They Don’t Have Ghost of Chance to Find the Answers

With an audible psi, scientists attending that 30th annual conference of the Parapsychological Assn., which ended Saturday in Edinburgh, Scotland, admitted that things can go bump in the night but can’t be explained. “We don’t have any idea what we’re doing,” said Robert McConnell, a retired physicist at Pittsburgh University and the association’s first president. “All we know is that something occurs.” Such as extrasensory perception, a form of psi--shorthand for the apparently inexplicable. Or psychokinesis (PK), spoon-bending or getting a pair of dice to roll 7s and 11s in a feat of mind over matter. In one PK case cited at the conference by Alok Saklani of Garwhal University in Srinagar, India, a Himalayan shaman or faith-healer persuaded one group of wheat seeds to germinate more abundantly than another group, seemingly by concentrating her thoughts on them, and under test conditions. But a note of caution about psychic phenomena was sounded by Dr. John Beloff, a retired Edinburgh University psychologist and an organizer of the meeting. “I consider that excessive credulity does far more harm than excessive incredulity,” Beloff said.

--The Milan daily Corriere della Serra, quoting unidentified but “highly reliable” sources, reported that Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi has married Nabila Khashoggi, the 25-year-old daughter of Saudi Arabian billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. It said that as a gift to the bride’s family, Kadafi had signed a contract to sell Khashoggi Libyan crude oil at below the market price. The report did not say whether Kadafi, 44, had divorced his second wife, Safia, a nurse, before marrying Nabila.