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Psychic Powers
 MYSTERIES OF THE UNKNOWN

Psychic Powers

By the Editors of Time-Life Books

TIME-LIFE BOOKS, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

 CONTENTS

Essay Other Ways of Seeing

7

CHAPTER 1

Beyond (he Five Senses

14

Essay Science and the Spirits

35

CHAPTER 2

Seeking a Science of ESP

48

Essay Mystic Powers of the Shamans

75

CHAPTER 3

Hie World of flie Psychic

82

Essay Psychics at Center Staee

103

CHAPTER 4

Pulling Psi to Work

118

Essay The Kirlian Effect

145

Acknowledgments
152

Picture Credits
152

Bibliography
153

Index
155
 Other Ways of Seeing

,n the world of everyday exis-

tence, the five senses reign, but their powers are sharply limited. We
perceive the universe in glimpses through narrow portals, acquiring
our knowledge by and touch. But what if
sight, hearing, smell, taste,
knowledge has wider gateways and thresholds 7 What if, beyond vi-
sion, humans have another way of seeing 7
All over the world, from time immemorial, some people have

been called gifted with what is known as second sight, the third eye,
the sixth sense— powers of the mind that seem to bypass the usual
sensory channels and transcend mundane reality. Shamans have
communed with their gods, saints have seen visions, oracles have
foretold the deaths of kings. And, from time to time, ordinary people
have felt a moment's slippage into the inexplicable and uncanny.
Researchers have begun trying to codify psychic experiences.
Among the categories posited are clairvoyance, or the ability to see
objects and events beyond the range of physical vision; telepathy, the
ability to read minds and transmit thoughts; precognition, the ability
to perceive future events; and retrocognition, the ability tosee into the
past. In the following pages, a scientist bears clairvoyant witness to a
distant fire, a doctor peers into a vanished past in a moment of retro-
cognition, a mother hears, telepathically, her child's inaudible cries.
Foryears, such experiences have been claimed and studied. But
they have not, as yet, been fully explained.
 fliafRagedina
Mind's Eye

Un the evening of July

19,1 759, a pleasant party was just beginning
at the home of a prominent citizen of Gote-
borg, Sweden. Suddenly, unaccountably, the
most eminent of the sixteen guests-the
famed scientist and mystic Emanuel Sweden-
borg— left and walked outside without expla-
nation. When he returned a short time later, he
was pale and shaken. A fire was raging, he
said.It had already destroyed a friend's house

and now threatened his own.

The guests exchanged startled glances. As
they all knew, Swedenborg did not live in
Goteborg, but in Stockholm. And Stockholm
was almost three hundred miles away.
The party proceeded, but Swedenborg left
the house several more times and returned to
report the blaze was still spreading. Finally, at
8:00 p m he , announced had been extin-
that it

guished—only three houses from his own.

By the next morning, a Sunday, Sweden-
borg's vision was the talk of Goteborg. Had
there really been a fire? Or was the seventy-
one-year-old's imagination running amok'
An apparent answer came the following night
when an express messenger arrived from
Stockholm with news of a great fire. Three
days after the vision, a second messenger
brought more details. They matched Sweden-
borg's account of the Dlaze and confirmed
that it had halted only three doors from his
own and had ended, just as he said, at 8:00 p m
Swedenborg was a respected engineer, in-
ventor,and author whose intellect encom-
passed sciences ranging from psychology to
zoology. When he was in his late fifties, how-
ever, he received what he regarded as a visita-
tion from God. Thereafter, he turned his full

and the
attention to theology, metaphysics,
exploration of his psychic powers, which
seemed abundant.
To many parapsychologists. Sweden-
borg's reported vision of the Stockholm fire is

an example of clairvoyance: the ability to see

psychically what the eye cannot perceive.
 Met Present on a
County Road

Dr. Edward Gibson

Moon, a country physician in England, con-
sidered himself a hardheaded man of science,
but an experience he had in the early 930s 1

shook his faith in orthodox notions of time.

One of Moon's patients was Lord Edward Car-
son, who lived on the Isle of Thanet. The front
steps of his house, Cleve Court, led to a semi-
circular driveway that opened at either end
onto a country lane. A tall hedge screened the
house from the road.
Lord Carson was very ill, and Moon saw
him daily. After one morning's visit, the physi-
cian stood at the head of the steps, deep in
thought about his patient. As he told the story
later, he was not much mindful of his sur-
roundings when he happened to glance up
toward the hedge.
But there was no hedge. Nor did a road lie
beyond where the hedge should have been.
Try as he might, Moon could not see a single
familiar landmark. There was only a muddy
track stretching across empty fields. Odder
still was the man walking up the track toward
the house. He carried a flintlock and was
wearing breeches, riding boots, a caped over-
coat,and a top hat with a narrow crown —
haberdashery long out of fashion - and he ap-
peared to belong in another century, perhaps
the late eighteenth or e<irly nineteenth.
To Moon it seemed the stranger saw him as
The visitor stopped midstride, and for a
well.
moment the two men gaped at each other.
Trying to orient himself. Moon turned to see
whether Cleve Court was still behind him. It
was, and when he turned again he found the
landscape had righted itself. The hedge and
the road were in theiraccustomed places, and
the stranger had vanished.
Some parapsychologists interpret the doc-
tor's vision as an instance of simultaneous
retrocognition and precognition. Through a
tear in the fabric of time, Moon was peering
past— retrocognition. The stranger, if
into the
indeed he saw the doctor, experienced pre-
cognition— seeing the future.
..
'*-
 An Apprehension
of Danger

Une day in 1955, five-

year-old Joicey Hurth of Cedarburg, Wiscon-
sin, came home from a birthday party to find
that her fatherand two brothers had gone to a
movie without her. The theater was only a
block and a half away, so the little girl dashed
out to join them.
Shortly after the child left, her mother, also
named Joicey, was washing dishes at the
kitchen sink when suddenly, inexplicably,
she knew her daughter had been in an acci-
dent. Without hesitation, Mrs. Joicey Hurth ran
to the telephone and dialed the theater.
"My little girl was on the way to the the-
ater," she told the woman who answered.
"
'She has had an accident. Is she badly hurt 7
"How did you know?" stammered the con-
fused theater employee "It — the accident-
just happened."

Indeed, it turned out that the child, in rush-

ing to join her father and brothers, had run
into the path of a moving car just outside the
movie house. After being hit, she had bounced
off a fender and landed on the pavement, but
she was not badly hurt.
"I did not see or have a mental image of a
car hitting Joicey," the mother rec illed. "bull
did have the impression so strongly that I did
"
not question it or hesitate to call the theater
Recounting the episode some years later,

the daughter said that just alter she was hit

by the car she ran to the side of the street,

crying and calling out in her mind, "Mama.
Mama. Mama!" She was. she believed,
"screaming inaudibly."
Since Mrs. Hurth neither heard nor saw
anything that could have alerted her to her
daughter's mishap, parapsychologists study-
ing the case attributed her knowledge of it to
telepathy— direct mind-to-mind communica-
tion occurring without the five senses.
 CHAPTER 1

Beyond (he Five Senses

fSamuel Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, had been content to spend his life
as a riverboatman, a remarkable episode in psychic lore would have been lost
to history. But his often-autobiographical writings in later years as the author
Mark Twain made some of his most personal thoughts public. Among them is

the story of a dream he had about his younger brother Henry in 1 858.

At that time, Sam Clemens was an apprentice pilot on the steamboat

Pennsylvania, which plied the Mississippi River between New Orleans and St.

Louis. Henry, a likable and handsome lad of about twenty, was a clerk on the
same vessel. One night, when the Pennsylvania was berthed in St. Louis, Henry
stayed on the ship while his older brother lodged at a boardinghouse on shore.
Sam dreamed that he saw a metal coffin resting on two chairs in the sitting

room, and in the coffin the laid-out body of Henry. On Henry's chest was a
bouquet of white flowers with a single crimson flower in the center.

The vision was so when Sam awoke in the morning he did not
vivid that

realize he had been dreaming. "1 dressed and moved toward that door," he
wrote in his autobiography, "thinking that would go 1 in there and have a look
at it, but changed
1 my mind. I thought could not yet bear to meet
I my mother.
He went out on the street and walked about a block. And then: "It suddenly
flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this-it was only a dream."
He told a sister what he had dreamed, but he mentioned nothing of it to

Henry on their trip downriver together. In New Orleans, Sam was transferred to
the steamboat Lacey which was to head back upriver two days after the Penn-
sylvania. On the night before Henry sailed, Sam got to talking about disasters on
the river and what to do in case of accident. "Don't lose your head," he advised
his brother. "The passengers will do that !" What Henry should do, he said, was
to help the women and children into the lifeboat and then swim to shore him-
self. On that note the brothers parted, and hours later the Pennsylvania sailed
Two or three days later, when Sam and the Lacey reached Greenville,
Mississippi, they were greeted at the landing with grim news: "The Pennsylvania
is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island! One hundred and fifty lives
lost!" According to that first report, Henry was not among the casualties. But
the news got worse as the Lacey moved from port to port upriver. By the time
Sam reached Memphis he knew that four of the Pennsylvania's have never had an experience as searing as Sam Clemens's.
eight boilers had exploded, that many of the passengers and But almost everyone has had experiences that are cause for
crew had been killed outright, and that others had been scald- some slight wonder. Someone thinks of a long-lost friend, and
ed almost to the point of death. Henry was one of the latter. moments later that person calls on the telephone. A young
Sam found his brother in Memphis and stayed with him man suddenly senses that his favorite uncle is dead, and a
until he died. A kind citizen of the city then took Sam in and telegram arrives with the bad news. A mother writing to her
gave him a bed. Exhausted with grief and strain, he fell into a daughter feels a sharp pain in her writing hand, while at the
profound sleep. When he woke, he went to the place where same time her daughter burns her right hand on the stove. A
Henry's body lay. It was in a room with several other victims of woman dreams of a disaster at sea, and two days later a great
the explosion, all awaiting burial services. liner sinks with hundreds of passengers. A little girl refuses to
The coffins provided by the city were of plain white get on a school bus because she thinks something terrible is

pine -except for Henry's. His youth and beauty had appealed going to happen to it, and the bus gets hit at a railroad cross-
to several ladies of Memphis, who had collected sixty dollars to ing. How did she know? She just "knew."
buy him a special metal coffin. Sam Clemens saw his brother It is of course possible to attribute any of these and thou-
lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream: in an open sands of similar events to coincidence. Considering how often
metal coffin, resting on two chairs. About the only item from we dream or sense or just "know" things that do not occur,
his dream was missing was the bouquet of flowers. As he
that coincidence no doubt is sometimes the likeliest explanation.
stood there looking on, an elderly woman entered the room And yet, so many instances of apparent knowledge have ac-
with a large bouquet of white flowers- in the center of which cumulated throughout history— some of them very difficult to

was tucked a single red rose— and placed the explain away as simple quirks of fate-that
bouquet on the dead man's chest. In the millions of people have come to believe

most awful sense, Sam's dream had humans possess more than five
come true. Most people senses. Some additional faculty,

15
they maintain, enables a person to sense an occurrence be- danger that is creeping up on an unsuspecting loved one.
fore it has happened, or apprehend what is in someone else's The third type of ESP is precognition, the knowing of
mind, or be aware of an event taking place far away. This something in advance of its happening-whether in a dream
faculty permits a glimpse into another plane of time or space, such as Mark Twain's or in a waking state, as, for example, the
unreachable by the ordinary senses of hearing, seeing, touch- December 969 prophecy of psychic Malcolm Bessent of Lon-
1

ing, tasting, or smelling. don. "Starting with 1972-73," he said, "it will be a crucial year
for the U.S.A. Water everywhere, resulting in social upheaval,
In ancient times, people spoke of prophecies and auguries anarchy, and political confusion. The people will be looking
and miracles. In our more rational age, such things tend to be for a new leader, but none forthcoming.
'

' Psychics, who often

lumped under the prosaic-sounding heading of extrasensory interpret such predictions broadly, see in this statement a fore-

perception, defined as the apparent reception of information telling of the Watergate scandal, which preoccupied the
through means other than the known sensory channels. The American public for two years beginning in 1 972. Literal flood
experiencing individual is said to be psychic. did not occur and anarchy is an overstatement; but the en-
Three types of alleged extrasensory perception (ESP) are trance of the word "Watergate" into the language to stand for

most commonly studied. The most familiar is telepathy, or the political upheaval that led to President Richard Nixon'sexit
mind reading, which is the transference of thoughts from one from office speaks for itself.

person to another without the use of words. Telepathy is said All ESP phenomena, because they seem beyond the lim-
to occur most often with people -such as identical twins— its of our present understanding, are said to be paranormal;
who are very close to each other emotionally serious investigators describe their research field as the
Clairvoyance, or second sight, is an science of parapsychology.
awareness of distant objects and events Many scientists and other skeptics scoff at ESP
In its most vivid manifestation it may research as an extension of old-fashioned
involve a prolonged vision of a fire or
murder taking place a great dis-

tance away; more often, it is a

quick mental picture of a
train wreck or the con-
tents of a sealed en-
velope or some
A physical resem-
blance between the
young Samuel Clemens
and his brother Henry
(background) may have
been accompanied by a
psychic bond. Clemens,
lata- famed as Mark
Twain, foresaw
his brother's
death in a
dream.
spiritualism — the alleged communicating, through mediums, At the specified time, the king was boiling up a lamb and
with the spirits of the dead. Debate continues to rage over tortoise stew in a brass pot, an activity that could scarcely
whether parapsychology is a true science, a so-called spiritual have been guessed at through any normal sense. Satisfied that
science, or no science at all. At the same time, the human he had found a reliable clairvoyant, Croesus sounded out the
belief in psychic powers has been with us always, and it re- Delphic oracle regarding his plans for war. The oracle an-
mains strong. Surveys such as Gallup polls, academic ques- nounced that a great army would be defeated, and again the
tionnaires of students and general populations, and random king was satisfied. Regrettably, he had neglected to ask which
national samplings by various magazines have consistently army would be the loser, and it turned out to be his own.
shown an acceptance of the reality of some psychic phenom- was on
ena. Often that acceptance is based on personal experience.
According to a recent national survey, 67 percent of adult
When Socrates trial

against charges of heresy, his guiding voice

silent. "How do I
and defending himself

explain this?" Socrates asked

was

Americans believe they have experienced ESP. The same rhetorically. "Let me tell you: regard as ap- I it

survey indicated that close to 20 million Americans have un- proval of what am saying. The customary sign
I

dergone profound psychic experiences. It is often said that would surely have opposed me, were going toward evil rather I

statistics can be made to prove anything. But there are so than good. My approaching end is not happening by chance. I

many tantalizing indications of something beyond the edge of see quite clearly that to die, and thus to be released, will be
everyday understanding that it seems unreasonable to brush better for me; and therefore the oracle has given me no sign."
them all aside as mere fantasy or hallucination or superstition. So Socrates willingly drank poisonous hemlock, convinced
that his prescribed death was ordained by a greater power.
People with what appear to be special gifts have lived in every About 2,000 years later, in the Middle Ages, Joan of Arc,
age, and sometimes they have had great influence on the the peasant girl of Orleans, claimed to hear inner voices that
course of history. In ancient Greece, for example, oracles were told her she was divinely appointed to rout the English from
sought out in times of crisis. Not all oracles were seen as equal, French soil and seat the Dauphin— or crown prince— on the
and one truth seeker— Croesus, king of Lydia from 560 to 546 throne. The perceptions and predictions she revealed in the

b.c. -put several to a test before making a choice. course of her short life were as astoundingly accurate as her
Croesus wanted to make war on a neighbor, but not campaign was brilliant. The English did withdraw, the Dau-
without ascertaining the results ahead of time. According to phin did ascend the throne. In addition, Joan foretold her own
the historian Herodotus, he sent a messenger to each of seven imprisonment and subsequent death, saying repeatedly that

highly regarded oracles with instructions that on the 1 00th day she would "last but one year or a little more."
after departing Lydia they should ask their respective oracles a In more recent times, any number of well-known fig-

question: "What is the King of Lydia doing today?" He did not, ures—the Italian revolutionary patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, the
however, tell his envoys what he planned to be doing at that musicians Charles Camille Saint-Saens and Robert Schu-
time. The messengers duly asked the question and brought mann, and the inventor Thomas Edison, to name just a few-
their answers back to Croesus. Five of the oracles were no- have experienced psychic episodes. Abraham Lincoln, too,

where near the mark. The one at Amphiaraus came close but reported paranormal experiences. He believed in omens. Ac-
not close enough. And the oracle of Apollo at Delphi answered cording to his close friend and biographer Ward H. Lamon,
in verse even before being asked the question. Said the oracle, certain signs assured him that he would rise to power and
chewing mulberry leaves and inhaling volcanic fumes: greatness yet "would be suddenly cut off at the height of his
Lo, on my sense there striketh the smell of a shell- career and the fullness of his fame." Soon after his election as
covered tortoise, president in 1860, he looked into a mirror and saw a double

Boiling now on a fire, with the flesh of a lamb in a image of himself. He took it as an image of the future and
caldron— understood it to mean that he would be elected to a second
Brass is the vessel below, and brass the cover term but would die before the end of it. After the Cleveland

above it. Plain Dealer published a story about the president's interest in

17
psychic matters, someone asked Lincoln if the account was
true. "The only falsehood in the statement," he replied, "is that

the half of it has not been told. This article does not begin to tell
the wonderful things I have witnessed."
One he had yet to witness was a precognitive dream,
which he later related to Lamon "in a melancholy, meditative

mood." In the dream, said Lincoln, he had heard the sound of

numbers of people weeping and sobbing as if their hearts

would break. He could not see the mourners, so he followed

the sound through the White House until he arrived at the East
Room. "There," according to his account to Lamon, "was a Saint Joan's Voices
sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque on which rest-
A special kind of clairvoyance is called clairaudience
ed a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were hearing things not perceptible in the ordinary way Per
stationed soldiers who were actingasguards." Mourners wept haps history's most famous clairaudient was loan ol
and gazed upon the corpse, whose face was covered. " 'Who Arc, depicted above in Antonin Mercies 906 sculpture at 1

the Instilut Jeanne D'Arc in Orleans, France.

is dead in the White House?' demanded of the
I soldiers. 'The
A medieval peasant, Joan lived in a world far less visu
"
president,' was the answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' al than ours. Sound regulated her rural existence She
As every American schoolchild knows, Lincoln was shot awoke to a rooster's was summoned to Mass
crowing, by

early in his second term by the actor John Wilkes Booth at church bells, learned news from travelers tales Thus it

seems natural that what she regarded as divine guidance

Ford's Theatre in Washington. Less widely known is the fact
came to her in voices.
that the theater party that night was smaller than had been Joan said she lirst heard the voices when she was thir-

anticipated because someone else had a premonition, too. teen. They belonged, she said, to Saints Michael, Mar
garet, and Catherine and carried messages from God. di-
April 13, 1865, was a day of great joy and celebration in
recting her destiny and foretelling her future Foi
Washington. General Ulysses S. Grant had accepted the sur- example, they said she would lead an army to lift the Eng-
render of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox a lish siege ol Orleans in the spring of 429 and would 1

few days before, ending the Civil War, and was enjoying a be wounded in the battle. The predictions came Hue
The voices even assigned her a sword It would be
brilliant reception given in his honor in the capital. His wife
found buried near the altar ol the Church of Saint Cather
Julia took much pleasure in the festivities.
ine al ierbois, they said. Us blade would be covered
I

The next day, however, Mrs. Grant awoke with the sense with rust, but cleaning would reveal live crosses inscribed
that she and her husband and child must leave Washington on it. At Joan's request, priests ol the village church un-
earthed the sword. It was rusty, but when the priests
immediately and return to their home in Burlington, New Jer- cleaned it, gleamed forth
the live crosses
sey. She begged Grant to take them away at once. The general In 1431, the English had Joan IriedbyanecclcMastkal

had appointments that he could not break, but he promised to court, which convicted her of witchcraft and heresy

leave as soon as possible. Shortly before her execution, she told her inquisitors ol
another prophecy from her voices: "Have no care tor
As the day wore on, Julia Grant's sense of urgency in-
martyrdom: in the end thou shall come to Paradise
creased. At noon a messenger came to the door of her hotel Alnn .si live hundred years alter burning her at the
room and said: "Mrs. Lincoln sendsme, Madam, with her com- slake, the Church declared Joan a saint.
pliments, to say she will call for you at exactly eight o'clock to
go to the theater."

18
19
 Mrs. Grant found the man's appearance strange, dis- he walked past the near-side door, which had been opened so
liked his manner, and thought his message peremptory. "You that he might occupy his usual seat. He opened the far-side

may return with my compliments to Mrs. Lincoln," she replied, door himself, climbed in, and gave instructions to depart.

"and say regret that as General Grant and intend leaving the
1 I When the car had driven several blocks, a bomb exploded
city this afternoon, we will not, therefore, be here to accompa- close to the car and lifted it so precariously onto two wheels

ny the President and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater." The man that it almost rolled over. Then it righted itself, apparently be-

persisted: "Madam, the papers announce that General Grant cause of the strategically placed weight of the substantial
will be with the President tonight at the theater.
'

' But Mrs. Grant prime minister. Later, asked by his wife why he had chosen to
did not care what the papers said. She felt a growing sense that sit on the other side of the car, Churchill said at first that he did
something sinister was about to befall her husband, and she not know. Then he added: "Of course know. Something said 1

ordered the messenger to deliver her regrets. When he had left, 'Stop!' before I reached the car door held open for me. It then

she sent one imploring note after another to General Grant, appeared to me that was told was meant to open the door on
I I

saying that they must not go to the theater and entreating him the other side and get in and sit there-and that's what I did."

to leave for Burlington that evening. At length the general sent In other words, he just "knew."
word back to her that he would make every effort to be on time Churchill made no known attempt to investigate his own
for the evening train. intuitions. But some supposed psychics, and persons close to
"I am glad I am going away tonight," Mrs. Grant said psychics, have gone to great pains to investigate such phe-
cryptically to a friend. "Do you know, believe there will be an
I nomena. The novelist Upton Sinclair did -perhaps surprising-
outbreak tonight or soon. I just feel it." ly, since more than anything else, he was known as a skeptic
The Grants had reached Philadelphia when they heard and a muckraker. He was aware, too, that there were many
the news of the assassination. They learned later that not only cheats and frauds in the field of psychic phenomena. Yet he
had the general been expecte- 1

to sit in Lincoln's theater box knew that he himself was not a fraud, and experiences he
but that he was on the assassin's list of intended victims. shared with his wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, known as Craig,
It is not unusual for statesmen to be guided by their own convinced him that there are levels of the human mind that are
intuition or the intuitive powers of others. Throughout his life, barely tapped. "I say it with ail the emphasis I can give to
and particularly in wartime, Winston Churchill operated on words," he wrote. "There is another and supernormal way of
premonitions that went far beyond hunches. One evening getting knowledge." In his book Mental Radio, published in
during the Luftwaffe assault on London, the prime minister 1930, Sinclair described Craig's psychic talents and the tele-

was hosting Downing Street when the

a dinner at No. 10 pathic experiments they undertook together.
nightly air raid began. So commonplace was the occurrence usual procedure was for Upton, alone in his study
that no one thought to interrupt the party— except Churchill, Their
with the door shut, to draw a picture of anything that
who suddenly rose from the table and went into the kitchen. came into his head, and for Craig, in another room
"Put dinner on a hotplate in the dining room," he instructed several doors away, to attempt to receive the image
the staff and then ordered them all down to the bomb shelter. and draw it. In three years, Craig produced 290 draw-
He rejoined his guests and proceeded with the meal. A few ings of such projected images as trees, stars, animals, hats, or
minutes later, a bomb fell on the back of the house, obliterat- whatever happened to pop into her husband's head. Once,
ing the kitchen but missing staff and diners altogether. when they varied the procedure, she received a mental image
On another occasion, Churchill visited an antiaircraft from her brother-in-law, forty miles away. He drew a simple
battery during a raid. When he returned to his waiting staff car. object selected at random, and she took paper and pencil and

20
wrote down the date and the following words: "Saw a table lished himself as a pioneer in the psychoanalytic movement
fork. Nothing else." A day or two later, the drawing and the founded by Freud. Years later Freud was alleged to have said
words were compared, and the drawing made by her brother- that if he could live his life over he would go into psychical
in-law was indeed that of a solitary table fork. research, but in 1909, when Jung asked him his opinion of
Of the 290 drawings, Sinclair rated sixty-five totally suc- parapsychology, Freud replied: "Bosh." Nevertheless, Jung
cessful. Another 155 were partial successes: They contained continued to take paranormal events very seriously.
some elements recognizable from the original drawings. The in time, developed the theory that he called the col-

remaining seventy he ranked as failures. On any mathemat- Jung, lective unconscious. He had noticed, while working with
ical scale of chance, the success rate of these unscientific but his patients, that certain symbols and motifs-such as
earnest experiments may be accounted extraordinary. the wise old father figure and the evil serpent or dragon
In defining what telepathy meant to him and his wife, occurred and recurred in their imagery and belief sys-
Sinclair said: "It seems to indicate a common substratum tems. These same themes, he realized, appeared repeatedly in
of mind, underlying our individual minds, and which we dreams and in the folklore and myths of many cultures. There
can learn to tap. We are apparently getting hints of a cos- seemed, in short, to be a common symbolism where no com-
mic consciousness, or cosmic unconsciousness: some kind of mon denominator was apparent— none, that is, but the hu-
mind common to us all, and which we can bring
stuff which is man psyche. The universality of the symbols led Jung to hy-
into our individual consciousness. Why is it not sensible pothesize a reservoir of mind matter, consisting of certain key
to think that there may be a universal mind-stuff, just as elements of the unconscious, that exists not only in humans
there is a universal body-stuff, of which we are made, and but in some sort of continuum beyond the confines of time and
to which we return?" space -which the unconscious mind is able to tap. In this
framework, he suggested, virtually all aspects of psychic ex-

Upton Sinclair may or may not have been familiar with the perience could be explained, from odd coincidences and clair-
work of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, whose Psycholo- voyance to divination systems such as Tarot cards.
gy ofthe Unconscious was published in 1 9 1 6. But he appears to
have been groping toward a concept that Jung expressed with A rumbling from the unconscious might have been behind a
considerably more sophistication— and after infinitely more momentous incident in the life of Henryjames the elder, father
disciplined research. Jung came to psychology through a life- of William the philosopher-psychologist and Henry the novel-
long exposure to the paranormal, which was accepted as nor- who were babies at the time. One evening in 844 the elder
ist, 1

mal in his family. His mother kept a diary of premonitions and James— a peripatetic American theologian -was relaxing by
what she called odd coincidences, and his grandmother was the fireplace of a rented house near Windsor Forest in England
known in the family for having second sight. When Carl was a when he was gripped by a sudden and inexplicable fear: "A
student considering a career in surgery, a cousin developed perfectly insane and abject terror," he wrote, "without osten-
the ability to enter trances in which she said she was commu- sible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed
nicating with unknown entities. Jung began a lengthy study of imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me
the young woman and her circle, ultimately producing a doc- within the precincts of the room, and raying out from this fetid
toral dissertation on the psychology of the medium. With that, personality influences fatal to life. " The experience lasted for a
Jung found his calling and the world lost a surgeon. full hour, or so it seemed, and left James in a state of "almost
By 907, when he met Sigmund Freud, Jung had already
1 helpless infancy." For years afterward he was dogged by the

published major works on the nature of psychosis and estab- memory and frequently spoke of it to his children.

