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T C Lethbridge – ESP Beyond Time and Distance

There is an invisible, intangible, apparently remorseless link between the mother and chick and presumably it is the same kind of link which draws the dog-fox to the vixen, the male moth to the female. It is strong enough to alter the whole behaviour of the animals concerned. The people who use 'The Box' do not appear to find any diminution caused by distance between a patient and his blood-spot, or piece of hair. Distance does not seem to come into the picture at all.

These rays are extra-special. They do not diminish in intensity as they ought to do if they were electro-magnetic waves with the square of the distance. They are something not yet understood. As far as we know a dog-fox might pick up a vixen’s call-ray on the Pacific side of Siberia and only be deterred from trotting across to see about it by having some idea that it came from a long way off. One does not know, but it is obvious that migrating birds follow their particular rays, as swallows do from England to South Africa.

There are swallows which nest in my wood-shed. There are never more than two nests. On a day in April they arrive out of the blue and go straight into the shed and look at their old nests. They do not fly about the district looking for a suitable nesting site. They arrive and fly in at the half-door, which I keep shut all the winter, but open at the time they might be expected to appear. One moment there are no swallows. The next there are two or three fluttering like beautiful butterflies round the old beams in the shed and squeaking with excitement.

Birds have this faculty highly developed. As a small boy I listened on occasion to the talk of an old ornithologist. He told me of a pair of peregrine falcons, which he kept under observation. While the eggs were being incubated the male falcon, the tiercel, was shot. Within a day the hen bird, the falcon, had called up another mate. Then the falcon was shot. The foster father called up another falcon and the nest went on with a completely fresh pair of birds. He did not know how it was done, but he did observe the fact. I asked him, I remember, where he thought the new birds came from and he replied that he thought there must be a reserve of unmated birds somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland. But the nest was on the south coast of England. Although I have not observed it myself, I have frequently heard of nests being carried on with one new parent. But this is the only case in which I have heard of two.