Media Appearances
of Dale E. Graff

The following article by Bill Uhrich was originally published in Reading Eagle 11/27/2010. 

Retired physicist recalls work reviewing Book of Revelation

An outwardly relaxed Dale E. Graff, 75. a retired aerospace engineer and physicist, stood outdoors near his Tilden Township hilltop home, a speck of a man with expansive earth below, infinite sky above.  He appeared imperturbable, perhaps comfortable with the Biblical quotation "There is nothing new under the sun."

But as Biblical quotes go, that particular one wouldn't capture the perspective of this empiricist-oriented military intelligence researcher, the coiner of the term Stargate during his studies into so-called psi phenomena - extrasensory perception and precognitive dreaming that might be used to locate fugitives, find the missing or abducted or have life-saving applications.

For Graff, more to the point might be American humorist Ambrose Bierce's take on Ecclesiastes: "There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know."  That, in essence, was the message Graff delivered earlier this week to about 40 listeners at a monthly Spirit on Tap lecture titled "Into the Future - Ready or Not," at the Goodnites Lounge in the Crowne Plaza Reading, Wyomissing.

Spirit on Tap, supported by United Church of Christ ministries, encourages theological discussions and dialogue on spirituality issues.  "We will be slipping into different dimensions tonight," Graff said as a prelude to explaining how 40 years ago he was involved in a Lutheran church project of reviewing the Bible's visionary Book of Revelation.

Book of Revelation is an often criticized text, described by the likes of Enlightenment leader Thomas Jefferson as "merely the ravings of a maniac."  Playwright George Bernard Shaw, in a sharp, incisive comment, characterized it as, "a peculiar record of the visions of a drug addict."

Regardless, this apocalyptic account of the end-of-the-world battle between good and evil led Graff to study psi phenomena.  His quest was to better understand physical and mental realities and perhaps find a holistic pattern that integrates science, spirituality and consciousness beyond generally accepted space and time constraints.  Specifically, it was his own personal experience, a self-described "shock to my psyche" that involved the accuracy of his intuition and a precognitive dream that directed him to find an obscure doctoral dissertation.  He said this manuscript discovery not only provided him with a more clarified understanding of the Book of Revelation, but it inspired him to practice, in a more controlled scientific way, what he called intentional dreaming to see if he could predict future events - at least in the short term.

And that led to considering the randomness of photo selection at the Reading Eagle by creating a visual precognitive dream study involving 70 experiments conducted over 2005-2007 with other colleague participants.  The effort was to predict what photographs would appear on the front pages three to five days before publication date.

"I would begin by saying I desire to dream about such-and-such a picture on A1 or B1 that will appear in three to five days," Graff said. "Then I would make a sketch of what I perceived."  Surprisingly, about 70 percent of the time Graff said his sketches matched in pattern, form, shape, positioning and color what actually appeared in the newspaper, including photographs of a dog with a red kerchief, a parade, a public demonstration and a planetary astronomy picture.

"Further, I discovered that 30 percent of the photographs didn't even exist (the pictures hadn't even been taken yet) at the time I dreamed of them and made the sketches," he said.  Using the mind to dream about photographs before they are even snapped opens the door to all sorts of questions about global consciousness.

Ripe for theological speculation and scientific exploration is the whole matter of what happens when and how.  According to Graff, quoting author Lewis Carroll of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" fame: "The queen tells Alice it's a poor kind of memory that only works backward. Maybe we are moving toward the future or the future is moving toward us or it's all projection."

Graff doesn't know; he's curious.  "Maybe the queen was just ahead of her time," he said.

Contact Bruce R. Posten: 610-371-5059 or bposten@readingeagle.com.

 

This page last updated 11 April 2013