Lefty, Alice, and Jim

James McClenon and his group (the M-group), are telling us a story that they lived into being.The heroes of the story are named Alice and Lefty.They are unlikely heroes, crude little objects made of paper and foil and needles, and flimsy enough to be flipped into the air by a strong breeze.Yet they carry the weight of challenging an understanding of everything that almost all of us share almost all of the time.The M-group assigned personal names to these things because they seemed to display something like life and purpose.Some of us name our cars.They spring into life, from inert to ready to race, with the push of a button, and they are reliable enough in responding to us to seem something like loyal or even loving, and their powers are largely a mystery to most of us.Certainly, if we were challenged to make one, we would be at a loss.Easy enough to imagine life and agency.This sort of development from flimsy toys with inexplicable activity to a shared sense of personal agency is precisely what is most interesting to McClenon, the sociologist.He wants to understand how anomalous experiences, expressed by the most predisposed individuals, can become a subject of conflicted interest, then excited group involvement, and then evoke a set of ideas aimed at understanding them, and lead thence to collective belief systems with more magic in them than our normal sense of reality permits.Perhaps religions are born that way.McClenon, the sociologist, takes the typical posture of participant/observer.This is not just a research attitude, it is also a ratio.Before the series of experiments he reports here, he was heavy on the observer side, maintaining strict critical objectivity even while consorting with table-tilters who dallied with magical thinking -like the anthropologist who lived with cannibals but managed to never eat human flesh.In retrospect, he thinks he was too critical and analytical then, and discouraged the phenomena he was hoping to produce.The phenomena he pursued all involved the anomalous movement of things, or macro-PK.To try to do more PK-productive work, he took guidance from the approach of Kenneth Batcheldor (1984), who thought that a lively group process, unimpeded by too much effort to control non-paranormal artifacts, is optimal for generating a group mentality friendly to psi which is then conducive to genuine macro-PK (séance-like table movements, anomalous and sometimes intelligently responsive sounds or lights, odd electronic disturbances, etc.).The approach has been successfully applied by others, including the Toronto "Philip" group led by Iris Owen (1976).He also took guidance from researchers who reported that such experiments were more likely to be successful if they included at least one presumably gifted participant (someone already inclined to produce such things) (Gimeno & Burgo, 2017).Then, he took the bold step of moving the whole project online, conducting group sessions virtually, where the only contact people had with one another was via their screens.This proved propitious as the Pandemic unfolded.