COVER STORY
Glendower: I can call spiritsfrom the
vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why, so can
/, or so can
any man;
But will they come vhen you do call
for them ?
-Henry IV
For all the enormous achievements
of science in posting the universe that
man inhabits, odd things keep slipping
past the sentries. The tap on the shoul-
der may be fleeting, the brush across the
cheek gone sooner than
it
is
felt,
but
the momentary
effect
is unmistakable:
an unwilling suspension of belief in the
and memory? Could
there be a para-
normal world exempt from known nat-
ural law?
Both in America and abroad, those
questions are being asked by increasing
numbers of laymen and scientists hun-
gry
for answers. The diverse manifes-
tations of interest in so-called psychic
phenomena are everywhere:
In
the
U.S.,
The
Secret
Life of
Plants becomes a bestseller by offering
an
astonishing
and
heretical
thesis:
greenery
can
feel
the
thoughts
of
humans.
At Maimonides Medical Center in
New York City, the image of a paint-
spoons and
keys apparently
with
the
force of his thoughts.
In
the
Philippines,
Tennis
Star
Tony Roche is relieved of painful “ten-
nis elbow” when an incision is made and
three
blood
clots
are
apparently
re-
moved by the touch of a psychic healer,
who knows nothing of surgery or of mod-
ern sanitation.
In
the
U.S.,
the number of col-
leges offering courses in parapsychology
increases to more than 100.
In
the
U.S.S.R.,
researchers
file
reports on blindfolded women who can
“sec” colors with their hands.
In California, ex-Astronaut Edgar
DEVICE SET UP TO RECORD OUT-OF-BODY TRIP AT AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
Questionable procedures costumed in the prim gown of laboratory respectability.
AS
Approved For Resjg^se 2003/04/18
: CIA-RDP96-00787R0001 00030002-8
rational. An old friend suddenly remem-
bered, and
as suddenly
the telephone
rings and the friend
is on
the
line. A
vivid dream that becomes the morning
reality. The sense of bumping into one’s
seif around a corner of time, of having
done and
said just
this,
in
this place,
once before in precisely this fashion. A
stab of anguish for a distant loved one,
and next day, the telegram.
Hardly a person lives who can deny
some such experience, some such seem-
ing
visitation from across
the
psychic
frontier. For most of man's history, those
intrusions were mainsprings of action,
the very
life of Greek epic and biblical
saga,
of
medieval
talc
and
Eastern
chronicle. Modern science and psychol-
ogy have
learned
to explain much of
what was once
inexplicable, but mys-
teries remain. The workings of the mind
still
resist
rational
analysis; reports of
psychic phenomena persist. Are they all
accident,
illusion? Or are
planes and
dimensions
of experience
ing is transmitted by ESP, and seems to
enter the dreams of a laboratory sub-
ject sleeping in another room.
In England, a
poll of
its readers
by the New Scientist indicates that near-
ly 70% of the respondents (mainly
sci-
entists and
technicians)
believe
in
the
possibility of extrasensory perception.
At the
University of California,
Psychologist Charles Tart reports that
his subjects showed a marked increase
in ESP scores after working with his new
teaching machine.
In Los Angeles, a
leaf
is cut
in
half,
then
photographed
by a
special
process. The picture miraculously shows
the “aura” or outline of the whole leaf.
In Washington, the Defense De-
partment’s Advanced Research Projects
Agency
assigns
a
team
to
investigate
seemingly authentic psychic phenome-
na at the Stanford Research Institute.
laymen and scientists alike by bending
Mitchell, who while on
the Apollo
moon mission conducted telepathy ex-
periments with friends on earth, founds
the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His new
mission:
investigate
occurrences
that
will not yield to rational explanation.
In
London, Arthur
Koestler ex-
amines psychic research with
the zeal
of the believer. Koestler, one of the fore-
most explicators of Establishment
sci-
ence {The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Cre-
ation), speaks of “synchronized” events
that lie outside the expectations of prob-
ability. In anecdotes of foresight and ex-
trasensory perception,
in the repetition
of events and
the strange behavior of
random samplings, Koestler spots what
he calls the roots of coincidence. In his
unforgettable metaphor, modern scien-
tists are “Peeping Toms at the keyhole
of eternity.” That keyhole is stuffed with
ancient biases toward the materialistic
of psychic research. Once skeptics aban-
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CLOCKWISE. FROM LEFT: At Durham's
Psychical
Re-
search
Foundation,
Robert
Morris
displays
test
in
which
subject
outside
of room
"infiucnecs
movement
of
a
cat.
sensory-isolation and
telepathy experiment
at Maimomdcs
Medical Center in New York City:
Artist and Psychic _Ingo
Swann with painting completed after
his "out of body
ad-
venture
in outer space; gerbil
in
tests for prccognitive pow-
ers
at The
Institute
for
Parapsychology
in Durham, N.C.
Approved For Release 2003/04/18
: CIA-RDP96-00787R0001 00030002-8
wishrtVtOft
don those prejudices, says Koestlc
'icy
will be free
new categories.
That
exploration
is already
being
conducted by a number of serious para-
normalists in a wide range of disciplines.
