John Houck + PK Parties

Anyone have any views on John Houck and his PK parties?
Here's a double post of what I put on Keith Mayes' forum here :

Any views on this guy?

http://www.jackhouck.com/pk.shtml

Here's a snippet of his first PK party:

I was very skeptical about remote viewing when I was first exposed to the idea. However, I did continue to read about it and finally met Puthoff and Targ at SRI. They suggested that I run my own experiments in remote viewing. That idea appealed to me, so I found a women who seemed to be able to perceive things at remote locations and I asked her to participate in some experiments. These experiments worked, much to my amazement. A few years later, I wrote a conceptual model2 of how the brain and mind might interact with nature in an attempt to explain remote viewing. In trying to put together a model to explain these phenomena, I had to stretch my scientific background. Even though current physics works very well for most scientific applications, it does not go far enough to explain paranormal phenomena. By the end of the 1970's, I had conducted enough remote viewing experiments until I personally was convinced that that phenomenon was real. I wrote this model and was challenged to test it. I accepted that challenge as the standard scientific approach wherein people postulate a model, test its predictions, and if it doesn't work, fix it.

To test this idea, in January 1981, I decided to have a party wherein people could learn how to perform psychokinesis. Severin Dahlen, a metallurgist, came into my office a week before the first PK Party and said that he knew how to teach people to bend metal with their minds. He had been working with children at the University of California - Irvine. They had a little boy who could stare at a key and burn a hole through it. Since I was about to have this PK Party, I asked Severin if he would help at the party by giving the metal bending instructions. The instructions he gave at that first PK Party are identical to those still given at PK Parties.

I gathered 21 people in my home in Huntington Beach, California. Basically, half of them were people I met through the remote viewing research who were interested in psychic types of things. The other half were members of a tennis club I belong to, and they didn't know much about using their minds. I had stopped at the Sears Company hardware department on the way home that night and purchased a 5/ 16" steel rod that I could not bend with all my strength. I said to myself, "Boy, if that gets bent, I will be impressed."

I had heard of some PK experimental results that had suggested time shifts, much like the time shifts that I had noted in the remote viewing data. In remote viewing, when a person sends his mind out to a remote place, he does not necessarily get the information from that remote place at the current, what we call, time. Sometimes people get information from another time, like four, or even forty years ago. That is a real problem to understand --- where is that information stored? In part of my model I suggest that when you send your mind out to a point in space, the mind sweeps in time. I recognize that there are a lot of other models about time. As an engineer, it is very difficult to throw out time. Learning how the mind accesses stored information from some other time, which can sometimes be in the future, is a real important accomplishment. What I found was that the mind seems to lock onto the time of a peak emotional event at that remote place. One time I had a remote viewer go to the latitude and longitude coordinates where there was a sunken ship. There it was, sitting with half of it above the ocean, rusting with lots of seagulls sitting on it. The remote viewer described a scene that had a lot of excitement --- people running around, explosions occurring, and generally a lot of panic --- while the ship was sinking. That, of course, was the peak emotional event at that point in space. I used to say that if you want some paranormal phenomenon to happen at the current time, then you deliberately create a peak emotional event. In remote viewing, viewers use meditation techniques, while being very quiet, to remove the mental noise. At PK Parties we do just the opposite. We create as much noise and as much excitement as we possibly can, and hope that this becomes the biggest peak emotional event that has ever occurred at that place at anytime. In effect, all the people in the group have their minds lock onto the present time, and we get the paranormal events happening consistently.

And here's a link of a skeptical person who went to such a party:
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11...nding-0348.html