunication. Marcel Vogel had read of the Backster experiments and tried to go one step further. He claimed that, by putting himself or a volunteer into a relaxed state, it was possible to project thoughts and feelings to house plants. By connecting a leaf of the plant to a polygraph, it was then possible to make an objective record of its response. Vogel went further. He began to project bursts of 'mental energy' over long distances to the plants. In one experiment he claimed to be able to affect a plant in California from as far away as Prague, Czech Republic. I noticed that Vogel's address was given as San Jose, so I put through a 36
