Grover Cleveland "Nibble" Baxter Jr.(February 27, 1924 – June 24, 2013) was an interrogation specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), best known for his experiments with plants using the polygraph instrument in the 1960s, which led to his theory of "primary perception" where he argued, that plants "feel pain" and have extrasensory perception (ESP), which has been widely reported in the media but has been rejected by the scientific community.

biography

He was born in Lafayette Township, New Jersey, on February 27, 1924. Baxter began his career as an Interrogation Specialist with the CIA, and went on to become Chairman of the Research and Instrument Committee of the Academy of Scientific Interrogation. He is the former director of Lee's Baxter School of Detection in San Diego, California, and was a polygraph instructor before his experiments on plants. He received his PhD in Complementary Medicine from Medicina Alternative in 1996 and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Sciences High school human and research center, founded by Hiroshi Motoyama, which is unaccredited. He wrote a book Primary Perception - biocommunication with plants, food and human cells, which chronicles 36 years of his work and was published in 2003. He died on June 24, 2013, after a long illness.

Baxter founded the CIA's polygraph unit shortly after World War II. Lee's Baxter School of Discovery is located in San Diego, California. The school was founded in New York in 1960, shortly after Baxter left his post with the Central Intelligence Agency. He trains police officers to use a polygraph or "lie detector" test.

Primary perception

conclusions

Baxter's research on plants began in the 1960s, and he reported noting that a polygraph instrument attached to a plant leaf recorded changes in electrical resistance when the plant was harmed or even threatened with violence. His work was inspired by the research of physicist Jagadishu Chandra Bose, who claimed to have discovered that playing certain types of music in the place where plants grew caused them to grow faster. Bose used a crescograph to measure the response of plants to various stimuli and demonstrated feeling in plants. From an analysis of changes in the cell membrane potential of plants under various circumstances, he proposed that plants could “feel pain, understand, love, etc.” and wrote two books about him in 1902 and 1926.

In February 1966, Baxter attached polygraph electrodes to the reed plant Dracaena to first measure the time it took for water to reach the leaves. Electrodes are used to measure galvanic skin response and the plant showed readings that resembled those of a human. This made Baxter try different scenarios, and the reading went on a graph where he is depicted burning a leaf because, he said, the plant registered a stress reaction to his thought of harming it. He conducted another similar experiment, where he observed the plant's response to the death of brine shrimp in another room; his results convinced him that plants demonstrated telepathic awareness. He argued that plants perceive human intentions, and as he began to explore further, he also reported the discovery that other human thoughts and emotions caused reactions in plants that could be recorded using the polygraph instrument. He called the sensitivity of plants to thought "Primary perception", and published his findings from the experiments in International Journal of Parapsychology In 1968, Soviet scientists were invited by Baxter to the first Psychotronic Association conference in Prague in 1973, and his paper was entitled "Evidence of primary perception at the cellular level in the life of plants and animals." After 1973, he further experimented on yogurt bacteria, human eggs and sperm, and he claimed that his results showed "primary perception" could be measured in all living things.

Reactions from the scientific community

Controlled experiments that attempted to replicate Baxter's results failed, and the theory was not accepted because it did not follow the scientific method. At the 141st annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a group of biologists found the requirement overwhelming. The results are seemingly spontaneous; Repeatability is still an issue for him and the people who tried his experiment. His lack of control experiments has been criticized and explanations, such as that polygraphs respond to static electricity build-up and humidity changes, have been put forward. The reliability of the polygraph test itself has been questioned. Plants have cell walls of cellulose but no sensory organs, eliminating the possibility of plants with ESP.

Biologist Arthur Galston said St. Petersburg Times"We know that plants do not have nervous system. But they have small electrical currents flowing through them and are subject to external manipulation." He also said that plants can show altered electrical responses to light, chemicals and disease, but he "draws the line" on claiming they are "in response to human thoughts and events, including the elimination of life." Scientists from Cornell University and the Science Unlimited Research Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, could not find results that supported Baxter's findings in an experiment where the death of brine shrimp was caused by electrical voltage changes in plant leaves in another room. Baxter explained that they did not follow the exact laboratory methods he used to perform the original experiments, and he did not attempt to replicate them himself.

Popular culture and influence

Baxter's work became popular and attracted public attention, and his results were similar to the beliefs of Hindus, Buddhists and New Age followers. Some parapsychologists criticized his work, suggesting that the results were due to "his own telekinetic abilities." His theory in books such as Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's The Secret Life of Plants and Robert Stone The secret life of your cells. He was a guest on the June 27, 2007, evening radio show, "Coast To Coast AM", during which he discussed with the host

It has long been known that plants have their own clocks. Otherwise, how would they know when to bloom, when to set fruit?.. Moreover, some gardeners plant special “hour flower beds” every summer. Walking past them, you can find out the time with an accuracy of half an hour, judging by which flowers have opened their petals and which ones have gathered to retire...

