Dr Chris Roe places a pair of enormous fluffy earphones over the head of a blonde 20-year-old woman. He carefully slices a ping-pong ball in half and tapes each piece over her eyes. Then he switches on a red light that bathes the woman in an eerie glow, and leaves the room.
After a few moments, a low hum begins to fill the laboratory and the woman begins smiling sweetly to herself as images of distant locations start to pass through her mind. She says she can sense a group of trees and a babbling brook full of boulders. Standing on a boulder is her friend Jack. He's waving at her and smiling. She begins to describe the location to Dr Roe. Half a mile away, her friend Jack is, indeed, standing on a boulder in a stream. Somehow, the woman has been able to "see" Jack in her mind's eye, even though all of conventional science - and common sense - says it is impossible. Is this simply a bizarre coincidence?
Or could it be proof that we all possess psychic powers of the type popularised in such films as Minority Report? That is what Dr Roe is investigating. A parapsychologist based at the University of Northampton, he is examining whether it could indeed be possible to project your "mind's eye" to a distant location and observe what is going on - even if that place is hundreds of miles away. And though the research is not yet complete, the results have been tantalising. His early findings suggest that up to 85 per cent of people may possess some form of clairvoyance - the ability to "remote view". And he believes that with only a modicum of training we can all sharpen our psychic skills. "Our results are significant," says Dr Roe. "They suggest that remote viewing, or clairvoyance, is something that should be taken seriously."