21
 v
'

In a dream ofhis own death, Abraham Lincoln stood at the foot of a coffin in the White House and saw a shrouded corpse. Wht

22
ie asked who had died, a soldier among the shadowy mourners answered: "The president. He was killed by an assassin.

23
Under the lasting shadow of his father's terror, William James
grew manhood with a profound interest in the strange
to

workings of the human mind. He became convinced that psy-

chic sources supplied "knowledge that cannot be traced to the
ordinary sources of information." He sought enlightenment Upton Sinclair's labeled
through trance mediums because he believed that sincere sketch of an ax was drawn and
described by his wife after
practitioners of the medium's art possessed powers beyond her supposed telepathic percep-
tion of it. She claimed to see
the normal senses: specifically, the powers of thought trans-
a "letter A with something long
ference and clairvoyance. How these channels of perception about it" but interpreted the
ax itself as a "key or sword" wit
worked and what source of information they tapped baffled
a similar shape.
him. The closest he could come to an understanding of extra-
sensory perceptions was that they were indicative of "a con-

tinuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individ-

uality builds but individual fences, and into which our several
minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir." In this, he
was not far from the later speculations of Sinclair and Jung.
them, however, William James became a leader
Unlike
in the scientific study of psychic phenomena. His in-

terest in objective investigation was sparked by a t^L. fay «y^^~

meeting in 1883 with philosopher Henry Sidgwick,
first president of the Society for Psychical Research.
The SPR was founded in London in 1 882 by a group of promi-
nent individuals. In addition to Sidgwick, its members includ-
ed the physicists Sir William Barrett, Sir William Crookes, and
Sir Oliver Lodge, and philosophers Frederic W. H. Myers and
Edmund Gurney. These and other members with equally im-
peccable credentials set themselves a lofty task: to investigate

"the large body of debateable phenomena" consisting of te-

lepathy, clairvoyance, hypnotism and mesmeric trance, ap-
paritions, and hauntings, as well as "the various physical
phenomena commonly called Spiritualistic," and attempt to

rationalize them in terms of both science and religion. The

program much interested Wi'iiam James, who by then was
one of the most eminent members of the Harvard faculty. In

1 885, he and several other psychologists founded the Ameri-

can Society for Psychical Research in Boston, a group that
concentrated on studying the claims of various mediums.
The establishment of these two organizations marked a
turning point in parapsychology: Their members were re-

Her husband's rendering ofa

butterfly (above) emerged only
sketchily in Mary Craig's ver-
sions (right), although Sinclair
himselfsaid she got the
wings "remarkably well. " The
roundfigure below her main
drawing appears to be a detail of
her larger sketch

24
 Sinclair drew a volcano
(right); hiswife produced a
similarpicture but
called it an upside-down
beetle. She sometimes
seemed to perceive a shape
^f< correctly but miscon-
strue its sense.

"A diamond set in a stick" was Sin-,

clair'sdescription of the above drawing.
Hiswife transmuted it into a haloed
Charlie Chaplin —with whom, she knew,
Sinclair had just had lunch. Sup-
posedly, her awareness of this event
skewed her telepathic vision.

Mary Craig sits at a

writing desk. She helped
Doorway io (he her husband compose
the book Mental Radio.
Third Mind
Mary Craig, wife of the novelist Upton
Sinclair, believed she had telepathic
powers, and in the 920s she and her
1

husband set out to test them. He would

draw pictures and try to transmit
them to her mentally; she would draw
the image she received. Some exam-
ples, from Sinclair's book Mental Radio,
are shown here.
She believed that while some people
are especially gifted, psychic talent
can be cultivated by anyone. She recom-
mended a method that combines in-

tense concentration with relaxation. The

concentration involves clearing the
mind by focusing on a single mental pic-
ture. Doing this successfully, she said,

produces an almost sleeplike relaxation

that is conducive to telepathic recep-
tion. The method also requires autosug-
gestion—consciously carrying into
the relaxed state a reminder that the sub-
conscious should be ready to receive
mental transmissions.
Although enlisting the subcon-
scious is necessary, she said, that part of
the mind is not the source of psychic
powers. Rather, such powers flow from a
so-called third mind or deep mind be-
yond the conscious and subconscious.
 spected scientists who aimed the mark that observers believed they might well have been
not to prove the truth of medi- witnessing telepathy at work.
ums and spiritualism, but to Almost thirty years after the demonstrations, Blackburn
study the paranormal and see charged that the investigators had in fact witnessed some-
if they could explain it. Unfor- thing quite different from telepathy. In two articles, Confes-

tunately, the investigators in sions of a Famous Medium and Confessions of a Telepa-

both groups were for the most thist, he asserted that he and his partner had deceived the SPR
part amateurs in psychic re- by exchanging subtle signals. Blackburn claimed to have
search; for all their expertise been astonished by the inability of the society members to
in their own disciplines, they perceive and evaluate the evidence that was placed right be-
hardly knew how to study so fore their eyes. He wrote: "In describing one of my 'experi-

elusive a subject as paranor- ments, 'they say emphatically, 'In no case did B. touch S., even
mal phenomena. Right from in the slightest manner.' touched him eight times, that being
I

Sigmund Freud be- the start, the society faced diffi- the only way in which our code
lieved that psychic re- culties in separating truth from was then worked
search is a legitimate
hoax. In 1882, the year of its "Itisbutrighttoexplain,"
scientific pursuit but was
founding in London, the British he added, "that at this period
wary of linking him-
self with what he had SPR undertook to examine a neither of us knew or realized
once called the thought-reading act that was the scientific standing and ear-
"black tide of mud of oc-
popular at the seaside resort of nest motive of the gentlemen
cultism." Privately,
the founder of psy- Brighton. The performers were who had approached us. We
choanalysis was fas a journalist named Douglas saw in them only a superior
cinated by the uncanny Blackburn and a nineteen- type of the spiritualistic cranks
and sometimes prone
to mystical thinking. In
year-old hypnotist named by whom we were daily pes-

1905, he saw a man G. A. Smith. The SPR invited tered. Smith and I were genu-
who looked like himself the pair to London for a pri- inely amused, and felt it our
and took the incident
vate demonstration. duty to show how utterly in-
as an omen of his own
death. He went on to
The team of Smith and competent were these 'scien- Although he kept an
live until 1939. Blackburn obliged, not merely tific investigators.' Our plan open mind, Albert Ein-
stein considered te-
for one exhibition but for a long was to bamboozle them thor-
lepathy unlikely because
series of experiments during which Smith, as the message re- oughly." In his articles, Black- it seemed to defy
cipient, was virtually encapsulated in blindfolds, earplugs, burn explained how they oper- physics. Para-
and blankets while Blackburn, the sender, paced the room ated. Smith sat at a table psychologists
claimed distance be-
before the eyes of the SPR investigators and appeared to be enshrouded in his usual mum- tween subjects did
concentrating on transmitting a drawing, a number, or some mylike garb, deaf and blind to not affect their telepathic
other image supplied to him by the researchers. The results, as the eating under success For Einstein,
published in the society's journal, were amazing. Sometimes this contradicted the ob-
two very heavy blankets.
servation that forces
the resemblance between the drawings showed no mental Across the room, one of the decline over distance.
connection at all, but Smith's responses were often so close to SPR members showed Black-

26
 burn a drawing that he was to telepathize to "the brain be- tific world to accept," Upton
neath the blankets." Blackburn, keeping well away from Sinclair wrote, "is cheating."
Smith, paced the room and studied the drawing, openly copy- But he pointed out in his book
ing it several times in order to fix it in his brain. He also drew Mental Radio, "there is no pow-
the design secretly on a cigarette paper. er of man which may not and
"By this time I was fairly expert at palming," Blackburn will not be abused. In spite of
wrote, "and had no difficulty while pacing the room collecting all fraud, I am convinced that
'rapports' in transferring the cigarette paper to the tube of the there are thousands of genuine
brass protector on the pencil 1 was using. conveyed to Smith
1 clairvoyants and psychics."
the agreed signal that I was ready by stumbling against the No one denies that fraud
edge of the thick rug near his chair. Next instant he exclaimed, occurs in this as in other fields.

'1 have it.' His right hand came from beneath the blanket, say- Still, the fact remains that
ing, according to the arrangement, 'Where's my pencil?' Im- seemingly inexplicable things
mediately placed mine on the table. He took it, and a long and
I do happen — and they often
Renowned anthro-
^^anxious pause ensued." pologist Margaret Mead
happen to a good many people
^^^ uring that pause, Smith peeked at the drawing by was a strong propo- at once. On occasion, head-
H ^ the dim light of a phosphorescent stone hidden un- nent of psi research; she line-making disasters have
H ^| der his blanket. He copied it on a piece of paper
said she had ob-
been prophesied by not just
H W while Blackburn sat ten feet away, to all appear- cial
served evidence of "spe-
supernatural one person but by many — psy-
^^fc^r ances exhausted with the effort of his transmission. powers" in primitive cul- chics and everyday citizens,
When Smith threw off his eye bandage and his blankets five tures. Risking scorn adultsandchildren, the victims
from many fellow scien-
minutes later, he triumphantly produced a drawing that was
tists, she helped per-
themselves, and those who
incredibly like the original, right down to the scale. "It was a suade the American As- cared about them. Two nota-
splendid copy," Blackburn wrote. sociation for the ble episodes of alleged mass
It also was a splendid trick, which he said had been Advancement of Science ESP, each involving a major
to admit the Parapsy-
pulled only to demonstrate the incompetence of the SPR inves- catastrophe, are particularly
chological Association
tigators—except that the deception was not revealed until the as an affiliate. compelling. Oddly enough,
principal figures in the SPR were dead and unable to defend two fiction writers were
themselves. Blackburn had mistakenly believed that Smith among those predicting with remarkable accuracy - a
was also dead. However, the very-much-alive Smith respond- monumental shipwreck. The first was an English journalist by
ed to Blackburn's confession of 9 1 1 1 with an emphatic denial the name of W. T. Stead, who wrote a fanciful account of the
that he and his partner had ever cheated. "It was a bona fide sinking of a great ocean liner in the mid-Atlantic for the Pall
experiment," Smith insisted, "and the successful result was Mall Gazette in the 1 880s. His tale, he said, was intended to

either due to chance or telepathy. think I it was most unlikely prod steamship companies into providing the vessels they
that it was due to chance." manufactured with all possible safety measures, among them
Like most disputes over which of two parties is telling the adequate numbers of lifeboats. At the end of his fable of disas-
truth, this one was never resolved. Skeptics, of course, think it ter, he warned: "This is exactly what might take place, and
highly improbable that the results were due to telepathy. 'The
' what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats."

factor which makes psychic phenomena so hard for the scien- In 1 892, Stead wrote another article about a shipwreck,

27
From her fatal maiden voyage in 1912 have been coincidental. Classical literature merchant seaman. Later, he wrote some two
(above) to discovery of her ocean grave in was better known to readers in Robertson's hundred seafaring yarns for American and
1985 (right), the Titanic has fascinated be- time than now, so most people would have English periodicals.
lievers in precognition. In particular, they recognized Titan as one of a giant race of A favorite nineteenth-century literary
have pointed to the similarities between the Greek gods. The word had long connoted theme was society's technological arro
real Titanic and a fictional ship, the Titan, power and size, and it was singularly apt gance. Such books as Mary Shelley's I nm
whose sinking was chronicled in the 1898 for a mighty ship. kenstein. in which a doctor trying to create
novel Futility. Believers conclude that author Technical details, including the water- life winds up making a monster, were
Morgan Robertson had seen a prophetic vi- tightcompartments that supposedly made among the most popular of the time Robert
sion of the Titanic disaster fourteen years the Titanand the Titanic unsinkable, would son adapted the theme to shipbuilders, who.
before the fact. have posed no problem for Robertson. He in their race to produce ever biggei and last
Certainly, the similarities are uncanny: knew ships. Robertson first went to sea er vessels, gave short shrill to such praclk al
the names of the ships, their designations as as a cabin boy. He spent ten years as a safety precautions as providing adequate
unsinkable and the largest vessels afloat! numbers of lifeboats For the sake ol drama,
their collisions with icebergs during April Titan Titanu it made good literary sense to Robertson to

voyages, the high loss of life because each make his ship the largest afloal
Length 800 feel 882 5 feet
carried too few lifeboats. There were also Collisions between boats and icebergs in
Displacement tonnage 45,000 66,000
technical similarities (chart, right). the North Atlantic werecommonplai e at the
But do these commonalities pn i Hers 3 .1 time that Robertson wrote/ 'utility and usual
Robertson foresaw the Titanic tragedy? Oris ly happened in the spring, when icebergs
2 2
another explanation possible? drifted south. Thus April was a plausible
3.000 i. 000
Skeptics observe that the names could month for a fictional sea disaster
*4
mere twenty lifeboats- with room for no more than l,178peo-
ple. But only about 700 were able to scramble into them before

the boats were lowered into the sea. W. T. Stead, splashing

hopelessly around in the water among hundredsof others who

were struggling and screaming for help, may or may not have
had a chance to remember his own warning about what
would occur if liners were sent to sea with a shortage of boats.
He did not survive to tell.

No one who did survive would ever forget what one de-
scribed as "the agonizing cries of death from over a thousand
throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the
terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in

the last throes of drowning" -exactly the scene of horror that

had been predicted. In all, more than 1 ,500 lives were lost.

In the decades following the sinking of the supposedly

unsinkable ship, many investigators attempted to analyze the
multiplicity of premonitions. Discarding all vague forebodings
and after-the-fact claims of prescience, at least nineteen
impressive cases of precognition through dreams, trances, vi-

sions, and voices remained. To be sure, skeptics offered non-

psychic explanations for such seeming foreknowledge (page
30). But the uncanny accur?cy of the collective predictions
suggested to some investigators that a sort of early-warning
system, in the form of a central clearinghouse fo' prophecies
and premonitions, might help prevent future disasters or at
least reduce their magnitude. Such a central bureau would not
materialize until 1 967, however, following another cataclysm
that had been widely predicted -this time in the little South
Wales mining village of Aberfan.

On the morning of October 20, 1966, ten-year-old Eryl Mai

Jones woke up at her home in Aberfan and told her mother
what she had dreamed during the night. "I dreamed went I to
school," she said, "and there was no school there. Something
black had come down all over it."
A waking vision of something black had already ap-
peared on October 14 to Alexander Venn, a retired Cunard
Line employee and an amateur artist who lived in southwest-
ern England. He kept feeling that some sort of disaster was
Rescue workers search for
survivors in the aftermath of the
coal-waste avalanche in
Abetfan, Wales. Two weeks be-
fore the disaster, schoolgirl
Eryl Mai Jones (inset) correctly
predicted that she and a pair
ofyoungfriends would die. Two
nights before the slide, she
dreamed her school was en-
gulfed in "something black."

imminent, something to do
with coal dust, and he said to
his wife: "Something terrible is
going to happen, and it won't
be far from here." With a deep-
ening sense of foreboding, he
took up his sketch pad and
proceeded to draw a human
head engulfed in blackness.
On Wednesday night, October
19, reported dreams and fore-
bodings began to snowball.
An Englishwoman had a
dreadful nightmare of suffo-
cating in "deep blackness."
Several other people in various
parts of England also had
frightening dreams of enveloping blackness, and one woman
dreamed of a small child running, screaming, from a moun-
tainside that appeared to be flowing downward.
On the evening of Thursday the twentieth, a Mrs. C. Mil-

den of Plymouth, England, was at a spiritualists' meeting

when a vision came to her. Strangely enough, it seemed to be
on film. She saw a schoolhouse in a valley and a terrified small
boy with a long fringe of hair; she saw an avalanche of coal
thundering down a mountainside, at the bottom of which a
number of rescue workers were digging for bodies under
mounds of slag and other debris; and she noticed that one of
the workers was wearing an unusual-looking peaked cap.
In the early morning hours of Friday, October 2 1 , a Mrs.
Sybil Brown of Brighton, south of London, awoke from a
ghastly dream. A child in the confined space of a telephone

booth was screaming with fear, while another child walking

toward the dreamer was followed by -as Mrs. Brown de-
scribed it— "a black, billowing mass." At the same time, a

London woman woke up from a stifling dream and felt that the
walls of her bedroom were caving in on her. An elderly gentle-
man in northwestern England was puzzled by his dream: He
saw, spelled out in dazzling light, the letters A-B-E-R-F-A-N.
 At shortly after nine o'clock that morning, Ery! Mai Jones undertook similar investigations. The three surveys received a
joined her classmates at the Pantglas Junior School. Looming total of 200 replies, seventy-six of which were directed to Dr.
overhead was the mountain that dominated the village of Barker— who discarded sixteen that seemed to be obviously
Aberfan. Its peak, a 600-foot mass of coal waste from the suspect and conducted a thorough investigation of the re-
adjacent mines, glistened with the heavy rains that had fallen maining sixty responses.

over the previous two days. To more than half of the respondents, the premonitions

By 9:14, the morning prayer session was over, and the had occurred in vivid dreams. Most of the others had experi-
children were in their classrooms waiting for roll call. At the enced visions in a drowsy or trancelike state; some, like the

same time, in an not many miles away, a secre-

aircraft plant retired Cunard employee, had sensed the forthcoming event
tary, was overwhelmed by a sense that
Mrs. Monica McBean, while fully awake. A total of twenty-four precognitive epi-
"something drastic" was going to happen. A horrible image sodes were attested to either by a letter or diary note written at
flashed through her mind: "a black mountain moving and the time by the respondents or by others who had been told of

children buried under it." them before the coal slide.

the schoolhouse, the mountain moved. Haifa To Dr. Barker, the evidence he had seen for what he
Above million tons of black waste, dislodged by pounding viewed as some kind of seismic sense of impending events
rain, began to slither, then billow, then thunder was, iffar from conclusive, at least suggestive. "1 realized," he
down the mountainside in a gathering bulk of wrote in a letter published by the London Medical News-
blackness that reached forty feet high. Houses were Tribune on January 20, 1967, "that the time had surely come to
swept away; trees were torn up by their roots; Eryl Mai Jones call a halt to attempts to prove or disprove precognition. We
and more than 00 of her fellow pupils were buried under the
1 should instead set about trying to harness and utilize it with a
suffocating black mass. Pantglas Junior School was gone, view to preventing future disasters."
obliterated, just as Eryl Mai Jones had dreamed. Rescue work- To that end, Dr. Barker created an information ex-
ers dug all day and all nighi to recover the bodies. The final change, called the British Premonitions Bureau, to receive
count was 144 dead: twenty-eight adults and 1 16 children, and analyze predictions from recognized psychics and indi-
most of them the schoolmates of Eryl Mai Jones. viduals among the general public who just "knew" that some-
During the day of disaster and the weekend, news thing terrible-or even, perhaps, something wonderful-was
spread throughout the British Isles and reached people who going to happen. A similar agency, known as the Central Pre-
felt known something of it before it happened. Mrs. C.
they had monitions Registry, was founded in the United States shortly
Milden, for instance, saw a television broadcast on Sunday in after its British counterpart was formed.
which she recognized the digging-out operation of her filmlike Even the most enthusiastic investigators of psychic phe-
vision, complete with the terrified small boy with the long nomena will admit that a great many premonitions do not
fringe of hair and the worker wearing the unusual peaked cap. come true. The hits are remembered; the misses are not. In-
What she had seen was an apparent preview of the broadcast. deed, there are no reports that any disasters have been avert -
Other predictions surfaced as the days went by, largely ed-or even foreseen-as a result of predictions filed with
because of the efforts of a London psychiatrist named J. C. premonition exchanges. Nevertheless, the paranormal has
Barker, who was writing a book about psychic predictions. generated such widespread interest that in some scholarly cir-
Wondering if there had been any premonitions of the coal cles the question is no longer whether it deserves to be studied
slide, he launched a newspaper appeal to those who might but instead how the subject may be dealt with in a scientific
have experienced foreshadowings. Two other organizations and rational manner.

34
 Science and the Spirits

he mid-nineteenth century
marked one of those historic junctures when faith and reason threat-
ened to run afoul of each other to the detriment of both. The Industrial
Revolution had brought with it social upheaval and confusion, as well
as a full flood of interest in science. Sometimes old truths withstood
the torrent. Sometimes they were swamped. Against this tumultuous
backdrop, spiritualism— belief that the dead survive discarnate and,
often through mediums, can communicate with the living— raged
across America and parts of Europe. Eventually it even came to in-
trigue the intelligentsia, some of whom saw a rare chance to wed
rationalism to belief. What if, they thought, the newest methods of
science could be brought to bear on the oldest riddles of metaphysics?
So thinking, eminent Britishers organized the Society for Psychi-
cal Research (SPR) in London in 1882. Its agenda included not only
mediumship but hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and any other
area where the mind seemed to transcend its boundaries.
An American SPR (ASPR) was organized in Boston some three
years later. More fractious than its British counterpart, the ASPR went
through several disruptions caused by disputes over aims and meth-
ods. Nevertheless, it persists today, headquartered in New York. Re-
cently, the organization began to restructure its jumbled archives and
make them available for researchers and historians. From those ar-
chives come the pictures on the following pages. They represent
some of the earliest steps, stumbling but venturesome, toward docu-
menting the paranormal.

on
 Menial and Physical Mediums

The ASPR studied mediums in two cate- said by some to be the very substance of
gories: mental and physical. Mental medi- materialized spirits.

ums bring only spoken or written mes- The society's most fruitful investigation

sages from the spirits. The more of a mentalmedium involved a Boston

spectacular (if less plausible) physical homemaker named Leonora Piper Piper
medrums produce spectral manifesta- was discovered by the psychologist Wil-
tions: rappings, tooting trumpets, liam James, who, after early encounters
trembling tables, and sometimes even with her, said he believed she had a
I ectoplasm - eerily diaphanous matter power as yet unexplained Both the ASPR
and the SPR probed her work in studies
The ASPR compiled massivefiles on spanning almost thirty years In all that
[' mental medium Leonora Piper (left),
time, fraud was never proved
i
'
host to many spirit guides.
There was much debate as to wheth-
er Piper was truly visited by spirits or merely
gleaned information from her sitters
telepathically The fact was however, that
she often provided intimate details of
their personal lives
Piper s method was to enter a trance,
presumably clearing the way for spirit
guides who would speak in voices quite
dissimilar to hers As her career progressed
she could even admit two spirits at once
one who spoke and another who seemingly
guided her hand in writing
A muscular young Neapolitan immi-
grant named Nino Pecoraro was a phvs
medium who was studied by both the
ical

ASPR and the magazine Scientific Amen

can Investigative methods included strip

searching Pecoraro, binding his hands

and placing him inside an enclosure On a
nearby table would be such items as a
trumpet and a tambourine During the se-
ance, both instruments might be heard,
along with rappings and whistles The table
itself might move Nevertheless ringer

prints appeared on objects spectrally ma

nipulated in Pecoraro s seances And
once when the great Houdini tied his
bonds. Pecoraro managed only feeble
rappings On ASPR found
the whole, the
him far less convincing than Piper

Bound hand andfoot, Nino Pecoraro is

caged in one variety of the medium 's cabi
net designed to limit movement (right).
ASPRfiles do not identify his companion.