In his Foundation for the Research on
the Nature of Man,
in Durham, N.C.,
the grand old man of paranormal stud-
ies,
J.B. Rhine
(see box page
70),
still
keeps watch on test animals for precog-
nitive powers. At the nearby Psychical
Research Foundation, William Roll and
a research staff investigates “survival af-
ter bodily death.” In studies with a “sen-
sitive” and
his
pet
cat,
Roll
finds
ev-
idence
for a human
ability
“to leave”
some extent
in
the
existence of some
•nitted to finding phenomena. And few
2OQ®/Q14/‘1i8itoCtAi-R©P96xfM)7871KQP^Id(3jOO3Q0O2M8controis necessary in a
the forms are open to wide debate. Says
iTeld
in which deception, conscious or
VALERY SNUSTOV
m
il
MBt IS
i
Ad
RUSSIAN FINGER-READING TEST
Basically show biz.
the body and "visit” the animal. At the
University of Virginia Medical School,
Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson also studies
the plausibilities of reincarnation.
At the Division of Parapsychology
and Psychophysics of the Maimonidcs
Medical Center, Dr. Montague Ullrnan
directs
tests in which message senders
“think” images into the brains of sleep-
ing subjects. “If we had adequate fund-
ing,” says
Ullrnan, “we could have a
major breakthrough in this decade.” In
Connecticut, Businessman Robert Nel-
son
directs
the
Central
Premonitions
Registry,
meticulously
recording
the
prophecies
of the dreams and
visions
that people send him.
All of these researchers believe
to
Psychologist Gardner Murphy,
profes-
sor at the District of Columbia's George
Washington University, and a dean of
psychic researchers,
“It may well turn
out that parapsychology will be a mul-
tidisciplinary thing, owing much to psy-
chiatry,
neurology
.
.
.
medicine,
bio-
chemistry,
social
sciences.”
One
of
parapsychology’s
most
famous
propo-
nents, in fact, is an anthropologist: Mar-
garet Mead.
It was her passionate ad-
vocacy that helped give the Parapsycho-
logical Association
its greatest claim to
legitimacy. After several vain attempts
to enter
the eminent American
Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science,
the P.A. won membership in 1969—af-
ter a speech by Mead. Pier argument:
“The whole history of scientific advance
is full of scientists investigating phenom-
ena that the Establishment did not be-
lieve were there. I submit that we vote
in favor of this association's work.” The
final vote: 6 to
1 in favor of admission.
Immense Claims. As parapsychol-
ogy gains new respectability, so do
its
terms gain wide currency: “psi” for any
psychic
phenomenon;
“clairvoyance”
for the awareness of events and objects
that lie outside the perimeters of the five
senses;
“out-of-body”
experience
for
seeming to journey to a place that may
be miles from the body; “psychokinesis”
for the mental ability to influence phys-
ical
objects;
“precognition”
for
the
foreknowledge of events, from
the
fall
of dice to the prediction of political as-
sassinations; and the wide-ranging term
esp for extrasensory perception.
For all its articulate spokesmen and
scientific terminology, however, the new
world of psi
still has a serious credibil-
ity problem. One reason
is that like any
growth industry or pop phenomenon,
it
has attracted a fair share of hustlers. In-
deed,
the
psychic-phenomena
boom
may contain more charlatans and con-
jurers, more na'ifs and gulliblcs than can
be found on the stage and
in the au-
dience of ten Ringling Brothers circus-
es. The situation is not helped at all by
the “proofs” that fail to satisfy tradition-
al canons of scientific investigations. De-
spite the published discoveries, despite
the
indefatigable
explorations
of
the
psychic researchers, no one has yet been
able
to
document
experiments
suffi-
ciently
to
convince
the
infidel.
For
many, doubt grows larger with each ex-
travagant claim.
To Science and Mathematics Ana-
lyst Martin Gardner
(Relativity for the
Million,
Ambidextrous
Universe),
an-
nouncements of psychic phenomena be-
long not to the march of science but to
the pageant of publicity.
“Uri
Gcller,
The Secret Life of Plants, telepathy, ESP,
the incomplete conclusions of Kocstler
—all seem part of a new uncritical en-
thusiasm for pseudo science,” says Gard-
ner. “The claims are immense, the proof
nonexistent.
The
researchers,
almost
without exception, are emotionally corn-
unconscious, is all too familiar.”
Daniel Cohen, former managing ed-
itor of Science Digest and author of the
debunking volume Myths of the Space
Age, remains unpersuaded by what he
sees through
the
Koestlerian
keyhole.
“After decades of research and exper-
iments,” Cohen observes, “the parapsy-
chologists arc not one step closer to ac-
ceptable
scientific
proof
of
psychic
phenomena.
Examining
the
slipshod
work of the modern researchers, one be-
gins to wonder if any proof exists.”
The
criticism
that
psychics
find
hardest to counter comes not from sci-
entists but from conjurers. Theoretically,
magicians have no place in serious sci-
ence.