But it turns out that plants can remember people who are near them, remember good and evil - scientists discovered relatively recently. Chance helped. The famous American scientist Cleve Baxter, famous for inventing the “lie detector,” once decided to conduct a similar experiment with indoor philodendron flowers.
So that you understand what the essence of the experience is, a few words about how a lie detector works. The person being tested is seated in a chair and covered with sensors. They measure temperature, heart rate, amount of sweat produced, and so on. The person begins to be asked questions - both simple and tricky. He should quickly and briefly answer “yes” or “no.” There are many questions, and from time to time their essence is repeated in different forms... An honest person has nothing to fear. But the deceiver must remember all the time exactly how he answered a similar question last time. At the same time, of course, he begins to worry, feverishly wondering before each answer whether there is a catch... This increases the time to answer the question, increases the pulse rate... The sensors record everything, transmit the data to the recorder tape. And experts, having looked at the curves drawn with the pen of a recorder, quickly draw a conclusion: is a person truthful or deceitful...

So, Cleve Baxter placed similar sensitive sensors on the leaves of one of the philodendrons and decided to conduct such an experiment. He left the room himself, and his employees began to enter the room one by one. One of them - Baxter himself did not know who at first - played the role of a villain: he broke a nearby philodendron, which did not have sensors.
Baxter then returned to the room and began to carefully monitor the sensor readings. And when, after some time, the “intruder” entered the laboratory, the surviving philodendrons responded to this event with a sharp impulse - they recognized the offender!..

Baxter's experience caused a lot of noise in scientific circles. Some scientists believed that such a surge was just an experimental error; plants have no memory. Others reasoned like this: “It is known that dogs, cats and other animals know their owner well and can distinguish him even in complete darkness - by smell. So why do we deny plants such a property? After all, they are also living beings...” And they recall the experiments of the Soviet A.G. as proof of their reasoning. Gurvich. When Gurvich brought another green onion closer to one root, he noticed every time that the onions grew faster in a group than alone. The scientist came to the conclusion that plants exchange ultraviolet signals with each other. Why not assume that the philodendron could tell others about its death, and they remembered who did it?..

Of course, many would be calmer to think that a birch tree that is cut down for firewood does not feel pain, that nature does not pay attention to the outrages that we do to it... But this is probably still not the case... And so far nature has finally did not rebel, did not go to war against us, we must quickly remember that man is not a conqueror of nature, as they wrote on slogans not long ago, but a part of it, one of her sons.

... These are the thoughts that scientific experience led me to think. If you see a flower or sprout in the forest, please think before picking it: “After all, it is also alive!”

Photos from open sources

Recognizing plants as living, we nevertheless deny them the ability to think and experience various feelings. We are wrong. Plants, just like humans, experience joy, love, boredom, fear, empathize with those in trouble and are afraid of death.

Former CIA spy Cleve Baxter


Photos from open sources

Cleve Baxter was a polygraph (lie detector) specialist who collaborated with the CIA for a long time; in 1949 he developed a polygraph program for the Agency, several polygraph techniques and a 7-position polygraph analysis scale, the creator of the famous “Baxter Test”. He was one of the founders of printing and is still considered the number one authority.

In the late 50s of the 20th century, Baxter went free and founded a school to train polygraph specialists. Being a naturally inquisitive person, Cleve was interested in issues from a wide variety of areas. In February 1966, he first connected a plant (dracaena) standing in the laboratory to a lie detector, just out of curiosity. Instead of the expected straight or smooth curve, he received a diagram with many peaks and valleys: the plant lived a rich emotional life! Baxter began a series of targeted experiments.

Baxter Research

Dracaena reacted when it was watered, injured, or when its leaves were dipped in boiling water. One day, looking at a plant connected to a polygraph, Cleve thought about setting it on fire? The recorder rod jumped up sharply. Did the plant react to the thought? Started New episode experiments.

Photos from open sources

It turned out that plants react not only to the thought of a mortal threat, but also to the mental intention to water it and even to a simple wish for its health! It was revealed that plants have memory. One of the employees broke one of the flowers in the laboratory. Subsequently, every time the “murderer” entered the room, the witness of the “crime” greeted him with a “shriek of horror.” The appearance of a laboratory assistant caring for the plants was greeted by the experimental subjects with a “cry of joy.”

One day, while in the laboratory, Baxter cut his hand - and the plants immediately “cryed.” And when, looking at one of the flowers, Cleve thought that he had the same one at home, only better, the recorder produced a smoothly descending curve: the plant was “upset.”

Sympathy turned out to be no stranger to plants: the detector needle jumped when shrimp were boiled or a spider was killed. Even when boiling water was poured into the sink, the polygraph dispassionately recorded: plants hear the “cry” of dying bacteria and mourn their death.

Not just plants

After experiments with plants, Baxter began experimenting with other materials. It turned out that human blood maintains a connection with its donor for several hours and reacts to changes in his emotional and physical state.

Biological activity was recorded in an ordinary egg! Dipped into boiling water, it reacted to the approaching death, and its “cry” was heard by other eggs. So the custom of some peoples to ask forgiveness from the food they eat and to pray before a meal is not without meaning.