Antifraud precautions at one

Pecoraro seance (left) included
swathing the medium in cloth to
prevent his helping the spirits
produce manifestations.
 o

«#/ *»"
 L* '
r

w Z»*

The Sfrange Case of Maigeiy

usual vaporous stuffbut yet to investigate the medium, that

more solid material not he broke off a tour and rushed to Boston.

Runlike custard. Some inves- After a few seances, he concluded Mar-

W.lt ER tigators thought it looked gery was an arrant fraud. Prince, who had
like lung tissue. Margery made his own probe, could not have
was married to the emi- agreed more. He even suggested snidely
nent surgeon Le Roi God- that more credulous investigators
dard Crandon, who was were being swayed by the lady's per-
his wife's biggest booster, sonal charms. He and Bird had a bit-
but skeptics could only ter falling out, and when Bird

ponder the tissue's possible joined the ASPR, Prince resigned.

origin. In any event, she He became research officer for a
clearly relied on one source new organization, the Boston So-
of family help: Her chief ciety for Psychic Research. The
spirit guide was her dead more scientifically minded
Letters spelling out brother, Walter. ASPR members followed his
WALTER appeared on a box during In 1922, a Scientific lead, and the original or-
one ofMargery's seances. American contest of- ganization was thus split
fered $2,500 to any me- into warring pro-
If notthe most convincing, Boston's dium who could produce a "visible psy- Margery and
Mina Crandon was easily the most contro- chic manifestation," and Margery was an anti-Margery
versial medium the American Society for entry. Judges included Scientific Ameri- factions.
Psychical Research ever studied. She was can associate editor J. Malcolm Bird, ASPR The
better known as Margery— a nom de se- researcher Walter F. Prince, and the ma- breach
ance given her by a psychic investigator - gician Houdini. Bird became convinced of healed
and her exploits during the 920s helped
1 Margery's legitimacy and wrote rave re-
occasion a major rift within the ASPR. views in his magazine. Newspapers embel-
Margery was a physical medium, and lished the story, saying the medium had
ectoplasm was her specialty. Phantom
limbs seemed to sprout from her body.
Spectral hands groped across tables. More- ,
even stumped Houdini. So incensed by this
was Houdini,
who had
4
over, Margery's ectoplasm was not the

An ill-formed ectoplasmic hand lies on

a table before the en tranced Margery as
she clasps hands with other seance sit-
ters. Walter's hand supposedlyfrequented
her seances, though ASPR records do
not specify that this particular hand is his.
 : Spirts in flie Flesh

Although Margery was a wonder with cream cheese. In The beard was the
905, Eva astound- only aspect of the ec-
means had a corner
ectoplasm, she by no 1

„a toplasmic Bien Boa

on the market. In spiritualism's heyday, ed tu^
the ~o.„-i,;,-
psychic
(right) that struck in-
ectoplasm was all the rage. It was variously researcher Charles ves tigator Charles
semisolid, vaporous, or even liquid, and Richet by pro- Richet as phony.
it might emerge in forms ranging from spi- ducing a robed
dery tendrils to spectacular full-figure and bearded full figure who identified
manifestations. But it almost always himself as Bien Boa, a long-dead Hindu.
seemed to come from the medium's Eva later confessed that Bien Boa was in

body, usually emanating from the mouth or fact an Arab servant who was very much
some other bodily orifice. alive, but Richet would have none of it.

An early and famed extruder of ecto- He could not have been tricked, he insisted
plasm was a Frenchwoman named Eva's confession merely denoted that
Marthe Beraud, known in psychic circles as she was mentally unstable, which, he said,
Eva C. Her emanations were said to be- was typical of mediums.
gin with a flow that resembled thick saliva A Canadian medium who went by the
and end up with a name of Mary M. was notable for the
consistency human faces that sometimes appeared on
akin to the ectoplasm that she extruded Her
ectoplasm was variously described
as looking like cotton wool,
V dough, or paste.
i x. Theories about ecto-
plasm abounded. Some had it
that spirits formed them-
selves from the substance of chiffonwas the ectoplasm of choice for him
the medium's body or and his colleagues Sometimes the fabric
soul -or both. Allegedly for would be treated with a phosphorescent
this reason, seance eti- substance to give it a ghostly glow in the
quette forbade touching the dim light of seance rooms. The material
ectoplasm lest the medi- could be manipulated with a variety of
um be harmed or even killed mechanical contrivances. Or, it could be
Few such casualties were concealed inside the medium's body
ever reported, however, and vio- even swallowed, in some cases-and ex-
lators of the taboo sometimes truded at will.

found that ectoplasm felt very

This medium survives in ASPR files with a
much like cloth. Indeed, one large and detailed manifestation -apparently
medium who finally declared a bride (right). Ectoplasmicfullfigures
himself a fraud reported that were highly suspectforfraud.

1^>

At a 1 929 seance, ectoplasm

from the mouth of Mary M. bore a
picture of the dead British prime
minister, William E. Gladstone.
More ectoplasm formed a cap, a
bow, a necklace, and earrings.
±M
'«/«x y

t
 The Astral Pen of Patience Worth

Speech and ectoplasm were not the spir- Although she usually wrote in relatively
lific. and meticulous researcher was
skeptical
its' only vehicles for visiting the living. In modern prose, a medieval idyl called astounded by her abilities. She could, for
fact, one of the more unusual cases in Telka, published in 928, was written in an
1 instance, create two literary works at once,
psychic lore began with a Ouija board. Anglo-Saxon dialect that seemed to date switching between them and never los-
A St. Louis homemaker named Pearl it as pre-thirteenth century. It appeared un- ing track of either. Prince concluded that ei-
Curran was fiddling with the board one June likely that Curran, with little education, ther Curran's subconscious was work-
night in 1913 when the pointer spelled was doing such work on her own, though ing in some radically odd way, or "some
out: "Oh, why let sorrow steel thy heart? some investigators theorized that Pa- cause operating through, but not origi-
Thy bosom is but its foster-mother, the tience might have been a secondary per- nating in" her subconscious was at work.
world its cradle and the loving home its sonality born in Curran's subconscious. Patience Worth's Ouija-board messages
grave." This flower)' communique was In 1924, the Boston SPR's Walter F could be considered an extreme form of
similar to others Curran had received, but Prince investigated Patience, and the so-called automatic writing, in which a
the presumed author was still a mystery. spirit supposedly guides its host's hand
In July, however, the spirit gave a name: in writing astral messages. A once-popular
Patience Worth, born a Quaker in variation was called slate writing, in
seventeenth-century England. In time, the which words seemed to appear on a slate
Ouija board would be discarded in favor without benefit of a human agent. The
of direct mental linkage, but Pearl and Pa- ASPR tended to dismiss slate writing as
tience would maintain their relationship more a parlor trick than a psychic event,
until Curran's death
In early sittings,
in 1938.

Patience showed a
m£ however, since it could be easily faked.
A psychological explanation for Pa-
fondness for aphorisms, but she soon pro- tience -that she was a dissociated part of
gressed to serious and torrential literary Curran'sown personality -is also given
output, dictating plays, dramatic poems, for a psychic phenomenon known as
novels. Over the years, most were pub- obsession An obsessing sup- spirit
lished, usually to popular and critical ac- posedly invades a person and alters
claim. Meanwhile, the psychic story of
became a nationwide sensation.
7 the host's personality. Obsession

1
Patience is considered a possible prelude
She was as versatile as she was pro- . to spirit possession.

Pearl Curran, through whom

Patience Worth allegedly wrote
her voluminous works, com-
posed one short story on her
own. Perhaps significantly, it
tells of a young woman whose
:#*
boring life expands dramati-
cally when her personality is
taken over by a spirit guide.
 //;&*<
00 <<z*n
„ya *m 'f&rtif
M <mkMz
:

jf €&+*

4Z^m*- v***#**w.
t/ic^i
^EZ^

»*'

&*~ *.<*.** S

Houdini wrote ofmany ways to fake the

sort ofslate writing shown above. Common
ones en tailed switching slates. The medi-
um would write a spirit message on one slate
in advance, then substitute itfor a blank
one during the seance.

Obsession ? The ASPR studied a 1 905 case in which the spirit of

artist R. Swain Gifford supposedly invaded a slight acquaintance,
Frederick Thompson. Soon after the artist died, Thompson quit
his work as a silversmith and began pain ting and drawing obsessive-
ly in a style closely akin to Gifford's. Thompson 's sketched land-
scape (right) much resembles Gifford's painting (above).
 fonts on Film

Generally, theASPR was dubious of pho- of automatic writing, possiblycommunica- William M Keeler He was expert in spirit

tographs purporting toshow spirits of the tions from Bocock The writing told her photography, snapping supposed dis-
dead. But when Marguerite Du Pont Lee to take up photography: she did, usually carnate entities who coalesced around
declared she was taking such pictures, the putting an oil portrait of either herself or loved ones for portraits With Keeler s in-

society paid attention. Bocock on a chair and taking pictures of it. volvement, Bocock's appearances prolifer-
Lee, a daughter of the Delaware Some of them showed inexplicable blobs ated There were pictures of Bocock
Du Ponts, was of impeccable lineage, of light and spectral faces, some amor- dancing, preaching, sightseeing, and so on
spotless repute, philanthropic impulse, and phous, some distinct Some looked like Lee confided in the ASPR s lames H
apparent good sense. Her friend Episco- the dead pastor About the same time, Lee Hyslop. a philosopher and psychic invest!
pal minister Kemper Bocock died in 1 904. was having her own picture taken by gator in 1919 Declaring that in Lee s
Thereafter, Lee began having episodes case there could be no question of fraud
Hyslop undertook an investigation, only
to conclude that he could not say exactly
what was going on But by 920, Hyslop 1

was dead, Walter F Prince was the ASPR s

head researcher, and the Keeler Lee pic
tures had numbered some four thousand
After studying the case himselt, Pi ince
had little doubt about the forces at work
Although deferential to Lee. Prince
clearly regarded Keeler as a humbug
and an exploitive cad Prince noted that in
all the Bocock photographs, the minis-

ter's head appeared facing about one third

off center, right or left or almost in pro

file, The two poses were amaz
right or left

. i ingly like those in the only two extant

pictures of Bocock while he was alive
Whatever post-mortem pursuit was pic
tured. Prince noted the minister smiles
not. exults not. wonders not, gneves not
nor ever once opens his lips but is as if
fixed in the calm of Buddha forevei
Prince also observed that the statu. Bocock
heads were at odds with an alarminglv
plastic Bocock body, which appeared var
i
iously as fat thin, short, tall, swan
necked, no- necked The photos Prince
thought were obviously faked

A ghostlyface looms atop the

ample belly ofASPR leader Richard
Hodgson in this deliberately
faked turn -of the-cen tury spirit
photograph. Hodgson wanted
to show the ease offraud in spirit
photography. Retouching and
double exposure were among the
more obvious ploys.
 Medium A. V. Morgner sits amid a host of
spirits in this 1912 photograph. Recognizable
shades include Abraham Lincoln at the
upper left, and, on the right, Great Britain's
Queen Victoria.

The shade of the late Reverend Kemper Bo

cock dances with the astral essence of Margue-
rite Du Pont Lee in one of the Keeler-Lee pho
tographs. A skeptical Walter F. Prince
commented: "The gown is a bit youthfulfor
the lady, and the head a trifle hypertrophic
for the gentleman.
 In the town cemetery ofWeth-
ersfield, Connecticut, (left)aser
pent lies on a grave and
a va
Porousfigure seems to float
above. The 1 902
photograph
caused a sensation in
the town '
but, in 1920, it was
explained
as a double exposure.

*^^ A spectral head looms at

the
upper left ofa deathbed
scent
^ ri ht) Partici
Pantsin this

1
D lphotograph
ASPR l -

are unidenti
fled, but such pictures were
common in spiritualist circles

in

&r

4
I
*
- -\

A newspaper claimed this photograph ofan 1893 Chicago warehouse fire showed victims' spirits in thesmoke.
 '

m w

./
 CHAPTER2

Seeking a Science ol ESP

n the 1920s, most American universities were decidedly lukewarm toward

psychic research. At the time, the paranormal was tainted by association with

spiritualism and fraudulent mediums. So suspect was the field that a Cornell
University psychologist declared he would not even have the journal of the
Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the library lest it "inflame the imagina-
tions and corrupt the minds of the students."
Psychologist William James, an academic of such stature that he could
profess an interest in the paranormal and be taken seriously, had died in 1 9 1 0.
In the years following, spiritualism still had enough adherentsamong the public
that Harvard, Stanford, and Clark universities got bequests for psychic re-

search-though the schools were a bit uncomfortable about them. To an inqui-

ry about such activities at Clark, President G. Stanley Hall responded that he

'
'would much prefer to have you use the phrase Psychological Research' rather
'

than 'Psychic Research' in connection with the Smith-Battles Fund here, as we

do not indulge in what is generally known as psychic research."
What little serious experimentation did go on came to naught. John E.

Coover, a psychic-research fellow at Stanford, did a series of painstaking tests

in which his subjects tried to guess the number and suit of playing cards held by

someone else he concluded that his subjects showed no evidence of telepathy.

;

At Harvard, L. T. Troland designed a complicated piece of machinery to use

instead of cards, but the experiment was more an excuse to try out the appara-
tus itself than a serious investigation of telepathy. His results were also negative

(as he had expected them to be), and, like Coover, he abandoned the field.

If psychic research was to gain a foothold in scientific circles, it needed a

new William James-an enthusiast with enough prestige in orthodox academic

circles to discourage critics and make responsible psychic experimentation

respectable. Just such a figure materialized in the person of William McDougall,

a British physician and psychologist who arrived from England in 920 to take
1

the psychology chair that James had held at Harvard. McDougall had earned
enough respect in mainstream science to devise his own curriculum. He was
openly interested in the paranormal and would later adapt from the German the
term parapsychology for serious explorations in this area.
 McDougall used the Harvard funds at his disposal to help Marshallville, Ohio, where fifteen-year-old Joseph took a lik-

launch a number of scholars who would one day make names ing to a nineteen-year-old teacher named Louisa Weckesser,
for themselves. Among them were Gardner Murphy, a Colum- whom he married when he returned home from World War I.

bia University graduate student who tried inconclusively to The two of them immediately went to the University of Chicago
send mental images to fellow psychologist Rene Warcollier in in order to study botany.
Paris; and George H. Estabrooks, a Harvard graduate student When the Rhines arrived in Chicago, a titanic clash be-
who conducted card-guessing experiments between subjects tween science and religion was in full force. Charles Darwin's
in separate rooms in Cambridge. But McDougall's most spec- theory of evolution had been accepted by most intellectuals,
tacular protege was Joseph Banks Rhine, an earnest young and the proposition humans were descended from ape-
that

researcher who was to eclipse McDougall himself and become like creatures rather than fromAdam and Eve was seen as a
the father of modern parapsychology. grave challenge to the authority of the Bible. Many people were
also disturbed by the new school of behaviorist psychology,
When he first entered the field, Rhine was as far from the which seemed to reduce human free will to a series of pro-
credulous end of the psychic spectrum as one could get. He grammed responses to changing environmental stimuli. One
was a hard-nosed, irascible, skeptical, and meticulous World popular spokesman for that mechanistic view, John Watson,
War veteran who had enlisted in the Marine Corps despite
I insisted that people were just complicated rats.

color blindness and hearing impairment and emerged a na- Although Joseph Rhine was impatient with traditional
tional sharpshooting champion. He had grown up in the hills theology, he also recognized zealous fundamentalism in sci-
of Pennsylvania, the son of a mother who hoped he would ence when he saw it; he refused to follow Watson. Instead,
become a preacher, and a father who was a Rhine began to wonder whether scientific
sometime teacher and perennial itinerant methodologies such as those he and his
farmer. In 1910, after sixteen moves, wife used in the study of plants could
the Rhines finally settled down in be applied to territories of the mind
 that until then had been the sole property of religion or had Margery, and he noticed that although she was tied to her chair
been accepted on faith. as if to keep her from cheating, her bonds were quite loose.
Rhine was galvanized into action in May 1922 when he The lights were extinguished, and Margery swooned into what
went to a lecture given in Chicago by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, appeared to be a trance. While the other guests were marvel-
at the time almost as well known for his dabbling in spiritual- ing at the disembodied antics of Walter's alleged ghost, who
ism as for his famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. The young played music, rang bells, and bantered with the guests, Rhine
botanist was impressed by Conan Doyle, and he was even grew more and more suspicious that the effects were being
more taken with thenames of famous scientists said by Conan manipulated by the supposedly unconscious Margery. He was
Doyle to share the conviction that some kind of reality exists convinced he was right when he saw Margery kicking a
beyond the material world. One of these scientists was Sir megaphone within reach of her bound hands so that she could
Oliver Lodge, an eminent British physicist. Rhine read his use it to project Walter's voice to her credulous audience.

book, The Survival ofMan, in which the author claimed to have In a word, Margery was a fake. Rhine exposed her in a
communicated with his dead son through Gladys Osborne letter to the ASPR, saying of her performance: "We could not
Leonard, a well-known British medium. help but see the falseness of it all." Instead of enhancing his

It he book changed Rhine's life. Here was a scientist of

international repute, proudly proclaiming a belief in
own reputation, the only effect of Rhine's letter was toalienate
him from the psychic organizations on both sides of the Atlan-
life after death. And if Rhine was heartened by such tic. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even went so far as to pay for a
credentials, he was even more pleased with his read- black-bordered advertisement in a Boston newspaper: "J B.

ing of McDougaW's Body and Mind, which argued that Rhine," said the ad, "is a monumental ass."
psychic research was needed to complete a full picture of hu-
man nature. Rhine concluded that it would be "unpardonable The experience with Margery led Rhine to a far-reaching con-
for the scientific world today to overlook evidences of the su- clusion. Even barring fraud, he decided, all anecdotes of psy-
pernormal in the world -if there are such." chic phenomena "happen and are gone, leaving nothing but
In the summer of 1926, Rhine aoandoned botany alto- memory, none of the hard reality of a meteorite or a fossil. The '

'

gether and went with Louisa to Boston, lured by the prospect way to study the psychic abilities that so intrigued him would
of meeting McDougall and associating with the Boston contin- be controlled experimentation demonstrating the same ef-
gent of the American Society for Psychical Research. He could fects again and again.
not have had a more unpropitious beginning. McDougall left Rhine got his chance to develop such experiments a year
for Europe on the day Rhine went to meet him, and the Harvard later, when McDougall, back from Europe, accepted what he
research funds Rhine hoped for were impossible to get. The called a "gilded offer" to create a psychology department at
closest he and Louisa came to psychic exploration was a sit- Duke University in Durham, North Carolina Impressed by his
ting with Mina Crandon, known as Margery, who was hailed young colleague, McDougall invited Rhine to join him there
by Beacon Hill psychic enthusiasts as a medium of remarkable and undertake psychic research. By 930, Rhine was develop-
1

abilities. The wife of a respected Boston surgeon, she was said ing the techniques that would usher in a new era of study.
to have called up any number of spirits. He began with experiments in which he asked subjects
The seance took place after a dinner party at the Cran- to guess the order of a shuffled deck of cards. If they scored
dons' home. The participants were told that Margery would better than could be expected by chance, it was reasonable to
summon the spirit of her dead brother, Walter, who had been assume that some unknown factor was operating. At first
killed in a freak railroad accident. Rhine was seated next to Rhine, like his predecessors, used standard decks of fifty-two

50
 /.B. Rhine (near left) uses ESP cards to test
the psychic abilities of one of his most successful
subjects, Hubert E. Pearce.Jr., in 1932.

Testing Telepathy
A deck of cards, designed in 1 930,
provided Joseph Banks Rhine with his
basic tool for testing ESP. Each
card— developed with Rhine's Duke
University colleague Karl Zener—
displays one of five symbols (left). A
complete deck contains five cards
of each design.
A deck of ESP cards appears face
down at right; every row has five
different cards, each numbered on its

back. To simulate Rhine's test for

clairvoyance, concentrate on a card;
then write down the card's num-
ber and the symbol you think it bears
on its The card faces are
face.
printed on the next page so that the
face of each is directly behind the
back of that card. Predict the order of
all twenty-five cards; turn the
page and check your answers.
Random guessing over a series
of tests yields an average of five cor-
rect answers out of twenty-five at-
tempts. However, since you can con-
duct the test only once from these
pages before learning the actual card
sequence, your score will be
merely suggestive. Statistically valid
results require the use of a deck of
cards, reshuffled before each attempt-

^2'18|Sj!

51
playing cards. But after a few unsatisfying attempts to prove of his colleagues, Karl Zener, who was an expert in the psy-

anything, he decided that fifty-two was too large a number chology of perception, to design a set offive cards, each with a
and might lead subjects into habits and superstitions-guess- spare and unambiguous design on it. Zener obliged with a set
ing their favorite cards or avoiding bad-luck ones. that contained a plus sign, a circle, a square, a star, and a
To bar distractions such as these, Rhine persuaded one wavy line (below). Rhine christened them Zener cards.
The conception of the Zener card experiments
was simple. In a pack of twenty-five cards

In order to check your answers to the test on the preceding page, you containing five cards of each design, chance
should compare the number of each card and the symbol you predicted decreed that any person would be expected to
to the corresponding card in the deck pictured below. Note that the
cards are numberedfrom right to left. guess five of the cards correctly. Each correct
guess was called a hit. True, somebody might
hit one or two, more or less, in any given
twenty-five-card pack, but over many

ODi^ +
trials

with many packs, the law of averages would

bring the guesser's average closer to five —
unless something other than the law of aver-
ages was at work.
3 2
For more than a year, Rhine and several
colleagues searched tirelessly for someone

O^
who showed outstanding talent for picking

+ Zener cards.
dirt in

trials
one Adam
In the

J.
spring of 93 1

Linzmayer— an economics
student who had achieved high scores in three
running. Standing across the
Linzmayer one afternoon, with
1 ,

his spare
they hit

room from
hand
pay

shielding the deck, Rhine peeked at the top

card and asked Linzmayer what it was. Linz-
mayer guessed He guessed the next

-kO + U
correctly.

one too-and the next, and the next, and the

next-until he had hit nine in a row against
odds of two million to one.

