There is a group of people who believe the superhuman powers can be realised in our real world. (Image: StarWars)
But were they?
There is a group of people who believe the superhuman powers of the hit films can be realised in our world.
That’s what I was to discover as I researched my new book, The Men On Magic Carpets.
A Jedi-wannabe and sports nut, I’d always wondered whether the mind tricks used by Skywalker could be employed in real life.
What if a coach or athlete had tried to harness such mysterious powers? They would be unstoppable.
And so began my adventure across the West Coast of America in search of superhuman powers.
I discovered that in the 1960s there was a group of new age thinkers who believed they could create a superhuman through a heady brew of meditation, yoga and nude hot-tub bathing.
People who would be able to slow down time, pass through solid matter, see into the future and move objects with the power of their mind.
Qui-Gon Jinn, Darth Maul and Obi-Wan battle it out in The Phantom Menace. (Image: StarWars)
They set up a training school called the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Founded in 1962 it was a cornerstone of the flower power movement.
The Beatles’ George Harrison landed his helicopter there to jam with Indian musician Ravi Shankar and LSD advocate Timothy Leary held regular workshops on the benefits of the drug.
It was also the base for what was known as the human potential movement.
And it was this bizarre, far-out ideology that would directly inspire George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, who apparently first heard of the idea of The Force from one of Esalen’s teachers.
Lucas really picked up on this when he made Star Wars – the Dark Side of the Force. It’s a problem. We don’t want little Darth Vaders running around.
Michael Murphy
But the hippies at Esalen were no joke.
They ended up instigating a race between America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War as the two nations, gripped by paranoia that the other side was leading the way, tried to create real-life Jedi.
The early believers are still active today with their unique brand of psychology used at the top of professional sport, including the Premier League.
The beginnings of these strange ideas were more humble.
Esalen had been the brainchild of a man called Mike Murphy, who believed that the most fertile ground for Skywalker superpowers was the sports field.
I met the mysterious Murphy, then 86, in an Italian restaurant in Mill Valley, California, keen to learn more about a chapter in history he called “the great untold story”.
Reclusive and wary of granting interviews, I had tracked him down via an obscure fan club, set up to honour his stories about golf clubs swinging by themselves and his insistence that in a 1964 baseball match between the San Francisco Giants and LA Dodgers he used the power of thought to knock the Dodgers pitcher clean off his feet.
Murphy was not alone.
In 1978, 58 per cent of Americans claimed to have experienced some form of paranormal power.
This was a year after Skywalker, displaying the Jedi mind tricks the two nations were trying to harness, burst into the world’s