Research continues

In 1973, Baxter published the book “The Secret Life of Plants,” in which he described his experiments in detail; in 2003, a voluminous work “Primary Perception” was published. Scientists do not deny Baxter's research. Each experiment was carefully prepared to exclude the influence of extraneous factors and the possibility of double interpretation of the results. The main complaint: what to do with all this?

Cleve Baxter answers that initially no one knew what to do with open electricity, but where are we today without it? - and continues his research, not considering it a waste of time.

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BAXTER'S EXPERIMENTS. Can plants think and feel?

(From the book "The Secret Life of Plants")

Continuing the theme of the film:

Newspapers all over the world wrote about Baxter's bizarre experiments with plants.

All miracles began in 1966. One night, Baxter was sitting in the school he founded, where law enforcement officers from all over the world came to listen to his lectures and learn the intricacies of using a lie detector. By some inspiration, he decided to connect the detector electrodes to the leaf of his dracaena.

As the plant quenched its thirst and the water rose up the stem, the galvanometer should have recorded a decrease in resistance and an increase in the electrical conductivity of the water-saturated tissues of the dracaena leaves. But to Baxter's surprise, the curve on the tape, instead of going up and pulsating, went down.

The galvanometer is part of a lie detector. When the detector is connected to a person through electrodes through which a weak electric current is passed, the galvanometer causes a needle on an instrument scale or a recorder to move in response to brain activity and the slightest fluctuations in the person's emotions.

In investigative practice, the suspect is asked “clearly structured” questions and observed at which questions the galvanometer needle twitches sharply. Experienced specialists like Baxter are able to distinguish truth from lies by the nature of the graphs drawn by the polygraph.

To Baxter's amazement, the dracaena's reaction was very similar to the human reaction to short-term stimulation of his senses. So maybe the plant expressed feelings? What happened to Baxter in the next ten minutes turned his whole life upside down.

People react strongly to threats. At the same time, the galvanometer needle jumps. Baxter decided to threaten the dracaena and dipped a leaf of the plant into a cup of hot coffee, which he never let go of. No emotions. After some thought, Baxter came up with something even worse: he decided to set fire to the sheet to which the electrodes were connected. Baxter imagined a flame of fire, but before he could reach for the matches, the recorder jerked and the graph of signals from the dracaena shot up. Baxter didn't even touch the plant or the polygraph. So, does dracaena read his thoughts?

Baxter went to get some matches, and when he returned, he found another sharp peak on the chart, apparently caused by his determination to carry out the threat. Hesitating somewhat, he decided to set fire to the leaf. A less strong surge followed on the chart. Then Baxter pretended that he was going to burn the leaf: he opened the box, took out a match and, without lighting it, brought it to the leaf - but the plant did not react to this. Apparently, it distinguished a real threat from a feigned one.

Baxter nearly ran out into the street shouting, “Plants can think!” But, restraining his impulse, he plunged into scrupulous research into this phenomenon in order to understand how the plant reacts to his thoughts.

To begin with, I tried to find some simple explanation for all this. Maybe something is wrong with the dracaena? Or with himself? Or with a lie detector?

But when he and his colleagues observed the same effect using other plants and other detectors in different cities in the United States, it became obvious that this phenomenon deserved further study.

At first, Baxter thought that the plant's ability to respond to human intentions was some form of ESP (extra-sensory perception), but then he himself realized that this was not so. ESP refers to perceptions that go beyond the five senses of touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. Since plants have no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth, and, according to botanists since Darwin, no nervous system, Baxter concluded that the perception of plants must be deeper than that of the senses.

Therefore, he suggested that in addition to perception by the senses, there is also “deep perception,” perhaps inherent in all living things. “What if plants see better without eyes than humans see with their eyes,” Baxter suggested. To find out what plants sense and feel, Baxter expanded his office and equipped it with a scientific laboratory that would be the envy of the most discerning scientist.


Data from a lie detector recorder connected to the Dracaena Masenjiana plant: 1) Pressing the PGR contacts with your hand. 2) Considering methods of threatening the plant. 3) The first thought is about setting a plant leaf on fire. 4) The experimenter leaves the room to get matches. 5) No adjustments to the equipment were made at this location. 6) Lighting a match.

If the plant is in extreme danger or damage, then, in order to protect itself, it reacts like an opossum or even a human: “faints”, “falls” into a deep faint. One day, a Canadian physiologist came to Baxter’s laboratory to look at his experiments and encountered this phenomenon in all its glory. Baxter connected one, then another, and then a third plant to the polygraph, but none of them responded. He checked the equipment and tried two more plants, but to no avail. And only the sixth flower showed a weak reaction.

Intrigued by this, wanting to clarify what could have affected his pets, he asked: “Do you not harm plants in your work?” “How I cause it! - answered the physiologist. “I kill them - I burn them in a furnace to get a dry residue for analysis.” Forty-five minutes after the physiologist left for the airport, all of Baxter's plants again responded to his thoughts as if nothing had happened.