Rhine was ecstatic. The next day, he

^o +
dragged Linzmayer back into the lab, and
Linzmayer did it again. Nine in a row. All cor-
rect He then continued to guess through a
stack of 300 cards, hitting 1 19, almost twice
what chance would have yielded. For two
years, Rhine worked with Linzmayer on these
and other experiments; however, Linzmayer's

Oi^D 23
scores gradually crept down to just about the level of chance. card to see if they had made a hit. In another, called DT (Down
Meanwhile, Rhine undertook a long, frustrating search Through) subjects simply guessed the order of a pack of cards
,

for new psychic talent. He found it in 1932, in a shy divinity without touching them . In both cases, since there was no other
student named Hubert E. Pearce, Jr. Pearce first displayed ex- mind actively involved, clairvoyance was said to have been
traordinary powers with Zener exercises in which he shuffled demonstrated if better-than-chance scores were achieved. To
his own deck and guessed each card before turning it over. His search for PT (Pure Telepathy), Rhine would have an "agent"
scores of more than ten hits per twenty-five cards were re- imagine a certain card while the "receiver" would try to guess
markable. Rhine, anticipating accusations of fraud if Pearce the one being imagined.
touched the cards, designed an experiment with his assistant, and his associates had no explanations for the

Joseph Gaither Pratt, that still ranks among the most impres- Rhine results, but they did begin to discern what they saw
sive demonstrations of supposed ESP. as a psychology of the psychic process. They found
Pearce sat in the Duke library while Pratt sat with paper that mood affected apparent psychic abilities: Sub-
and pencil in the physics building, 100 yards away. Pearce when they were encour-
jects generally did better

and Pratt synchronized their watches, and at a prearranged aged or challenged. On one memorable occasion, Rhine
time, Pratt picked the top card off a Zener deck and placed it offered Pearce $100 for every hit, and Pearce won $2,500 in a
face down on the table without looking at it. There it lay for twenty -five-card streak at odds of 298,023,223,876,953,125
one minute while Pearce wrote down his guess; then Pratt to 1 . Conversely, people tended to do worse when they were
picked up another card. When he was finished with the deck, tired, bored, self-conscious, or depressed. Pearce's scores, for
Pratt would turn the cards over one by one to record the order example, declined considerably after his fiancee jilted him.
before shuffling and starting again. At the end of each session, In addition to individual motivational factors, there was
Pearce and Pratt would each seal their records and hand them a general tendency of ESP scores to drop— often to chance
over to Rhine before meeting to evaluate their copies. levels— overprolongedboutsof testing. This trend, dubbed the
The results were astonishing, even to Rhine. According decline effect, had been observed by psychic investigators
to Pratt's records Pearce went through twelve runs of the long before Rhine. Skeptics claimed the decline effect as evi-
Zener deck, scoring as high as thirteen hits per run and aver- dence that ESP does not exist and that declining scores were
aging 261 out of 750 cards, against odds of nearly ten hits. the result of better experimental controls. But Rhine was quick
In addition to placing Pearce's abilities firmly outside the to point out that similardeclinesoccurred in otherexperiments
realm of coincidence, the Pearce-Pratt experiments suggested involving motivation. If ESP behaved like other psychological
to parapsychologists that psychic ability was not limited by phenomena, he maintained, then the probability increased

distance. Pratt tested Pearce while sitting in another building that it was a naturally occurring human attribute.

250yards from the library, with much the same results. Subse- Nevertheless, Rhine sought various ways to combat the

quent experiments, in which Pearce guessed the approximate decline effect. One harrowing night, he fed Linzmayer a triple

order of a deck even before it was shuffled, suggested his abili- dose of the supposedly harmless barbiturate sodium amytal, a
ties were not limited by time either. depressant, to see if it would affect his scores. Linzmayer fell

The Duke team designed other experiments in hopes of into a stupor, and Rhine had to drag him back to his room
distinguishing clairvoyance (the perception of unseen objects under cover of darkness to avoid unsavory publicity. In a later

or events) from telepathy (the grasping of another's thoughts) test with caffeine, Pearce's powers seemed to improve.
In one exercise, called BT (Before Touching), subjects would Naturally cautious and always conscious of lurking crit-
look at a card face down, record a guess, and then turn up the ics, Rhine kept his work at Duke quiet until he was ready to

53
make a clear-cut case for it. After three years of research and
100,000 individual tests, Rhine went puDlic, disclosing his
findings in a monograph published in 1934. For its title, he

invented the term extrasensory perception-ESP. He told a

wanted "to make it sound as normal as may be
.

friend that he

Perception was an established subject of psychology by that

time, and Rhine hoped psychologists would recognize ESP as

a branch of perception, rather than as some otherworldly,

nonprofessional pastime.
Extra-Sensory Perception eventually reached millions of.

readers, an enormous audience for a scholarly treatise. The

press knew from the heyday of spiritualism that the public
loves news of the paranormal, and so they made the most of it.
Certain reporters at the New York Times, the New York Herald
Tribune, and Scientific American took to specializing in the

area, maintaining the public's interest in ESP for years after

the book was released.

Even in the academic world, Extra-Sensory Perception
was hailed as "epoch making." By demonstrating consistent
results, Rhine overcame the objections of scientists who
linked psychic research to nineteenth-century mysticism. He
also appealed to a wider community of scholars, while at the

Apollo 1 4 astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, who con-

ducted scien tific experimen tsonthe moon, performed
tests of his own during the 1971 voyage: He tried to
send ESP symbols telepathically topsychics on earth.
The results were inconclusive.
56
same time calming the psychic researchers who feared ESP Frances T. Bolton, an Ohio philanthropist, he established the
would be inhibited by the strict conditions he imposed. country's first university parapsychology laboratory in a build-

For all its acclaim, however, the book was highly contro- ing near the Duke University campus and made Rhine its

versial and stirred up criticism among psychologists and other founding director. Extra-Sensory Perception also got a warm
traditional scientists. Some found fault with his statistics; not welcome from McDougall's old protege Gardner Murphy, who
until 1937, when the American Institute of Mathematical Sta- had continued psychic research while building a reputation in

tistics declared his mathematics to be valid, were the statistical traditional psychology at Columbia. Rhine sent graduate stu-
critics silenced. More serious were the attacks on some of dents to Murphy for advanced research, and New York be-
Rhine's early procedures. Skeptics observed that a test in came another stronghold of ESP testing. In 1937, Murphy
which a single unsupervised experimenter conducts the ses- helped Rhine found the Journal of Parapsychology for dissemi-
sion and records the results-the very situation in which nating the latest developments in paranormal studies. New
Pearce guessed his twenty- five out of twenty-five cards— has research centers at other universities cropped up frequently
few safeguards against fraud or error. For example, cards that thereafter, and soon the press was predicting that parapsy-

are hand shuffled, as in these early tests, will not yield a com- chology would be the science of the future.
pletelynew and random arrangement each time. This allows Rhine's book also earned him an admirer among the
subjects who remember the previous shuffle to improve their century's intellectual pioneers— the eminent Swiss psychia-
scoreson each run-through. Furthermore, unconscious physi- trist Carl Jung, who wrote to congratulate him and to offer

cal reactions of the experimenter -say, tilting the head every some reassurance against the uphill battle Rhine would con-
time a star comes up-can provide information to the subject, tinue to face. "There are things," Jung said, "which are simply
as was later shown in tests by British scientist S. G. Soal (pages incomprehensible to the tough brains of our race and time.
1 10-1 1 1). To Rhine's credit, he soon realized these potential One simply risks being taken for crazy or insincere, and have I

sources of error and tighten d his procedures. He removed received so much of the other that I learned to be careful in

experimenters from the room co! itainingsubjects, added extra keeping quiet." But now that he was launched, Rhine had no
researchers to supervise tests and double-check results, and intention of keeping his work under wraps. Showing the sort
introduced a machine to shuffle cards. (His critics pointed out of self-assurance that had kept him going in dark days, he
that Rhine's results were much less impressive after he insti- wrote, "In the history of more than one branch of research, the
tuted these controls.) stone which a hasty science rejected has sometimes become
the main criticism scientists had of Rhine's the cornerstone of its later structure."
Probably
work was that it proved to be unrepeatable. In other For the most part, Rhine's focus remained the endless
areas of science, experimental results are consid- refinements of target guessing. Some of hisyoung colleagues,
ered questionable unless they can be reproduced by impatient with card counting, wanted to rush into more exotic
independent researchers. This unreproducibility of areas such as reincarnation and out-of-body experiences, but
ESP experiments has remained a major stumbling block to Rhine would have none of those - and may therefore have
widespread acceptance of parapsychology as a legitimate sci- saved the infant discipline from deadly ridicule. Eventually the
ence—and even raises questions about ESP's very existence. field would grow encompass many of these other experi-
to
Partly as a result of the furor over Rhine's work, the Duke ences, and the word psi would become the umbrella term for
University administration carefully separated parapsychology psychic abilities of every kind. But the main work to be done,
from psychology and the other traditional sciences. But as Rhine saw it, was to look for traces of ESP in all people, and
McDougall's response was more assured. With funds from as a rule he avoided self- professed psychic stars, reasoning

56
 en thus«-
sie '
.
fris t and P Rhine's

,orkclo s
"^;;;
% is

^hadmy 5.^kitchen-
which 1

inJ ^r/ound.
p
lou
:;w asev that if ESP were a natural human trait it could be found in the
population at large.
Occasionally, Rhine took time out for other research,
most notably in the field of ESP in animals, or anpsi, as para-
psychologists are wont to call it. The idea that animals could

have ESP was even more unusual than the thought of ESP in

humans, but Rhine had practical reasons for wanting to study

animals: They were easier to control and could be counted on
not to cheat or exaggerate.
The Rhines had first investigated anpsi on their way
down to Duke in 1 927. They stopped in Richmond, Virginia, to

investigate a horse named Lady Wonder that had achieved

national attention for having what appeared to be psychic
abilities. By nuzzling children's alphabet blocks to spell out

words, Lady foretold events; one of her alleged predictions

was the victory of boxer Jack Dempsey over Gene Tunney in
1 927. The Rhines later returned to Richmond with McDougall

to study Lady in depth and found that her performance dimin-

ished when her owner was not present and eventually deterio-
rated to chance levels— raising the distinct possibility that the
horse had been receiving subtle signals. Thereafter, Rhine ex-
perimented variously with rats, pigeons, and cats. Declassi-
fied documents reveal that in the 1950s, Rhine ran a series of

secret tests for the U.S. Army to see if German shepherds could
be trained to detect land mines through ESP. The dogs did well,
but Rhine thought they might have relied on their acute sense
of smell rather than on ESP.

In 1969, ESP researchers achieved a measure of the official

recognition they had long craved. The Parapsychological As-

sociation, formed twelve years before by Rhine and others in

the field, was admitted to affiliate status in the American Asso-

ciation for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the leading

organization of U.S. scientists. If the hypothesis of ESP and

other phenomena had not been finally proven, parapsychol-
ogy could at least claim legitimacy as an area of scientific

research. But it had scarcely gained its hard-won esteem

when it suffered a setback. Unfortunately for Rhine, the rever-
sal came as the result of fraud within his own ranks.

57
 Nature's
Sensory Spectrum

The term extrasensory perception im-

plies unnatural, even supernatural, abili-
ties. But research into the senses of
some animals suggests that the line be-
tween sensory and extrasensory may
be finer than previously imagined.
Animals have sense organs that
react to stimuli humans cannot even de-
tect. For example, some birds hear in-

frasound — noise in ultralow frequencies

undiscernible to human ears. Many
migrate for thousands of miles, using
sensory navigational skills scientists

have yet to explain. "Birds are not living

in the same sensory world that we

live in," explains Stephen T. Emlen, a

professor at Cornell University and a

leader in avian research. "They are
hearing, seeing, and sensing a world
expanded from ours."
Emlen's statement holds true for
other creatures as well. Marine animals
communicate underwater by sound
beyond the limits of human hearing;
schools offish move and change di-
rection simultaneously, presumably
cued by signals. Flying bats are guid-
ed by their heightened sense of hearing;
some distinguish betwee!, poisonous
and nonpoisonous prey by using sen-
sors on their mouths.
Some psychic researchers theorize
that senses such as these may once
have existed in humans, only to be sub-
merged somehow in the evolutionary
process. Perhaps, they say, people with
apparent psychic powers are merely
tapping into once-used but long-
forgotten abilities.

Migratory birds, such as the

trumpeter swans at right, can
orient themselves visually by
landmarks. Research shows
that birds may also be guided
by a sense of the earth 's magnet-
ic and gravitational fields.

58
A hungry bat advances on a
toad; moments later, the bat will
retreat, alerted by sensitive
protrusions around its mouth
that the quarry is poisonous.
Bats navigate — and findfood —
by emitting ultrasonic
squeaks that bounce off objects
and are picked up by the ani-
mal's acute sense of hearing.

A school ofsilversides
swerves as a unit to avoid an in-
truder. Marine biologists
theorize that as one fish senses
danger and begins to move
away, it somehow sends an im-
mediate signal to the rest of
the school. The result is a simul-
taneous change in course.
 In 1 973, Rhine appointed a young medical school gradu- data. They decided to set a trap for him. In the early evening of
ate named Walter Jay Levy to succeed him as director of an June 1 1 , they ran an extra set of cables from Levy's computer
institution called the Foundation for Research on the Nature of into a second computer in another room so that they could
Man, which Rhine had established in 1962 with privately examine Levy's raw data as it was generated. Davis then hid in

raised funds so that research in ESP would continue after he Levy's computer room and waited.
retired from the field. Rhine was in his seventies by this time Sure enough, late that night, Davis saw Levy come in

and looking for an Levy seemed a splendid

intellectual heir and force the computer to record a string of hits, while the raw
choice, even though some colleagues thought him overly am- data that were pouring into Kennedy's computer showed
bitious and prone to political machinations. For Rhine's pur- chance results. Davis and Kennedy informed Rhine, Rhine
poses, the young scientist's virtues easily outstripped his summoned Levy, Levy confessed, and Rhine fired him. The
faults. Brilliant and innovative, Levy had written numerous episodewas its own terms, but
disappointing on for Rhine it

papers on experimental research. He was ingenious at de- was doubly distressing because he had to make the painful
signing experiments, and his subjects ranged through a stag- sacrifice of publicizing the circumstances of Levy's departure
gering gamut from humans to chicken embryos. Levy was so that others would not be misled by his research results.
also remarkably energetic and single-minded. When he had If that was not enough, Rhine was publicly attacked in
an experiment under way, it was not uncommon for him to 1979 from other quarters for other reasons. The renowned
sleep in his lab to stay close to it. All in all, the usually crusty physicist John A. Wheeler- who originated the theory of black
Rhine found his young protege worthy of his faith and regard. holes- was a firm opponent of psi, and when he learned that a
In 1974, Levy was experimenting on rats, implanting paper he was scheduled to deliverat an AAAS meeting in
electrodes in the pleasure centers of their brains to see if they Houston would be followed by a discussion with parapsy-
could give themselves a jolt of happiness by willing the elec- chologists, he hastily wrote twoblisteringindictmentsentitled
trodes to turn on. For a time he seemed to be getting positive "Drive the Pseudos out of the Workshop of Science" and
results, but two of his fellow researchers, James Davis and "Where There's Smoke, There's Smoke."
James Kennedy, suspected that he was tampering with his Wheeler delivered these blasts as speeches at the AAAS

60
meeting. "Every science that is a science has hundreds of In effect, Rhine had the last word; when he died several
hard results," he said, "but search fails to turn up a single one months later, in 1980, his half-century of accomplishments
in 'parapsychology.' " He then called for stripping the Para- outweighed the hostility of critics such as Wheeler. Parapsy-
psychological Association of its coveted affiliation, declar- chology had spread over the globe during his lifetime, and he
ing that if "confidence men can be sent to jail" the AAAS left a rich legacy of terminology and testing procedures. But

should feel under no obligation to lend an "air of legitimacy" the problems that dogged Rhine continue to plague psychic
to psi. Later, in a panel discussion, he asserted that research: Psi effects seem fleeting at best, most ex-
fifty years previously, while an assistant to periments are irreproducible, errors
McDougall, Rhine had skewed the results on a and fraud abound despite tighter

psychology experiment. experimental procedures.

Rhine was recovering from a stroke The field has, however, ac-

when he heard of this accusation. He got a quired the patina of age. In

transcript of Wheeler's comments, saw the U.S. alone, parapsy-

that it was full of errors, and in a letter to chology is researched

the AAAS journal called Wheeler on and taught at an esti-

them. Wheeler replied, retracting the mated 1 00 colleges

accusation that Rhine had cheat- and universities. It is

ed—but standing fast on his opin- also studied in a num-

ion that psi was illegitimate science. ber of other countries,
among them Great Brit-
Retired California police official Pat
Price astounded psi researchers during a
ain, France, Germany, the
1974 remote-viewing test when he cor- Netherlands, India, Ja-
rectly described a sailing marina (left) —
the destination of a car driven at ran-
pan, and the Soviet Union.
dom - twenty minutes before the driver Moreover, the field is becom-
decided to stop there. Price performed
similarfeats seven times in a ing sophisticated. Zener cards
series of nine tests,
remained standard well into the
against odds calculated
at 100,000 to one. 1960s, but high-technology
equipment has largely re-
placed the tedious and
error-prone manual
testing. The ma-
jority of para-
psychol -
 In a 1 978 remote-viewing test,
ogists nowadays use computers to register test results directly,
s ubject Hella Hammid sketched an
rather than ask researchers to keep hand- written records - unfamiliar airport tower (left)
about three milesfrom herMenlo
which have proved susceptible to mistakes as well as to alter- Park, California, location. She
ation. They also churn out ESP targets with special machines described the target as "a square
tower with leaflike protrusions
called Random Event Generators (REGs) These are useful be-
.

around it. Something mechani-

. . .

cause statisticians have found that it is simply impossible for cal, something that needs to be
visiblefrom the sky . . . like . . .

humans to choose numbers or objects in a truly random way. an airport tower.

When they are asked to choose a number between one and
ten, for example, most people will pick seven. Those attempt-
ing to choose a series of numbers at random will avoid repeat-
ing the same one and will try to get an even distribution of
different numbers— resulting, in the long run, in predictable,

nonrandom patterns. physicist at Boeing

One of the first REGs, made to test for precognition, was Research Laborato-
built by German-born Dr. Helmut Schmidt while he was a ries. The heart of his
machine was a piece of
radioactive strontium 90,
an unstable element that
emits electrons as it decays. This
entirely random fallout drove four colored lights; subjects

guessed which light would be lit next.

In one series on Schmidt's machine, subjects predicted

correctly 26.7 percent of the time, more than the expected
twenty-five percent that
Given only longitude and
latitude coordinates, Keith Hor-
chance would decree. To the
ary sketched the Russian average layperson, so small an
sawmill town ofKamenka (left)
in a 1 980 remote-viewing
increment as 1 . 7 percent might
test. Drawings (below) revealed notseem very impressive, but
terrain and buildings and
"beaten up wooden poles. when maintained over long
periods of testing it assumes a
validity that social scientists

refer to as "statistically signifi-

cant." Thus, the equipment

and the results that it produced
led some mainstream scien-
tists to take notice.
For subjects, too, the new
machinery has brought a wel-
come change. It makes possi-
ble a variety of interesting tar-

gets, which help keep subjects

more involved in experiments.
In the mid- 980s,
1 for example,
researchers at the Psycho-
physical Research Laboratory,
located in Princeton, New Jer-
sey, developed a format some-
what like an arcade computer
game to keep subjects from
 As a researcher gazed at the
Louisiana Superdome (left) in
1976, a subject in California
drew the sketches shown here
and described "a large circu-
lar building with a white dome"
resembling "a flying saucer
in the middle of a city"— almost
the exact words the research-
er had spoken into his tape re-
corder moments before.

getting bored during extended deeply in test procedures.

sessions of testing. The most celebrated exam-
A number of parapsychol- ple of a free-response ex-
ogists, having decided that there periment was conducted at
is already substantial evidence Menlo Park, California, one
for the existence of psi, have moved on to explore the condi- afternoon in 1974. It began
tions that seem to enhance ESP performance. In the 1950s, when Harold Puthoff, a
Gertrude Schmeidler, an experimental psychologist at the City physicist, seated himself in
College of New York, pursued this so-called process-oriented a car at the Stanford Re-
research by examining the relation between personality traits search Institute (later re-

and psychic ability. She tested more than ,300 people for ESP.
1 named SRI International)
Before they were tested, all of the subjects were asked to indi- with his boss, Dr. Bonnar Cox. Their plan was that they would
cate whether they believed in ESP. Schmeidler called those drive aimlessly for thirty minutes. They had no idea where their

who believed the sheep, and she demonstrated that they journey would take them, nor did anyone else in the world—
scored significantly higher than those she called the goats, with the apparent exception of a man who was shut in an
who did not believe — and who, interestingly, performed worse electrically shielded room on the second floor of SRI's engi-
than chance. Schmeidler concluded that the goats were neering sciences building.
blocking their latent psychic abilities by unconsciously avoid- The man was Pat Price, retired police commissioner of
ing the assigned target. Burbank, California. During his career in law enforcement,
Process-oriented research has also been used to try to said Price, he had regularly used psychic powers to catch

counteract the decline effect. By moving from forced-choice criminals. Now, he was about to put his alleged talents to a

targets -such as Zener cards -to free-response targets, some laboratory test. With Price was Russell Targ, a physicist. At
experimenters hoped they could approximate spontaneous 3.05, Targ turned on a tape recorder and started to explain
ESP experiences more closely and involve subjects more that this experiment was being conducted to examine a psy-
chic phenomenon called remote viewing. Targ told Price that
when the two outbound investigators reached their destina-
tion, Price would be asked to describe what he saw there.

At that point, Price broke into the recording: "We don't

have to wait till then," he said. "I can tell you right now where
they will be. What I'm looking at is a little boat jetty or a little

boat dock along the bay. . . . I see some motor launches, some
little sailing ships. Sails all furled, some with their masts
stepped, others are up. . . .Funnything-thisjustflashedin. . .

a definite feeling of Oriental architecture that seems to be fairly

In 1984, Soviet psychic healer Djuna
Davitashvili described, from 10,000 miles adjacent to where they are."
away, the carousel (above) a California
researcher would randomly choose to visit
By the time Price finished his interruption it was 3:10;
hours later. Her sketch of "an animal's Cox and Puthoff still had another twenty minutes of aimless
eye and pointy ears" (right) and vision of
"a white divan " corresponded with driving ahead of them. At 3:30 they pulled off the road and got
seats on the children 's ride. out of the car. They were standing at the Redwood City Marina,
 I

A Meeting Foretold

^,

When MissJ. K. (below) volunteered in 1958 to take

part in Milan Ryzl's hypnotic ESP experiments the Prague
accounting clerk— whose name was withheld for pri-
vacy— had never experienced ESP. But Ryzl believed that
ESP could be taught and refined through hypnosis,
and, by their second session, it appeared that J. K. might

prove his theory true. Under Ryzl's tutelage— and a

light trance— J. K. seemed able to predict future occur-
rences in the lives of her friends or relatives.
During one exercise, J. K. foresaw a meeting the fol-

lowing day between Ryzl and a friend he had not seen

for some time. Ryzl decided to find out if predicted events
w
could be averted. "When the meeting was predicted,"
he explained later, "I assumed that would meet this per-
I

son on a street, as was the case in earlier meetings. To

avoid it, I decided to stay the whole next day at home."
However, J. K.'s prediction was proved accurate: Ac-
cording to Ryzl, the friend appeared at his door for a visit.

.-'.-'»

64
65
 What Dreams Are Made Of
Human beings have always their environment and re-

been intrigued by their hearse responses to various

dreams. From the moment situations. But no single the-

we awake, most of us strug- ory has accounted for the full

gle to recapture and under- range of dream experiences,

stand the elusive images that including those with alleged

flitted through our minds dur- psychic content. Large-scale,

ing the night. Scientists and systematic experiments have

psychologists, too, search for convinced a number of psy-
the meanings of dreams, but chic investigators that tele-

usually while addressing pathic exchange during

larger questions: When, pre- dreams is not rare and does

cisely, do dreams occur? not require a special aptitude.
What causes them? What is Although thoughts or images
their purpose? Might they may not always be transmit-
even, as some parapsycholo- ted whole from sender to
gists maintain, serve as dreamer, parts may be inter-
channels for psychic communication? During all sleep stages, dream woven with the ongoing dream or ap-
researchers monitor (above, from pear an analogous form.
in
As long ago as the early 900s, re- 1

top) eye movements,

searchers began to make the connec- Taking dream telepathy research one
muscle tone, and brain waves.
tion between the state of dreaming and step further, Dr. Keith Hearne of Hull,
rapid eye movements, or "EMs— short Less easy to uncover, however, has England, is studying the lucid dream, in
bursts of eye wiggling followed by a been the cause of dreams. One neuro- which the sleeper knows a dream is
minute or two of rest— during certain pe- physiological explanation is that dream- occurring Hearne has developed a de-
riods of sleep, in the 1950s, the correla- ing is a side effect of concentrated nerve vice that monitors the sleeper's breath-
tion between REM activity and dreaming signals traveling within the brain; an- ing, and when the subject breathes in a

was reinforced by studies in which elec- other view holds that during REM sleep prearranged pattern to indicate a dream
troencephalographs monitored the brain the central nervous system is clearing it- has begun, the machine automatically
waves of sleeping volunteers. Research- self of chemicals generated during the telephones a sender. The sender then
ers found that most sleepers progress day. However, neither theory addresses concentrates on delivering an image to
through four stages of sleep, ranging the content of dreams. That task has the alerted dreamer.
from slumber to deep sleep. About
light usually fallen to psychologists. Dream studies continue to be con-
ninety minutes after falling asleep, this Sigmund Freud dreams ex-
felt that dream researchers Montague
ducted, but
pattern is reversed. press unconscious wishes and desires. Ullman and Stanley Krippner have al-
While ascending through the sleep Carl Jung viewed them as glimpses into ready drawn some conclusions. "The
stages, the sleeper may be difficult to the collective unconscious, filled with psyche of man possesses a latent ESP
rouse, but the brain registers alertness. symbols that contain advice or guid- capacity that is most likely to be de-
This is the REM stage (above), and here ance. Some scientists believe that ployed during sleep," they have written.
dreams take place. This pattern is re- dreams are a way for the mind to rid it- "It took many hundreds of thousands of

peated four to five times per night, with self of excess information; still others years before man learned to write his
each dream period lasting for approxi- consider dreams the means by which language. How much longer will take it

mately ten minutes. humans integrate new knowledge about before he leams to use his psi?"

