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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily

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the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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The sound can only be described as otherworldly, but the source is as commonplace as the ground we walk on, the air we breathe.

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The sound comes from plants, through sensitive electronic devices which translate fluctuations of energy. Some call it a voice.

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Whatever it is, it raises the astonishing possibility that plants can communicate.

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If plants can communicate, what are they saying? To whom or what are they talking? And how can we communicate with them?

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The sound is from the ground.

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You'll see that plants can tell you different stories about themselves. As you feel them, that's right, they do talk. Learn how to talk to them.

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Okay everybody, let's have some fun now. You take your hand and just put it above the plant and just do this slowly.

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Do plants feel? Children often have an easier time grasping a new concept. They tend to be less skeptical, more accepting of phenomena outside the normal range of human experience.

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It's an energy that the plant is sending back to you. As you have a heart in your heart.

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Marcel Vogel believes that plants do have feelings, feelings that man can share.

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Vogel is a research chemist in San Jose, California. He has devoted years to studying plant behavior with sophisticated machines and with what he calls his mind's inner eye.

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The green thumbs among us have always known there was more to growing things than the right alchemy of soil, water and sunshine.

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They seem to have some special communion with plants and ability to make them thrive. The so-called brown thumbs don't seem to be able to do that.

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Yet they sometimes laugh when the green thumbs talk lovingly to their plants.

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Now we have a startling new concept that these simple life forms have been listening and are listening still.

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No room decor is considered complete these days unless it includes something green and living.

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It may just be a fad or the urban dwellers minor rebellion at too much steel and concrete or the roots may be deeper touching something forgotten in many of us.

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Whatever it is plants are big business and trained minds are beginning to pay attention to a mysterious new aspect of the green world around us.

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The Denver Botanical Garden provides a unique environment for plants.

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Music played a major role in an experiment with green life which startled the scientific community.

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The experiment led to the astonishing conclusion that plants have perceptions not unlike human senses and that they respond dramatically to certain sounds.

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Dorothy Retellick's passion is music. After raising her family she returned to college to complete her degree in that subject.

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She also studied biology and a sympathetic teacher allowed her to combine her two interests in one project.

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Mrs. Retellick had always felt an affinity for plants. They were as much a part of her world as music.

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Mrs. Retellick theorized that in subtle ways plants might share her sensitivity to sound.

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Harsh music had always bothered Mrs. Retellick. Could it be that plants also preferred one sound to another?

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Music played a major role in the development of green life.

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The experiment she devised to test her question has been duplicated many times almost always with the same remarkable results.

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I always used 75 plants in every experiment. There were some vegetable plants, some flowering plants.

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I used green beans, squash. For the filming I used our Colorado carnations, petunias, marigolds.

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I used a great great many different kinds of plants so it is not just by chance that these things are happening.

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Mrs. Retellick created two distinct environments for her test plants.

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Water levels were kept the same in both. Temperature and lighting were identical.

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Only one element was different. Semi-classical music was played into one. Hard rock into the other.

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In the chamber with soft music the plants leaned toward the speaker, seeming to draw strength from the melodious sounds.

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Music played in the chamber with rock music. The plants shrank away and eventually died.

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The time-lapse photography represents the reactions of the plants over several days. The results are unmistakable.

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Test conditions could only mean that it was the quality of the music, not the volume, that determined the reaction of the plants.

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The plants, it seems to me, are trying to tell us something.

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If plants hear, how do they hear? Certainly there's nothing in the plant world like the human ear and mind, but perhaps there's something else.

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A way of hearing that doesn't involve receiving and interpreting sound waves.

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What we call a sound wave is merely one form of energy, but scientists know that energy takes many forms.

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Kendall Johnson is a specialist in Curly and Photography, a technique for making the invisible visible.

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Curly and Photography is the popular name for maybe what is better known as electrical photography.

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Think about putting a leaf on a piece of film, lay the film on the dresser, the table in your house, and sneak up on the little leaf and spark it.

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And when you develop the film in the normal way, what results is an image on a film that looks very much like the leaf.

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Through the work of Kendall Johnson and others, a new world has been opened for exploration.

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Perhaps the aura captured photographically is the force others say they have felt with their hands, recognized in their mind's eye.

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One fantastic experience we had was simply photographing the discharge that takes place in the atmosphere, in the air.

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Air is very necessary for these images. If there's no air, if there's no atmosphere, there's no image.

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We simply exposed the film to this discharge, and the result was a patterning that was incredible.

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It looked very much like a scene on the desert in the winter, a zen garden, the way trees grow, and the impact of that image still is very vivid in my mind.

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And I wonder, is this saying something about the way patterns of energy perhaps pre-define the way physically things develop?

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Curly and photography not only creates these beautiful designs of energy, but it becomes very interesting when people interact with objects when these images are made.

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One example of that would be what we call the green thumb series of experiments.

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We would pluck a leaf from a plant and make a picture, and then we'd scratch it, and then we'd make another image on film.

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And what would usually happen is that over a period of time the leaf would gradually fade.

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But what we do then is using the same type of leaf, ask someone who had the reputation of having a green thumb, somebody that can grow anything.

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We ask them to hold their hand above the mutilated leaf, and with many of these people, rather than the leaf becoming dimmer, it actually became more brilliant.

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The profound implication is that the energy depicted by Curly and photography works both ways.

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The finger of someone noted for skill and sensitivity with plants has a bright aura.

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The finger of a person who's had little success with plants represents a marked contrast.

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Maybe having a green thumb or a brown thumb means more than anyone realized that a touch can convey as much information as volumes of words.