This experience led Baxter to understand that people can deliberately cause plants to become numb, unconscious, and perhaps something similar happens before an animal is slaughtered under kosher rules. Through communication with the victim, the butcher calms him down and he dies quietly. This prevents the meat from being exposed to the chemicals released by animals out of fear of death, which spoil the taste and are likely harmful to those who eat the meat. Perhaps plants and juicy fruits even want to be eaten, but only with the loving attitude of a person who picks and eats the fruit, and not with the usual callous exploitation of plants by man. Apparently, the Christian ritual of communion is also intended to establish a similar connection. According to Baxter, it is possible that the fetus enjoys becoming part of another life form rather than rotting on the ground. In the same way, when a person dies, he moves with relief to a higher level of existence.

The scientist also discovered that there is a special connection between the plant and its owner that does not weaken over any distance. Using synchronized stopwatches, Baxter noticed that plants responded to his thoughts when he was in another room, at the other end of a hallway, and even on the next block. Then he drove twenty-five kilometers from his office, and when he returned, he discovered that his plants reacted violently at the very moment when he decided to return to them.

Baxter then left to lecture throughout the United States. He talked about his first experience in 1966 and showed a slide of that very “dragon tree”. The plant, still living in his office in distant New York, invariably reacted every time he showed a slide with its image.

In addition, having tuned in to a specific person, plants are able to maintain constant communication with him, even if he gets lost in a crowd of thousands. On New Year's Eve, Baxter went to the very center of New York with notebook and a stopwatch in hand. There was an incredible crowd on the streets. Baxter noted in his notebook what was happening to him: here he was walking, running, going down an escalator into the subway, now he was almost hit by a car, and now he was arguing with a newspaper seller. Returning to the laboratory, he discovered that each of the three plants, connected to a separate galvanometer, responded similarly to his emotional states during this little adventure.

Wanting to find out whether plants react over long distances, Baxter asked his friend to record the details of her thousand-kilometer connecting flight, and he connected lie detectors to her indoor plants. Using synchronized clocks, they discovered how plants responded to a woman's emotional stress as the plane landed.

To test the response of plants at a distance of millions of kilometers and find out whether space affects the "depth perception" of plants, Baxter would like to send a flower with a galvanometer to Mars, and use modern communications to track the plant's reaction to the emotions of its owner here on Earth.

Radio waves, propagating at the speed of light, cover the distance from Earth to Mars in 6-6.5 minutes. The experiment Baxter proposes would make it possible to determine whether the signal of human emotions reaches Mars faster than an electromagnetic wave. Baxter suggests that the signals of human feelings travel instantaneously. If it turns out that an emotional signal reaches Mars faster than electromagnetic waves, then it will become obvious that human thought and feelings go beyond our concept of time and extend beyond the electromagnetic spectrum.

“According to Eastern philosophy,” said Baxter, “there is a timeless connection between everything in the world. The Universe is in balance, and if in some part of it the balance is disturbed, then one cannot wait hundreds of light years for this imbalance to be detected and eliminated. Perhaps we are talking about this timeless connection, this unity of all living things.”

Baxter was never able to determine how human thoughts and feelings are transmitted to the plant. He placed the plant in a Faraday cage and in a lead container, but both of these screens in no way disrupted the communication channel connecting plants and humans. Consequently, the waves of this connection lie outside the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, they connect not only creatures, but even individual cells.

One day, having cut his finger, Baxter smeared the wound with iodine and suddenly noticed that the plant connected to the polygraph immediately reacted, apparently, to the death of several cells of Baxter’s finger. While this may have been a reaction to Baxter's emotions at the sight of blood or the burning sensation of the iodine, he soon identified a specific pattern that the plant drew when any living tissue died. “What,” thought Baxter, “if a plant at the cellular level senses the death of even individual living cells?”

The answer to this question came completely by accident. Once the polygraph drew this typical death graph while Baxter was stirring a spoonful of jam into a cup of yoghurt. At first this seemed strange to Baxter, but then he realized that the chemical preservative contained in the jam was killing the lactic acid bacteria in the yogurt. Exactly the same explanation was found for another graph, which, as it turned out, reflected the plant’s reaction to the death of bacteria in the sink when very hot water was turned on.

Baxter consulted with a professional medical bacteriologist, Dr. Howard Miller, who concluded that, apparently, all living things are endowed with a special “cellular consciousness.”

To test this hypothesis, Baxter learned to connect electrodes to liquids containing various single-celled creatures: amoebas, paramecia, yeast, mold, human oral bacteria, blood and even sperm. In terms of clarity and originality of the graphs drawn on the polygraph tape, all of them were not inferior to plants. In particular, sperm was found to have interesting property: sperm reacted violently to the presence of their donor, but did not react in any way to other men. Such observations suggest that even individual cells have some kind of special, comprehensive memory, and the brain is not an organ for storing information, but only its receiver.

“It appears that the ability to feel is not limited to the cellular level, but extends to the molecular, atomic and subatomic levels,” says Baxter. - We are accustomed to consider many objects inanimate. We may have to reconsider our view of the nature of life."