66
Blurred by time-lapse photography, a
sensory-isolation cradle rocks a blind-
folded, headphone-wearing subject
at Brooklyn 's Maimonides Medical Center.
Patterned after a medieval witch 's cra-
dle, supposedly used to induce a trance so
witches could communicate with the
devil, the device disorients occupants until
they lose touch with the outside world.
The cradle is used to test the theory that
sensory deprivation creates a state of
mind receptive to telepathic exchanges.

a harbor and boat dock some four Despitesome seasickness,

miles from SRI. Small and medium- Hammid was able to "see" the
size sailboats and motorboats were target; herbeacon had climbed
bobbing lazily in the water; a mod- a large oak tree on a cliff over-
ern, Oriental-looking restaurant looking Stanford University.
stood nearby. From all indications, While submerged, Hammid re-
Price had not only envisioned the corded the tree, the cliff, and the
marina from a windowless room fact that her beacon was behav-
miles away; he had also correctly ing in a very "unscientific fash-
predicted that Puthoff and Cox ion." Presumably, she picked up
would end up there, long before on movements but
his peculiar
they had arrived. could not discern that he was
The remote-viewing ex- climbing a tree.

periments of Targ and Puthoff Although these remote-

continued at SRI International viewing experiments had reason-
formore than a decade. The SRI ably tight experimental controls,
team expanded remote-viewing critics have still found room for er-
attempts over incredible dis- ror or even fraud in Targ's and
tances. Subjects in Menlo Park Puthoff's procedures. In some tests,

with varying degrees of appar- for instance, subjects knew that

ent success tried to perceive ten viewing targets were selected
targets at sites as distant as one at a time, and they were told at

New York and San Andreas, the end of a session which targets
Colombia. One subject in De- had been visited. This would allow
troit seemed to come close to the subject to rule out previously
identifying her sender's view chosen targets. Similarly, judges
of Rome International Airport. were supposed to choose hits or
Another subject, a photogra- misses by matching transcripts of the
pher by the name of Hella subject's descriptions with actual tar-

Hammid, was judged to have gets. However, the transcripts appar-

described correctly five out of ently contained a number of clues-
nine target sites, a feat that for instance, references to places vis-

beat odds of half a million to one. Follow- ited the day before -which would cue
ing that success, she underwent a particularly severe test. the judges to the correct match. Some critics have even
In July 1977, she was placed in a small submarine, towed charged that Targ and Puthoff did not report many of their

two miles out into the Pacific Ocean off the California coast, negative results, a charge the two scientists deny.
and submerged. She knew that her telepathic "beacon "— who While such process-oriented research has been examin-
would go to the target she had to identify-would be located ing external influences on psychic abilities, other investiga-
somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area, but that was all. tions have been exploring how internal changes can affect

67
 ^^3r
-,^M - '
*4k^

Ganzfeld Cocoon
An intriguing area of psychic investi-
gation today isganzfeld (German for
"whole field") research. Developed in
1971 by parapsychologist Charles Hon-
orton, the ganzfeld environment is
considered an analogue of the highly re-
laxed dream state, in which psychic
powers are said to flourish.

The subject lies quietly in a darkened

room, bathed in a dim red light.
Halved table-tennis balls cover his eyes,
and headphones fill his ears with the
synthesized sounds of white noise. Alert
and relaxed, but deprived of normal
sensory stimulation, the subject turns in-
'J
ward, focusing on the images that
come unchecked into his mind.
Inone such experiment, in 1984,
an ESP test subject outfitted for ganzfeld
research relaxed in a room at the Psy-
chophysical Research Laboratories in

Princeton. Meanwhile, in another

room, a sender concentrated on a pho-
tograph - ilashed at intervals on a TV
monitor of two fire-eaters (top), intent
on transmitting the picture telepathi-
cally to the subject. The ganzfeld subject
described his thoughts as follows:
"This white noise, which ordinarily
sounds like water, this time seems
like flames . . . again hearing the rush of
flames. I am reminded of a funeral
pyre, I remember a picture of Gandhi's
body being burned, but so far the fire
images haven't been unpleasant. My im-
ages of flames didn't really include
the feeling of heat. Red color, red-
orange color together."
 psi. This area of experimentation, called Altered States Re-
search ASR) tests the notion that when we loosen our grip on
( ,

everyday reality we open ourselves up to a world of communi-

cation deep within our minds.
Since the Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, psychics
have claimed to tap powers of clairvoyance and precognition
by going into trances. In the eighteenth century, the Austrian
physician and mystic Anton Mesmer developed the tech-
niques of hypnosis to try to produce a similar state in his sub-
jects. Rhine conducted some unfruitful experiments with hyp-
nosis but discontinued them when he learned that his students
were hypnotizing each other for fun in their rooms.
In the early 1 960s, however, the Czech biochemist Milan
Ryzl used hypnosis to make parapsychology history. Ryzl hyp-
notized a subject named Pavel Stepanek into believing in his
psychic powers, and Stepanek emerged as an astoundingly
high scorer at card guessing, sometimes against odds of
500,000 to one. Stepanek went on to perform impressively in

all sorts of conditions over a decade. One parapsychologist

described this as "the longest period on record of a successful
demonstration of ESP by a subject in laboratory tests." Skep-
tics, however, have pointed out that Stepanek was permitted
to handle the card packages during the experiments, thus rais-

ing the possibility of some sort of cheating.

Besides using hypnosis, researchers have sought to in-

duce altered states through drugs, meditation, biofeedback,

and a technique called ganzfeld, a German term meaning,
roughly, "total field." In the ganzfeld setting, subjects are
isolated from the external environment by having opaque
hemispheres -halved table-tennis balls-put over their eyes
and white noise played to them through earphones. By letting
their minds wander, subjects try to respond to information

projected mentally by an isolated sender (left).

Sleep is a naturally altered state, and there is abundant

anecdotal evidence that it enhances psychic ability. Louisa
Rhine collected data on 00,000 spontaneous psi occurrences
1

over twenty years; her analysis showed that sixty-five percent

of them occurred in dreams. In one, a woman in North Wales
saw, on March 4, 87 1 1 , an image of her distant son in ill health

69
 Three Theories of ESP

Parapsychologists face two basic chal- travel, they lose strength. How then can
lenges: proving that psychic powers exist i
parapsychologists account rationally for
and, if so, explaining how they work. !
precognition, in which information from
Most psi researchers have quite logically an event is said to reach the subject be-
devoted themselves to the first problem. How can they ex-
fore the event occurs 7
However, the absence of a coherent the- :
plain the way
which a telepathic mes-
in

ory of ESP has cast doubt on the entire sage allegedly arrives at its target
field. Critics point out that psychic powers undiminished by intervening distances?
are so unlikely from a scientific point of Some psychic researchers have re-
view that any other explanation for posi- sponded to these questions with theories,
tive experimental results, including or at least interpretations of theories,
fraud, must be considered first. suggesting that psychic effects may not
Indeed, telepathy, clairvoyance, and be incompatible with modern scientific
precognition seem to contradict the ele- \
thought. Such researchers speculate that
mentary physical laws that govern our some physical descriptions of the uni-
lives. How can information travel from verse might serve as models, or meta-
person to person, or from event to per- 1

phors, for the way psychic phenomena

son, without following known sensory behave. Among these models are elec-
channels' Standard physics dictates that tromagnetism, multidimensional geom-
no signals of any kind can travel faster etry,and quantum mechanics, illustrated
than the speed of light and that as they on the next three pages.
 Invisible

Waves
The nineteenth-century discovery
of electromagnetism, which described
how some signals travel in waves
from a source to a receiver, provided
one of the earliest models for ESP.
Physicists found that light, the infrared
energy of heat, and other phenomena
fit into an electromagnetic spectrum
(left). At one end are extremely short,
high-frequency waves, such as X rays,
and, at the other end, extremely long,
low-frequency waves, such as radio
waves from distant galaxies.
With a few exceptions, such as light
and heat, humans cannot sense elec-
tromagnetic radiation. Perhaps, said
early researchers, psychic in-
formation also travels invisibly, like
radio waves, and is accessible only to
those people who can tune in their psy-
chic receivers. Speculation generally
located "psi waves" in the low-
frequency end of the spectrum.
Psi waves, however, have never been
found, and this model still fails to ac-
count for the faster-than-light speeds
and undiminished power suggested
by reports of precognition and telepathy.
Most parapsychologists now believe
thatelectromagnetism is a naive model
for extrasensory perception.

71
 IhePsi
Dimension

Another, more recent model for sup-

posed psychic effects places them in a
dimension outside of - but interact-
ing with - the four dimensions of space
and time we can perceive. These are
illustrated symbolically here: If a line,

with only the single dimension of

height,moves through space, its
shape over time is a
plane - a shape

?D

in the
two dimensions 3D
of height and width.
The plane, moved through
space and time to gain
depth, will form the outlines of a
three-dimensional cube as it travels.
%
These three dimensions are the
only ones we can see, but we experience
the dimension of time no less clearly.
The existence of the cube over time adds
a fourth coordinate to the shape, cre-
ating a new configuration known as a
hypercube — invisible to human eyes
but not to the vision of mathematics.
Some mathematicians have sug-
gesi :d the universemay contain even
more than four dimensions - as
many as eleven, or even twenty-siv A
few psychic theorists speculate that
human consciousness itself belongs to
one of these additional dimensions
intersecting our four-dimensional world.
If so, the four "hard" coordinates of

space-time would be joined by a fifth,

"soft" coordinate of psi. If our minds
could somehow tap into this extra di-
mension, the way information travels
we presently
outside of the natural laws
know might be explained. However,
with no physical evidence to support ex-
tra dimensions, the idea of a con-
sciousness plane remains nothing more
than fascinating speculation.
 A Quantum Connection

One of the most popular current met- does not possess properties such as
aphors for psychic communication relies spin or velocity until it is noted by an ob-
on the paradoxical world view of server; the very act of measurement
quantum mechanics. This science de- is said to "collapse its wave function"
scribes the behavior of matter at the and assign it values at random. At the
subatomic where basic units are
level, moment that observers do measure pho
neither particles nor waves but act ton A, causing it to acquire a certain
like both, and where matter cannot even spin, photon B will acquire the opposite
be said definitely to exist. Rather, it spin,no matter how far away it is,
has a "tendency to exist," expressed as a and despite having no connection with
mathematical probability. the first particle. Photon B somehow
The micro world of subatomic behav- seems to "know" instantaneously what
ior follows different rules from the photon A is doing.
macro world we know. A famous exam- This occurrence, confirmed in physi-
ple of this is the paradox illustrated cal experiments, suggests that the
above. In this thought experiment, two universe is connected in some hidden
particles — say, an electron and its way, perhaps at a hypothetical sub-
antimatter equivalent, a positron - col- quantum level that includes our con-
lide, annihilating each other and cre- sciousness If so, then clairvoyance,
ating two photons, which speed off in which supposedly enables a psychic to
different directions. By the strange know instantly of an airplane crash
laws of quantum mechanics, photon A miles away, may become plausible.

73
She later learned that he had died in Africa that same evening. ceptance among mainstream scientists and psychologists. As
The most famous series of attempts to track dream telep- one critic, psychologist David Mark, said: "Parascience has so
athy was conducted in 1965 by Drs. Montague Ullman and far failed to produce a single repeatable finding and, until it

Stanley Krippner at their laboratory for dream research at Mai- does, will continue to be viewed as an incoherent collection of

monides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. In this experi- belief systems steeped in fantasy, illusion, and error."

ment, after a receiver had gone to sleep in one room, a sender To be sure, new developments in other sciences have

in another room concentrated on a picture chosen randomly occasionally led to a more open view of psi research. Theoreti-
from a large selection at the lab. cal physicists, for example, have proposed theories of the uni-
are accompanied by Rapid Eye Movements verse that allow for concepts such as time travel-making
Dreams (REMs). Sleeping receivers at Maimonides were claims for psi seem almost conservative by comparison. And
connected to electroencephalographs to monitor through the study of quantum mechanics- which deals with
their brain waves for REMs that would show when events within atoms-some physicists have concluded that
their dreams began. Receivers would be wakened reality must be defined as a relation between our minds and
in mid-dream to record what they had seen while dreaming. the thingswe observe, rather than as some objective, outside
The Maimonides team took extraordinary measures entity.A number of parapsychologists have tried to adapt
against cheating, intentional and otherwise. Rooms were these theories as explanations of psi phenomena (page 70).
soundproofed; pictures were sealed and signed across their An even more favorable development has been the
seals, and signatures were covered with tape. The images the emergence of so-called anomalistic psychology. In recent

dreamers described were compared with the senders' pictures years psychologists have admitted the existence of what they
by independent judges to see if there were correspondences. call puzzles in psychology -repeatedly observed phenomena,
The results were often surprisingly on target. One sender such as apparently precognitive dreams, that cannot be fully

was given a picture of George BeUows's Dempsey and Firpo, a explained with current knowledge. Although anomalistic psy-
dramatic painting of a prize light in Madison Square Garden. chologists do not attribute parapsychological answers to such
The dreamer reported the following: "Something about posts. puzzles, they do not dismiss them and are more open to exam-
Just posts standing up from the ground and nothing else. ining the evidence for alternative explanations.
There is some kind offeeling of movement. . . .Ah. Something For all that, parapsychologists themselves are becoming
about Madison Square Garden and a boxing fight." more patient with traditional explanations and are no longer
Another subject demonstrated what some psychic re- wedded to paranormal explanations for all mysterious phe-
searchers have interpreted as precognitive dreaming. She nomena. Indeed, the Parapsychological Association holds
dreamed she saw a co-worker looking at the front page of the that the very existence of psi is still a hypothesis and not a
New York Daily News and seeing a collapsed building. He was validated fact. The association also states that "A commit-
not, in fact, doing any such thing at the time. But two weeks ment to the study of psi phenomena does not require assum-
later, the Broadway Central Hotel caved in, and hundreds of ing the reality of 'non-ordinary' factors or processes."
thousands of New Yorkers saw its picture on the front page. It is still too early to determine whether the uncertainties
and unanswered questions that surround psi are symptoms of
With these and other experiments, parapsychologists have at- parapsychology's growing pains or indications that its goals
tempted to follow the rest of the world into the age of science. will remain forever beyond human reach. But laboratory ex-
They have kept their eyes on new scientific developments, perimentation notwithstanding, the psychic world has been
tools, and methods. But their field still struggles for broad ac- embraced by millions of ordinary people.

74
 Mystic Powers of (he Shamans

m 'hile claims of psychic powers are

viewed by many today with a healthy dose of skepticism, some cul-
tures accept contact with supernatural forces without question Since .

have honored individuals believed to

earliest times, tribal societies
possess the ability to communicate with deities and spirits. Variously
called seers, healers, or medicine men— but most widely known to-
day as shamans— they are called upon to cure physical or emotional
illness, secure food during times of famine, help misplaced or find
stolen objects, predict the future, control the weather, retrieve the
departing souls of the sick, and guide those of the dead.
Shamans usually try to contact the spirit world while in a trance.
To reach this altered state of consciousness, they employ methods
not unlike those used in some modern parapsychology experiments.
They may meditate quietly or concentrate on the rhythmic sounds of
drumming, singing, or dancing; they may fast or use hallucinogenic
drugs. Once the mind and body have surrendered to the trance, the
shaman is free to visit— often, it is said, through magical flight— the
spirit world. There theshaman receives a message that may come in
the form of a magic song, prayer, or ritual to be performed; it may also
be an illuminating vision about the nature of life. On rare occasions,
shamans have sought to describe, through words and pictures, some
of the often ineffable messages they received during psychic odys-
seys to the spirit world. Examples from three tribal cultures - the Iglu-
lik Eskimos, Oglala Sioux Indians, and Huichol Indians of Mexico-

are shown on the following six pages.

75
 The Spirits of Anarqaq
When the Danish explorer Knud Ras- and some truly evil. Although the entire
lent,

mussen arrived in arctic North America in community worked to keep the bad spir-
1 92 1 to study the Iglulik Eskimos, he its at bay by practicing prescribed rituals

found a culture that revolved almost entirely and taboos, only shamans were suc-
around a multitude of unseen beings — cessful in banishing them completely.
spirits that inhabited every person, animal, As a shaman, Anarqaq was aided by
and object, and unspecified spirits that so-called helping spirits. These were said to
were held responsible for seemingly inex- present themselves by invading a sha-
plicable events such as illness and foul man's body or simply calling his name:
weather. With the aid of an Eskimo shaman When he answered, their power became
named Anarqaq (left), who recalled from his. Many kind spirits first appeared as

his visions the beings shown here and monsters or ferocious animals that had
painstakingly set them down on paper, to be conquered or subdued. But once help-
Rasmussen learned that certain spir- ing spirits were won over,
its were kind and they remained steadfast,
helpful, others aggres- loyal, and readily

sive and malevo- available to the shaman.

Eskimo shaman Anarqaq

Anarqaq held that the spirit Igtuk was

responsible/or booming noises that were
occasionally heard coming from the
arctic mountains. As the shaman saw him,
Igtuk had just one huge eye, which was
set in to his body at the same level as his
arms. His mouth opened wide to dis-
close a dark abyss, and his chin was cov-
ered with a thick tuft of hair

Soon after Anarqaq's parents died, he said, a melancholy sj

known as Issitoq, or Giant Eye, appeared. "You must not be afraid oj

me," the spirit entreated, "fori, too, strugglewith sad thoughts.
Therefore will I go with you and bey our helping spirit. "Issitoq, who had
short, bristly hair, exceptionally long arms, and a vertical mouth
with one long tooth and two short ones, helped Anarqaq find people
who had broken the tribe's taboos.
In a vision that appeared to Anarqdq one spring day, afemale spirit
named Qungiaruvlik tried to steal a child by concealing it in her parka
(above). Before she could accomplish the deed, however, two well-
armed helping spirits came to the rescue and killed the kidnapper.
**

Kigutilik, one ofmany spirits

that Anarqdq claimed to have
encoun tered during h un ting
expeditions, was a monstrous
being as big as a bear. With a
mighty roar, Kigutilik arose
from an opening in the ice as
Anarqdq confronted this rotund spirit, the shaman was hunting seal.
called Ndrtdq, one day while h un ting cari- Anarqdq was sofrightened
bou. Ndrtdq rushed at Anarqdq as if that he fled home without secur
to attack him, but when the shaman pre- ing the spirit as helper.
pared to defend himself, the spirit van-
ished. Later, Ndrtdq reappeared and ex-
plained that ifAnarqdq would learn to
control his short temper, Ndrtdq would
become his helping spirit.
Led by two guides with /laming spears. Black
Elk ascends on a cloud to visit the spirits. "I could
if
see my mother and myfatheryonder, " he re-
called, "and Ifelt sorry to be leaving them.

-'-~.3n '

Black Elk's Great Vision

As Black Elk was presented to the six Grandfathers - the spirits of the
East, West, North, South, Earth, andSky-he "shook all over with fear,
for these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. "

During his lifetime. Black Elk, an Oglala "They looked older than men can ever
Sioux Indian chief and medicine man, had be," he said, "old like hills, like stars."
several visions that helped him guide his The Grandfathers taught Black Elk
people through misfortunes. But his first about the spiritual values of life and pre-
journey to the spirit world occurred sented him with symbols of their powers:
when Black Elk was a young boy. In 1 93 1 a cup of water and a sacred bow that make
the aged Black Elk recalled this vision life or destroy it, the healing herb and

for poet John G. Neihardt; Black Elk's boy- cleansing sacred wind, the peace pipe and
hood friend, Standing Bear, illustrated herb of understanding; the hoop of the
the story with these drawings world, symbolizing the universe; the flowei
For a number of years spirit voices had mg stick, symbol of the tree of life.
called out and sung to Black Elk, he re- Then Black Elk was led to the center of
lated, and when he reached the age of nine, where he was shown "the
the earth,
the voices said: "It is time." With that. goodness and the beauty and the strange-
Black Elk suddenly fell ill and lay near ness of the greening earth the spirit
. . .

death for twelve days; during this time, shapes of things as they should be." His tu-
the great vision occurred. telage complete. Black Elk was dis-
Two spirits came down from the sky missed by the oldest Grandfather, who told
boy from his home, he
to fetch the said, and him: "Go back with power to the place
with them Black Elk ascended I from whence you came." Black Elk re-
world of cloud. . . a great white plan- .
turned to his village his illness was
snowy hills and mountains. "There, in a cured. But he hadchanged forever. The
tepee adorned with a rainbow at its en- lightheadedness of boyhood had been
trance, Black Elk met the six Grandfa- transformed intc the maturity of one who
thers, the most powerful spirits of the world. speaks with the knowledge of the ages.
Black Elk prays to the spirits.
From the center of the hoop of the world,
Black Elk surveys each quadrant of the universe
and the objects that symbolize its powers.

Demonstrating his newly acquired abilities, Black

Elk uses a Ugh tning-tipped sacred spear to turn the
spirit of drought into a harmless turtle.

At the end ofhis vision, Black Elk views from the center of the earth "the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being
 Hie Powers of Peyole
To Ulu Temay (right) and the other sha- disk he has reproduced from one seen in

mans of Mexico's Huichol Indians, a dream- earlier dreams. Such dream disks re-

less sleep is far worse than no sleep at mind the shaman of a promise that he made

all. For it is through dreams and visions that to the gods during a previous vision; to
shamans receive messages from the fulfill his obligation, the shaman makes an

gods. Their dreams may forecast future offering of the disk.

events, remind the shaman of obliga- The colored disks are also considered
tions that he needs to fulfill or rituals that he rewards from the gods for keeping a
should perform, reveal whether some- vow or a bargain and are thought to hold

one has offended the spirits, and suggest the essence - and thus the power — of the
means for atonement. gods. In addition to colored disks, the sha-
But while dreams tell what must be ac- man creates a tool of power by attaching
complished, the Huichol shaman's actu- bird feathers to arrows. Birds are thought
al powers are shown to him through peyote to be messengers of the deities, and the
visions - kaleidoscopic images that ap- feathered wands — when used together
pear after the shaman eats the hallucino- with the disks - create a channel for de-
genic buttons, or tops, of the peyote cac- livering messagesto and from the gods.
tus. Through the vision, the shaman leaves The tools, kept in a woven basket such
reality and enters an inner world where as the one held by Ulu Temay, are used
spirits share the secrets of their omnipo- in almost all shamanic rituals. They appear

tence and teach the shaman how to use in the peyote vision described by the

and expand his powers. shaman and illustrated below, and in the vi-
While he eats these peyote buttons, sion of the rain-making ceremony
the shaman may hold a brightly colored shown on the opposite page.
Ulu Temay and shaman 's tools

This yam painting vividly recreates a

peyote vision experienced by Ulu Temay.
As the shaman explained: "The nea-
lika [colored disk, cen terj promised me
the healing energy of the sun, and the
rain making powers of the Rain Mothers.
The sun and rain offered me thefeath-
ered wands. The deer spirits offered me
their knowledge about how to use my
powers with wisdom and precaution, and
the eagle offered me his power to see
all.The snakes are the voice of Grandfa-
ther Fire, who is the wisest and most
powerful of all shamans. He spoke to me
through the rattles on the snakes, and
told me they will become my allies and
make me strong against those who
wish to do me harm.
In his rain-making ceremony, Ulu Temay usesfeathered wands to contact the
Rain Mothers. The Rain Mothers, he said, "live in the sea as serpen ts, and give
birth to the Rain Child [bottom right], who turns into a serpent and guides my
prayers up to the clouds. When it rains, baby serpents/ail to the ground who are
children of the Rain Mothers. The coiled serpent in the middle is the Earth
Mother, who communicates with the serpents in the sea and sky, and thanks
them for the nourishment they send. The people thank me, theshaman,
for making the gods happy through my ceremony, and convincing the Rain Moth-
ers to allow it to rain.

