Psychoanalyst, researcher, and UC-Berkeley professor Elizabeth ("Lisby") Lloyd Mayer faced a similar dilemma. One day in 1991, Lisby's 11 year-old daughter Meg's handmade harp was stolen from the theater where she was playing. For
two months, Lisby tried everything to recover the harp. The police got involved. She contacted instrument dealers all over the country. A CBS TV news story even aired. But nothing worked. The harp was lost.
Then a friend of Lisby's said, "If you really want that harp back, you
should be willing to try anything. Try calling a dowser."
Lisby was skeptical. All she knew about dowsers was that they were made up of odd people who walked around with forked sticks telling you where to drill wells.
But Lisby's friend told her that really good dowsers could find not just underground water, but lost objects. At a loss, Lisby figured she had nothing to lose. She contacted the president of the American Society of Dowsers, Harold McCoy in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and explained that a harp had been stolen from Oakland, California. She asked Harold if he could help her locate the harp. Harold said, "Give me a second. I'll tell you if it's still in
Oakland." He was silent for a moment and then said, "Well, it's still
there. Send me a street map of Oakland and I'll locate that harp for you." Lisby overnighted Harold a map of Oakland. Two days later, he called to give her the address of where the harp was located. Lisby had never heard of the street he named, but she passed the information along to the police. The police shook their heads. They couldn't issue a search warrant based on a hunch. So Lisby decided to drive over and post flyers within a two block radius of the address Harold had given her, offering a reward for the return of the harp. Three days later, her phone rang. A man said that his neighbor had recently showed him the exact harp the flyer was describing. He promised to give it to a teenage boy who would deliver it to her in the rear parking lot of an all-night Safeway.
In spite of her own skepticism, Lisby showed up at the appointed time and place, where a young man loaded the harp into the back of her station wagon. That's when Lisby came to the same conclusion Don would have come to if he
had accepted what had happened with he and his roommate. This changes everything.
Lisby went on to write a wonderful book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, which is full of stories of people who knew things they shouldn't have, as well as the scientific data supporting the existence of paranormal phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, remote viewing, and the power of prayer.
- Alissa Rankin, M.D. March 6, 2014
Meg
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