Gradually, Baxter came to the idea that in order to prove the existence of the phenomenon he observed, it was necessary to conduct a fully automated experiment without any human participation. Baxter spent two and a half years and several thousand dollars, part of which was provided by the Parapsychology Foundation, to develop such an experiment and flawlessly working automatic equipment. With the help of scientists from different disciplines, a complex system of control experiments was developed.

In the end, Baxter settled on this experiment: at randomly selected points in time, the robot killed living cells, and the polygraph recorded the reaction of the plants. Moreover, the entire process was fully automated and was carried out in the complete absence of people in the laboratory or near it.

For lambs to slaughter, Baxter chose tiny brine shrimp (crustaceans often found in salt and brackish water bodies), sold in pet stores as food for aquarium fish. The victims must certainly be alive, healthy and energetic, since previous experiments have shown that diseased or dying tissues no longer transmit a signal to the plants about their death. It was not difficult to determine the condition of the sea crustaceans: the main activity of healthy males is chasing females and copulating with them.

The device for killing these loving creatures consisted of a small plate that was automatically immersed in a pan of boiling water. The plate was set in motion by a special mechanical device, which selected a random moment in time for this. Thus, neither Baxter nor his assistants knew or could know at what point this event would occur. To exclude the possibility of the plants being affected by the process of lowering the plate into the pan, the equipment was programmed to sometimes immerse a plate of water, but without crustaceans, into boiling water.

Three plants were connected to three galvanometers in three different rooms. The fourth galvanometer was connected to an object with a constant resistance and monitored possible random deviations in the readings of the galvanometers due to voltage surges in the electrical network or changes in the electromagnetic field in the rooms where the experiment was carried out. All plants were placed in conditions with constant and identical lighting and temperature. In addition, plants were brought to the laboratory from outside. They were allowed to acclimatize and were left almost untouched until the very beginning of the experiment.

For the experiment, we chose plants of the species Philodendron cordatum with large dense leaves that can withstand the pressure of the electrodes. For each repetition of the experiment, new plants of this species were used.

The scientific hypothesis tested by Baxter, saying scientific language, was as follows: plants are endowed with hitherto unexplored deep perception, which, in particular, is expressed in the reaction of plants to the destruction of animal cells at a distance; Moreover, this perception does not depend on the person.

The results of the experiment confirmed that all plants reacted sharply and simultaneously to the death of crustaceans in boiling water. An automated system for recording plant responses, tested by independent scientists, showed that plants responded to the death of crustaceans five times more often than could be explained by chance. The entire experiment and its results were published in the winter of 1968 in the tenth volume of the International Journal of Parapsychology in a scientific report entitled “Evidence of the Capacity of Plants for Depth Perception.” Now any scientist could try to repeat Baxter’s experiment and compare his results with his own.
More than seven thousand scientists have purchased copies of this report. Researchers from twenty American universities have announced their intention to repeat Baxter's experiment as soon as they obtain the necessary equipment. Charitable foundations have expressed interest in funding further research. The media, which initially ignored Baxter's report, trumpeted the story around the world after National Wildlife magazine plucked up the courage to publish an extensive article on his experiments in its February 1969 issue. Baxter's discovery became so famous that secretaries and housewives all over the world began to talk to their plants, and Dracaena massangeana became the topic of conversation in the kitchen over a cup of tea.

Readers were most struck by the idea that trees are capable of being afraid of a lumberjack, and carrots are afraid of hares. The possibilities of applying the Baxter effect in medical diagnostics, criminal investigation and espionage were so promising that the editors of the magazine did not even dare to mention them in their article.

William M. Bondurant, director of the Foundation. Mary Raynold Babock of North Carolina, explaining her decision to give Baxter ten thousand dollars to continue his research, stated: “His experiments indicate the possibility of a deep connection between all living things, a connection that goes beyond the known laws of physics. A problem like this is worthy of study."

With the allocated funds, Baxter purchased more expensive equipment, including electrocardiographs and electroencephalographs. Typically used to measure electrical signals from the heart and brain, these devices have a major advantage over a galvanometer: they do not pass current through the plant, but only record changes in their electrical potential. The cardiograph turned out to be more sensitive than the galvanometer, the encephalograph - ten times more sensitive than the cardiograph.

As luck would have it, a whole new area of ​​research opened up for Baxter. One evening he was going to feed a raw egg to his Doberman Pinscher and noticed that one of the plants connected to the polygraph reacted violently when he broke the egg shell. The next day the same thing happened. Baxter wondered what an egg could feel. He connected a galvanometer to it and plunged into new research.

Baxter recorded nine hours of egg signals. They corresponded to the heartbeat rhythm of a four-day chicken embryo, 160-170 beats per minute. But there was one “but” here: this egg was not fertilized. Then Baxter broke it down and conducted a thorough examination. To his amazement, the egg lacked any kind of fluid circulation system that could explain the observed pulsation. It seems that Baxter stumbled upon some kind of field, rather than physical, structure, little known modern science.

Perhaps the only researcher in this field before Baxter was Yale University School of Medicine professor Harold Saxton Burr, who in the 1930s and 1940s conducted amazing studies of the energy fields surrounding plants, humans, and even individual cells. Burr's research is only now receiving due recognition.