81
 CHAPTER 3

The World oi flic Psychic

he room was all white except for dark brown wainscoting around its bottom
half. A strong, astringent smell hung in the air, an odor that meant hospital to
the small boy strapped onto the hard white table. Two-year-old Ingo Swann
was about to undergo what the grownups called a tonsillectomy. He under-
stood that the operation was necessary to make his throat stop hurting, but he
also understood that he was afraid. Struggling against the restraining straps
and caterwauling with all his might, he resisted the nurse's effort to cover his
face with a dark mask. She retreated, only to return with a half-filled balloon.

"I bet you can't blow this up further," she teased. The air in the balloon
smelled funny, but young Ingo took up the challenge. In moments, the room's
bright lights began to fade and dim. Then - Ingo Swann would write long after-
ward—a strange thing happened. The white walls turned emerald, and the dark
wainscoting took on an iridescent glow. Ingo felt himself hovering about three
feet above his own body, secure in the shadows above the glare of the table,
watching the surgery in progress. He gazed down at the doctor and the nurse
and his mother, who had been allowed into the operating room to help calm
him. He watched the scalpel slip and nick the back of his own tongue, and he
heard the doctor curse in response He watched the nurse put two small, brown
.

objects-presumably his tonsils - into a bottle and stow them behind some rolls
of tissue on a table against the wall.

Some time later, when Ingo came out from under the ether, he demanded
to be given his tonsils.

"Now, now," the nurse said to the little boy, "We have already thrown
those dirty things away."
"No you didn't," the child snapped, pointing toward the rolls of paper.
"You put them behind those over there."
The doctor, the nurse, and his mother exchanged alarmed glances No-
body spoke. The nurse had done exactly as Ingo said: The tonsils were in the
bottle behind the rolls of paper on the table. The grownups could not under-
stand how he could know -and he
could not understand why he should not
know. He often had the sensation of seeming to leave his own body and watch-
ing from a distance what was happening around it. But he had not yet learned
that the experience, although known to psychics by a number of names-out-
of-body experiences and astral travel among them -was not Gertrude R. Schmeidler of the City University of New York, he
in the ken of most people. demonstrated apparent psychokinesis- the ability to alter the
Swann would grow up to become a noted psychic artist, physical environment, such as changing the air temperature
his canvases filled with auric light he presumably saw ema- inside sealed vacuum bottles, through mind power alone.
nating from the life he painted. For a time, discouraged by the Still, his frustrations persisted. Although Swann greatly
cultural mind-set that viewed his claimed psychic powers as admired the work of Schmeidler and never abandoned psy-
impossible, he stopped cultivating them. He eventually re- chic experimentation, he found much of it disillusioning. He
newed an active interest, however, prompted partly by plants concluded that science was too often wanting imagination
and animals. He noticed that he seemed to communicate tele- and strictured by its own rationalist traditions, and that it was
pathically with his pet chinchilla, which would exhibit great not yet up to the intricate task of exploring the world of the
distress if Swann merely thought of putting it into its cage for psychic. In the main, Swann said, researchers had "only suc-
the night. In addition, he felt he was able to receive mental ceeded in grinding the diamond into a dust pile while trying to

signals from a bedraggled Dracaena massangeana—a com- capture the sparkle."

mon house plant. For example, Swann believed he could pick Yet, even as Swann wrote those words in a memoir pub-
up on the plant's "mental" complaints of being watered too lished in 1 975, the psychic world was exploding from the con-
much or of lacking proper minerals in its soil. fines of the laboratory, where it had migrated from seance
Concluding to his own satisfaction that something note- rooms and side shows only a few decades before. Blending

worthy was going on, he submitted to testing by some of para- with the neomysticism and antimaterialism of the 1960s and
psychology's leading researchers. The results were often ex- the self-realization movement of the 1 970s, a pursuit of things
traordinary. At the American Society for Psychi- psychic had at last infiltrated the mainstream
cal Research, for instance, he purportedly of twentieth-century culture. Psychic
proved adept at remote viewing (oppo- powers were part of a loose amal-

site), and in experiments with Dr. gam that, in the years after Swann
described his experiences, came under the general title the tural trends that directly preceded was not without its
it, it

it owed a debt to two re-

New Age. It was an age in which old definitions were expand- individual progenitors. In particular,

ed and blurred. Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and re- cent giants of psychism: Eileen Garrett and Edgar Cayce.
trocognition were all part of the New Age paraphernalia, but They operated quite differently, but each seemed able- while
these aspects by no means circumscribed the movement. unconscious -to gain access to information not available
Whatever its tools, its goals were so-called higher conscious- to the waking mind. Garrett functioned mostly as a medium
ness, enlightened awareness. —a conduit for spirits of the dead. Cayce was renowned as a

New groups and movements arose to help psi enthusi- psychic healer and a prophet. Firm conclusions about the na-

asts escape the mundane world in ways ranging from simple ture of their apparent powers eluded both of these two people,
meditation to astral voyaging and pagan rituals. Some aspi- though others theorized that clairvoyance, or telepathy, or
rants to enlightenment flocked to so-called channelers, peo- both, figured in their work.

ple who transmit purported sublime truths from spirits long

dead. Others looked to psychic advisers to counsel them on Garrett was born Eileen Jeanette Vancho in mist-shrouded
their present lives, predict their futures, or even regress them County Meath in Ireland. She spent her childhood near the

through past existences. mystical Hill of Tara, a fey countryside where, she said later,

Swann, who apparently possessed psi talents that "the 'little people' were universally accepted as an everyday

Ingo most New Agers could merely aspire to, had little pa- part of normal existence." This myth-laden landscape was
tience with the movement's mystical trappings. Believing one of two factors she credited for the possible origin of her

the psychic impulse was of a piece with the creative urge psychic gifts. The other was what she called "the almost
human psyche and was in no way paranormal, he
in the equally universal acceptance of death as an intimate element
thought weird mysticism as great a trap as smug rationalism of the daily round." She granted the possibility that the dead
to those seeking a wider awareness of the universe. "Granted could communicate with the living and was fairly comfortable
many individuals, their synapses misfiring or their alleged serving as a vehicle for the dialogue.
karma catching up with them, do sometimes go bonkers and Certainly, deathwas an intimate specter in Garrett's per-
create confusion among their fellow men," Swann wrote. sonal life. Both her parents committed suicide while she was
"But, even so, this is no sign that all people whose imagination still an infant; one of her three husbands was killed in World

and consciousness wander beyond the immediate barriers of War and only one of her four children survived into adult-
I,

ideas of consciousness are bonkers." hood. But for all the death surrounding her, Garrett was
Many detractors were less restrained in their contempt anything but morbid.
for New Age doings. Most traditional religionists warned "She hated to be deprived of any experience within her
against the psychic boom as idolatry. ESP skeptics insisted grasp-or even slightly beyond it," Garrett's daughter, Eileen
that years of scientific research had produced, at best, only Coley, has said. "She was such an entertaining personality-
the flimsiest evidence that psychic phenomena existed in interested in so many things, so many people. If I could be
any form The ubiquitous New Agers, however, believed other-
. fascinated by waking up at 7 am to exchange funny stories
wise. No longer the province of academics on the one hand or with her, you can imagine what sort of person she was. A lot of
the lunatic fringe on the other, the world of the psychic had people likened her to Auntie Mame. Indeed, according to Co-
'

'

become respectable, even fashionable in a way. And it was ley, novelist Patrick Dennis knew Garrett and used her as a

quite densely populated. prototype for his zany, globe-trotting heroine \x\ Auntie Mame.
While the New Age was spawned partially by broad cul- It was Garrett's sheer force of personality, at least as much as

84
 Hie Vision of logo Swann
Remote viewing— seeing beyond the
range of physical vision— is one of sev-
eral psychic talents attributed to Ingo
Swann. To test his abilities, the Ameri-
can Society for Psychical Research
devised an experiment in 972. Pictures
1

or objects were placed on a suspend-

ed platform; seated below it, pad and
pencil in hand, Swann tried to see Ai
the images and then draw them while
electrodes measured his brain's elec-
S
trical activity (above).

The substantially accurate

sketches shown here, detailing shapes
and colors of two abstract pictures on
the platform, were among his successes.
Swann believed he saw the objects
by traveling out of his body, floating up-
ward to where the pictures lay. Other (/TV
possibilities considered by ASPR re-
searchers are clairvoyance— having
a vision of the pictures— or telepathy,
reading the mind of someone
knew the platform's contents.
who OM
her alleged psychic gifts, that

made such an impact on the

many people she influenced.
Garrett left her native Ire-
land as a young woman and
lived in London and the south
down
of France before settling
in New York, becoming an
American citizen, and under-
taking a successful career in
publishing. This was a reason-
able enough direction for her
life to take. From heryouth, she A pensive youth (above) and woman Garrett even investigated the practice of devil wor-
a dramatic/lower appear to be
had been something of a pet surrounded by auras in these ship, though more in a spirit of curiosity than commitment She
oil paintings by the widely tested
among the British literati, and also submitted herself to the scrutiny of psychiatrists, psychol-
psychic Ingo Swann.
her friends and acquaintances ogists, and neurologists, as well as to J. B. Rhine and other
included D. H. Lawrence, Wil- serious parapsychologists.

liam Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Al- One famous experiment in 1931 tested Garrett's sup-

dous Huxley, Robert Graves, and H. G. Wells. posed ability to leave her body while in a trance and report on
In 1951, Garrett founded the Parapsychology Founda- distant scenes she saw in her astral state. In a New York apart-
tion, which supported scholarly and scientific research. The ment, a psychiatrist and a secretary looked on while the medi-
venture was funded mostly fr the wealthy Ohio philanthropist um tried to see into a doctor's office in Reykjavik, Iceland. In

Frances T. Bolton, who admired Garrett and was fascinated by preparation for the experiment, the doctor had placed a num-
paranormal phenomena. Over the years, other adherents of ber of items on an office table. Garrett was supposed to de-

the medium also contributed, and Garrett volunteered money scribe them. While in a trance, she did so, and then went on to

of her own. Through the organization, she funded expeditions repeat verbatim a passage from a book the physician was
to many parts of the world, spreading her passion to define reading while the test took place In addition, she reported that
and explain psychic powers. According to some of her friends, the doctor's head was bandaged. The doctor confirmed later

she was generous to a fault. Psychic researcher and anthro- that she had identified the objects correctly, quoted the book
pologist Eric J. Dingwall, who knew Garrett for almost half a accurately, and, because of a slight accident that happened
century, sometimes despaired of her propensity for handing just before the experiment, his head had indeed been ban-
out money to almost any alleged researcher who asked for it. daged. He also reported sensing Garrett's presence in his of-

"It was but rarely that succeeded in persuading her to refuse a

I fice during the test.

grant to some patent swindler," Dingwall said. " 'You never Along with participating in experiments, Garrett tried to

know,' she used to say, 'there might be something and we advance research by traveling widely to lecture on psychic
"
mustn't miss it, must we?' phenomena-to Switzerland, Spain, the Scandinavian coun-
Garrett's fascination with the mysterious and arcane tries. Austria, Germany, Italy, Greece, India, Japan, and parts
seemed inbred and inexhaustible. She took an interest in of South America In the course of her travels, she would, if

voodoo, which she studied in Haiti and Jamaica. As a young asked, conduct seances. But these meetings were not public

86
events. Rather, they consisted of only small groups, often of The seance followed by three months the death of Sir
only one or two friends. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. A devout
As a medium, Garrett purportedly worked with several spiritualist, Conan Doyle was convinced that the living could
spirit guides, or controls, who identified themselves as long- commune with those who had crossed to the other side, as his
dead individuals. Chief among the controls was an Oriental fellow believers were wont to say. Thus it did not seem unrea-
personage called Uvani. Seeming to act as a sort of doorkeep- sonable to expect that he himself might be accessible post-
er, Uvani controlled access for the other spirits seeking to mortem. So thinking, and sensing a possible sensational sto-
speak through Garrett. ry, journalist Coster had asked Price to find the most reliable
A hallmark medium
of Garrett's fifty-year career as a and respected medium in England to summon Conan Doyle's
was a money for her
reputation for honesty. She never took spirit. Price chose Eileen Garrett, the lady in the armchair.
seances. And, though she worked in a time when spiritualism deeper into her cushion Garrett breathed heav-
,

was under attack and many mediums were exposed as

Settling
ily and evenly, seeming to drift toward deep sleep. But
frauds, she remained beyond reproach. This is not to say, no sooner had she closed her blue-green eyes than
however, that her accuracy was beyond question. In fact, the they began to gush tears, to the onlookers' astonish-
results of one of her most famous mediumistic triumphs were ment. Uvani made only a brief appearance before an
subject to considerable debate. urgent voice interrupted him. "The whole bulk of the dirigible
The seance took place in London on October 7, 1930. It was . . . too much for her engine capacity," the male voice
was organized by Harry Price, director of the National Labora- stuttered. The startled observers could see the psychic speak-

tory of Psychic Research, who was one of three people seated ing, but the voice coming from her mouth certainly was not
at the seance table By his side his secretary, a Miss Ethel Been-
. Garrett's, nor was it Uvani's, nor was it the restrained delivery
ham, edged forward on her chair, her notebook poised, while of Conan Doyle. The speaker was agitated, panicky. "Useful

an Australian newspaperman named Ian Coster nervously lift too small," he said. "Gross lift computed badly. . .elevator
twined and unlaced his fingers. The evening had begun with jammed. Oil pipe plugged." On and on he went. Miss Been-
talk about the most sensational current news. Two days be- ham scribbled shorthand notes, her eyes glassy with amaze-
fore, the British dirigible R- 1 1 , the largest and costliest airship ment. Along with the others, she had read with horrified fasci-

built to date, had crashed in northern France during its maiden nation the newspaper accounts of the R- 1 1 disaster. No one
voyage. In the ensuing explosions and fire, all but six of the had any trouble recognizing the man who was speaking
fifty-four people on board perished. Among the dead was through the medium. It seemed that Flight Lieutenant Irwin

Flight Lieutenant Carmichael Irwin, the dirigible's command- was describing in great technical detail the crash that had
er. Newspapers bulged with accounts of the disaster, the worst killed him two days before.
in British aviation history at the time, and controversy raged Sometime after Irwin finished his account, Conan Doyle
over whether England's ambitious airship program should be did impart a message through Mrs. Garrett. At that point,

jettisoned altogether. however, the seance attendees regarded his contribution as a

The three seance participants had discussed the subject distinct anticlimax.

at some length, but now they were silent, all staring expec- knew nothing about the mechanics of dirigibles,
Garrett

tantly at the stylish woman slumped in an armchair. If her yet somehow she— or whoever was speaking through her-
companions were almost feverishly anticipatory, she seemed had spouted all sorts of technical aerodynamic details. Price

unaware of it —or perhaps even bored by it. She was, as Coster rushed a transcript of the performance to the R- 1 l's builders

later wrote, "yawning her head off." at the Royal Airship Works in Cardington. It was directed to a

8?
 A rare photograph from the 1 930s
shows Eileen Garrett, seated on a day bed,
going into a trance while two other se-
ance participants await revelations. De-
scribing her trances, the medium said
that "the space behind theforehead
clears and becomes suffused with soft
light in which changing colors play an im-
portant part, and I actually enter a di-
mension which is color.

man named Charlton, described by Price as an "acclaimed

expert" on the majestic zeppelin. The alleged expert declared
himself astounded by the accuracy of Garrett's technical de-
scriptions and her revelations of secret details about the air-

ship. In fact, however, Charlton was not an engineer or an

aviator, but one of 400 members of the Cardington ground
crew. His expertise was thus much in question, as was his

objectivity: He was, as it turned out, a spiritualist. When the

same document Charlton had reviewed was shown to two

high-ranking, well-qualified members of the airship team,
they adjudged that most of the vaunted technical details that
Garrett had spouted were dead wrong.
In addition, Charlton's contention that secret details
came out at the seance was hard to credit, since virtually noth-
ing about the R- was secret. The dirigible was a pet project
1 1

of Britain's Labour party, then in power. The government,

competing with a private company that was building a similar
craft, was anxious to get the ship airborne to prove the superi-
ority of state ownership over private enterprise. Thus bureau-
crats were constantly dismissing objections from scientists

that numerous technical problems had to be resolved before

the zeppelin could safely fly.
T he whole matter became a sub-
ject of great public debate, and most anyone who cared to
follow it in the newspapers knew almost all there was to know
about the ill-fated R- 101.
Nevertheless, Garrett's R-101 seance gained instant
fame and easily outstripped the facts on its way to becom-
ing legend. At the time, not even skeptics cared to call the

lady a liar; was far too pristine. Rather, it was

her reputation
suggested that the medium had somehow picked up telepathic
emanations from Coster, who, being a journalist, probably

would have been familiar with at least some specifics about

the dirigible and its problems. As was her habit, Garrett herself
offered no assessment of the matter and left the debate about
the seance to others.
Although her purported psychic gifts centered on me-
diumship, Garrett commonly experienced more straightfor-
ward psychic episodes as well. She was dining with friends at
the Savoy Hotel in London one night during World War when I
89
she suddenly felt herself surrounded by reeking fumes and the psyche and its manifold patterns in terms of language gets
sounds of war. At the same time, she had a horrifying clairvoy- bogged down. The answer may well come from other aspects
ant vision of her young husband and several other men being of science as yet not heard from officially." Finally, her quest

blown up on a battlefield. A few days later, the British War was as inconclusive as it was thorough. It was not the habit of
Office advised her that her husband was among the missing. most mediums to doubt the utter \ eracity of their spirit guides,
He had gone on a wire-cutting mission and not returned, and but Garrett, a lifelong skeptic despite her seeming gifts, was
the War Office was never able to supply details of his death. always dubious about the true nature of hers. In her autobiog-
"Only knew the manner
1 in which he had died," the psychic raphy, she theorized that the controls might have been no
wrote at a later date. more than manifestations from her own subconscious. Be-
Eileen Coley has said that her mother considered her yond that, she knew of them only what she was told, she said,
unusual talents more a burden than a blessing, and her long since she had never met them . Necessarily, they were present

search to explain them was a way of exorcising the affliction only when she was unconscious.
and trying to turn it to good use. "Why should she be stuck with As to her purported powers of clairvoyance, telepathy,
this business, she felt, unless she could find out and precognition, Garrett was certain only that there was
some way it could be used for the good of other nothing supernatural, or even paranormal, about them. She
human beings?" the daughter said. Garrett en- speculated that they might have originated in the hypo-
couraged the laboratory approach to unraveling thalamus gland, or in the vestigial animal brain at the base
the mystery, as she encouraged all inquiry. But of the skull. Animals seemed able to sense danger in ways
she observed that "any attempt to explain the unrelated to the five senses, she posited, while in most hu-

Perhaps the only photograph ever tak-

en of an Edgar Cayce reading was pub-
lished by the Chicago Examiner on
February 19, 191 1. In it, the so-called
sleeping prophet reclines on a couch
while hisfather, Leslie B. Cayce, conducts
the reading and a stenographer takes
notes. Edgar Cayce did more than 1 4, 000
such readings in his lifetime; most
dealt with psychic healing.
mans that knack might have atrophied beneath the weight of her, andwas difficult to see. But when she spoke, he realized
it

prodigious forebrains. she was not anyone that he knew. Her voice was uncommon-
Secure in her powers but still unsure of their origins, Gar- ly soft and musical.
rett died in France September 1 5, 1 970, at the age of 77. Nearly "Your prayers have been heard, "she said. "Tell me what
two decades after her death, her Parapsychology Foundation you would like most of all, so that I may give it to you."

still continued her workunder Eileen Coley's stewardship. Co- Though frightened, the teenager stammered an answer:
ley's own daughter worked there as well, making three gen- "Most of all I would like to be helpful to others, especially to

erations of Garrett women who had furthered efforts to chart children when they are sick."
the world of psychic powers. Without reply the woman vanished into the sunbeams.
Edgar's first reaction was to fear he might be going
Although Garrett and Edgar Cayce were contemporaries crazy. But following on the heels of the vision was an indica-

and had in common the apparent ability to transcend tion that, indeed, he had been given some special power.
their own psyches, they could scarcely have been more Edgar had never done well in school. His teachers com-
different. Garrett was a brilliant, sophisticated, much- plained that he was dreamy and inattentive. These failings

traveled, and worldly woman. Cayce was an unlet- much displeased his father, a no-nonsense fellow called
tered rustic from rural Kentucky. Garrett spent a Squire Cayce by his neighbors because he was the local justice
lifetime seeking to explore and develop of the peace. The night after the vision, Edgar was studying his
her talents. Cayce was a somewhat reluc- spelling primer-as usual, without much luck— when the elder

tant seer, troubled through much of his Cayce decided to take matters in hand. Father and son sat at a

life by his strange gifts. Cayce and Gar- table with the book between them. Over the course of a long
rett met once, in the 1930s, and did evening, the father intoned one word after another, and the
readings for each other. Although as- son spelled most of them incorrectly. At half past ten, the boy
sociates of both said the psychics had heard the lady in the woods saying, "If you can sleep a little,

great respect for each other, the sin- we can help you. Begging the squire for a short respite, Edgar
'

'

gle meeting did not produce a close curled up in a chair with the spelling book under his head and
friendship. Whatever the two may fell asleep instantly.
have had in common in matters When the lesson resumed a few minutes after he woke,
of spirit, they were worlds apart in the story goes, Edgar's answers were rapid and correct. To his
matters of style. father's astonishment, he went on to spell words from future

According to his biographers, lessons and even to specify which words were on which page

Cayce's psychic turning point came and what illustrations went with them. For the rest of his life,

on a fine May afternoon in 1 890 when Edgar Cayce allegedly maintained this clairvoyant ability to

he was thirteen years old. He was sit- absorb near-photographic images of printed matter when, lit-

ting in the woods on the family farm erally, he slept on it.

near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, enjoying a Not long after the spelling incident, young Edgar had an
favorite pastime-reading the Bible. Sud- accident. In games during recess at school, a pitched ball hit

denly, he realized he was not alone. He looked him near the base of the spine. There was no apparent serious
up to see a woman standing before him. At first he injury, but for the rest of the day he behaved oddly At dinner

thought it was his mother: The sun was bright behind that night, the normally reserved boy threw things at his three

91
All big cities have their share ofprofessed psychic advisers. ing to induce a trance, but his patient interrupted. There was
Those pictured here and on the next seven pages work in or
near London, England. Steve Speed, shown above, is apsy-
no need for such an effort, Edgar said. He often put himself "to
chometrist. Holdingan object, hepurports toreadin itspsy- sleep." It was no trouble at all. Layne should just concentrate
chic vibrations dues about its owner.
on making the proper suggestions once Edgar was under
sisters and taunted his father. Stranger yet, when he went to With that, the young man sighed deeply and slipped instantly

bed and fell asleep, he began to talk. He told his parents he into what appeared to be protound slumber. Layne then sug-
was in shock. To cure it, he said, they should make a poultice gested that Edgar look inside his own body and pinpoint the
of cornmeal, onions, and herbs, and apply it to the back of his trouble with his throat.
head. They did. The next morning he remembered nothing at As his biographers would have it later, the entranced
all of the day before, but he was back to normal. It seemed that Cayce began to mumble at first, and then the young man be-
he had just delivered his first psychic reading. gan to speak in a clear voice. "Yes," he said, "we can see the

During the eleven years following these two curious epi- body. In the normal state this body is unable to speak due to a
sodes, Cayce made scant use of his apparent psychic power. partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cords, pro-
He was ill at ease with it. A deeply religious fundamentalist duced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition pro-
Christian, he was unsure whether his gift came from God or the ducing a physical effect. This may be removed by increasing
devil or why, in either case, it should have devolved on him. It is the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this
possible he might have continued trying to ignore his talents unconscious condition."
indefinitely had he not in 1900, lost his voice. squire and the hypnotist were amazed. Edgar did
It was a peculiar infirmity in that doctors found no ap-
parent physical cause for it, yet it persisted into 1901 . This
The not ordinarily talk that way. Awake, he might not
have been able to pronounce some of those words, let

came at a particularly troublesome time. Cayce was just start- alone understand them. Nevertheless, Layne gave the
ing to make his way as an apprentice photographer, hoping instructed suggestion . He and the squire looked on for
to earn enough money to marry his fiancee, Gertrude Evans. the next twenty minutes while the skin over Edgar's throat and
Being unable to talk above a muffled rasp was interfering with upper chest turned pink, then rose, then crimson with height-
both his career and his courtship. Near despair, Cayce turned ened blood flow. Finally, the sleeping man spoke.
for a cure to hypnotism, which was much in vpgue in the Unit- "It is all right now," he said. "The condition is removed.
ed States at the time. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal, and
A local hypnotist named Al C. Layne, familiar with the that after that the body awaken." When Cayce awoke, his
squire's tale of Edgar's poultice cure, proposed putting the voice was fully restored.