But they are entertainers whose
business
it
is to deceive; thus they
feel
that they are better qualified to spot chi-
canery than scientists, who can be woe-
fully naive about the gimmicks and tech-
niques
that
charlatans may
use
for
mystical effects. James Randi, who ap-
pears on
television
as
“the Amazing
Randi,” duplicates many of Uri Geller’s
achievements
with
a
combination
of
sleight
of hand,
misdirected
attention
and patented paraphernalia, then calls
them feats of clay. “Scientists who
fall
for the paranormal go through the most
devious reasoning,” Randi
says.
“For-
tunes are squandered annually in pur-
suit of mystical forces that are actually
the result of clever deceits. The money
would be better spent investigating the
tooth fairy or Santa Claus. There is more
evidence for their reality.”
Pure
Deception.
Charles
Reyn-
olds, editor and member of the Psychic
Investigating Committee of the Amer-
ican
Society
of
Magicians,
agrees.
“When evaluating the research, we have
found that the researcher’s will
to be-
lieve is all powerful.
It’s a will that has
nothing
to do with
religion; there are
Marxists,
atheists, agnostics who cling
stubbornly
to
the
ancient
faith
in
black magic. Only now
it’s called
‘the
paranormal.’ ”
That faith
is nowhere more evident
than
in
the U.S.S.R., which has been
beset in recent years with controversial
sensitives. One, Ninel Kulagina, was ap-
' praised as capable of causing objects to
float
in
mid-air. As Martin Gardner
notes, “She
is
a
pretty, plump, dark-
eyed little charlatan who took the stage
name of Ninel because it is Lenin spelled
backward. She
is no more a
sensitive
than
Kreskin, and
like
that
amiable
American
television
humbug,
she
is
basically
show
biz.”
Indeed,
Ninel
has been caught
cheating more
than
U.C.L.A. Psychologist Thelma Moss ex-
plores the mysteries of Kirlian photog-
raphy—pictures
believed
by some
to
show the “aura” of living things. Insert:
Kirlian photos of normal elbow (left) and
same elbow
while
experiencing
mild
electrical shock.
Approved For Release 2003/04/18
: CIA-RDP96-OO787RQQO1GOG30QO2«®'5 S"<se«t' DR. T. MOSS a KENDALL JOHNSON
CLOCKWISE FROM LlA^roVftdiFor. lg^^c2flOS/Q4/|15 A,QI/^|iBR9l$ iftOl71^RaOO^pa<?AQft02s§;l fraud
the Menninger Foundalion prepares a biolcedbaek
test for a
who duplicates psychic
feats with a combination of sleight-
yogi
on
bed
of
nails:
Ex-Astronaut
Edgar
Mitchell, who
of-hand. psychology and
theatrical gimmicks checks
set of
experienced "altered stale of consciousness"
in outer space,
"ESP" cards: Trinidadian “sensitive" performing card clair-
at
his
Institute
for
Noetic
Sciences
in
Palo
Alto,
Cal.;
voyance experiment
at The
Institute
for
Parapsychology.
BEHAVIOR
once by Soviet
Another Russian
lItJ3
,
y~fl osa fCul'esh''
ova, can “read” with her fingertips while
securely blindfolded. James Randi, an-
alyzing
photographs
of
Kuleshova,
promptly announced
that her act was
“a fraud.” To prove his point, he invit-
ed
testers
to blindfold him
with
pizza
dough, a mask and a hood. Then he pro-
ceeded to drive a car in traffic. “1 won't
tell you how
I did
it,” he says. “But
it
was not parapsychologically. It was pure
deception, just as hers was.” Such rev-
elations have not deterred the parapsy-
chologists in the U.S.S.R. or elsewhere.
They freely concede that many of their
subjects do sometimes
cheat,
but
still
may have paranormal powers.
In and out of the laboratory, many
paranormalist investigators conduct ex-
periments that mock rigorous and
log-
ical procedure. Claims are made, and
the
burden
of proof
is
shifted
to
the
doubler. Ground rules are laid down by
the
psychic
subject
and
are
all
too
eagerly accepted by his examiner. If ihe
venture
proves
unsuccessful,
a
wide
range of excuses are
proffered: an un-
believer provided hostile vibrations; the
subject was not receiving well; negative
influences
were
present;
testing
rules
were too restrictive.
It
is all reminiscent
of the
laws
in
Through
the
Looking-
Glass, where people approach objects by
walking away from them. And
it
cre-
ates an atmosphere in which even a gen-
uine paranormal subject might have a
hard time certifying his abilities.
No one has contributed more to the
paranormal explosion than Uri Gcller,
the handsome,
26-ycar-old
Israeli
for-
mer
nightclub
magician
who
seems
equally adept at telepathy, psychokine-
sis and
precognition.
“I don't want
to
spend my whole
life
in
laboratories,”
Geller recently told Timr London Cor-
respondent Lawrence Malkin. “I’ve just
done a whole year at Stanford Research
Institute [Time, March
121. Now I’ll go
on
to other countries, and
let them sec
if they know what
it is I've got.”
,
Death
Threats.
At
the
Stanford
Research
Institute
Gcller
successfully
worked most of his
repertoire of mir-
acles.
