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THE STARTLING TRUTH BEHIND CLAIMS OF ASTRAL PROJECTION

Hello!

In the pages of JUNIOR SKEPTIC, we often discover that incredible-sounding paranormal claims are, in truth, fake mysteries— misleading stories told by tricksters to fool people.

Today we’ll try to solve a genuine mystery! It’s a fact that millions of people all over the world have had the bizarre experience of feeling that they temporaily left their bodies behind. During these out-of-body experiences (OBEs), people feel that the thinking, feeling part of themselves has somehow floated free as a spirit. Some people even report that they have looked down from the ceiling to see their own bodies! How can this be? What is really happening?

Let’s find out!

JUNIOR SKEPTIC No.68 (2018)

SPIRITS AND ASTRAL PROJECTION

Some characters in fantasy stories have a superpower called “astral projection”— the ability to leave their physical body, travel about as a sort of ghost, and then return to their body. For example, Marvel’s Doctor Strange is a sorcerer who uses magic to project his astral form to other places and mystical dimensions.

If such an ability really existed, you might imagine that it would be a rare and special gift. Surprisingly, however, it turns out that it’s quite common in real life for people to feel that they’ve left their bodies. About one in ten people will experience this sensation at least once in their lives! Some have an out-of-body experience only once. Some have several such experiences. A few people even learn to have out-of-body experiences whenever they choose. These people claim that their spirits travel freely, sometimes to other worlds.

Most cultures have some form of belief in astral travel, possibly because out-of-body experiences happen to so many people. Some societies believe that we all travel as spirits when we dream. Others believe that astral projection requires special rituals or drugs that allow gifted shamans to send their spirits to distant places.

Many religions include a belief that we have a spirit or soul that leaves our bodies when we die. These spirits may move on to an afterlife, or perhaps be reborn into a new body. Some people believe that spirits may linger to haunt the Earth as ghosts.

The idea that we have both a physical body and spirit or soul is called “dualism.” Dualism seems naturally correct to most people. Our minds feel distinct from our bodies. Most people find it natural to suppose that their mind or spirit inhabits their body, in much the same way that an owner inhabits a house or a driver inhabits a vehicle.

INCREDIBLE TALES

Researchers and other interested people have often hoped that out-of-body experiences might provide scientific evidence that we have a spirit that can separate from our physical bodies. But stories of out-of-body experiences are just that— stories about experiences that people claim to have had. The problem, as SKEPTIC Editor Michael Shermer reminds readers of his book Heavens on Earth, is that “Sometimes people just make things up.”

He’s right. Some people do indeed invent fake stories about leaving their bodies. For example, a 2010 book titled The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A True Story claimed that a boy named Alex Malarkey temporarily left his body and journeyed to heaven after a car crash. But Malarkey later confessed that this story was a hoax. “I did not go to heaven,” he admitted. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.”

Also, memories are not always reliable even when people try their best to be truthful. Researchers have discovered that some people later claim to have had out-of-body experiences that they did not remember happening at the time. These claims are not fibs but mixed up mistakes—false memories based upon stories those people have heard. We should be careful with stories of out-ofbody experiences if they are told many years later. It’s natural for the details of stories to change and become exaggerated over time.

Nevertheless, other out-of-body experiences have been described in detail soon after they happened. These are more likely to accurately tell us what those experiences were like. Some stories even include details we can check. Let’s look at one good example.

JUNIOR SKEPTIC No. 68: (2018)

Susan’s Story

One night in 1970, a university student in England had an experience that changed her life forever. Susan Blackmore and a group of her friends had spent hours that evening trying to contact spirits using a ouija board. As the hour grew late, Susan and two remaining friends drifted away to another room. They sat up listening to music. Susan felt very tired and relaxed.

As she lounged there crosslegged on the floor, Susan began to feel strange. She felt she could vividly see things even with her eyes closed. She seemed to move through a tunnel of trees, seeing every leafy detail “very, very clearly. In more detail than if I had seen them real.”

Sometime after midnight it seemed to Susan that she was “gently drifting about” near the ceiling. She looked down and saw her physical body sitting below her. She saw a slowly moving “shiny grayish-white” cord connecting her floating spirit self to her physical body. She then “moved up and out and saw below me all the roofs” of her school. She journeyed to a magical island where she discovered that she “could change shape at will.” She soared high “over Italy, Switzerland and then France,” before visiting New York and then Africa. Then she felt herself growing, and “became larger than the whole earth quite quickly.” She grew until she was larger than “the whole solar system,” and then kept expanding until the Milky Way and “many other galaxies” were inside her cosmic spirit body. Soon she felt that she filled the entire universe and could see beyond it into a “whole new set of dimensions.”

Eventually she shrank back to normal size and returned to hover above her body. Then, slowly, she struggled back into her own body and opened her eyes.

Susan was stunned for days. She carefully wrote down every detail she could remember. This three hour experience really happened. It wasn’t a dream. She knew she wasn’t making it up. It was, she wrote in her diary, “Really the most fantastic thing that ever happened in my life.”

But what was it? How could this amazing, lifechanging experience be explained? Susan reasoned as most people might: it felt like she left her body, so that must be what happened. It seemed obvious to Susan: “I went astral traveling. I was thousands of miles away— not in my body at all.”

Susan was “completely convinced,” but she wasn’t content just to believe. After all, she was studying to become a scientist. She wanted evidence! She wanted to prove that astral travel and other psychic feats were real things—and then to discover how they worked.

She had a mystery to solve, and she had a hypothesis (a possible explanation that fits the evidence and can be tested in some way). But was her hypothesis correct? Was the feeling that she left her body caused by astral projection? Or could her experience be explained better by some other hypothesis she hadn’t thought of yet? There was only one way to find out. She needed to put her hypothesis to the test.

INVESTIGATING SPIRITS

Susan badly wanted to understand her out-of-body experience.

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Ástor Alexander is a figurative illustrator and painter.
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