Ted Owens, the Mail-Order Prophet, and the Most Powerful Nervous System Since Moses

Sep 3

Written By Daniel Dashnaw

Thursday, September 3, 2026.

Ted Owens was a difficult man.

That may be the only uncomplicated conclusion available to us.

He was grandiose, combative, theatrical, easily injured by disbelief, and spectacularly offended by neglect.

He called himself “the PK Man”—the Psychokinesis Man.

He wrote to scientists, presidents, intelligence agencies, and government officials.

He claimed extraterrestrial intelligences had modified his brain and were cooperating with him.

When recognition failed to arrive, Owens did not reduce the size of his claims.

He enlarged the demonstration.

Storms. Lightning strikes. Earthquakes. Blackouts. UFO appearances. Hurricanes that changed direction.

Sporting events that turned unexpectedly. Owens described some as predictions.

Others were requests transmitted to beings he called the Space Intelligences.

A few were warnings about what might happen if powerful institutions continued ignoring him.

This makes Owens easy to dismiss.

It also makes him remarkably difficult to explain.

He did not merely wait for something unusual to happen and then announce that he had foreseen it.

He repeatedly sent letters describing intended events before they occurred. Some were retained. Some were witnessed or notarized.

Some were later paired with newspaper reports documenting events that appeared to fulfill them.

Owens demonstrated what he believed were extraordinary powers, and the demonstrations were documented.

Documentation is not causation.

But it is not nothing.

How to Contact Space People

In 1969, Owens published How to Contact Space People, a breathless little volume composed of autobiography, UFO reports, predictions, affidavits, newspaper clippings, and instructions for communicating with extraterrestrial beings.

The title sounds almost cheerful—something one might find beside How to Win Friends and Influence People, except that the people are elsewhere in the galaxy.

The book is not cheerful.

Owens described two upright, insect-like creatures inside a chamber, looking into an oval communications device. He nicknamed them Tweeter and Twitter. Above them was a higher intelligence that appeared as a shadowy face with luminous green eyes.

These beings, Owens said, operated from another dimension. They could see across time, enter our world through “time windows,” influence natural forces, and receive human requests through concentrated mental imagery.

His method combined visualization, memory training, self-hypnosis, and intense concentration. Owens pictured his face appearing on the creatures’ oval screen and mentally spoke to them.

One flash meant yes.

Two meant no.

Then he waited to see what the world would do.

A Nervous System Built for Contact

Owens believed he had been selected because his mind had undergone unusual preparation.

For years, he practiced elaborate memory techniques based on vivid internal imagery. He worked as a hypnotist, taught self-hypnosis, and repeatedly entered deep states of absorption. This training, he said, had constructed a kind of psychic muscle.

A scientist identified in the book as Zakow reportedly told him this explained why his brain could withstand the extraordinary power of the Space Intelligences. Other recipients, Owens claimed, had suffered strokes, cerebral hemorrhages, or psychological collapse.

Then came the comparison around which his entire story seemed to organize itself:

Ted Owens claimed he was the first human being since Moses capable of withstanding direct transmission from a higher intelligence.

It is an astonishing statement. It may be grandiosity in its purest form.

But what if an extraordinary capacity did not arrive inside an agreeable man?

We often use personality as a shortcut for deciding what is possible. Someone making impossible claims is expected to be modest, calm, precise, emotionally regulated, and almost painfully credible.

Nature has never promised that its strangest gifts will be distributed according to emotional maturity.

Owens could have been vain, retaliatory, exhausting, unstable—and still anomalously gifted.

Those possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

Hitchcock Had Already Explained this Trick

Twelve years before Owens published his book, Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired an episode called “The Mail Order Prophet.”

E. G. Marshall plays Ronald Grimes, an ordinary office clerk who begins receiving letters from a mysterious J. Christiani. Each contains a prediction about a forthcoming public event.

The first comes true.

Then another.

Every letter is postmarked before the predicted event.

Christiani appears to have established precognition through precisely the documentation a sensible person should demand. Grimes begins wagering money and eventually risks everything.

Then the trick is revealed.

Christiani sent thousands of letters.

Half predicted one outcome; half predicted the opposite.

After each event, he discarded everyone who had received the losing prediction and divided the remaining group again.

Most recipients saw Christiani fail and never heard from him again.

A small surviving group received an apparently miraculous sequence of correct predictions.

Nothing supernatural had occurred. Every surviving letter was genuine, mailed in advance, and accurate.

The trick was hiding the denominator.

Was Owens a Mail-Order Prophet?

Perhaps Owens sent many predictions to many people and publicized only the successful ones. Perhaps failed recipients simply disappeared from the story.

Some of his forecasts were broad: strange weather, destructive lightning, an earthquake, or a UFO report within a generous period.

Our world produces abundant material for fulfillment. Issue enough elastic predictions and coincidence may begin to look like obedience.

This is the strongest conventional explanation. I truly felt quite comfortably smug with it.

But it is also somewhat incomplete.

Enter Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove is the reason Owens cannot be comfortably filed away as Christiani with a flying saucer.

Mishlove earned a specially constructed interdisciplinary doctorate in parapsychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980. He later hosted Thinking Allowed and now hosts New Thinking Allowed.

His career has been devoted to consciousness, psychical research, and possibilities conventional psychology tends to leave outside the building.

For roughly a decade, Mishlove corresponded with Owens, interviewed him, received his predictions, gathered supporting material, and attempted to understand both the claimed ability and the difficult personality attached to it.

According to Mishlove, from 1976 onward Owens sent all his predictions and proposed demonstrations directly to him before the events.

Earlier predictions had reportedly gone to figures including psychologist Leo Sprinkle, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, and SRI researchers Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff.