In a film made by S.R.I., Geller
picks the can containing an object from
a group of identical empty cans,
influ-
ences
laboratory
scales,
reproduces
drawings
scaled
in opaque
envelopes,
deflects a magnetometer and correctly
calls the upper face of a die in a closed
box—eight times
in eight
tries.
If Gel-
ler’s prowess with dice
is indeed para-
normal,
it raises serious and disturbing
CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT:
Psychic Uri Geller, whose reputed abil-
ity
to bend objects with
his mind has
stirred sharp
debate; ESP
test
at
the
American
Society
for
Psychical
Re-
search; Lie Detector Expert Cleve Back-
ster
with
plant
that
he
believes
can
“read”
his
thoughts;
in
psychokinesis
test, subject
tries to influence sequence
in which bulbs will light.
IT€3
RBRS6JG0787RQ(H^QOQ300Qi2s&y meets the in-
re indeed conducted
vestigators from S.R.I., he confesses that
if S.R.l.’s
tests were
with what University of Oregon Profes-
sor Ray Hyman calls “incredible slop-
piness,” then other disturbing questions
may be raised. Assigned by the Depart-
ment of Defense to report on the won-
drous happenings at S.R.I., Hyman, ac-
companied by George Lawrence, DOD
projects manager for the Advanced Re-
search
Projects Agency, caught Geller
in some outright deceptions.
Unhappily
for
Geller,
his
powers
have a tendency to vanish in the pres-
ence ol' sleight-of-hand men. On the To-
night Show, where Johnny Carson
in-
stituted
airtight
controls
at
Randi’s
suggestion, nothing that Geller attempt-
ed (during an embarrassing 20 minutes)
seemed to work. After a group of Eng-
lish magicians made plans to catch him
PSYCHOLOGIST TART WORKING ESP MACHINE
Searching for a wider kind of self.
in the act during a British tour, Gcller
abruptly canceled out, citing mysterious
“death threats.”
In
the long
run,
however,
Geller's
friends may well be more damaging to
his cause than are his detractors. This
spring the reputable
old
firm of Dou-
bleday will publish a book entitled
Uri
by Dr. Andrija Puharich, who brought
Geller to the U.S. from Israel. In a crude
mishmash of Mission: Impossible, 2001
and
the James Bond
series,
Puharich
(author of a previous volume on the psy-
chedelic effects of mushrooms) soberly
describes his adventures with Geller.
From outer space, highly intelligent
computers
called spectra communi-
cate through taped messages, which dis-
appear.
“We
can
only
talk
to
you
through Uri’s power,” says the mystical
voice. “It is a shame that for such a bril-
liant mind we cannot contact you
di-
outer-space
intelligence
directs
his
work. But
the
S.R.I.
scientists are not
taken aback. One, Russell Targ,
plac-
idly remarks, “The things you are
tell-
ing us agree very well with things that
Hal
[S.R.I. Colleague Harold
Puthofl'l
and I believe but we can't prove.” Adds
Astronaut Ed Mitchell: “Uri, you’re not
saying anything to us we don’t in some
way already sense or understand.” The
text raises some troubling questions.
Is
Puharich indeed in touch with what he
calls “my editor in the sky”? Is his ac-
count of the S.R.I, meeting as
true as
his reasonably accurate report of Uri’s
meeting a year ago with the editors of
Time? If it
is, why have the S.R.I.
sci-
entists
failed
to mention
Uri
Geller’s
contacts
with
outer
space?
Are
they
properly fearful of that most
irrefutable antidote to non-
sense:
laughter?
Or
were
they,
as
they now
claim,
merely
“humoring”
their
subject?
Almost as impressive as
Geller’s rise to fame
is the
phenomenal success of The
Secret Life of Plants (Har-
per & Row;
$8.95), a
vol-
ume
that
is unaccountably
placed
on
the
nonfiction
shelves of bookstores. The
work of two occult journal-
ists, Secret Life is an anthol-
ogy of the absurd, costumed
in
the prim gown of labo-
ratory
respectability.
In
it
are
researchers
like
Cleve
Backster, a lie-detector ex-
pert who attached
the
ter-
minals of his machines
to
plants. Behold! The vegeta-
tion reacted to his thoughts.
Most scientists have greeted
the experiments with open
skepticism—with good rea-
son. After his plants would
not respond
for
a
visiting
Canadian
plant
physiolo-
gist,
for example, Backster
offered
an
interesting
hy-
pothesis:
the
plants
“fainted”
because
they sensed
that she routinely inciner-
ated her own plants and then weighed
the ashes after her experiments.
Backster is the essence of conserva-
tism compared with the book’s more ad-
venturous
researchers. A New
Jersey
electronics buff, Pierre Paul Sauvin, at-
tached a Rube Goldbergian machine to
his plants, and then spent the weekend
with his girl friend at a place 80 miles
away. He found
that even at that dis-
tance the plants had responded
to
his
sexual relations with the girl. The tone
oscillators went “right off the top,” he
says, at the moment of orgasm.
In Japan, Ken Hashimoto, another
polygraph
expert,
discovered
that
his
cactus could count and add up
to
20.
