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today. examining." The Dentons were a family of practicing psychometrists, who believed in a spiritual universe. Their "trips," then, were strictly of spiritual nature, but, in many ways, their reports seem strangely prophetic A psychometrist is one who "reads" the history of an object by psychic vibrations which he receives as he holds the thing in his hand. William Denton often said in his lectures that a personal relic of Shakespeare could, in half an hour, reveal more of the bard to one who had the gift of psychometry than biographers have been able to discover in 200 years. "| have known a little dust from a copper knife to reveal the story of ancient copper-miners of Lake Superior," Denton said. "To the psychometer, the secrets of ancient times are as open as a field in the sunshine. We have only to open our spiritual eyes to discover them!" Denton conducted many experiments with ancient relics and achieved some truly notable "impressions," which were subsequently proved to be correct. In 1866, he became interested in using psychometry to bridge the great gaps between planets. "A telescope," he said, "only enables us to see; but the spiritual faculties enable their possessors to hear, smell, taste, and feel, and become for the time being, almost inhabitants of the planet they are One evening after supper, Denton and his son, Sherman, were in the orchard. "Venus shone like a young moon in the western sky," Denton later wrote in one of his many volumes, "and | said to Sherman, ‘look at that star; and then shut your eyes and tell me what you see.' "Sherman described- trees, animals that were half fish and half muskrat, and water that was heavy but not wet. This was the first of a number of experiments in outer space, achieved by choosing the object, then closing the eyes." During another experiment, Sherman went "out into space" and reported that there were people on Mars who looked astonishingly like earth people. "They soar above traffic on individual fly-cycles," he told his father. "They seem particularly fond of air travel. As many as 30 people occupy some of the large flying conveyances." On the Dentons' own planet, in the 1860's, aluminum had barely been heard of, yet