Spectrum was a weekly radio documentary series which ran on Radio New Zealand's National station from 1972 to 2016.
Alwyn Owen and Jack Perkins produced the series for many years, creating a valuable library of New Zealand oral history.
Part 2 of 2. Strange Powers of the Mind.
Doctor Kenneth Morris, retired doctor of biological science, is interviewed in his house on Lake Rotorua by Jack Perkins. He talks about his supernatural encounters whilst living in Africa from the 1920s to after World War II, whilst undertaking his work combating the Tsetse fly.
Introduction: Doctor Kenneth Morris talks about scientific evidence of parapsychology and parakinetics?
Doctor Morris states he encountered many examples of the occult and psychic activity amongst African tribes. He gives an example of one of his workers being terrified upon finding he had been cursed when a rival cut off the corner of his shirt.
Doctor Morris says he put a counter juju curse on the rival who then left the village.
He describes frequent psychic phenomena associated with crocodiles and recounts an incident where he had to pay a village blood money after shooting a crocodile that the village believed to be an ancestor. He then talks about a witch doctor who could stop crocodiles attacking villagers.
A story from Tanzania is told where a lion tribe would blackmail cattle herders by threatening to cause wild lions to attack their cows and how native drum signals were used to send telepathic messages.
He then describes incidents of parakinetics [psychokinesis?] (control of inanimate objects through thought) where camera equipment was prevented from functioning properly.
Doctor Morris states the need to abandon the materialistic ways of the Western world and sticking to the true values of nature. He quotes from the poem by John Dryden, ‘To my honoured friend Sir Robert Howard on his Excellent Poems’.