Mens Tee

Womens Tee

Do you remember that scene at the beginning of Ghostbusters when Dr. Peter Venkman is conducting his research on “the effect of negative reinforcement on ESP ability?” If you don’t its a classic, go rent it. Basically Bill Murray holds up what look like large playing cards with different designs on them, and people try to guess what the design is. They’re called Zener Cards and they were created by Karl Zener in the 1930′s for ESP test conducted with J.B. Rhine.

There are 5 symbols, the star, circle, square, plus and wavy lines. I believe that’s the order they show up in the movie too. So that’s five symbols and five copies of each for a total of 25 cards in a deck. Too bad the gal in the movie didn’t know that, or she wouldn’t have bothered guessing “figure eight.”

The finished design.

The test that the cards were originally designed for was meant to test for ESP ability. One guy holds the card toward him and mentally tries to project the image in his mind. There’s another person sitting opposite who cannot see the card, but tries to receive the mental image. The test isn’t designed to tell if the sender is telepathic or the receiver is clairvoyant, but instead just validate the existence of ESP ability. A book was written by J.B. Rhine in the 30′s stating that after 90 thousand runs of this test ESP ability did in fact exist.

Since these are all basic shapes, the design didn’t take more than a few minutes. Probably the most time was spent on the wavy lines. How wavy should they be? How many humps? How thick? Anyway this is what I came up with.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

I’m calling this shirt the ESP shirt, but its just as much about remote viewing as it is about extrasensory perception in general. So far people get the idea just by looking at it, so whatever you see in it, that’s what it is.

The government has put money into remote viewing research and programs, but I don’t know if they are doing it anymore. I think they officially stopped funding, but who knows what they are doing in secret. I believe it wasn’t that the US thought remote viewing was so powerful, but that other countries like the Soviet Union had psychic spies, and we didn’t want to be left out. From what I’ve heard they did develop a program that could be taught to the average person, so you didn’t have to be natually psychic to be a psychic spy, although I’m sure it couldn’t hurt. There are people who still claim to teach this method, and I’ve always wanted to try the courses, but I never have. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was all bogus, and it also wouldn’t surprise me if it was for real.

So for the graphic I wanted to have somebody looking at something and somebody else seeing a picture of that object in their mind. That isn’t exactly remote viewing, but any images of remote viewing didn’t exactly read as paranormal. They think of a place and then that place exists? How do you know they aren’t just remembering some vacation or something. So I needed two people sort of transmitting thoughts to one another. So I sketched out a couple guys I found on the internet.

A pencil drawing of the guy receiving the message.

Then those pencil drawings are brought into Illustrator and traced. Then I chose a flower for them to look at, because its a simple graphic and easily recognizable. Also I think I remember them doing a similar experiment with two twins in the series Taken when they are trying to find people who can power the spacecraft they found.

Outline view of the vector graphic.

The line work was too thin for flex printing, so I had to save it as a png with an alpha channel. I’ve ordered this shirt though and it looks pretty good.

The finished design.