19 Facts About Cleve Backster

Cleve Backster was born in Lafayette Township, New Jersey on February 27,1924.

Cleve Backster is the former director of the in San Diego, California and was a polygraph instructor before his experiments on plants.

Cleve Backster wrote the book Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Foods, and Human Cells which describes 36 years of his work and was published in 2003.

Cleve Backster died on June 24,2013, after a prolonged illness.

Cleve Backster founded the CIA's polygraph unit shortly after World War II.

The Backster School of Lie Detection, originally founded in New York City in 1960 after Cleve Backster left his position with the Central Intelligence Agency, was located in San Diego, California.

Cleve Backster's work was inspired by the research of physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who claimed to have discovered that playing certain kinds of music in the area where plants grew caused them to grow faster.

In February 1966, Cleve Backster attached polygraph electrodes to a Dracaena cane plant, to measure at first the time taken for water to reach the leaves.

Cleve Backster conducted another similar experiment where he observed a plant's response to the death of a brine shrimp in another room; his results convinced him that plants demonstrated telepathic awareness.

Cleve Backster argued that plants perceived human intentions, and as he began to investigate further, he reported finding that other human thoughts and emotions caused reactions in plants, which could be recorded by a polygraph instrument.

Cleve Backster termed the plants' sensitivity to thoughts "Primary Perception", and published his findings from the experiments in the International Journal of Parapsychology in 1968.

Cleve Backster explained that they did not follow the exact laboratory techniques which he had used to perform the original experiments and he has not attempted to repeat them himself.

Cleve Backster's work became popular and drew public attention, and his findings were similar to the beliefs of Hindus, Buddhists and New Age followers.

Cleve Backster's theory is in books like Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's The Secret Life of Plants and Robert Stone's The Secret Life of Your Cells.

Cleve Backster was a guest on June 27,2007, on the evening radio show, "Coast To Coast AM", during which he discussed with host George Noory and with callers to the program his experiments with primary perception and findings of an interconnection between all living cells.

Cleve Backster had been a guest several times before on Art Bell's Coast to Coast, as well as on Jeff Rense's radio shows, and has presented papers at many international conferences and meetings as well as those in the US.

Cleve Backster's work caught the attention of the Church of Scientology founder, Ron Hubbard.

Cleve Backster's "Primary Perception" theory was a subject of the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters.

Experiments where the team employed the same model of polygraph machine used by Cleve Backster showed positive results with the plant reacting both to actual harm, as well as thoughts of harm.