From the book “The Secret Life of Plants”
Newspapers all over the world wrote about Baxter's bizarre experiments with plants.
All miracles began in 1966. One night, Baxter was sitting in the school he founded, where law enforcement officers from all over the world came to listen to his lectures and learn the intricacies of using a lie detector. By some inspiration, he decided to connect the detector electrodes to the leaf of his dracaena.

As the plant quenched its thirst and the water rose up the stem, the galvanometer should have recorded a decrease in resistance and an increase in the electrical conductivity of the water-saturated tissues of the dracaena leaves. But to Baxter's surprise, the curve on the tape, instead of going up and pulsating, went down.
The galvanometer is part of a lie detector. When the detector is connected to a person through electrodes through which a weak electric current is passed, the galvanometer causes a needle on an instrument scale or a recorder to move in response to brain activity and the slightest fluctuations in the person's emotions.
In investigative practice, the suspect is asked “clearly structured” questions and observed at which questions the galvanometer needle twitches sharply. Experienced specialists like Baxter are able to distinguish truth from lies by the nature of the graphs drawn by the polygraph.
To Baxter's amazement, the dracaena's reaction was very similar to the human reaction to short-term stimulation of his senses. So maybe the plant expressed feelings? What happened to Baxter in the next ten minutes turned his whole life upside down.
People react strongly to threats. At the same time, the galvanometer needle jumps. Baxter decided to threaten the dracaena and dipped a leaf of the plant into a cup of hot coffee, which he never let go of.
No emotions. After some thought, Baxter came up with something even worse: he decided to set fire to the sheet to which the electrodes were connected. Baxter imagined a flame of fire, but before he could reach for the matches, the recorder jerked and the graph of signals from the dracaena shot up.
Baxter didn't even touch the plant or the polygraph. So, does dracaena read his thoughts?
Baxter went to get some matches, and when he returned, he found another sharp peak on the chart, apparently caused by his determination to carry out the threat. Hesitating somewhat, he decided to set fire to the leaf. A less strong surge followed on the chart.
Then Baxter pretended that he was going to burn the leaf: he opened the box, took out a match and, without lighting it, brought it to the leaf - but the plant did not react to this. Apparently, it distinguished a real threat from a feigned one.
Baxter nearly ran out into the street shouting, “Plants can think!” But, restraining his impulse, he plunged into scrupulous research into this phenomenon in order to understand how the plant reacts to his thoughts.
To begin with, I tried to find some simple explanation for all this. Maybe something is wrong with the dracaena? Or with himself? Or with a lie detector?
But when he and his colleagues observed the same effect using other plants and other detectors in different cities in the United States, it became obvious that this phenomenon deserved further study.
At first, Baxter thought that the plant's ability to respond to human intentions was some form of ESP (extra-sensory perception), but then he himself realized that this was not so.
ESP refers to perceptions that go beyond the five senses of touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. Since plants have no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth, and, according to botanists since Darwin, no nervous system, Baxter concluded that the perception of plants must be deeper than that of the senses.
Therefore, he suggested that in addition to perception by the senses, there is also “deep perception,” perhaps inherent in all living things. “What if plants see better without eyes than humans see with their eyes,” Baxter suggested.
To find out what plants sense and feel, Baxter expanded his office and equipped it with a scientific laboratory that would be the envy of the most discerning scientist.
Data from a lie detector recorder connected to the Dracaena Masenjiana plant: 1) Pressing the PGR contacts with your hand. 2) Considering methods of threatening the plant. 3) The first thought is about setting a plant leaf on fire. 4) The experimenter leaves the room to get matches. 5) No adjustments to the equipment were made at this location. 6) Lighting a match.

