Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1956-02-01

learn the technique here and
any more.
The idea of taking an unfair
advantage at poker certainly
doesn't At with the most extra
ordinary, outSide-of mature phe-
nomenon ever reliably reported
of course. that there
is no hidden 'bug" in the pro-
cedureS. Right here should
emphasize that every step taken
at Duke University seems un-
assailably honest and the pre-
cautions taken far beyond re-
quirements. There is always. OF
course. the possibility of misin-
depreciation.
Sad to say, from the poker
standpoint, so far as the tests
went they Indicated that neither
/ nor my colleague had any psi
at all.
This was a test of that phase
of psi known as precognition OF
clairvoyance. Telepathy is some
thing else again and much hard
er to demonstrate.
Uses Calculator
Miss Rhea White Of the para
psychology staff sits in front OF
q high-speed calculating machine
and performs an operation in
arithmetic which requires sew
eral minutes. For q numbers
wizard with pencil and paper it
would take a half hour,
First she has thrown three dice
and added the numbers on the
faces that turned up. This guides
her in some way to a certain page
and column of a book containing
q few hundred thousand random
numbers. Then she does such
things as multiplying two Of them
together. finding the square root
of the product, multiplying by
the square root. multiplying the
product by itself backward, then
that product by itself backward.
then deriving various square and
cube roots and a half dozen other
equally complicated calculations.
In the end she comes UP with q
number which tells her how far
down to cut an already ram
domly shufned deck of Is cards.
ALI this labor is intended to make
sure beyond all possibility Of
question that the cards actually
are arranged at random and that
the game to be played Is actu-
ally ION the square. Perhaps 1t
Is enough to say that the method
has been approved as fraud-proof
by the American Mathematical
No Proximity
The subject, in this case. was
seated in a room three doors
down the hall. He is supposed to
read the faces of all the cards
In the deck in the right order.
BY pure chance he should get
Ave right. If he gets six or seven
right in a considerable number
Of trials he is running enor-
mouSly above all possibilities Of
chance. My own score. on two
trials, was one under chance. It
had no statistical significance
whatsoever.
This. of course, was the simp-
lest sort Of experiment. 1t will be
Included in no statistics. No pre-
cautions were taken, due to my
honest face, against fraud. The
two rooms were less than 30
yards apart. ! might have had a
confederate with a telescope on
the roof of some nearby building
looking at the cards and signal
ling me in some way.
In a real test the cards and
the reader would be separated by
at least half mile. Some of the
best experiments have been over
a distance of 1000 miles. The
experimenter does not look at
the cards. nor does anybody else,
until the subject has designated
the order in which he thinks
they are arranged.
COntradicts Nature
This is one of the outstanding
nature-contradicting aspects OF
psi, as stressed in the criticisms
Of DR.. Price. Whatever force Is
involved is not in the least
attenuated by distance, as is
every other force known to man.
Nor is transmission hindered in
the least by any barrier whatso-
ever.
But there is something far
more remarkable. far more con-
Trajectory to gross common
sense" in which the Duke expert
now arel chiefly in
terested.
Certain persons with a lot of
psi can read today the order of
cards in a deck not as 1t is to-
day but as 1t will be after it has
been shufned, with all the cal
culating machine precautions. at
some time in the future. The
length of time apparently makes
no more difference than dis
lance.
DR.. Mangan now has an ex-
pertinent in progress in which a
lady on the Pacific Coast is
reading decks of cards as they
will be after they are shuffled
three months from now. The
experiments have been extra
ordinarily successful to date.
Only one thing is wrong. DR.
Mangan says. The lady almost
never reads the actual sequence
OF the cards. She is usually just