younger Cayce into a trance and having him diagnose himself. Layne, who dabbled in osteopathy, argued that Cayce
Edgar agreed to try. On a Sunday afternoon in March, Layne should use his apparent gift for psychic healing to help others.
was ushered into the parlor of the Cayce farmhouse, where At first, Cayce He knew nothing about his uncon-
resisted.
the squire and Edgar waited. Layne began talking softly, try- scious pronouncements except what he was told, and certain-

92
ly he had no conscious control over them. He feared he might clesiastical body," threw the case out of court. The police
harm the very people he was trying to help. But finally, reluc- had no right, the magistrate stated, to tamper with the beliefs
tantly, he agreed it was his duty to try. of an ecclesiastical body. Besides, he did not believe Cayce
Over the next twenty-two years, Cayce did thousands of intended any fraud.
medical readings. Twice a day he would lie down and "sleep," Despite the favorable outcome, the case was enough to

as he regarded it. In this altered state, which resembled a self- exacerbate the psychic's considerable self-doubt and send
induced hypnotic trance, he would answer requests for psy- him into a depression. As he had several times during his ca-

chic healing. As newspapers began spreading reports of his reer, he wondered if his apparent psychic gifts were either

work, those requests began coming in from throughout the valid or useful, and he considered giving up the work.
United States. Cayce dealt with as many of these requests as Cayce sometimes longed for the kind of widespread le-

time permitted. Apparently, distance was no barrier to his al- gitimacy that seemed to elude him for much of his lifetime, but
leged mental probes, since he often did readings for clients he was unsure how to pursue it. Submitting himself to testing
who were hundreds of miles away. In time he came to have by parapsychologists had little appeal, since he had acquired
thousands of enthusiastic supporters. But, of course, there an early and deep distrust of scientific inquiry.

were detractors as well. In 1906, when he was living in Bowling Green, Ken-
A very private man, Cayce suffered under the notoriety tucky, Cayce let a physician friend persuade him to give a

his work occasioned, and he was mortified by the inevitable reading before an audience that included other doctors. Once
accusations of fraud. InNovember of 93 during a brief visit
1 1 , Cayce was unconscious, a debate arose in the audience
to meet with admirers in New York, he ran afoul of the law. He about the exact nature of his condition. Some argued for self-
had acceded to two women's request for a reading, but the hypnosis, others for trance or dream, still others for simple

women turned out to be police officers and Cayce was arrest- fakery. One doctor stuck a needle in Cayce's arms, hands, and
ed. He was charged under a 1927 New York statute making it feet to seehow the psychic would react. When there was no
a misdemeanor to tell fortunes for money or with intent to response to that assault, another physician pushed a hatpin all

defraud. At a hearing before a magistrate, Cayce was asked the way through the sleeping man's cheek.
about claims that he was a psychic. "I make no claims what- "He's hardened to all of that," said a third skeptic, who
ever," he answered. "For thirty-one years I have been told I then took out a penknife and partially excised the nail from
was a psychic. It first began as a child. I know what it
didn't Cayce's left forefinger. There was still no indication of pain
was. After it had gone on for years, a company was formed to and no blood, but when Cayce awoke he was in agony In a

study my work." rare loss of temper he berated his tormentors and, before

The company in question was the Association for Re- walking out, declared: "I'll never try to prove anything to any

search and Enlightenment (ARE), founded by Cayce adher- one of you again."
ents earlier in 1931 to study and preserve his work. The Cayce was at odds with most traditional physicians,

magistrate, deciding that the ARE was an "incorporated ec- largely because of his medical unorthodoxy. His adherents

9?
have assessed his diagnostic accuracy at eighty-five percent. he concluded that he was fated for his psychic work. Not until

However, that figure was arrived at in a random sampling of 1923 did he give up photography and all other attempts at

only about .5 percent of the available data. The therapies he business and begin devoting full time to the readings. Even

prescribed were eclectic and hard to classify. They encom- then, he never refused petitioners because they lacked the
passed osteopathy, chemotherapy, hydrotherapy, nutrition, wherewithal to pay for his services.
chiropractic, massage, and home remedies. Some of the ther- new dimension that same year.
Cayce's career took on a

apies were decidedly bizarre. For example, when his wife, Ger- The instigator of the change was Arthur Lammers, who was a
trude, was diagnosed as having terminal tuberculosis, he or- wealthy printer from Dayton, Ohio. Lammers sought out
dered a regimen entailing a special diet, small doses of heroin, Cayce for some readings, but he did not want answers to
the application of a poultice made of crushed grapes, and health problems. Rather, he asked about such things as eso-

sniffing apple brandy fumes from a charred wooden keg. She teric astrology, the workings of the subconscious, and the na-
made a complete recovery. ture of spirit and soul. He mentioned the mystery religions of

However, not all of Cayce's psychic healing went so well, Egypt and Greece and Tibet and the Jewish cabala, along with
and some cases were demonstrable failures. For instance, he alchemy, yoga, and theosophy.
once gave a long diagnosis for a little girl suffering from leuke- had only the faintest idea of what the man was
mia and recommended a complicated dietary treatment. Un- Cayce talking about, and he was not at all sure he wanted to
fortunately, the child had died the day before the reading was know more. Once again, he felt a threat to his funda-

given-a fact Cayce somehow failed to divine. In another mentalist Christianity. What if Lammers was leading
case, he advised the following recipe for an ailing male pa- him to sacrilege? Eventually, however, Cayce let him-
tient: Boil together wild cherry bark, sarsaparilla root, wild self be persuaded to work with Lammers. Lammers argued
ginger, Indian turnip, wild ginseng, prickly ash bark, buchu, that the ideas of one God, of the need for human morality and
and mandrake root. Add grain alcohol and tolu balsam. Ad- brotherhood, were common to all the great metaphysical sys-
minister for ten days. tems. If Cayce could clear up the confusion that reigned be-
The efficacy of this odd nostrum was not to be tested. yond those central it was his duty to do it.
tenets, then

Again, as it turned out, the psychic was prescribing for a pa- Cayce gave a reading Lammers that began with as-
for

tient who had already died. trology. Its end result, however, was to confirm the reality of

Still, many of Cayce's clientele did report remarkable reincarnation. Humans did, indeed, experience successive
cures and were more than happy to pay for them. Neverthe- lifetimes for the purpose of perfecting their souls, the ultimate
less, Cayce intensely disliked taking money in return for his aim being the union of those souls with God.
services. Although he was often on the edge of penury himself, In time, Cayce's consternation at his own pronounce-
he began accepting fees regularly only when, in middle age, ment gave way to belief. Once he was able to reconcile the
idea of reincarnation with his Christian faith, he enthusiasti-
Armed with birth dates and times, high-tech cally added metaphysical readings to his purely physical
psychic Bettina Lee uses a computer io cast as-
trology charts for her clients. She uses her
ones. He developed what he called a life reading. Starting with
supposed psychic powers to interpret the charts. astrological conditions of the subject's birth, the life reading
would then turn to several of the individual's alleged past in- ing system of all events, thoughts and actions impressed up-
carnations. The aim of a life reading was to find information on an astral plane, which may be consulted in certain condi-
from past lives that would make one's present existence hap- tions of consciousness." Events so recorded on the astral
pier and more fruitful. ether were thought to be "reanimated by mystics like a celes-
When he was unconscious, Cayce always spoke of him- tial television set."
self in the third person, which augmented the impression of It was Cayce's habit to have someone take notes during
some strange bifurcation in his personality. Awake, the mild- his readings. In the early years, the transcriptionist would be
mannered provincial had no explanation for his seeming his father or his wife, but in 1923, he hired Gladys Davis as a
magic. However, once, in his altered state, he gave this assess- full-time secretary. Thereafter, there was a verbatim record of
ment of his psychic powers: all his work. When Edgar Cayce died in 1945, he left behind
"Edgar Cayce's mind is amenable to suggestion, the more than 14,000 recorded readings, the great majority deal-
same as all other subconscious minds, but in addition thereto ing either with physical ailments or with past lives of his cli-

it has the power to interpret to the objective mind of others ents. All remain on file in Virginia Beach, Virginia, at the head-
what it acquires from the subconscious mind of other individ- quarters of the ARE, which continues to flourish under the
uals of the same kind. The subconscious mind forgets noth- two sons.
aegis of his
ing. The conscious mind receives the impression from without The ARE today claims a membership of more than
and transfers all thought to the subconscious, where it re- 30,000 people. Thousands more belong to many "Search for
mains even though the conscious be destroyed." God" study groups that pursue Cayce's work. These are locat-
Some analysts of Cayce's work have categorized his ed on every continent in the world except Antarctica. Some
power as clairvoyance— an ability to see into bodies at a dis- one hundred books have been written about the sleeping
tance to diagnose ailments, as well as a talent for peering into prophet, and collectively they have sold more than twelve mil-
the past and future. However, Cayce and his family saw it more lion copies. No psychic, not even Eileen Garrett, has ever ap-
as telepathy— mind-to-mind communication— but on a sub- proached Edgar Cayce in popular appeal.
conscious level. In addition, Cayce seemed to be saying that That appeal cannot be explained fully in terms of the
he could telepathically tap into the knowledge of some tran- knowledge he claimed phenomenal though it was.
to tap,

scendental mind, perhaps akin to what psychologist Carl Jung Rather, his enduring influence seems more a product of the
called the collective unconscious. man himself, the waking Cayce— gentle, unassuming, much-
Cayce himself described this cosmic mind pool as God's beleaguered, and perfectly ordinary. If Mrs. Garrett was the
book of remembrance or the universal consciousness. He also grand doyenne of the psychic world, Cayce was its quintes-
used a term that would eventually be popularized by New Age sential common man. He was, as his chief biographer, Thom-
psychics who came after him— the akashic records. The term as Sugrue, once commented, "just an American guy." Pre-
was derived from the Hindu theosophical word akasa, refer- cisely because of his ordinariness, hundreds of thousands of
ring to a primary creative principle of nature. The authorita- people who were not rich or famous or well connected could
tive Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology gives the identify with him. They believed that if a man like Cayce could

definition of the akashic records as "a kind of central fil- somehow enter a mysterious world that was finer, loftier, and
John Lindsay's technique combines palmist- bility of transcending the mundane world in one way or an-
ry, numerology, and tarot. He begins a sitting by
checking the client's hands for suppleness,
other, whether by meditating on crystals or by studying with
size, and the length and shape offingers. gurus or by any number of other vehicles.
Although detractors tend to regard them as holdover hip-
saner than this one, and if a powerless man could call on great pies or dwellers on the social fringe, New Agers hardly fit that

power, then maybe anybody could. Certainly, in his wake, profile. Neither are they a credulous, ignorant undercaste. SRI
many have tried. International estimated in 1987 that movement members
made up some five to ten percent of the American population
By the mid-1980s, believers in psychic phenomena had be- and that most were in their thirties or forties, affluent, and well
come a majority in America; two-thirds of American adults educated Especially in the cities, having a personal psychic
reported to pollsters that they had experienced psychic events. adviser had become as chic for young professionals as driving
Among these millions, some belong to that multifocused ka- the proper car or maintaining an exclusive address.
leidoscope of disparate beliefs and pursuits that is the New Thousands of enthusiasts have joined self-help groups,

Age subculture. which operate toward the conservative end of the New Age
New Agers have no central organization, hierarchy, or spectrum and are akin to the so-called human potential
common dogma. Their interests are extraordinarily diverse. movements popular in the 1970s. For instance, the Spiritual
Some are mild adherents who practice holistic health or try Frontiers Fellowship in New York sponsors lectures, seminars,
honing their psi potential as a hobby. Others are dedicated and workshops on developing spirituality. The Fellowship,
practitioners who build lifestyles around ancient mystery reli- which utilizes the teachings of Cayce, among others, believes
gions or the pronouncements of disembodied spirits. that psychic poweis are often a by-product of the spiritual
Although most New Agers share an interest in psychic quest. Headquartered in Sedona, Arizona, a nonprofit organi-
powers, there is some disagreement within the movement zation called Free Soul seeks to explore the human spirit by
over what the word psychic means. Does it stop with mind means of biofeedback, meditation, and mind and body con-
reading, remote viewing, and seeing the past and future? Or trol. One aim is to cultivate psychic sensitivity for use in daily

does it apply in some general sense to all things that are ar- living. Free Soul has upward of two hundred instructors work-
cane, occult, or spiritual? Cayce looked to the word's Greek ing throughout the United States and a clientele of approxi-
origin, psyche, or soul, and defined it as "spirit, soul, or the mately 25,000 people. Each pays ten dollars per lesson for the
imagination of the mind," having to do with things "not un- Free Soul instruction.
derstood from the physical, or material, or conscious mind." Some organizations offer almost limitless options for psi
For the most part, it is in this cosmic sense that things psychic buffs. In New York City the Open Center, the Circle of Light
underpin the New Age. Institute, and the Learning Annex provide past-life regres-
What all New Agers share is a search for some meta- sions, aura reading, and even telepathic communion with the
physical meaning in life. In addition, most believe in the possi- psychic energy of whales. Venice, California, is headquarters

96
for the Conscious Connection, once a metaphysical meeting per person. The message is consistent with much New Age
ground for single men and women but now open to all. It teaching: Everyone bears God within; there is no right or
features the full psychic menu, but for the truly venturesome - wrong, just individual reality; each person has the power to

skeptics might say the truly credulous— the Connection touts control his or her destiny. Knight's own destiny is getting
its centerpiece subgroup, the Channeling Network. along handsomely. Her income from Ramtha-related enter-
Channelers— the term has supplanted mediums— are a prises is said to run into the millions of dollars.
New Age passion. They purport to be pipelines for disem- An estimated 2,500 New Age bookstores exist in Amer-
bodied spirits, whether of long-dead humans or entities who ica, and many New Age periodicals are available. Some spe-
never lived on this earthly plane. The Channeling Network cialize in networking information— about local witchcraft

offers a selection of channelers to accommodate the needs of covens, for example. Some publications report heavily on per-
a varied, but generally well-to-do, clientele. One of this num- sonal mystical experiences. One popular magazine features
ber is Shawn Randall, who hosts a spirit adviser called Torah. interviews with dead celebrities.
Torah is described as an "interdimensional consciousness," The periodicals usually contain advertisements for all

and, according to Randall, is "a pretty easy guy to talk with." manner of occult talismans and psychic services. They tout
Torah regresses Randall's clients through past lives and, like books offering to reveal the ritual secrets of "Hopi sacred

most good spirits affiliated with channelers, gives advice on sweats" or detail the afterlives of plane-crash victims or teach
temporal problems. Some channelers specialize in dead ce- the laws governing psychic assassinations. Psychics adver-
lebrities. California-based William Tenuto claims to produce tise to tap the universal consciousness for answers to petition-
the late Beatle John Lennon, not to mention Jesus Christ. ers' questions— all by mail and at the rate of only two dollars

Tenuto says he has channeled Jesus often enough to call him per answer, sometimes less.

friend." These mail-order psychics occupy the low end of a psy-

chic adviser hierarchy that part of the New Age. Today, sev-

td hanneling is a growth industry, complete with agents. is

New York's Cosmic Contact Psychic Services, the first eral hundred thousand psychic advisers are operating in the

agency to represent so-called paranormal profes- United States alone. Joining the mail-order contingent near
sionals, includes channelers along with its more tra- the bottom of the scale are the old-style fortune tellers who use

ditional astrologers, palmists, and tarot readers. tea leaves or crystal balls, many of whom operate from shabby
Perhaps the most successful channeling entrepreneur, how- store fronts in the cities or from house trailers in the country-

ever, is a strictly freelance one-time homemaker from Yelm, side. But there is also a new aristocracy of psychic advisers

Washington, named J. Z. Knight. Her claim to superterrestrial who are a far cry from the turbaned swamis or bejeweied gyp-
contact is as conduit for Ramtha, purportedly a 35,000-year- sies of popular folklore. The new seers dress tastefully, live

old warrior from the lost continent of Lemuria. Ramtha is quite well, and command large fees from large followings. Some

a draw. In a husky voice that affects a variety of accents, he attract celebrity clients, and some of them are celebrities in

addresses large crowds in weekend seminars that cost $400 their own right. Whether these advisers read tarot cards or

97
astrology charts, they usually come equipped with business started reading Edgar Cayce books in the 1960s," McLaine
cards and press kits says. In those days, she was an aspiring young playwright
working as a secretary at the Twentieth Century Fox movie
One such representative of the psychic elite is Patricia McLaine studio in Los Angeles. Inspired by what she read of Cayce, she

of Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the began visiting psychics. After two of them told her that she
capital city of Washington. Around four or five times each herself would eventually become a psychic reader, she began
weekday, McLaine will sit with one of her clients in the sunny doing free readings for her friends at the studio. McLaine's
study of her suburban home and lay out the tarot cards that career developed from there.

help guide her readings. She is not, however, always in resi- classifies herself as partly psychic but "at least 50
dence there.

California.
She travels often to serve people in

There are still other clients as far

Texas and
away as Europe,
She percent intuitive." There
'
'The intuitive is
is,

superior to the psychic

she says, a big difference.
, '

' she explains.

Asia, and Australia, with whom she confers by telephone. In "The psychic is receiving a feeling or an impression,
all, she estimates that she has as many as 3,000 clients, most and the intuitive level of knowledge is direct knowl-
of whom, she says, come in for "a yearly checkup or a twice-a- edge." A psychic impression is like "looking at something
year checkup." Her patrons include a number of well-known through a foot of water. You may see it correctly, you may not
individuals, among them actress Shirley MacLaine, whose ... or maybe you get a general impression, but it may not be
best-selling books and popular television movie about her the absolute." With intuition, though, one "can't be wrong."
own metaphysical search prompted a boomlet within the New Whatever her vehicle of access may be, McLaine de-
Age movement. Featured in several books and magazine arti- scribes the source of her psychic knowledge as "the great
cles about psychics, Patricia McLaine is also a popular televi- storehouse of the collective unconscious. That's where it all

sion talk-show guest. comes from. That's where it is created. People are creating
Utilizing astrology as well as tarot, she usually gives their lives at all moments of all days. The psychic person is

readings that last for a half hour or an hour. She charges $65 simply able to tune in to that."

for the shorter reading, $125 for the longer. In addition, her Despite her success, McLaine has misgivings about her
more affluent clients might request a master reading, which vocation. A serious student of metaphysics for more than
lasts several hours. The master reading, for which McLaine twenty years, she began in 1 975 to teach courses on tarot, the

prepares with meditation and fasting in order to achieve a cabala, and other metaphysical subjects. She prefers teaching
properly receptive state of mind, covers a sitter's past lives and these subjects to being what she calls "an esoteric psycholo-
the numerous intricate relationships that may be affecting the gist" for her clients. People are inclined to vest too much power
present existence. in their psychic advisers, she says, rather than work toward
"I don't think I would have become a psychic if I hadn't enlightenment on their own.
"A lot of people are not willing to meditate and put the
A black orb of Venetian crystalfigures in John effort into spiritual study that is involved in developing your
Christopher Travers's readings, alor.g with the
tarot cards and a magnifying glass he uses to
higher connection," she says. "They want it to be real easy
read the fine lines in his clients' hands. and simple- 'show me the fastest way to heaven. There's one '

98
creative process, and we are godlets. A master of wisdom rural Tennessee, one of eleven children in a poor farm family.
would not sit down and read your cards for you, or do your As a child, her feelings about incipient events supposedly
planets for you, or give you a reading. He would try to give you proved accurate enough to prompt her father to consult her
principles by which to live in order to enhance your life." about when to pick cotton or when to expect rain.
McLaine attributes the modern psychic and spiritual re- Harking back to psychic superstars of an earlier genera-
vival to the fact that the so-called Age of Aquarius, which tion, Hughes shared with Edgar Cayce a sylvan vision in child-
dawned in the 1960s, is just picking up steam in the 1980s. hood and with Eileen Garrett an Oriental spirit guide. When
She hails the Aquarian Age, a term that is synonymous with she was four, Hughes was alone in the woods when she alleg-
the New Age, as a time of great spiritual awakening and evo- edly was visited by a shimmering lady. The luminous vision
lution. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that not all psychics described and validated the child's ability to feel strange and
are equally talented— nor are they equally honest. "A lot of wonderful things not sensed by others. Some years later, the
people in my business," she says, "are downright strange." adult Hughes was recovering from surgery when she received
Indeed, debunkers of psychics pinpoint several tech- another visit from a discarnate entity. As she lay at home in her
niques used by the dishonest to bilk clients. Chief among these sickbed, an Oriental man materialized in front of her and
is the so-called cold reading in which the psychic is able to identified himself as Kaygee.
satisfy a client by tossing out generalities and then detecting As Hughes later reported the conversation that followed,
responses (page 102). Part of the cold reading is the "stock Kaygee described himself as "your control, your teacher, and
spiel," wherein the sitter is offered a set of bland pronounce- your friend." He predicted that she would eventually learn
ments that could apply to almost anyone. In many cases, the "many things unknown to others' and would have '
'

' the key to

sitter's reactions to the spiel, both verbal and in body lan- all life." During the course of their meeting, Hughes said, Kay-
guage, cue the alert reader to home in on a few particulars- gee guided her through her incarnation in a past life in Egypt.

enough, often, to convince the sitter that he or she has experi- Kaygee was supposedly a wise Japanese Christian who died in
enced a true psychic event. 1961 . A devout Christian herself, Hughes considers her psy-
chic abilities to be God-given.

Most well-known psychics of recent years have provided Hughes is among many psychics who believe psychic

some psychic counseling for individual clients, but not all have talent is present, at least potentially, in everyone. But New
specialized in it. For example, Chicago's Irene Hughes, al- York's Alex Tanous thinks himself uniquely marked from birth
though she is an adviser for several celebrities, is probably with signs of special gifts. Tanous is of Lebanese extraction,

better known as a seer in the realm of public events. Among and his father was a friend of the famed Lebanese poet Kahlil

the more notable of her claimed precognitions were the assas- Gibran. By the psychic's account, Gibran predicted to the elder

sinations ofJohn and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Tanous before Alex's birth that the boy would become "a man
Jr., the 1967 outbreak of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, and of exceptional gifts, of great abilities." In addition, Tanous

President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision not to seek a second says, he was born with some lines in his palm forming a hexa-
term. A popular television personality and newspaper colum- gram and others depicting a mystic cross, and still others
nist, the platinum-haired psychic was born Irene Finger in spelling the name "Alex" backward. He was also born with a
100

T
 A London psychic lays out tarot
cards in one of the manyforma-
tions used in divination.

caul, a fetal membrane that covered his face. In several cul-

tures the caul signifies second sight. Like most psychics, Tan-
ous believes his gifts were manifest in childhood. Retrocogni-
tionwas one of them. In school, he did well in history, he says,
because he was able to return in time and relive whatever
period was under study.
Among the most intriguing of Tanous's seeming para-
normal aspects is the special relationship he claims to have
with light. He energizes himself psychically, he says, by look-
ing into bright lights, even into the sun. Although he recom-
mends against others trying the technique, he reports that he
himself has never suffered the retinal burns that might be ex-
pected to result. Moreover, Tanous's mysterious connection
with light apparently encompasses transmitting as well as re-
ceiving. He can, according to some witnesses, make balls of

light shoot out of his eyes.

Such extravagant claims meet considerable skepticism, of

course. Nor are New Age paths to enlightenment always
viewed with equanimity. The critics' responses range from
mild to vitriolic. Some psychologists see the movement as a
fairly innocuous attempt by people who are disillusioned with
organized religion to vacuum in their
fill a spiritual lives.

"Many well-educated people have moved away from tradi-

tional religion," says Dr. Robert Millman of Cornell Medical

College, an expert in social psychiatry. "But they still want to

believe there is a force that is higher than themselves; they

don't want to think they are insignificant little animals, pro-
duced by a random series of events. They want to know that

there is a system, and they want to know where they fit in."
Others, those who are wary of the cultlike aspect of some New
Age phenomena, regard the movement as far more danger-
ous. A West German psychologist, describing an "occult epi-

demic" in his country, says teenagers are suffering mental

health problems from contact with occult practices.

In one reported case in the United States, belief in

a psychic's prediction proved deadly to a susceptible adult.