George De La Warr, a British engineer,
insisted that young plants grew better if
their “mother” were kept
alive.
Ironi-
e«t0# IPREAO' (TOP) DON SNYDER—HOft
or Release 2003/04/18
: CIA-RDP96-00787R0001 00030002-8
eiAa
CPpffToSE; (I&ttom) henry groskinsky. opposite page! <top left) ben martin, groskinsky
BEHAVIOR
cally, the ^
R&taaSte
selves
to sormT significant
facts about
botany. Plants do respond physiological-
ly to certain sound waves. Talking to a
plant may indeed make
it healthier, be-
cause it thrives on the carbon dioxide ex-
haled by the speaker.
Many
psychics and
their followers
believe that paranormal powers may be
dependent on mysterious auras or “en-
ergy
(lows," phenomena
that they say
can be recorded by
Kirlian
photogra-
phy. The
technique, developed
in
the
late
1930s by Russian
Electronics Ex-
pert Semyon Kirlian and
his wife Va-
lentina,
involves
introducing
a
small
amount of high-voltage, high-frequency
current
into the subject and recording
the
subsequent
discharge
on
photo-
graphic film. The result is a photograph
showing
an
“energy
body”—a
weird
aura—around the plant, animal or hu-
man part being photographed.
Soon.
Kirlians claimed
that photo-
graphing a portion of a
leaf, for exam-
ple, would produce the aura of the en-
tire
leaf on
film. Some psychics claim
that in time the aura of a missing limb
might be discernible with Kirlian pho-
tography. Today the
process
is an
in-
tegral
part of paranormal exploration.
In the U.S. the leading proponent of the
2<mi<Mmt£\
Moss, who has taken more Kirlian pho-
tographs and done more experimental
work
with them than anyone
outside
Russia.
Moss,
a former Broadway
actress,
found her interest
in parapsychological
phenomena kindled
after LSD therapy.
“From the
first," she recalls, “1 intend-
ed
to specialize
in
parapsychology
be-
cause of the glimpses of psychic
phe-
nomena
1 experienced during the LSD
treatments. But
L certainly don’t feel the
need
to use drugs any more
.
.
, When
you’ve gotten the message, you hang up
the phone."
For Moss,
the message
is
that Kirlian photography clearly dem-
onstrates a human aura. “We have done
work with acupuncturists and [psychic]
healers,” she says, “and we find that the
corona of the healer becomes intense be-
fore healing, and then afterward is more
relaxed and less strong. We think we’re
looking at a transfer of energy from the
healer to the injured person.”
Others are
less
certain. Writing
in
the
Photographic
Society
of America
journal, Bill Zalud concluded, “All spec-
ulation hinges on obtaining photographs
of normal
tissue
patterns
for compar-
ative purposes and, so
far, no one has
really determined what a normal Kir-
is.” Stanford Professor
illiam
Tiller,
an
enthusiast
of
the
paranormal,
is more assured about the
technical cause of Kirlian phenomena
on
film. “What
we’re
looking
at,”
he
maintains, “is cold electron discharge.”
Sickly Tissue. Says L. Jerome Stan-
ton, author of a
forthcoming book on
auras and
Kirlian
photography:
“Per-
haps some day the technique will be a
valuable
diagnostic
tool.
Maybe
sick
people do have different ‘auras.’ But as
of now, there is no assurance that
it
is at
all useful.” Though not accusing Kirlian
researchers
of faking
effects,
Stanton
notes that the famous “phantom leaf’
is
easy to duplicate by double-exposing the
film, first with the whole leaf, again af-
ter a portion has been removed, and that
different
voltages
and
conditions
can
change the picture in incalculable ways.
“Working with advanced equipment,”
he says, “1 could produce Kirlian effects
that would astound the unsophisticated,
and that includes a lot of scientists and
physicists. Remember,
electronics and
photography arc two very complicated
A Long History
The first professional organization to
study paranormal phenomena was the
British Society
for Psychical Research,
founded in 1882. Among its membership
were prominent scholars and scientists
—men
of
unimpeachable
credentials
and
high
moral
character. They soon
discovered and enthusiastically reported
on
the
telepathic
abilities of
five
little
girls, daughters of the Rev. A.M. Creery.
The mentalist millennium was at hand.
Six
years
later,
the
girls were caught
cheating
and
shamefacedly
admitted
that they had
fooled
the
investigators.
They were the first in a long series of de-
ceivers of scientists.
The society's next major project was
an investigation of two “sensitives” from
Brighton,
G.A.
Smith
and
Douglas
Blackburn. Smith would allow himself
to be blindfolded, his ears to be plugged,
his body to be thoroughly blanketed; yet
somehow
the
thoughts
of Blackburn
reached him. This time,
it seemed, the
S.P.R. had really justified
its existence.
When Smith left the S.P.R. in
1892,
no other comparable sensitive could be
found.
Still, the members had seen the
telepathy
performed
with
their
own
eyes; the evidence was held acceptable.
