The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage into the World of the Weird

by Dan Schreiber

Backster had the idea for an elite force of vegetable officers after conducting an experiment in which he tested his plants to see if they could pick out a murderer from a line-up of six suspects. To do this, he asked six students, one by one, to enter a room that contained two potted plants, and have one of them ‘murder’ one of the plants by tearing it out of its pot and stamping all over it. To make sure that no one knew who the murderer was, including Backster himself, the six participants were each asked to draw pieces of paper from a hat, with only one of the pieces containing the instruction to kill. After the grisly task was completed, the surviving plant, which had witnessed the crime, was then attached to a lie detector as the six students re-entered the room one at a time. As the first five students wandered into the room, the plant showed no emotional reaction, then as the sixth student entered the room the plant began to display ‘wild stress’. When Backster asked if he was the killer, the student admitted that yes he was. The experiment had worked.