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UNITED KINGDOM. How do pigeons manage to successfully navigate huge distances and return to their roosts? Do they use the earth’s magnetic field? Perhaps they have an incredibly developed sense of smell? Do they use visual landmarks? Or do they somehow “tune in” telepathically to their homes?

Rupert Sheldrake, the British biologist and parapsychologist who developed the theory of “morphic resonance” and whose experiments with “telephone telepathy” are described elsewhere on this site, believes that there is a memory in nature with which animals resonate and which produces, in effect, an invisible elastic band that stretches through the cosmos between the pigeons and their lofts.

Sheldrake’s theory was put to the test in Five TV documentary called “Paranormal Pigeons” which was screened on 25 October in the channel’s “Stranger Than Fiction” series.

His experiment, which had to compete with rival ones from teams at the universities of Frankfurt, Pisa and Oxford, involving magnetism, a super sense of smell and the use of visual landmarks, failed to impress. It was tested by towing their loft out to sea but the pigeons didn’t find it. They were waiting forlornly when it was towed back 55 hours later. As one newspaper put it, “the cosmic elastic band seemed to have snapped”.

But Rupert Sheldrake (right) explains that it was not a fair test and should be repeated under better conditions. The points he makes were not included in the programme and would not occur to most viewers:

1. Pigeons don’t home much in November, which was when the filming had to take place to satisfy the demands of the production schedule. Pigeon races take place in the spring and summer, during the breeding season.

2. They don’t fly in storms like the one experienced on the day of filming. The production crew had no alternative but to film when they did because the seaworthiness certificate of the dredger they were using expired at midnight!

3. The birds had no experience of flying over the open sea and there was no time to train them with shorter moves because of the film’s schedule and limited budget.

Sheldrake says he agreed to it happening because it was “then or never”, but he put on record beforehand how he didn’t think the birds stood a chance. “They filmed me saying this,” he adds, “but of course left it out of the film.”

The biologist tells us a much better pigeon experiment took place several years ago with the Royal Dutch Navy, in the Atlantic, and pigeons found the ship at sea from at least 25 miles away. This is written up in the Appendix to the new edition of Sheldrake’s book Seven Experiments That Could Change The World.

It would certainly be worth doing again, he says, “but with the loft on a sea- going ship with the pigeons accustomed to living out at sea, as in the Dutch experiment”.

Posted on Sunday, November 12, 2006
Category: Parapsychology

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