A Personal Note from The Blue Book

What would you rather do ... spend 5 minutes laughing, or 5 minutes getting screamed at for something you've done wrong?

Right. That's why humor is a tool. 99.9% of breathing human beings would rather laugh than get scolded. So I hope you'll keep reading, and be entertained.

What's next are two of the weirdest things in The Blue Book files. Science can't explain either one, but at the end we're gonna venture a guess. So don't skim or skip to the end ... you'll only miss out on some spooky stuff.

That's a promise from The Blue Book.

Weird Thing #1
Psychologists take a group of rats, and randomly divide them into two smaller, identically-sized sub-groups. Then volunteer observers (human beings, duh) are brought into a lab room containing a maze.

The observers are told they'll be observing a group of "dim witted" rats trying to complete the maze. The volunteers are asked to make notes describing how the rats learn to escape the maze.

Then the rats are released, and the observers start scribbling their notes. The first half of the experiment ends when the last rat finishes the maze.

For the second half of the experiment, the scientists bring in the other group of rats.

But this time the observers are told these rats are extremely intelligent, and expected to complete the maze very quickly. Then the rats are released, and the observers start scribbling their notes.

What psychologists learned from the experiment was that the "dim witted" rats completed the maze more slowly than average, and the "intelligent" rats completed the maze more quickly than average.

Yet all the rats came from the same original group.

Weird Thing #2
In the late 1990s scientists at Princeton began assembling data from a group of 41 random number generators [in this case, a random number generator, or RNG, is just a little gadget that does the digital equivalent of tossing a coin, creating a random series of "heads" and "tails" 200 times per second, day in and day out, as long as it's left on] from around the world ... and started keeping track of the results.

(Don't roll your eyes. You're already past the hard part and charging to the finish line.)

As you'd expect, the total number of heads and tails comes out pretty much the same ... an almost identical number of heads and tails.

But then on September 6, 1997, something strange happened. The number generators began throwing billion to one odds of heads sequences. No one could figure out why. It happened again on September 11, 2001. And again on December 26, 2004.

On September 6 1997 Princess Di's funeral was broadcast worldwide on live TV.
On September 11 2001 terrorists attacked the World Trade Center.
On December 26 2004 a psunami in the Indian Ocean killed over 230,000 people.

And the number generators had gone off the scale on those very same days.

Skeptics claim the results are pseudo science and inconclusive, the idea being that the combined mental processes of every human being on the planet somehow forms a "global consciousness" that might be predict, or at least acknowledge in some way, the future.

Gentle Reader, what do you think's going on?

Why did the "dumb" rats finish the maze so much more slowly than the "intelligent" rats ... when all the rats came from the same group?

Why do random number generators start throwing "all heads" during cataclysmic events?

The Blue Book guesses that both perception and expectation actually do affect a given outcome [we'll get into particle/wave issues another time, over coffee]. How or why this happens doesn't matter.

What's important is this: Bad Things will happen to your life when it's carelessly shared with people who only plan, know and do bad things.

You can expect it.