The Stopped Bus: Did I Do That?
Joe Kamiya
I was riding a Greyhound bus to Oakland in 1949 from the family farm in Turlock, California. I was a first year graduate student in Psychology at UC Berkeley, and I was doing a paper on parapsychology for a seminar in general experimental design. The bus was a two section bus (two buses, one following the other) because of the excess number of passengers. I was riding in the following bus.
Because I thought a little pilot study would be useful for concretizing my thinking for my paper, I resolved that I would, by force of psychic power, cause the leading bus to make an unscheduled stop before it arrived in Oakland. The only scheduled stop before Oakland, if any, would have been at Manteca or Tracy. I forgot at which point in the trip to Oakland I exerted intentions to stop the bus, but I believe it was no less than a half-hour before the resulting event. While the buses were climbing up the Altamont pass, the engine access door at the rear of the leading bus flew open. The driver of the bus in which I was riding pulled up alongside the leading bus and signaled the other driver to stop to correct the problem. The leading bus stopped, while my bus continued on. As I looked back at the stopped bus, I was amazed that I had apparently succeeded.
Contributor's
Comments on the Experience
The bus stopping on the Altamont pass was truly abnormal, of course, because not only was the highway shoulder unfriendly to vehicular parking, especially wide buses, but the area for miles around was totally unpopulated and most unlikely to produce a person flagging the bus for a ride. I rode the same bus route many times before and after that day, and have never seen a bus stop anywhere along the Altamont pass.
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