Japanese Ministry of Telepathy
What will the Japanese think of next?
Japan's Ministry of Posts and
Telecommunications, the government
agency that oversees the phone and
postal systems, recently announced it is
looking into human telepathy as a new
communications medium.  The ministry's
specially appointed 8-member committee,
which includes Japan's foremost
parapsychologist as well as bigwigs from
Japan's aerospace and electronic
industries, has already begun
discussions on the potential uses not
only for mental telepathy, but also for
gravity waves, the as-yet-unproven
gravity patterns thought to travel
almost infinite distances.  The
committee will also be seeking uses for
neutrinos -- subatomic particles thought
to have no mass, thus enabling them to
pass right through the earth at the
speed of light.
Theoretically, the gravity waves could
be used to send incredibly long-distance
communications.  And because neutrinos
are emitted by the reactors aboard
nuclear submarines, a huge neutrino
detector might conceivably be built to
track underwater movements of submarines
on the opposite side of the world.  The
parapsychologist on the ministry's
committee, Soji Ootani of Japan's
National Defense Academy, says,
"Although scientifically we are not at
the stage to actually use telepathy or
these other proposed methods, there is a
good possibility that they could be
used.  So it is a good idea to begin
thinking about them."
But Alun Anderson, Tokyo correspondent
for the British science journal NATURE,
has reported on the new committee's
work, and he disagrees heartily.  "The
ideas they are looking into are really
farfetched, yet they decide to look for
practical applications first, before the
basic research is done," he says.  "It's
like announcing that you're going to
investigate whether tarot card readers
can predict the behavior of the Russian
army."