Some anecdotes

Some anecdotes

In a paper that I co-authored for Psychic magazine, the following anecdotal material was reported.

"Although such anecdotes prove nothing, they often us remarkable insights into successful executive style. Then we can try to do experiments to prove it, In our book Executive ESP (Prentice Hall, 1974) we have over 100 similar stories and also statistics on tightly controlled computer tests confirming this idea.

"A good example comes from a Wall Street Journal article of November 17, 1969, by Roger Benedict. The state of Alaska was auctioning off land for oil drilling rights. The North Slope at Prudhoe Bay had proven out by drilling to contain vast oil deposits. Atlantic Richfield and others in a consortium had discovered oil. Several nearby tracts were up for auction, and other oil companies had combined into consortia to bid for them. The largest bid, of course, would win oil rights. In particular, there was Tract 57, three square miles alongside the proven oil of the Atlantic tract. Mobile, Esso, and Phillips were in one consortium. Amerada Hess and Getty Oil were in another. There were others but their bids were small. Both consortia sent up geologists to Tract 57 to prepare geological maps and estimates of what to bid.

"The result was strange. Both consortia decided in secrecy that $70,000,000 would be right. Then both groups coincidentally decided to add a safety factor and both groups chose 3 percent. However, something went wrong with the arithmetic. As was known later when the bids were opened, the Mobile bid was $72,200,000 and the original Hess-Getty bid was $72,100,000 - so the Mobil group stood to win by only $100,000. Now 3 percent of $70 million is $2,100,000. Maybe the Mobil engineers rounded it up to $2,200,000 while Hess-Getty left their safety factor at $2,100,000. Regardless, as the bids stood, Hess-Getty was $100,000 behind.

"Then on the weekend before the bids were to be opened, Leon Hess got a feeling in the pit of his stomach that they would lose. He telephoned Getty executives and suggested that they raise the bid to $80 million. The Getty executives refused to go to Hess' new figure. Hess still had the 'pain' in his solar plexus and pressured Getty to let the bid go up. So finally, to keep the peace between them, the Getty executives compromised and raised the bid to a total of $72,300,000. Thus when the bids were opened, Hess and Getty won by a paltry $100,000 on their final, revised $72.3 million bid.

"Hess fussing would have looked pretty silly if the Mobil-Esso-Phillips' bid had been only $5 million, as the third place bid was. In fact, Mobil-Esso-Phillips did bid $41 million on another tract and the second place bid was only $5 million. $5.1 million would have won it for them, but in secret bids, one does not know what amounts are offered. Or does one sometimes know like Hess seemed to know?

"In the preceding case, ESP seemed to help Hess win with very little extra money; whereas, without ESP, Mobil-Esso-Phillips lost Tract 47 and also paid up to $35.9 million more than necessary on the tract they did win.

"Another example of how ESP, especially precognition, can effect a business decision was told to Dean (co-author of Executive ESP) by Lawrence Tynan, a New Jersey automobile dealer.

"In the summer of 1971 business was very slow. The public was not buying. His sales room and lot were chock full of cars and he could not move them. Then the time came in June 1971 when he would normally send in his next order for more cars. Against all logic he got out the order paper and was filling it in. He should have thrown the paper away, he said, but he found himself filling it in for five times more cars than he had ever ordered before. This seemed insane as his lot was full of his last order of cars. Logic told him to destroy the paper, but under some strange compulsion he sent it in to the manufacturer.

"The enormous order of cars arrived by train and truck transporter. He wondered if something had happened to his mind. There was nowhere to put the cars, so he had to go out on the edge of town and rent a place to park them, at a very high fee.

"Then the bills came in. He had not paid the previous bills for the previous order. No one was buying cars. He thought he had gone crazy - that his days as a businessman were over. He just could not understand why he had done it. He began to think about bankruptcy.

"But on August 13, 1971, President Nixon announced the imposition of a 10 percent duty on foreign cars and the relaxation of the 7 percent tax on domestically produced cars. What happened then is history. The market changed completely around. The public flocked to the car dealers' showrooms and bought cars with abandon.

"Mr. Tynan sold out his previous order, and his succeeding five times larger order. He said that he became a millionaire.

"Dean asked him a couple of questions:

"Did the manufacturer force you to take the five times larger order because business was so slow?

"'Oh no, I did it voluntarily and thought I had gone crazy sending the order in.'

"If you had not ordered in June, could you have placed the order and received the cars after President Nixon's announcement?

"'No, no, all the other dealers wanted cars then and I would not have gotten any. I had to do it when I did, even though it made me think I was mad.'

"So it seemed as though he was making the decision to order so many cars based on unconscious precognitive knowledge of what was going to happen. This was despite the decision's making no sense at the time. It is a reasonable assumption that even President Nixon did not know in June that he was going to make the announcement on August 14, since controls were so very contrary to Nixon's beliefs."

(This article was written by Prof. John Mihalasky and is copyrighted by him. We thank him for sending it to Jose Silva several years ago, and for graciously granting us permission to publish it here.)

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