It was not until 1908 that Blackburn ad-
mitted deceit. “The whole of these
al-
leged experiments were bogus," he later
wrote. The remainder of his statement
has echoed to this day: “[Our hoax
I orig-
inated in the honest desire of two youths
to show how
easily men
of
scientific
COMING OF THE FAIRIES
mind and
training
could
be
deceived
when seeking for evidence in support of
a theory they were wishful to establish.”
The American Society for Psychical
Research,
organized
with
the
help
of
Philosopher William James in
1 885, suf-
fered
similar
embarrassments.
Yet
it
pursued
its quarry with vigor. As James
had noted, "To upset the conclusion that
all crows are black, there
is no need to
seek
demonstration
that
no
crow
is
black;
it
is
sufficient
to
produce
one
white crow.” But after 25 years of read-
ing
psychic
literature and
witnessing
phenomena, James admitted that he was
“theoretically no further than
I was
at
the beginning, and I confess that at times
I have been tempted
to believe that the
EXPERIMENTER J.B. RHINE & VOLUNTEERS
Creator has eternally intended
this de-
parture of nature to remain baffling.”
Other
researchers
had
not
been
humble or uncertain. Late
in
the cen-
tury, a self-styled sensitive named Henry
Slade toured the U.S. and Europe mak-
ing objects vanish and swinging com-
pass needles without the aid of a mag-
net.
lie
was
so
convincing
that
a
German
scientist
published
a
book,
Transcendental
Physics,
devoted
to
Slade’s
accomplishments.
Again,
the
psychic millennium seemed imminent.
But in his biography, A Magician Among
the Spirits, Harry Houdini reported that
the conjurer was simply a
fraud
with
a
dazzling
technique; Slade
later con-
fessed
that
it was
indeed
all
an
act.
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TIME, MARCH 4, 1974
fields. Mix them and a!^(MR rl!Ry^p!rP r
will remain in the dark.”
The most irresponsible and odious
niche in the world of the paranormal is
occupied by
the
psychic
healers, who
cannot operate
legally
in
the U.S. but
lure
unfortunate
Americans
overseas
with claims of spectacular cures. Diag-
nosing illnesses and locating diseased or-
gans by purely psychic means, they per-
form operations by plunging their hands
through what appear
to be deep
inci-
sions to grasp and remove sickly tissue.
In the Philippines, currently the center
for psychic surgery, a number of con-
jurers use sleight of hand and buckets
of blood and animal parts to work their
wonders. Surrounded by adherents who
have been “cured,” the
ill -educated and
often
filthy surgeons perform
“opera-
tions”—slashes of the epidermis, knives
in the eye cavity, fingers in the abdomen
—sometimes painlessly and always with
great flourish.
As one witness to such “surgery” de-
scribes
it: “The healer pulled some
tis-
sue from the area of the ‘operation’
.
.
.
F.UOT EUSOFON
mi
WMc
1 MfoOTuS*
-
from Tony's hand
...
I wanted to have
valid medical tests performed on it. The
tests, conducted in Seattle, showed that
the
tissue was
‘consistent with
origin
from a small animal
.
.
. there is no ev-
idence
in any of this
tissue
to suggest
that this represents metastatic carcino-
ma from
the
breast
of the
patient.’
Tom Valentine, author of a book on per-
haps the best known of the psychic sur-
geons, Tony Agpaoa, documents the ex-
perience of a Mrs. Raymond Steinberg
of Two Rivers, Wis. Tony “made a ma-
jor production” of removing a piece of
metal and several screws that had been
surgically placed in her hip after an au-
tomobile accident. X rays later showed
that Agpaoa had removed nothing.
True
Believer.
But
the
psychics,
and those who profit from them, remain
undaunted. In a few months, the respect-
able
publishing
firm
of Thomas
Y.
Crowell will publish the story of yet an-
other psychic healer, the late great Bra-
zilian Arigo, Surgeon ofthe Rusty Knife.
The author: John Fuller, whose pro-fly-
ing-saucer books Incident at Exeter and
The Interrupted Journey were big sellers
during the uro craze of the 1960s. The
afterword
is written by Geller
Biogra-
pher Puharich, who in Uri incidentally
00787RQ003 00030002-8.
tells of ex^Stcrrestrial intelligence as-
suring him that Arigo was not hurt in his
fatal car accident in
1 97 1
: “There was no
pain. He left his body before the crash.”
No amount of demonstrable fraudu-
lence, no exposure of the fake, the ma-
nipulator, the unscrupulous, ever seems
capable of dissuading the true believer
in
paranormality. James Fadiman,
of
the Stanford School of Engineering, be-
lieves
that “most
(but
not
all)
para-
psychologist
demonstrators
are
also
frauds,” then gives the classic rationale:
“Look at it this way. You think you have
powers of clairvoyance, and finally you
become a celebrity because of it. You’re
on the stage or in an experimental
sit-
uation and sometimes your powers
fail
you. They do very often for most of these
guys. So what do they do? They cheat.”
