Ted Owens was a genius and a member of Mensa, but that’s not what made him impressive to some and a laughing stock to others.  Ted could control the weather and bring on droughts, floods, and hurricanes with a high degree of success.  Maybe.  Or maybe it was the “Sis” – Space Intelligences – who used him as a conduit to wreck climatological havoc on certain regions and use lightning to bring down airplanes.  Owens believed the latter.  Either explanation is outlandish.  Yet countless witnesses and written documentation support the notion that high strangeness surrounded Ted Owens, whose story Jeffrey Mishlove chronicles in The PK Man.

Mishlove documents years of correspondence and meetings with Owens, who believed that psychokinesis – PK – could be used as a valuable tool by the U.S. government against its enemies.  The government ignored Owens’ endless stream of letters sent between the 1960s and 1987, when he died.

To reiterate, in most instances Owens rejected the idea that the weather calamities and air catastrophes he predicted were of his own influence, preferring to see himself as an ET intermediary.  Mishlove wonders if Owens created the UFO overlords explanation to rationalize psychokinesis powers that Owens himself may have possessed.

As if weather and areal manipulation weren’t weird enough, Owens also believed he could force the outcome of sporting events and summon UFOs to buzz the sky.  Moreover, he thought he could teach his wondrous abilities to others – for a hefty fee.  Owens was an early contactee (see my earlier review of A is for Adamski).  He chronicled his own story in How to Contact Space People, but the book wasn’t exactly a bestseller.

Although he lived in near poverty most of his life, Owens conducted seminars that amounted largely to the conveyance of positive thinking philosophies and mantras.

The most eyebrow-raising elements in The PK Man are:

• The many chronicled incidents that Owens seemed to have accurately predicted.  To cite but one example: While on a 1970s flight returning from Egypt and preparing to land at Kennedy Airport, Owens showed a Saga magazine article that discussed his alleged psychic abilities to stewardesses and other passengers.  The article speculated whether Owens’ attempt to produce lightning may have brought down an airplane flying over the Chesapeake Bay.  After his show and tell with the magazine, Owens’ plane prepared to land – but was delayed because the airliner ahead of his crashed, killing over 100 people.  According to witnesses and reports, the cause of the crash was attributed to a possible lightning strike.  A clear case of residual or unconscious PK?  When it comes to Ted Owens, no case is fully clear.
• Owens’ prediction that one of the four space shuttles was going to suffer a disaster.  The Challenger exploded shortly after Owens’ prognostication.
• Owens’ directing his alleged psychic abilities at Mt. St. Helens the day it blew up.
• The notion that other paranormal activity seemed to shadow Owens and his family throughout his life.  Poltergeist incidents, phantom footsteps, and unexplained rapping often manifested wherever Owens and his family lived.  Reports of giants stalking around his property and UFOs divebombing the premises were also common.  (This echoes John Keel’s reports of UFO incidents and poltergeist activity appearing in tandem after many incidents of high strangeness (see Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, Our Haunted Planet, and his best work, Operation Trojan Horse).
• Owens’ diffidence for the loss of life resulting from the many weather disasters and accidents to which he laid claim.  Callousness was not always his reaction to the mayhem, but too often, deaths were regarded as unavoidable consequences of events he either set in motion or had a hand in steering.

Jeffrey Mishlove presents us with an extensive chronicle of the Weird in The PK Man.  It’s a well-written and well-documented book.  While it may not be entirely convincing in making us accept Ted Owens’ abilities – even Mishlove wrestles with his subject’s claims as he sets up controlled experiments and assesses the volumes of evidence, circumstantial and otherwise – it does makes us ponder whether Owens was gifted in unfathomable ways.

– Oscar De Los Santos