That substantially weakens the Hitchcock explanation.

If Mishlove received the continuing stream—failures as well as apparent successes—Owens could not secretly divide him into different prediction groups. Mishlove was not merely the lucky survivor of a hidden mailing list.

Ted Owens had acquired something Christiani never permitted:

A continuous witness.

The Owens Archive

Mishlove eventually published The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter in 2000 and preserved an extensive archive containing correspondence, recorded interviews, predictions, newspaper reports, photographs, witness statements, and audio from a two-day Owens training program.

There are even recordings of Owens delivering hypnotic suggestions intended to develop psychokinetic ability.

The archive contains at least three Ted Owenses.

There is Owens the public prophet, announcing demonstrations and demanding recognition.
There is Owens the private correspondent, cultivating a relationship with the man he hoped would understand him.
And there is Owens the teacher, attempting to prepare other nervous systems for contact.

The collection is not a controlled experiment.

Its complete predictions would need to be independently scored for specificity, timing, probability, and correspondence.

But the archive establishes something more modest and still remarkable:

Owens made at least some claims before the corresponding events, and a serious investigator preserved them.

The Challenger Warning

The most disturbing episode came near the end of Owens’s life.

On Christmas Eve 1985, Owens was seething and irate. He reportedly telephoned Mishlove and warned that the government should cancel an upcoming space shuttle flight. Owens had grown rageful over official neglect and allegedly threatened the safety of the shuttle program.

On January 28, 1986, Challenger broke apart shortly after launch. Seven crew members died.

We know the physical cause. The shuttle launched in unusually cold conditions, and an O-ring seal failed. Nothing in the engineering investigation requires psychokinesis or extraterrestrial intervention.

But Mishlove received the warning beforehand.

It does not prove that Owens destroyed Challenger. It may have been one threat among many. It may have acquired its terrible precision only after the event.

Still, imagine being Mishlove.

A man who has sent you predictions for years, warns you about the shuttle. Weeks later, the shuttle disintegrates on live television.

The analytic mind asks about mechanical causation, probability, specificity, and the complete prediction record.

The human nervous system asks:

What if he did it?

A Difficult Man With an Impossible Gift

Owens did not merely want the scientific community to acknowledge psychokinesis.

He wanted it to acknowledge Ted Owens.

Government indifference did not merely disappoint him. It injured him. His demonstrations could therefore become retaliatory.

The implied message was chilling:

Recognize me, or something may happen that makes recognition unavoidable.

If Owens possessed no unusual ability, these were the threats of a grandiose man attempting to force the world to validate him.

If he sincerely believed in his powers, the threats belonged to a closed and potentially dangerous private cosmology.

But if Owens actually possessed psychokinetic ability—even intermittently—then one of the most powerful nervous systems in recorded history may have belonged to a man with a grievance, if not a full-blown personality disorder..

We would prefer such a gift to arrive in Mr. Rogers.

There is no reason it should.

Moses was not selected for being easygoing.

The biblical Moses argued, raged, threatened, shattered the tablets, and carried an almost intolerable relationship with power. His story included liberation and law, but also plagues, punishment, destruction, and dread.

Owens’s comparison was preposterously grandiose.

It may also have been the only myth large enough to organize what he believed was happening to him.

The Man and His Witness

Owens needed a credible person who would neither laugh nor disappear. Dr. Mishlove needed a well-documented human mystery capable of testing the accepted limits of mind.

Each possessed something the other wanted. I think this is closer to the truth; both men had a hunger for significance.

Owens gave Mishlove access to a seemingly impossible phenomenon. Mishlove gave Owens what presidents, scientists, journalists, and government agencies had withheld:

Sustained Bestowed Attention.

That does not make Mishlove gullible or Owens consciously manipulative. But it made theirs more than an ordinary research relationship.

If Mishlove ignored Owens and nothing happened, the matter ended.

If he ignored Owens and disaster followed, he would have to live with the possibility that he had failed to pass along a warning from the PK Man.

Owens had not merely found an investigator.

He had appointed a witness.

Astonishment With the Brakes On

The Mail Order Prophet gives us exactly the right question:

Where are the losing letters?

Mishlove’s archive matters because he may have preserved them along with the apparent successes.

Perhaps a rigorous analysis would reduce Owens’s powers to chance, flexible interpretation, theatrical confidence, and the tendency to remember astonishment more faithfully than disappointment.

But perhaps Owens would remain statistically peculiar.

The record does not compel us to accept that Owens was a human operator selected by extraterrestrial intelligences. I’m certainly skeptical.

It does not permit us to dismiss him lazily as a fraud or a madman either.

The honest position is not credulity.

It is astonishment with the brakes on.

Something happened between Ted Owens, the world, and the people who preserved his predictions.

Perhaps it was psychokinesis. Perhaps Owens possessed an extraordinary sensitivity to developing events. Perhaps he issued so many claims that coincidence eventually dressed itself as obedience.

Or perhaps the border between mind and world is not located exactly where we have been told it is.

Perfect Bestowed Attention

How to Contact Space People appears to be a book about extraterrestrial communication.

Beneath that, it is about power, recognition, and the unbearable experience of believing one possesses something no respectable institution will acknowledge.

Owens constructed—or encountered—a universe in which nothing happened accidentally.

Storms answered him. Lightning confirmed him. UFOs appeared. Games changed direction. Newspaper headlines became receipts issued by the cosmos.

It was a universe in which Ted Owens could never be irrelevant.

Perhaps that was his grandiosity.

Perhaps it was his wound.

Perhaps it was his gift.

Ted Owens may have been abrasive, vain, psycho-kinetically homicidal, unstable, retaliatory, and exhausting.

He may also have possessed the most extraordinary nervous system anyone had encountered since Moses.