Robert
Benchley
once
separated
people into two categories:
those who
separate people into two categories and
those who do not. Parapsychologist Ger-
trude Schmeidler of New York’s City
College is in the first category. Her stud-
ies show
that
on
the
issue
of
para-
psychology her subjects divide into be-
lieving sheep and doubting goats. The
sheep
almost
invariably
score
higher
in
tests
of paranormal
powers.
Will
the sheep ever convince the ruminating
IN EARLY ESP TEST (1940)
Perhaps parapsychology’s most gul-
lible proponent was Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle,
creator
of
the
superrationalist
detective Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle
re-
mains
the
greatest
proof
that
intelli-
gence and scruple cannot compete with
naivete and the desire to accept the par-
anormal as demonstrable fact. After the
death of his son in
the Great War, he
turned
to spiritualism
for
solace.
This
led, in time, to investigations of spirits,
and eventually to little winged creatures
in the bottoms of gardens. In his 1922
volume The Coming ofthe Fairies, Doyle
reproduced photographs of a
tiny gob-
lin and elves caught by a child's cam-
era. The pictures were manifestly staged;
the entire project made all but the blind-
TED SERIOS PROJECTING PICTURES
est
believers wince. One who did
not
was a young American botanist named
J.B.
Rhine.
After an
inspiring
Doyle
lecture on spiritualism, Rhine and
his
wife Louisa immersed themselves in lit-
erature
published
by
the
Society
for
Psychical Research. When Rhine
later
joined the
faculty of Duke University,
he began a lifelong devotion to psychic
research.
It
was
he who
coined
the
terms extrasensory perception and
psi
(for
psychic
phenomena);
it
was
he
who
gave
his
specialty
an
academic
imprimatur by compiling mountains of
statistics
about
psychic
subjects
who
could
“read”
cards
that
they
could
not sec.
From the start, Rhine was criticized
lor juggling numbers.
(Subsequent
re-
searchers have
also used
questionable
procedures, citing “negative esp” when
the number of correct guesses
fall
be-
low average and “displacement” when
subjects call the card before or after the
one they arc trying to guess.) H.L. Menc-
ken summarized the early views of the
dubious when he wrote, “In plain
lan-
guage,
Professor
Rhine
segregates
all
those persons who, in guessing the cards,
enjoy noteworthy runs of luck, and then
adduces those noteworthy runs of luck
as proof that they must possess myste-
rious powers.” Rhine tightened his lab-
oratory
conditions
in
the
1930s,
and
much of the criticism withered—but so
did his esp stars.
In
the
1960s
a
psychic
superstar
came along in the person of Ted Series,
a hard-drinking, onetime bellhop from
Chicago. Serios’
gift was definitely
off-
beat: he produced pictures inside a Po-
laroid
camera
using
nothing
but
his
mind and a
little hollow tube he called
his “gismo.” Reporters Charles Reyn-
olds and David
Eiscndrath, who
ob-
served Serios
at work
in Denver, had
little trouble constructing a device that
could be secreted inside a gismo to pro-
duce
all of Serios’
effects. The
instru-
ment contained a minuscule lens at one
end and a photographic transparency at
the other. When the device was pointed
at the camera lens and the shutter was
clicked, an image was recorded on film.
The
Reynolds-Eiscndralh
story
was
printed
in
Popular
Photography
and
many of Series’ followers were shattered.
Again the millennium was deferred.
TIME, MARCH 4, 1974
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BEHAVIOR
NATIONAL TATTLER
goats? Will
the goats ever underr
the
faith
of oApptfiQV^cp.O£
se
events have occurred.
Just
a
few
years ago what smug
Western rationalist would have accred-
ited acupuncture? Yet the ethnocentric
prejudice seemed to disappear almost at
a
stroke
when
the
Western
world
learned of James Rcston’s appendix op-
eration. The New York Times columnist
submitted
to acupuncture after surgery
on a
trip to China
in
1971; thereafter,
the unorthodox method was examined
throughout the U.S. Today acupuncture
is under intense study at several med-
ical centers. Although some of the ben-
eficial effects of “paranormal" medicine
have
been acknowledged
by Western
scientists, they are
still at
a loss to explain
it.
It was
not
long
ago
that
most
Americans attributed
the
feats of Eastern
yogis
to
clever fakery. Yet the new
Western experimentation
with biofecdback*
has
shown
skeptics
that
the
mind can indeed
control
what are normally invol-
untary
bodily
functions.
The Mcnningcr Founda-
tion
in
Topeka,
Kans.,
reports
incontrovertible
proof that subjects trained
by biofecdback can con-
trol their blood circulation
and lower the temperature
of the parts of their bod-
ies at will; migraine head-
aches
can
be
literally
wished away. The ancient
yogic
mythic
skills
sud-
denly
seem
within
the
grasp of everyone.
Is
it not possible that
thoughts—like
TV
pro-
grams—can
be
transmit-
ted from one brain to an-
other?
And
if
enough
energy can be generated
by the brain, why should
it not influence the roll of
dice? Or make a plant respond?
In an epoch when the new physics
posits black
holes
in the universe and
particles that travel faster than the speed
of light, and has already confirmed the
existence of such bizarre things as neu-
trinos that have no mass or charge, an-
timatter and quasars, why should any
phenomenon
be
assumed
impossible?
