The Plants Respond - An Interview With Cleve Backster

[ktlight]

"Sometimes it happens that a person can name the exact moment when his or her life changed irrevocably. For Cleve Backster, it was early in the morning of February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds into a polygraph test he was administering. Backster, a leading polygraph expert whose Backster Zone Comparison Test is the worldwide standard for lie detection, had at that moment threatened his test subject’s well-being. The subject had responded electrochemically to his threat.

The subject was a plant.

Since then, Backster has conducted hundreds of experiments demonstrating not only that plants respond to our emotions and intents, but so do severed leaves, eggs (fertilized or not), yogurt, and human cell samples. He’s found, for example, that white cells taken from a person’s mouth and placed in a test tube still respond electrochemically to the donor’s emotional states, even when the donor is out of the room, out of the building, or out of the state.

I first read about Backster’s work when I was a kid. His observations verified an understanding I had then, an understanding not even a degree in physics could later eradicate: that the world is alive and sentient.

I spoke with Backster in San Diego, thirty-one years and twenty-two days after his original observation, and a full continent away from the office on Times Square in New York City where he had once worked and lived. Before we began, he placed some yogurt into a sterilized test tube, inserted two gold electrodes, and turned on the recording chart. I was excited, yet dubious. We began to talk, and the pen wriggled up and down. Then, just as I took in my breath prior to disagreeing with something he’d said, the pen seemed to lurch. But did it really jump, or was I only seeing what I wanted to see?

At one point, while Backster was out of the room, I tried to muster up some anger by thinking of clear-cut forests and the politicians who sanction them, of abused children and their abusers. But the line depicting the electrochemical response of the yogurt remained perfectly flat. Perhaps the yogurt wasn’t interested in me. Losing interest myself, I began to wander around the lab. My eyes fell on a calendar, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an advertisement for a shipping company. I felt a sudden surge of anger at the ubiquity of advertising. Then I realized — a spontaneous emotion! I dashed over to the chart, and saw on it a sudden spike apparently corresponding to the moment I'd seen the ad.

When Backster returned, I continued the interview, still excited, and perhaps a little less skeptical."

Now go to the link to read the interview:

http://thesunmagazine.org/archives/1882

[Qba]

It's also mentioned and well described by David Wilcock in "The Source Field Investigations".
Highly reccomended book by the way.

[grannyfranny100]

There have been writers claiming that some ET craft have consciousness and interact with the pilot's brain. Hmm, Cleve Backster may be on the right track.

[Hervé]

Yeah-yeah... took Backster a few years to catch up on this one:

Dr Hubbard's experiments soon came to the attention of Garden News, to which publication he revealed, gardener to gardener, his conviction that plants felt pain. He demonstrated by connecting an E-meter to a geranium with crocodile clips, tearing off its leaves and showing how the needle of the E-meter oscillated as he did so. The Garden News correspondent was enormously excited and wrote a story under the sensational headline 'PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN', describing Hubbard as a 'revolutionary horticultural scientist'.[Garden News, 18 December 1959]

Hubbard as 'revolutionary horticultural scientist', proving that plants can feel pain. (Rex Features Ltd)

It was not long before television and Fleet Street reporters were beating a path to Saint Hill Manor demanding to interview Hubbard about his novel theories. Always pleased to help the gentlemen of the press, he was memorably photographed looking compassionately at a tomato jabbed by probes attached to an E-meter - a picture that eventually found its way into Newsweek magazine, causing a good deal of harmless merriment at his expense. Alan Whicker, a well-known British television interviewer, did his best to make Hubbard look like a crank, but Hubbard contrived to come across as a rather likeable and confident personality. When Whicker moved in for the kill, sarcastically inquiring if rose pruning should be stopped lest it caused pain and anxiety, Hubbard neatly side-stepped the question and drew a parallel with an essential life-preserving medical operation on a human being. He might have whacky ideas, Whicker discovered, but he was certainly no fool.

Scientologists around the world could have been forgiven for wondering what their beloved leader was up to, but an explanation was soon forthcoming. The purpose of Ron's experiments, they were told, was to 'reform the world's food supply'. He had already produced 'ever-bearing tomato plants and sweetcorn plants sufficiently impressive to startle British newspapers into front-page stories about this new wizardry'.[A Piece of Blue Sky, Jon Atack, 1992]

[...]

One was taken ridiculously... not the other one... why?

[birddog]

Grannygranny100 wrote:

"There have been writers claiming that some ET craft have consciousness and interact with the pilot's brain. "

I believe most, if not all have this characteristic. One has to be telepathic, or have artificial telepathy.