A police officer, a listener of my lectures, provided me with this newspaper report. I wrote the following letter to the editor of the police newspaper immediately after the first edition appeared: To the editor of Police-Newspaper Baden-Württemberg Stuttgart Ravensburg, 14th of May 1981 Dear Sirs! In the 4/1981 issue of the Police-Newspaper, Baden-Württemberg , you started a series of articles by an anonymous author under the title of ‘Parapsychology – criminal spook or science?’. The first article that appeared did not say anything about the science of parapsychology, it rather concentrated on examples that have nothing at all to do with parapsychology, like the mass suicide in Guyana and it tried to portrait this science as something abnormal. Through the completely unsubstantiated assertion that Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin had an affinity to ‘occultism’, something you equate with parapsychology anyway, you also try to insinuate a connection between parapsychology and terrorism. To this I can only say: People in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones. What would you say if I were to publish a series of articles under the title ‘Police, your friend and helper or a criminal gang of gangsters?’ and if I would exclusively use reports in this series like the ones in the enclosed photocopies? (these photocopies consisted of newspaper clippings of reported bank robberies, thefts and murders carried out by police officers!) These reports are indeed true, whilst your story about Ulrike Meinhof is untrue. Would you consider such a negative series of articles by me as just and the activities by the police as appropriate? I think that dealing with the importance of parapsychology in your police newspaper is a good thing. But this should be carried out by an expert and not through an anonymous layman who is bereft of any expertise. If you feel that as a policeman, you are committed to the law, I challenge you to print my essay ‘ESP is not an aberration’ that’s included in this letter, as a counterstatement to the series of articles that you started in your newspaper or at least publish this letter and all the included photocopied newspaper clippings under the rubric ‘people’s letters’. I remind you here of the right of reply Sincerely yours W. Schiebeler On the same day, the 14th of May 1981, I wrote a similarly constructed letter to the Interior Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Professor Dr. Roman Herzog, who later became Federal President. On the 22nd of June 1981, I received a written reply from the Home Office Baden-Württemberg, Section III – State Police Headquarters, in regards to my letters: “You are critically dealing with the beginning of a series about psycho-science that is supposed to deal with the relationship between criminology and occultism and parapsychology. It informed neither unobjectively nor untruthfully about it and parapsychology should not be guided in the direction that you suggest.” The publication of my essay “ESP is not an aberration” was rejected. In further letters to the State Police Headquarters and the Minister of the Interior on the 13th of July 1981 and the 6th of December 1981, I objected to the belittling interpretation of the content of the
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