If the plant is in extreme danger or damage, then, in order to protect itself, it reacts like an opossum or even a human: “faints”, “falls” into a deep faint.
One day, a Canadian physiologist came to Baxter’s laboratory to look at his experiments and encountered this phenomenon in all its glory. Baxter connected one, then another, and then a third plant to the polygraph, but none of them responded.
He checked the equipment and tried two more plants, but to no avail. And only the sixth flower showed a weak reaction.
Intrigued by this, wanting to clarify what could have affected his pets, he asked: “Do you not harm plants in your work?” “How I cause it! - answered the physiologist. “I kill them - I burn them in a furnace to get a dry residue for analysis.”
Forty-five minutes after the physiologist left for the airport, all of Baxter's plants again responded to his thoughts as if nothing had happened.
This experience led Baxter to understand that people can deliberately cause plants to become numb, unconscious, and perhaps something similar happens before an animal is slaughtered under kosher rules.
Through communication with the victim, the butcher calms him down and he dies quietly. This prevents the meat from being exposed to the chemicals released by animals out of fear of death, which spoil the taste and are likely harmful to those who eat the meat.
Perhaps plants and juicy fruits even want to be eaten, but only with the loving attitude of a person who picks and eats the fruit, and not with the usual callous exploitation of plants by man.
Apparently, the Christian ritual of communion is also intended to establish a similar connection. According to Baxter, it is possible that the fetus enjoys becoming part of another life form rather than rotting on the ground. In the same way, when a person dies, he moves with relief to a higher level of existence.
The scientist also discovered that there is a special connection between the plant and its owner that does not weaken over any distance. Using synchronized stopwatches, Baxter noticed that plants responded to his thoughts when he was in another room, at the other end of a hallway, and even on the next block.
Then he drove twenty-five kilometers from his office, and when he returned, he discovered that his plants reacted violently at the very moment when he decided to return to them.
Baxter then left to lecture throughout the United States. He talked about his first experience in 1966 and showed a slide of that very “dragon tree”.
The plant, still living in his office in distant New York, invariably reacted every time he showed a slide with its image.
In addition, having tuned in to a specific person, plants are able to maintain constant communication with him, even if he gets lost in a crowd of thousands.
On New Year's Eve, Baxter went to the very center of New York with a notebook and stopwatch in hand. There was an incredible crowd on the streets. Baxter noted in his notebook what was happening to him: here he was walking, running, going down an escalator into the subway, now he was almost hit by a car, and now he was arguing with a newspaper seller.
Returning to the laboratory, he discovered that each of the three plants, connected to a separate galvanometer, responded similarly to his emotional states during this little adventure.
Wanting to find out whether plants react over long distances, Baxter asked his friend to record the details of her thousand-kilometer connecting flight, and he connected lie detectors to her houseplants.
Using synchronized clocks, they discovered how plants responded to a woman's emotional stress as the plane landed.
To test the response of plants at a distance of millions of kilometers and find out whether space affects the "depth perception" of plants, Baxter would like to send a flower with a galvanometer to Mars, and use modern communications to track the plant's reaction to the emotions of its owner here on Earth.
Radio waves, propagating at the speed of light, cover the distance from Earth to Mars in 6-6.5 minutes. The experiment Baxter proposes would make it possible to determine whether the signal of human emotions reaches Mars faster than an electromagnetic wave.
Baxter suggests that the signals of human feelings travel instantaneously. If it turns out that an emotional signal reaches Mars faster than electromagnetic waves, then it will become obvious that human thought and feelings go beyond our concept of time and extend beyond the electromagnetic spectrum.
“According to Eastern philosophy,” said Baxter, “there is a timeless connection between everything in the world. The Universe is in balance, and if in some part of it the balance is disturbed, then one cannot wait hundreds of light years for this imbalance to be detected and eliminated. Perhaps we are talking about this timeless connection, this unity of all living things.”
Baxter was never able to determine how human thoughts and feelings are transmitted to the plant. He placed the plant in a Faraday cage and in a lead container, but both of these screens in no way disrupted the communication channel connecting plants and humans.
Consequently, the waves of this connection lie outside the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, they connect not only creatures, but even individual cells.
…

