I was never the kind of guy who believed in ghosts, spirits, paranormal, elves, goblins, alien abductions. But I did believe in extrasensory perception. My mother, Gerry, had the touch. Right up to the time she died, I would call her long distance and she’d say, "I was just thinking about you!" or "I was about to call you!" For 50 years, no relatives had a baby that she didn’t know the sex in advance (or at least that’s what she said).

My sister, Alberta, inherited the same kind of psychic sense which, among other things, she used to find lost children. She was one of the people called in to investigate that haunted house in Connecticut where the Lunts lived--The Amityville Horror--although the result was to get her out of the psychic business altogether. Things began to go downhill when her daughter, Livia, starting smelling strange odors. When Alberta thought the evil was going after her children, she made both Livia and Albert wear Catholic scapulas around their necks. The supernatural is dangerous, she later told me. "Stay away from it."

Like many people I had always wanted to believe in the supernatural. But I was too hardheaded to fall for mere coincidences. As a child, I used to lie on a blanket on the front yard and watch for shooting stars and flying saucers. I saw plenty of shooting stars but despite high hopes I never saw any strange lights in the sky that weren’t readily identifiable as planes, helicopters or blimps.

My only close encounter came when I was a midshipman on a summer cruise on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea. One day when the fleet was having a war game exercise I was given the job of scanning the horizon on the starboard side of the ship looking for low-flying enemy aircraft trying to slip in under the radar coverage. Suddenly I looked up and there on the horizon was this fuzzy flying object, moving fast, keeping low. I knew what an airplane looked like and this didn’t look like any plane I’d ever seen. I was thinking, "Hey! I’ve finally seen a flying saucer." Then suddenly my UFO turned into an airplane right in front of my eyes. Apparently I’d been standing on a catwalk below the flight deck. Directly above me a Phantom F-4 exhaust was expelling a superheated column of hot gas. I was looking at the plane through hot gas which distorted the image. But as the plane continued on its way and my line of sight was no longer though the hot gases suddenly it turned back into an airplane again.

This isn’t to say I never had any psychic experiences. They just were very small ones. In the mid-seventies when I was a freelance writer living in Berkeley, I wrote a query letter to American Express magazine, suggesting a travel story. Weeks passed. Nothing came in the mail. I forgot about it. One morning when I went down to get the mail I suddenly had the strongest feeling there was a letter waiting from American Express. I could see it very clearly. A business envelop with the bright red and blue logo. And when I opened the mailbox, there it was.

I wasn’t so much blown away as simultaneously pleased and puzzled. In my vision, the stamp end of the envelope was toward the back of the mailbox. But real life, the stamp end was closest to me. "Well, shoot," I thought. "Here I have a vision, practically the only one I’d ever had my entire life and I get it half wrong."

Later I began to think that perhaps my vision wasn’t wrong after. What if it was a leak from a parallel universe? There are such things as Heisenberg events. The problem is, you can’t observe such an event without changing it. My notion was that it was possible to see the future but once you did, it wouldn’t be the future any more. It might be close to what you foresaw, but never exactly. The act of foreseeing any event invalidated the possibility of it ever coming true. It used up the potential energy that would have enabled that exact event to pop through from the other side. You could have other futures, even ones every close to the one you envisioned (such as a letter reversed in your mailbox) but never the event exactly the way you saw it. So there it is--Paul’s theory of parallel universes.