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If somewhere in between this very personal world, one that I feel, one that I live in, and the other world that we, the ordinary world that we live in every day, that's me and the world's out there, there's this whole new other possibility.

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And that's very exciting.

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Can plants also speak? If so, can we learn to decipher this other voice?

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For the lover of things that grow, the ultimate would be to learn that plants have a language that can be learned.

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It would satisfy the needs of those who touch and complete that miraculous chemistry between man and plant.

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Aristotle and Plutarch thought that trees had perceptions, that they were capable of passion and reason.

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Modern thinkers believe they may not have been far off.

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Cleve Baxter has spent more than 25 years researching the behavior of plants.

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Right now we're going to use a pair of electrodes that are regularly used on people but now are mounted between this C-clamp.

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Baxter is a polygraph expert and has conducted lie detector tests for the Army and the CIA.

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The polygraph is essential to his work with plants.

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This is a conventional piece of polygraph equipment of which we're using only one third, the galvanic skin response section.

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Now I'm going to activate the chart drive on the equipment and turn up the sensitivity and balance in the plant between these electrodes.

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Now tracing we're getting now represents the plant.

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Right now I'm going to take a scalpel and try to get underneath the skin level of my hand, see if the pain first of cutting causes any change in the plant.

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It is an experiment Baxter has performed many times.

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By inflicting pain on himself he hopes to register some reaction in the plant.

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It is proof Baxter feels of perception on an elemental level.

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All living things he believes react to the pain of another.

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For whatever reason the experiment fails.

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Perhaps Baxter has performed it too often.

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His reaction may not have been genuine.

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Baxter now tries the experiment with the insurge of staff member Kay Hoffman.

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I'm going to balance this in and turn it to automatic surgery in this case.

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And let it quiet down a bit.

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He calibrates the machine, this time in hope of achieving a response from the plant to the cutting of Kay's hand with a scalpel.

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You got a hand just there? Right here?

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Alright, now what I'm going to do is just to cut a little bit here.

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When you feel this, the thing that was going fairly calm is now going pretty well.

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I think the plant has tuned into your apprehension pretty nicely.

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Now let's see if it's tuned into this.

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Now I'm going to put some iodine in there.

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This time the results were positive.

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The plant has reacted in some way.

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Baxter can only conclude that it is a reaction to the pain felt by another living thing.

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Alright now, let me take a look at this with you.

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This is sort of interesting because through here we were doing nothing that related to this.

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And then we decided to ask you if you would sit down and let us cut your hand.

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And right here is where you had the invitation to sit down and your apprehension of doing so.

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And here's where I'm starting the cutting.

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And actually your apprehension is worse than my putting the iodine in which apparently didn't hurt too much.

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In fact the thing quieted down.

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Well that was happening, but the idea of being cut and the cutting itself causes to go into this vibratory thing.

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So all the way through here you can see the changes that you may be able to match to your own mental set.

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Cleve Baxter is concerned not only with plants but with primary perception in all simple life forms.

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Bacteria is the simplest plant life.

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And Baxter believes the bacteria in yogurt also yields evidence of what scientists call primary perception.

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Alright now I'm going to take some yogurt into this syringe, wipe the excess yogurt off and fill the test tube with the yogurt which contains two kinds of bacteria used in dairy products.

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And I'm going to take the two silver wires that are being held and clamped into place by this little device.

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Put the two silver wires down into the yogurt and place them in a steady position with this little clamp.

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Baxter sees no difference between wiring the finger of a person to his lie detector machine and wiring a beaker of yogurt.

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The yogurt is alive too.

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But does the simple life form at work in the yogurt have feelings?

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And these leads go to the biological preamplifier up here and from there into the final amplification that drives the pen motors.

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How wide is the gulf between man and plant if there is a gulf at all?

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Now we're getting tracing from the bacteria in the yogurt.

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Now we're going to see what will happen when I take a capsule of antibiotic material and sprinkle it into the yogurt and stir it in.

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And as I stir it up, we'll see if it has an effect.

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Baxter has killed the bacteria growing in the yogurt.

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I would say that's not enough.

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There is no reaction from the other sample.

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It begins again with a fresh beaker and a different experiment.

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Now I'm going to take some milk and on the count of five pour the milk into the yogurt that I have in this beaker.

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Stir it up and usually it takes maybe 15 to 20 seconds for the bacteria to find the nutrient to see what happens.

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You have about a 15 to 20 second delay and then this is the kind of activity you get here.

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Well what I suspect is going on is that this yogurt is being fed the nutrient and the other yogurt is trying to find its own nutrient.

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It's not making out.

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It's not being fed anything and yet somehow it is aware that the other yogurt is being fed.

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To cleave Baxter, the inescapable conclusion is that even the simplest living things have feelings.

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If you've ever awakened in the night with a knowledge that something has happened to someone you love and found out you were right,

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you might have wondered who or what was the messenger.

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One intriguing idea presented by this trip through a world of other voices is the possibility that plants carried the message.

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Apparently plants feel and hear and speak to each other.

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Can they talk to us?

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It's clear we have a lot more to learn by deciphering these other voices.

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By listening with the patience, this green world has apparently lavished on us for so long.

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As the races of man speak in different languages, so do the varieties of plants manifest their voices in different ways.

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They seem to be able to hear and understand us.

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Music

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For the time being, however, we must listen to them through our machines.

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Music

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One day, those machines may be unnecessary.

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Music

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Coming up next, FBI The Untold Stories investigates the brutal death of United Mine Workers' presidential candidate,

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Jacques Jowlonski, his wife and young daughter.

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Then histories, crimes and trials tracks the crimes, capture and punishment of killer David Berkowitz,

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aka the Son of Sound.

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Music