One day, having cut his finger, Baxter smeared the wound with iodine and suddenly noticed that the plant connected to the polygraph immediately reacted, apparently, to the death of several cells of Baxter’s finger.
While this may have been a reaction to Baxter's emotions at the sight of blood or the burning sensation of the iodine, he soon identified a specific pattern that the plant drew when any living tissue died. “What,” thought Baxter, “if a plant at the cellular level senses the death of even individual living cells?”
The answer to this question came completely by accident. Once the polygraph drew this typical death graph while Baxter was stirring a spoonful of jam into a cup of yoghurt.
At first this seemed strange to Baxter, but then he realized that the chemical preservative contained in the jam was killing the lactic acid bacteria in the yogurt.
Exactly the same explanation was found for another graph, which, as it turned out, reflected the plant’s reaction to the death of bacteria in the sink when very hot water was turned on.
Baxter consulted with a professional medical bacteriologist, Dr. Howard Miller, who concluded that, apparently, all living things are endowed with a special “cellular consciousness.”
To test this hypothesis, Baxter learned to connect electrodes to liquids containing various single-celled creatures: amoebas, paramecia, yeast, mold, human oral bacteria, blood and even sperm.
In terms of clarity and originality of the graphs drawn on the polygraph tape, all of them were not inferior to plants. In particular, an interesting property was discovered in sperm: sperm reacted violently to the presence of their donor, but did not react in any way to other men.
Such observations suggest that even individual cells have some kind of special, comprehensive memory, and the brain is not an organ for storing information, but only its receiver.
“It appears that the ability to feel is not limited to the cellular level, but extends to the molecular, atomic and subatomic levels,” says Baxter. - We are accustomed to consider many objects inanimate. We may have to reconsider our view of the nature of life."
…
Gradually, Baxter came to the idea that in order to prove the existence of the phenomenon he observed, it was necessary to conduct a fully automated experiment without any human participation.
Baxter spent two and a half years and several thousand dollars, part of which was provided by the Parapsychology Foundation, to develop such an experiment and flawlessly working automatic equipment.
With the help of scientists from different disciplines, a complex system of control experiments was developed.
In the end, Baxter settled on this experiment: at randomly selected points in time, the robot killed living cells, and the polygraph recorded the reaction of the plants.
Moreover, the entire process was fully automated and was carried out in the complete absence of people in the laboratory or near it.
For lambs to slaughter, Baxter chose tiny brine shrimp (crustaceans often found in salt and brackish water bodies), sold in pet stores as food for aquarium fish.
The victims must certainly be alive, healthy and energetic, since previous experiments have shown that diseased or dying tissues no longer transmit a signal to the plants about their death.
It was not difficult to determine the condition of the sea crustaceans: the main activity of healthy males is chasing females and copulating with them.
The device for killing these loving creatures consisted of a small plate that was automatically immersed in a pan of boiling water.
The plate was set in motion by a special mechanical device, which selected a random moment in time for this. Thus, neither Baxter nor his assistants knew or could know at what point this event would occur.
To exclude the possibility of the plants being affected by the process of lowering the plate into the pan, the equipment was programmed to sometimes immerse a plate of water, but without crustaceans, into boiling water.
Three plants were connected to three galvanometers in three different rooms. The fourth galvanometer was connected to an object with a constant resistance and monitored possible random deviations in the readings of the galvanometers due to voltage surges in the electrical network or changes in the electromagnetic field in the rooms where the experiment was carried out.
All plants were placed in conditions with constant and identical lighting and temperature. In addition, plants were brought to the laboratory from outside. They were allowed to acclimatize and were left almost untouched until the very beginning of the experiment.
For the experiment, we chose plants of the species Philodendron cordatum with large dense leaves that can withstand the pressure of the electrodes. For each repetition of the experiment, new plants of this species were used.
The scientific hypothesis tested by Baxter, scientifically speaking, was the following: plants are endowed with hitherto unexplored deep perception, which, in particular, is expressed in the reaction of plants to the destruction of animal cells at a distance; Moreover, this perception does not depend on the person.
The results of the experiment confirmed that all plants reacted sharply and simultaneously to the death of crustaceans in boiling water.
An automated system for recording plant responses, tested by independent scientists, showed that plants responded to the death of crustaceans five times more often than could be explained by chance.
The entire experiment and its results were published in the winter of 1968 in the tenth volume of the International Journal of Parapsychology in a scientific report entitled -
"Evidence of Plants' Capacity for Depth Perception."
Now any scientist could try to repeat Baxter’s experiment and compare his results with his own.
More than seven thousand scientists have purchased copies of this report.
Researchers from twenty American universities have announced their intention to repeat Baxter's experiment as soon as they obtain the necessary equipment. Charitable foundations have expressed interest in funding further research.
The media, which initially ignored Baxter's report, trumpeted the story around the world after National Wildlife magazine plucked up the courage to publish an extensive article on his experiments in its February 1969 issue.
Baxter's discovery became so famous that secretaries and housewives all over the world began to talk to their plants, and Dracaena massangeana became the topic of conversation in the kitchen over a cup of tea.
Readers were most struck by the idea that trees are capable of being afraid of a lumberjack, and carrots are afraid of hares. The possibilities of applying the Baxter effect in medical diagnostics, criminal investigation and espionage were so promising that the editors of the magazine did not even dare to mention them in their article.
William M. Bondurant, director of the Foundation. Mary Reynolds Babock of North Carolina, explaining her decision to give Baxter ten thousand dollars to continue his research, stated:
“His experiments point to the possibility of a deep connection between all living things, a connection that goes beyond the laws of physics we know. A problem like this is worthy of study."
With the allocated funds, Baxter purchased more expensive equipment, including electrocardiographs and electroencephalographs.
Typically used to measure electrical signals from the heart and brain, these devices have a major advantage over a galvanometer: they do not pass current through the plant, but only record changes in their electrical potential.

The cardiograph turned out to be more sensitive than the galvanometer, the encephalograph - ten times more sensitive than the cardiograph.
As luck would have it, a whole new area of ​​research opened up for Baxter. One evening, he was about to feed a raw egg to his Doberman Pinscher and noticed that one of the plants connected to the polygraph reacted violently when he broke the egg's shell.
The next day the same thing happened. Baxter wondered what an egg could feel. He connected a galvanometer to it and plunged into new research.
Baxter recorded nine hours of egg signals. They corresponded to the heartbeat rhythm of a four-day chicken embryo, 160-170 beats per minute. But there was one “but” here: this egg was not fertilized.
Then Baxter broke it down and conducted a thorough examination. To his amazement, the egg lacked any kind of fluid circulation system that could explain the observed pulsation. It seems that Baxter stumbled upon some kind of field, rather than physical, structure, little known to modern science.
Perhaps the only researcher in this field before Baxter was Yale University School of Medicine professor Harold Saxton Burr, who in the 1930s and 1940s conducted amazing studies of the energy fields surrounding plants, humans, and even individual cells.
Burr's research is only now receiving due recognition.
Baxter temporarily suspended his experiments with plants and devoted himself to studying a new phenomenon discovered in the egg. These studies are of great importance for understanding the origin of life, and a separate book could be written about them.