What
is wrong with Physicist Sir James
Jeans' attempt
to give coherence to an
unruly cosmos: “The universe begins to
look more and more like a great thought
than a great machine"?
The psychic adherent's reply is sim-
ple: anything is possible. But simply say-
ing that
it is so and then supporting the
contention
with shoddy
or downright
fraudulent evidence,
is not enough. Psy-
chic phenomena cannot be accepted on
live researchers. To date, those demon-
strations have not been made.
Any close examiner of psychic
in-
vestigators and reporters will find a new
meaning for Kocstlcr’s roots of coinci-
dence. A loose confederacy of parapsy-
chologists parodies the notion of the sci-
entific method. Harold PutholT, one of
the two S.R.I. investigators of Uri Gel-
ler,
is singled out in The Secret Life of
Plants as a reputable scientist who has
been experimenting with
the response,
of one chicken egg to the breaking of an-*
other. He
is also a promoter of the
bi-
zarre and controversial cult of Scientol-
ogy, which Ingo Swann, another psychic
PSYCHIC SURGEON OPERATING IN PHILIPPINES
Sometimes painlessly, always with flourish.
*A process by which one can learn
to control
in-
voluntary
bodily
functions
(such
as
heartbeat)
through
the
visual or aural monitoring of physi-
ological data.
tested by S.R.I., also practices. William
Targ, a Putnam executive, recently con-
tracted to publish Astronaut Ed Mitch-
ell’s forthcoming book, Psychic Explo-
ration. A Challenge for Science. At the
signing, Targ stated that “the real race
now between the Russians and us
is in
the area of sciences
like
LSI’.” Mitch-
ell's Institute of Noetic Sciences helped
to fund S.R.I.’s Gellcr research, which
was conducted
largely by
Puthoff and
Russell Targ, who happens to be Editor
Targ's son.
The
questionable
connections
of
many
psychic
researchers,
in
addition
to the paucity of objectively verifiable re-
sults in their work, has made
it difficult
to raise funds for research; parapsychol-
ogists barely squeak by with money from
a few foundations and gifts and encour-
agement
from
occasional
philanthro-
pists like Stewart Mott and Manhattan
Realtor John Tishman. There
is only
one academic chair on parapsychology
R000J'O&
,Gfe’O00^-$Jniverslty of Virgin-
SNShouId
the
findings prove depress-
ingTy negative,
it
is unlikely that acad-
emics or foundations would encourage
more chairs, or promote further psychic
investigations.
In a way,
it is rather a pity that the
sheep cannot get together with the goats.
At the very
least,
the paranormal
es-
tablishment has questioned the dogma,
emphasized
the ignorance and
under-
lined the arrogance of modern medicine
and
science.
Indeed, modern
doctors
have scarcely breached the frontiers of
the mind. Science has all too frequently
destroyed the layman's sense of wonder
by seeking materialistic explanations for
all phenomena.
As C.P. Snow
says:
“Scientists
re-
gard
it as a major intellectual virtue to
know what not
to think about.” Com-
plains one S.R.I. spokesman; “The so-
ciety we
live
in
doesn’t give you
per-
mission
to have psychic
abilities. That
is one reason that so much talent is sup-
pressed.” As Martin Gardner
believes,
“Modern science should indeed arouse
in
all of us a humility
before the im-
mensity of the unexplored and a toler-
ance for crazy hypotheses.”
As
for
the
parapsychologists who
make many of those hypotheses,
they
could learn the most valuable weapon
in the arsenal of the truth seeker: doubt.
One hundred and fifty years ago Charles
Lamb observed
that credulity was the
child's strength but the adult's weakness.
That observation is even more valid to-
day, when shoddy or ignorant research
is used
to lend
legitimacy
to the most
extravagant
tenets
of
the
psychic
movement,
That
is not to say that parapsychol-
ogy ought to be excluded from serious
scrutiny. Some
first-rate
minds
have
been
attracted
to
it:
Freud,
Einstein,
Jung, Edison. The paranormal may ex-
ist, against logic, against reason, against
present evidence and beyond
the stan-
dard criteria of empirical proof. Perhaps
there arc reasons why the roll of the dice
and turn of the cards sometimes appear
to obey
the
bettor’s
will.
Perhaps
the
laws of probability are often suspended.
Perhaps Geller and other magicians can
indeed
force metal
to bend merely be-
cause they will
it. Perhaps photographs
can be projected by the mind. Perhaps
plants think.
Perhaps not.
There
is only one way to
tell: by a
thorough examination of the phenom-
ena by those who do not express an a
priori belief. By those for whom proba-
bility
is not a mystique but a compre-
hensible code. By those who have noth-
ing
to
lose but
their skepticism.
Until
such examiners are allowed to play the
psychic game,
it
is
unlikely
that
the
paranormal will escape the ambiguous
utterance against it in Leviticus: “Do not
turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek
them out, to be defiled by them
.
.
.” And
that most wondrous and mysterious of
entities, the human mind,
will remain
an underdeveloped country.
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TIME, MARCH 4, 1974