Discovering Channeling
By Edie Fischer


About three months after the Challenger shuttle blew up, we got a phone call from a friend, Sam White, who was staying with some other friends, Jeanne Love and her family in New York State. My husband Bob Shacklett – a physics professor – took the call. Sam explained that Jeanne was having weekly channeling sessions to find lost souls who have died, and directed them “into the light.” There was always a small group of attendees at these events; Jeanne would go into a light trance and her physicist husband Tom Love conducted the conversation with souls that would show up. All these sessions were recorded.

They had a scheduled evening session on the evening of the Challenger disaster. To their surprise, a female voice had identified herself as Christa, the schoolteacher on the Challenger. She was extremely upset, almost incoherent, trying to explain what happened, and basically screamed for most of the session.

Sam explained that in the ensuing three month they had many sessions as all of the astronauts came through and provided much information about the accident. For example, they did not die instantly as NASA claimed, but screamed through the several minutes of free-fall, and drowned in the ocean, because they had no space suits on. NASA said the same thing several months later. They spoke about the O-ring failure – which at that time NASA did not talk about – and many other details. The Loves did not know what to do with the accumulated tapes – many of them transcribed – and wondered if our foundation, FMBR, would be interested to look at it.

Bob was intrigued, but being a pragmatic physicist, he was skeptical about both the channeling phenomena and the survival of consciousness. He was, however, willing to check it out, but he wanted to “interview” the astronauts himself, and ask them some professional and scientific questions. Unfortunately the Loves were not able to come to California, and we were not able to go to New York.

Jeanne came up with the solution. She had a good friend by the name of Regina Ochoa in our area (Santa Cruz), who was also a natural-born channeler and could possibly get in touch with the astronauts. Thus, an appointment was made (for three weeks later) with Regina to come to our house and attempt to channel the astronauts for us.

Five days before the appointment, a tragic event happened in our lives. A close friend, Eta, was invited to a little dinner party at our house, and when she did not show up we went to her place and found her dead. We were the ones that discovered the body, called the authorities, found and called her sister and other family members, etc.

Eta was sixty-something with a flamboyant, colorful personality, who passed for forty-something, and had a torrential on-and-off love affair with a forty-five year-old man named Russell for the past three years. We were privy to the many ups and downs of the relationship, the passionate love letters when she spent the summer in her Michigan lake house, the bitter breakup six month later, and the ritualistic burning of the letters in order to “let him go.” We missed Eta.

We kept the appointment with Regina in spite of all the emotional upheaval in our life. I was not too enthusiastic about this whole process – as a NASA research psychologist, I had strong reservations about the validity of channeling. I am not sure what I was expecting a psychic to look like, but Regina was certainly not it. She was a good looking young suburban woman, a mother of two teens, wife of the local fire captain, somewhat shy, and somewhat leery of a physicist and a psychologist “testing” her.

We broke the ice over lunch and I think all of us relaxed a bit about the situation. She explained to us that after a brief meditation she’ll go into a light trance and will ask the spirits of the astronauts to come forth and identify themselves. At that point we may ask them anything we want.

Regina said that she is usually aware of what is going on; she just steps aside enough that a spirit can communicate through her. However, after the brief meditation her head rolled to her shoulder and it looked like she completely lost consciousness. I was alarmed. After what seemed like a couple of minutes she suddenly sat up straight, looked at us with clear eyes, smiled and said, “Dear ones, this is Eta; I am sorry I spoiled your dinner party…”

She even sounded like Eta, and proceeded to tell us she has been waiting for us, and to please ask her anything we want. Although we were a bit surprised, Bob started to ask Eta all kinds of questions and most of the answers were either “I don’t know” or general enough to apply to any situation. I was feeling like a fool; I wanted to ask something that this psychic could not have gotten from any source – to make sure that it was indeed Eta who was speaking.

I interrupted Bob’s questioning, and asked: “Eta, what about the letters?” I was deliberately vague, did not want to give any clues.

“I see fire… but I don’t remember any letters,” she said; I thanked her. The reference to the fire was interesting.

After several minutes of answering Bob’s questions she suddenly said, “I remember about the letters, Russell has them.” I thanked her again and did not comment. I knew it was not true.

Several more minutes later Eta interrupted herself again and said, “I know about the letters, they are in the chest of drawers by the bed.” Now I really knew it was wrong.

Soon Regina was getting visibly tired, even Eta made a comment about it, and said her good-bye. When Regina came to, she asked us if we got any useful information from the astronauts. She was very surprised to hear that only our dead friend showed up. She did not know anybody named Eta, and was apologizing for not getting the astronauts.

That evening we got together with Russell to discuss the event. I asked him what happened to the love letters. He said that after their hard breakup Eta demanded that he give them back to her, and he did –the whole grocery bagful of them. He did not know what happened to them (Eta brought the whole bag and we ritualistically burned every one of them in our backyard BBQ).

I told him about the comment “Russell has them” and he turned red as a beet. He confessed that two of the letters were so dear to his heart, that he kept them and still has them. Bingo! And then it dawned on me – the letters we burned were the ones Eta wrote to Russell and then took back. I asked him what happened to the letters that he wrote to her and sent to Michigan. He said he had no idea. We called her sister in Michigan, who happened to be at the lake house. We asked her to look in the drawers by the bed to see if there are any letters there. She was very surprised to find a large roll of letters neatly tied in a blue ribbon, all from Russell to Eta!

Three pieces of information about the letters were provided by the psychic (or Eta through the psychic): “I see fire” (we burned them); “Russell has them” (he did); and “they are in the chest of drawers by the bed” (they were). No living being had the knowledge of all three of these facts. One can speculate about how consciousness functions outside of the physical, and how memory is accessed outside of the body, and how the consciousness of the psychic colors what she “sees.”

I would like to report one other event that happened – this one is with Jeanne Love. One summer the Loves came out to California for a vacation and spent a delightful day with us. The day was not about channeling, or psychic stuff, just two families catching up with each other’s lives.

Towards their last evening we were sitting around in the living room, when suddenly Jeanne became very agitated. She said she is sorry but she sees death around us – it is not us but it is imminent. It naturally shook us up a bit, but no matter how we asked the question, all she could say is that it is here, now, but not us and not them. They left in a hurry, leaving us wondering.

The next day we went to the post office where we received our mail. Bob flipped through the mail; there was one envelope from the Veteran’s Administration, where he still had a small life insurance policy that I was the beneficiary of. Every quarter they sent him a statement, so the envelope was not a surprise, until Bob noticed that it was addressed to me. The letter said in essence that they were sorry for my loss, and I can receive the proceeds by signing…

We called and found out that somebody who died had a social security number one digit off from Bob’s and the agency made a mistake. Jeanne had picked up the energy or vibration of death, but did not clearly see what happened.

These two channeling events were pivotal points in changing our skepticism to an open curiosity. Instead of trying to prove or disprove the survival of consciousness, our focus became trying to understand how it works.
 
We had many subsequent sessions with both Regina and Jeanne Love – privately and through FMBR – and got to know them and their families and became close friends. They are genuine, honest and born with a natural ability to communicate with incarnate entities. I feel the information they brought forth from the astronauts merit further attention, as it shows us that there is life after death indeed!


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