“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We started the Instream tests and our own envelope tests in August of 1965. In October my first book was coming out, and Peg Gallagher, a reporter for the Elmira Star Gazette, interviewed me. I’d known her slightly in the past, but now she and her husband and Rob and I became good friends. Bill is assistant advertising director of the Star Gazette, and he and Peg were soon leaving for a vacation in Puerto Rico. We decided to set up an experiment.

Sometimes Rob prepared the envelopes just before a session, and sometimes way ahead of time. He used all kinds of things for test items, some that I had seen, recently or in the past, and some that I had never seen. He might use a letter, for example, that had come the day before, and which I had read, or a bill from several years back, or an item he picked up that I had never seen, or an envelope prepared by a friend—in which case the contents were unknown even to Rob. Pieces of paper Rob picked up in the streets, leaves, beer coasters, chunks of hair, photographs, sketches, bills—all were used at one time or another. Sometimes Rob chose items specifically because they had strong emotional charges connected with them. Other times he purposely used neutral objects. We wanted to see if Seth did better with certain kinds of targets than others.