Alan Vaughan Psychic Training

Alan Vaughan has one of the better test records among psi practitioners in the United States. His talents are described in Dream Telepathy (1973), which he coauthored with Montague Ullman, M.D., and Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., and also his own books, Patterns of Prophecy (1973), Incredible Coincidences (1979) and The Edge of Tomorrow (1982). Vaughan is, perhaps, most well known for his accurate, registered precognition describing the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968.

Prior to 1966, Vaughan considered himself an informed skeptic regarding psi. He had read the skeptics such as Martin Gardner and assumed that ESP experiments must be flawed in some way. He had always been interested in the unusual but just assumed there was nothing to it until, as he said, "it happened to me." In 1966, Vaughan had an experience that changed his life. He described it as follows when I interviewed him: "I had the feeling of getting possessed and spontaneously going into a meditation in which I could feel energy rising in my body. It frightened the hell out of me. I pushed this entity out of my head. For about two hours after this, I suddenly became psychic, and also elated, as if some part of me extended out beyond my skin. I was able to get feedback and discover that this was true ESP." As a result of this experience, Vaughan went to consult with Eileen Garrett, then the head of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York, who, rather unexpectedly, offered him a scholarship to study psychic phenomena in Europe.

Vaughan's actual psi training began in 1967 at the London College for Psychic Science, under the guidance of the well known spiritualist medium Douglas Johnson. Vaughan describes Johnson's teaching methods in his article, "Development of the Psychic," in Psychic magazine, August 1970:
"A group of from six to eight students meet for one hour each week. Seated informally about the room, which has been darkened, the students are asked to meditate for half an hour on an image proposed by Johnson, such as a beautiful sunset or a Chinese garden. Often, he asks the student to visualize light coming toward them. At the end of the meditation, he asks the students what other images intruded. Sometimes those images contain ESP about the others in the room.

"After this initial period of stilling the mind, the student is asked to pick up psychic impressions about some ‘mystery object' which Johnson passes around. The students attempt to give objective information about the owner of the object, in what is termed ‘psychometry'. Often a ‘mystery visitor' becomes the target for the students. The mystery visitor affirms or denies the students' impressions, thus giving them immediate feedback so that they can learn to distinguish between ESP and ordinary imagery.

Vaughan studied with Johnson for about a year. He states that it was difficult for him, at first, to succeed at the ESP tasks. With practice and feedback it became easier and easier. Another of Johnson's students was Malcolm Bessent, who was also later a very successful subject at the Maimonides Hospital dream telepathy experiments in Brooklyn.

After leaving England, Vaughan traveled to Freiburg University in Germany where he started teaching ESP classes using these same techniques with German students. Vaughan claims that these students were able to pick up accurate information.

Upon returning to the United States in 1969, Vaughan began working at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory as a parapsychological research subject. Based on his experiences as a subject there, he developed an ESP training technique using artistic pictures as targets. The basic method involved practice with targets and feedback plus meditation. The instructions given to students are published as follows in Vaughan's 1970 Psychic article: "Now I want you to relax completely. Close your eyes, rid your mind of mundane problems, and try to make your mind blank. You might concentrate on a circle of blankness, a circular fence to keep out thoughts that keep trying to come in like stray sheep. If a thought strays in, you must be very patient like a shepherd and shove the stray out, no matter how many times it strays back. When your mind is stilled and the circle is blank, then quietly await impressions of the target picture. Don't try to force it. Just relax and wait, and then the impressions will come. At the end of the meditation, when I turn the lights on, jot down notes on what you saw." Vaughan states that this technique served as the basis for ESP training techniques developed by William and Lendell Braud, which are discussed in Chapter IV.

Vaughan claims that a controlled experiment with his group was conducted by parapsychologists Charles Honorton and Rex Stanford. The experiment is described by Vaughan in his 1970 article in Psychic. The results are positive, with five out of six subjects scoring hits (probability of a hit = .5) and three of the six subjects scoring direct hits (probability of a direct hit = .166).

Another experiment involving Vaughan and his students was conducted by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York and reported in the 1973 volume of Research in Parapsychology, the annual proceedings of the Parapsychological Association. Seven subjects took part in the experiment: Alan Vaughan, three of his students, and three control subjects. The targets for the experiment were dreams that had been written down by individuals not present at the experiment. These dreams were placed in sealed, opaque envelopes. The subjects were allowed to hold the envelopes and then went into individual rooms to describe their ESP impressions of the dream or the dreamers.

Vaughan was the only subject in the experiment whose transcript showed a significant correlation with the targets. The experiment was designed to test the possibility that, through intergroup telepathy, one person's hits might facilitate or inhibit others' hits on the same target items. The results were quite interesting. For Vaughan's three students, the items on their transcripts similar to items that Vaughan had also reported on his transcript were significantly more correct than items not corresponding to Vaughan's impressions. In contrast, each of the control subjects showed an insignificant relation to Vaughan's reports. Schmeidler interprets this result as follows: "The data thus imply that Vaughan's friends showed a telepathic rapport with him when he was correct but not when he was Incorrect. Two possible interpretations of this finding are suggested. One is that when a psychic is correct, his impressions have a special quality which elicits a response from other (psychic) individuals who are in good rapport with him. The other is that in a group psychometry session, friends of a psychic are oriented both to the psychic and to the absent sitter, and that when the two orientations mesh they are more likely to result in a correct response than when they do not mesh. Either of these two implications has many theoretical implications for discovering the nature of psi."

Vaughan continues to teach psychic development classes in the Los Angeles area. He believes that the training works best with people who are highly motivated and have some way o integrating it into their lives.

Schmeidler, G. R., & Goldberg, J. Evidence for selective telepathy in group psychometry [Summary]. In W. G. Roll, R. L. Morris, & J. D. Morris (Eds.), Research in Parapsychology 1973 (pp. 103-106). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1974.

Vaughan, A. Development of the psychic. Psychic, 2(1), August 1970.

Vaughan, A. Patterns of prophecy. New York: Hawthorne, 1973.

Vaughan, A. Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1979. (Reprinted by Ballantine Books, New York, 1989.)

Vaughan, A. The Edge of Tomorrow: How to Foresee and Fulfill Your Future. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1982.

Ullman, M., & Krippner, S., with Vaughan, A. Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP (2nd ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989.

Vaughan, A. The Power of Positive Prophecy: How to Envision and Create Your Best Future. London: Harper Collins, 1991.

Vaughan, A., & Houck, J. Software for training anomalous cognition: A preliminary report. Subtle Energies, 2(2), 29-53, 1991.