A Colorado woman, upon being told by a medium that she
and a married man for whom she cared would become lovers

101
 in a future life, killed the man and then committed suicide.
Much criticism centers on speculation about fraud. "A lot

of people get in to make money and pass themselves off as

Is This ttie Real You?
having supernatural powers," says Marc Medoff, publisher of
Whole Life magazine, which deals with New Age topics. "We
get complaints all the time from people who are charged a lot
You are basically a serious person, but with a fine
sense of humor. A loner by temperament, you never- for rubbish that's made up on the spot." Jacob Needleman, a
theless have a talent for working with others. You theologian at the University of California at Berkeley, notes
prefer people whose intellects equal yours, but you are
there is "no Better Business Bureau" in the psychic world. "Let
never unkind to inferiors. You are very sensitive but
tend to maintain a stiff upper lip in difficult times. You
the buyer beware," he says. "You should be open-minded, but
sometimes feel insecure, but you mask it so well not so open-minded that your brains fall out."
that friends see you as confident and outgoing. You In the main, the New Age is anathema to conventional
are meticulous - a perfectionist - but an overabun-
religion. Some religious leaders see it as a kind of collective
dance of details bores you. You crave adventure but
are never irresponsible. You have a complex nature antichrist. Others simply deplore its depersonalization of God,
and wide-ranging interests, coupled with a great abili- with the concomitant notion that "anything is permissible if

ty to focus all your energies on a single task.

everything is God." "When people stop believing in God,
Does this description fit you? It should. It fits most
they'll believe in anything," says Reverend Monsignor William
people; or, at least, it fits the self-image of most
people. Hardly anyone with a well-integrated ego B. Smith, academic dean and professor of moral theology at St.
cares to think of himself or herself as a frivolous, Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, New York. "We start relying on
humorless, ignorant, insensitive, weak, boring, shal-
ersatz substitutes: crystal balls, tarot cards. One is as irrational
low clod. Any good psychic reader knows this;
thus, a so-called cold reading — such as the one you
as the next, and none can determine your free will or your
just read — will a'most always be flattering as well future." Even so, a New Age influence can be discerned in
as general. It will also offe. choices. Note that most of mainstream religion: an upswing in faith healing among Epis-
the propositions paired above are basically contra-
copalians, a revival of Jewish mysticism, the training of medi-
dictory. Nevertheless, a psycnic's client — generally
known as a sitter — will tend to integrate them into a tation in Roman Catholic monastaries.
coherent statement. Moreover, the more intelligent the It is doubtful that the New Age, in all its varied aspects,
sitter, the more complete this integration is apt to
would have won unqualified approval from its precursors. Ed-
be. Humans process all sensory input by imposing or-
der on chaos, and they will usually react to a psy-
gar Cayce and Eileen Garrett probably would have applauded
chic reading you come down on
no differently. And if the search for spiritual elevation. But, without question, Cayce
one side of a reader's equation harder than on the would have been appalled by the New Age departure from
other, well and good. Verbally or with body language,
traditional religion and the enthusiastic neopaganism. As for
you will probably give the psychic enough clues to
move from generalities to particulars. Eileen Garrett, Eileen Coley said her mother would have re-

Also operating in this situation is a phenomenon garded much of the New Age as "utter nonsense."
called subjective validation. This means that you tend Nevertheless,was one of Mrs. Garrett's fondest hopes
it
to make the reader's statements fit in with what
that her own work with psychic phenomena would hasten the
you already know or believe about yourself. In this
way, the sitter may do most of the real work in a time when people would find practical uses for such powers.
reading, interpreting the adviser's vague generalities Perhaps she would have been gratified to know that as the
as personally tailored revelations.
New Age dawned, pragmatists both within it and outside it

were trying to do exactly that.

102
 Psychics al Center Stage

psychic has been given to a diverse collection of

title

The characters, from medieval soothsayers to the unlettered Ed-

gar Cayce. But nowhere has the word aroused more ire than
in the field of stage magic. Professional magicians, or con-
jurers, usually have individual specialties. Illusionists
cause
large objects toappear or vanish (or so it seems) escape artists free ;

themselves from seemingly inextricable bonds. Mentalists, the

psychics of the stage, perform feats of apparent telepathy or
clairvoyance, but some outrage fellow entertainers by claiming
to have real psychic powers.
When believers in psychic phenomena point to these per-
formers as living evidence of the paranormal, skeptics - many of
them professional magicians - retort that mentalists such as Uri
Geller and George Kresge, known as Kreskin, are nothing more
than glorified tricksters, exploiting a gullible public. For their part,
mentalists take a philosophical view: Just because psychic powers
resist laboratory testing orcan be copied by clever magicians is no
reason to believe that such phenomena do not exist. The controver-
sy began more than a century ago — and is not likely to end soon.

through midtown Manhattan as he tracked

The Mind Who Came to Dinner down a hidden diamond brooch— solely, he
On May 12, 1889, a pale young man stood said, by the power of thought. Later, on a
before a gathering at the exclusive Lambs headline-making tour of Europe, the men-
Club of New York City. His goal: nothing less talist apparently read the thoughts of the

than to provide conclusive proof of his abil- Prince of Wales in order to locate a gold sov-
ity to read minds. Yet, despite supposed ereign coin concealed in the Duchess of
psychic gifts that had attracted worldwide Kent's silk stocking. On that same tour,
attention, the thirty-three-year-old mental- however, theyoung performer found himself
ist apparently did not foresee that this dem- at odds with an established magician, John
onstration, the crowning event of his career, Nevil Maskelyne, who claimed Bishop was a
would have a gruesome finale. trickster without genuine powers. After a
Washington Irving Bishop was not any heated exchange of accusations, Bishop
stranger to controversy. In the early 1 880s, thought it prudent to leave Britain
he had created a sensation with his Blindfold Returning to the United States, Bishop
Carriage Test, a dramatic demonstration of met more opposition. In New York, a promi-
what he termed mental telegraphy. Donning
Just mon ths before his death, mind
a heavy black hood and taking the reins of a
reader Washington Irving Bishop flaunts
horse-drawn cart, Bishop led a mob of 500 the medals he claimed to have received
news reporters and spectators on a wild ride from the crowned heads of Europe.

103
 hands jerking spasmodi-
his lips. Finally, his
cally,he seized a pen and pad and scrawled
a puzzling message;
CJM32UWOT
Nonplussed, Green revealed that he had
chosen the name Margaret Townsend from
the membership rolls. When he held the mes-
sage up to a mirror, the name TOWNSEND
was dramatically revealed.
Even as the audience exploded into ap-
plause, Bishop's exertions caught up with
him The performer pulled off his blindfold
and crumpled to the floor. Stunned club
members put him to bed in an upstairs room,
and a doctor in attendance attempted to re-
vive Bishop with electric shocks and injec-
tions of brandy. Not surprisingly, by the time
morning arrived he was unconscious and
was soon pronounced dead.
This was not the first time such a thing
had happened to Bishop. The young man
suffered from catalepsy, a condition charac-
terized by sudden plunges into an uncon-
sciousness so deep that all life signs were
Magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin and son Emile perform a second-sight act in 1848. supressed Often the stresses of his perfor-
mances would bring seizures upon him. In-
nent newspaper editor published his own curred in his absence. The mentalist set to deed, Bishop had been pronounced dead on
explanation of many of Bishop's most prized work with characteristic energy. Allowing a two previous occasions, only to recover un-
thought-reading effects. Bishop, said the blindfold to be fastened over his eyes, he aided several hours later
editor, was nothing more than a glorified took the arm of a witness and began pacing There would be no such recovery after
magician. Although the performer stead- furiously. To the astonishment of all. Bishop the Lambs Club episode. Convinced that the
fastly maintained that his demonstrations unhesitatingly identified the killer and victim mentalist was dead, a doctor from New York
were genuine, the accusation seriously tar- and located the hidden murder weapon. Hospital immediately performed an autopsy,
nished his reputation and left him more de- The feat won warm applause, but the removing his brain Bishop's distraught
termined than ever to prove himself a genu- mentalist was from finished. By now
far mother arrived too late to prevent the action.
ine psychic. The Lambs Club afforded him Bishop's nerves seemed at the breaking Ever afterward she maintained that her son
an opportunity to restore his good name. point; trembling hands and ashen features had been murdered by medical ghouls, ea-
When a friend invited him to dine, Bishop attested to the enormous strain of his efforts, ger to learn the secrets of Bishop's powers.
knew that the evening would provide an but he seemed determined to press on.
ideal platform for his talents. Clay Green, the Lambs Club secretary,
After the meal was Lambs
finisher the volunteered to help Bishop in his next feat.
Trade Secrets
Club members— many of whom were show Bishop asked Green to focus all his thought Ironically, the man who had risen to fame as
people themselves— clamored forademon- on a book listing Lambs Club members. "the world's first and world eminent mind
stration of thought reading. Bishop happily When he could picture it clearly in his mind, reader" began his career as the scourge of
obliged them. A high-strung, agitated per- Bishop instructed, Green was to select a spiritualism. In 1876, capitalizing on secrets
former, he fairly quivered as he announced name found in its pages. Anna Eva Fay, a
learned as an assistant to
that he would favor the assembly with an Again donning his heavy blindfold. Bish- famous American medium, Bishop devel-
effect that he had recently exhibited for the op grasped the secretary by the arm and led oped a popular stage program in which he
tsar of Russia. Before leaving the room in the him on a frantic dash through the building, re-created -and then exposed — the most
company of a club member, Bishop asked knocking over tables and chairs until — still cherished routines of professional mediums
that an imaginary murder scene be enacted blindfolded- the mentalist laid his hands on A feature of this act, and one that Bishop
in his absence, complete with a killer, a vic- the register book Green had envisioned. insisted was genuine, was a demonstration
tim, a weapon, and a witness. The chosen This demonstration of thought reading of thought reading. However, Bishop's
killer, whose identity Bishop would not won more enthusiastic applause from the thought-reading stunts, which he advanced
know, was instructed to select a victim, then observers, but Bishop was not finished. as evidence of superior powers, took their
act out a crime of his own devising, and fi- Holding up a hand for silence the performer
,
inspiration from a world-renowned magi-
nally hide the weapon. announced that he would reveal— by prob- cian -a man who made no claim whatso-
This was done, and the members called ing Green's innermost thoughts -the name ever to psychic gifts.
Bishop back into the room with his chaper- selected moments earlier. Bishop still lean Eugene Robert-Houdin. a French
one, who attested that the mind reader could clutched Green by the arm. His features con- clockmaker turned conjurer, had stunned
not have heard or seen anything that oc- torted with effort; a series of groans escaped Parisian audiences in the 1840s with his

104
seemingly supernatural second-sight act technique that would come to make him fa- using this technique can locate a hidden
His performance was straightforward mous. Brown's technique, known today as object as long as he is touching someone
enough, but it had a dazzling effect. While muscle reading, is itself very nearly as in- who knows where the object is. A canny
the magician circulated among his audi- credible as the seemingly psychic feats it en- performer can very easily give the appear-
ence, hisyoung son Emile sat blindfolded on abled Bishop to perform. Only a handful of ance of reading minds.
the stage. As audience members handed mentalists over the last century have mas- Bishop relied heavily on muscle reading
Robert-Houdin small items from their pock- tered this delicate, inexact skill, which de- as he molded himself into one of the nine-
ets or handbags, the magician asked his son pends on unconscious physical indicators teenth century's most remarkable perform-
to identify them. Emile would then shout out given by an innocent volunteer. In a typical ers. So great was his success that by the time
astonishingly complete descriptions, as if— case, the performer of muscle reading will of his unfortunate death in 1 889, public exhi-
though blindfolded— he could plainly see the ask his subject, usually a member of the au- bitions of thought reading had become al-

objects. No detail escaped the magician's dience, to concentrate on an object hidden most commonplace.
son, he could even be counted on to recite nearby. Then, gripping the arm or wrist of
the contents of private letters or read the the subject, the muscle reader begins to
foreign-language inscriptions on medal- move about the room, asking for mental Psychics under the Big Top
lions and coins that were proffered. commands leading to the hidden object, Although Bishop's career had ended, the
The second-sight act, which relied on an such as "go forward'' or "turn left." public's appetite for demonstrations of psy-
ingenious and elaborate verbal code under- With enough practice, the performer be- chic powers remained very much alive. A
stood only by the magician and his son, comes sensitive to tiny movements by the host of colorful Bishop imitators emerged in
proved ill-suited to the plans of Washington subject that are imperceptible to the audi-
Irving Bishop, who preferred to work alone. ence. For example, if the subject gives a Eleanor Bishop hovers over the lifeless
Accordingly, Bishop traded the secrets he slight pulse of resistance, the performer real-
body ofher son, who by 1889 had become
the world's foremost thought reader.
gleaned from Robert-Houdin's memoirs to izes he is heading the wrong way. If there is
An autopsy line across the deceased men-
a resourceful mentalist named J. Randall no resistance, the direction is correct. Thus, talist'sforehead attests to the unfortu-
Brown. In return, Brown taught Bishop the even when blindfolded, a stage mentalist nate circumstances of his death.

105
 Despite his success, Houdini remained ery performance, she explained that in order
A lithograph advertises theyoung Har-
ry Houdini's skill as a card manipulator ambivalent about his career as a mentalist. for her to form a clear psychic impression,
without mentioning the mentalism act in 1898, he decided to abandon the act, each question must be written out on a pad
that the magician sometimes performed
claiming that if he could not make good as a of paper. Participants then ripped off the top
on the same bill.
real magician within a year, he would sheet and Fay's assistants collected the un-
find himself a more respectable job. used portion of the pads. Almost immediate-
Anna Eva Fay, considered the great- ly, the mentalist would begin calling out an-

est female stage psychic of all time, swers from beneath her sheet.
shared none of Houdini's reservations Ironically, it was Washington Irving Bish-

about her chosen career. Fay was an op, a former assistant, who exposed her in-
accomplished magician who turned to genious secret-though her career seemed
mentalism in the 870s, giving seances
1 unaffected by Bishop's revelations. In an
in music halls and variety shows. By the

time of her retirement in 924, she had

1

risen to the status of a vaudeville head-

liner. Described as "a slender, almost

fragile creature with grey eyes and

flaxen hair," the psychic invariably
made a most bewildering im-
pression on her audiences.
In the centerpiece of
Fay's act, the mentalist
sat on the stage, blind-
folded and covered by a
thick orange sheet, as
she answered unspo-
ken questions from the au-
dience. At the start of ev-

the 1890s, many of them magicians whose

careers had hit the skids. These performers,
of widely varying skill and credibility, per-

meated the circuses, "dime museums," and

variety halls of the day often vanishing from
public view as quickly as they had appeared. Magician James
Those who managed to duplicate Bishop's S.Harto - also
known as Chan-
effects could seldom match h attention-
;

dra — and his wife,

grabbing histrionics-except perhaps for Verda Wren, affect-
Theodore Pull, whose gimmick of chewing ed exotic silk robes
on a piece of soap Muring his performances to capitalize on
the demandfor
gave the impression that psychic fervor
mystical
caused him to foam at the mouth. thought-
Even Harry Houdini, later the most vehe- reading
ment antispiritualist of his generation, acts.

served a brief early turn as a psychic enter-

tainer. Known at the turn of the century as
Dime Museum Harry, owing to the seedy
venues in which he appeared, Houdini
brought the same flair to his mind-reading
act that hewould later apply to his career as
an escape artist. Transmitting coded signals
to his wife, Bess, with almost imperceptible
wiggles of his right ear, Houdini could stage
a convincing display of mentalism. When,
on one occasion, he appeared to be deliver-
ing messages from a local murder victim, su-
perstitious audience members fled from the
theater in panic.
 anonymous newspaper article pub- minds ol the era, including those of British
I
lished early in both performers' ca- statesman William E. Gladstone and Kaiser
reers, Bishop revealed that as Fay's Wilhelm II of Germany
spectators wrote their questions on Even Fannie Brice, the popular comedic
the note pads provided, a thin coat- star of the Ziegfeld Follies, was known to
on the second sheet
ing of paraffin entertain her friends with amateur mind-
took an impression of the pencil reading stunts. Asked for an explanation,
markings. Backstage, her assistants she replied, rather obliquely, "Oh, just do I

quickly dusted the paraffin with these things, darling."

graphite, yielding a clear copy of the
questions while the originals re-
mained in the hands of the audience. Minds of the Times

THE GREAT The assistants then transmitted these

questions to Fay through a speaking
tube that ran through a hole drilled in
As the demand grew for psychic entertain-
ment, the techniques used by Bishop and
others became more widely known to the
LE GRANDE HYPNOTISME the stage floor. public. Audiences familiar with codes and
Having taken such extraordinary muscle reading demanded more sophisti-
I measures to discern her audience's cated feats before they would consider a
,
questions, Fay was scarcely less clever psychic genuine.
'

in devising the answers. Generally the Maude Lancaster, an English woman,

|
questions held simple pleas for advice, demonstrated one great procedural im-
I but Fay proved herself equal to greater provement. In 1893, while performing the
challenges. On one occasion late in her familiar stunt of locating a hidden object,
career, a Brooklyn man asked where his Lancaster succeeded without physical con-
[
stolen car might be found. Pausing dra- tact of any kind. Although blindfolded, she
matically and giving appropriate gasps also duplicated Bishop's murder-mystery
of effort from beneath her orange cover- test and several other impressive stunts, all
i ing, the performer slowly recited an ad- without benefit of touch.
young man. NewmannT^, th ° a Ver dress. The next day's newspapers report-
T Lancaster's success prompted many to
oneofthe^WH™ « ackno^^ed to be ed that the missing automobile had proclaim her a genuine psychic, but in fact
* »*. . ZVeZZTJZ fact
7it indeed been found at that exact location. she was one of the first to use a technique
As the city buzzed with the news of Fay's that soon came to be called noncontact
at the NewYorrir^^^^ stunning feat, an energetic reporter un- thought reading. This method of achieving
ScWo'p^r
™^^^nobst,
ieDC€
Chicago "* «"
•*»*, a refined
y
^duHT 5 eWmann
-

M covered a disillusioning piece of informa- seemingly psychic results relied mainly on a

H^
ta

marvelous skill whose tion. Fay's husband had paid two men to keen visual interpretation of the same physi-
is
steal the car and park it in a prearranged cal clues felt bv the earlier muscle readers
-^amounts to ait^enTus,^^ ^
be cnn,~o^ f™
agement the man -

tune in
is to
secur^t '^f^ °n itS &ood fo*" $ NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE
Jhirlwind of ^ *tuJ^S ""^ a
1
delivers the
b~H
clearest *
farthermore he 1

Week Dec. 19— Loop-End Theatre -Chicago

I
Investigate!
Meditate"
Think!!!
location. Simple theft, not psychic illumina- Joseph Mercedes and Mademoiselle
tion,had brought about the miracle. Stantone combined thought reading with
piano playing in a "mental novelty" act
Such revelations did little to dampen the
one critic called "the acme offinesse.
public's enthusiasm for mentalism on the
stage. Another stage psychic, Stuart Cum- To be successful with this highly delicate

berland, claimed that more than 1 ,000 sci- approach, a performer needed sharp
C. A. George Newmann performed his entistsand members of the clergy had en- hours of practice, and-in many case
act in a way that confounded all as to
dorsed his powers as genuine. Along with see-through blindfold.
the secret of his blindfold carriage ride.
As shown here, he gripped the horses' thought reading, Cumberland regaled his C. A George Newmann may have had all
reins, not his volunteer's wrist. audiences with tales of having read the best of these things and more The Minne:

107
bred mentalist, whose long career spanned nearly as impressive. Rather than rely on a Conan Doyle echoed this opinion. After

spoken code, Mercedes had devised a sys- seeing the Zancigs' act in 1922, the creator
the years from the late 890s into the 950s,
1 1

even one-upped Washington Irving Bish- tem based on the length of the pauses be- of Sherlock Holmes commented: "lam quite
op's famous blindfolded carriage rides Un- tween his words to communicate the select- assured that their remarkable performance,
like his predecessor, who took the reins in ed tunes. Thus, even while Mademoiselle as I saw it, was due to psychic causes
one hand and the wrist of his helper in the Stantone played a brisk fox trot or languor- [thought transference) and not to trickery."

other, Newmann would keep both hands on ous waltz, the two performers remained The British author, renowned for the rigid
the reins of his carriage, while the person synchronized by a private tempo counted off logic and keen reasoning of his fictional de-
who had hidden the search object remained silently to themselves. tective, was an uncritical supporter of psy-

in theback seat. Even if he was aided by the Stage mentalists continued to entrance chic claims, and he spent the final years of

noncontact technique, it seems as if New- audiences through the first decades of the his life in enthusiastic pursuit of paranormal

mann must have had eyes in the back of his twentieth century, even as the exact nature phenomena. In his passion, Conan Doyle
head to succeed in this dramatic display; his of their art grew more controversial. No two would often proclaim mediums and psy-
figures more clearly embodied the opposing chics to be genuine even when other observ-
sides of that debate than the distinguished ers could easily provide more mundane ex-
writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an avid spiri- planations of their feats.
tualist, and the zealously skeptical Harry Houdini, despite his own early turn as a
mentalist, had become the world's foremost
exposer of fraudulent mediums, tirelessly at-
tending performances and seances in order
to confront phony spiritualists. In fact, many
of the conjurer's own performances were
given over to the exposure of mediums
whom he believed to be bilking the public of
hard-earned money.
In his book A Magician among the Spirits,

Houdini commented on Conan Doyle's fas-

cination with the Zancigs: "Mr Julius Zancig
is a magician, a member of the Society of
American Magicians of which have been I

the President for the past seven years. be- 1

lieve he is one of the greatest second-sight

artists that magical history records. It would
not be fair to disclose his methods despite
Conan Doyle put the
the fact that Sir Arthur

The thought-transference act

stamp of genuineness on his work. Un-
ofJulius Zancig and his wife, Ag- doubtedly it appeared unfathomable to Sir
nes, impressed even Houdini, Arthur and he therefore concluded that it

who admitted "I havefailed to was psychic and that there could be no other
trace anyone superior.
solution." Houdini's comments undoubtedly
secret has never been revealed so the public Houdini Although fast friends, the two men failed to shake Conan Doyle's conviction,
Not all stage mentalists relied on such found themselves at odds over the mind- for the author also believed that Houdini
techniques. A phenomenal act from the reading capabilities of Danish performers himself possessed psychic powers enabling
1920s and 1930s called "Mercedes and the Julius and Agnes Zancig. him to perform his astonishing escapes
Marvelous Musical Mystic Mademoiselle In an act entitled Two Minds with a Sin-
' and illusions - an idea strenuously rejected
Stantone" had its roots in the verbal decep- gle Thought," Zancig and his wife appeared by the magician
tion of the illustrious Robert-Houdin. In this to read each other's mind as well as minds In any event, the question of the Zancigs
act, Joseph Mercedes moved among his au- in the audience. The pair generated such in- was decisively resolved two years later
dience, encouraging spectators to whisper terest that within a few years of their debut when lulius Zancig, who was badly down
the names of popular tunes into his ear. Al- in 1892 they commanded most exclu-
the on his luck, was forced to sell off the secret of
most at once, the blindfolded Mademoiselle sive stages in show business, including an his second-sight act - an ingenious verbal
Stantone, seated at a piano on stage, would eleven-week engagement at Oscar Ham- code - to a London newspaper.
play the chosen selections. merstein's famed Roof Garden in New York
This act fooled not only the pair's vast City One journalist was so moved by the
audiences but also magicians familiar with Zancigs' seeming ability to read and trans- The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
Robert-Houdin's word code. The performers mit thoughts that he wrote: "It is a case of Unique among performing mentalists, Kuda
spoke very little during their act, and what telepathy pure and simple The respective Bux - "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" -
they said varied only slightly from night to mental batteries of this pair are so perfectly managed to excite the interest of psychic in-
night. Could this at last be a demonstration adjusted that the vibration of the thought vestigators without raising the ire of magi-
of actual psychic power on stage' current of the man instantly registers itself cians. Born in Kashmir, India, in 1905, Bux
The solution proved less mystical, though upon the mind of the wife.' first gained notoriety for walking across

108
blazing coals or paraffin without suffering peek." First, under the mentalist's instruc ly,"Can anybody see with his nostrils?"
harm — a he had mastered as a
skill that tion, audience members fastened large Even so encumbered, Bux was able to
youth. By 1935, the stoical performer had coins over each eyeball with adhesive tape copy written messages, read books, and de-
been tested with a stroll across a fire mea- Then other spectators pushed masses of scribe objects held up by the audience On
suredat l,400degreescentigrade. However, flour paste into both eye sockets, followed one occasion, he rode a bicycle through New
after he emigrated to the United States in the by cotton wads and more tape. Finally, they York's Times Square in heavy traffic, an im-
late 1930s, Bux became better known for wound a wide surgical bandage around pressive feat even without the blindfold
feats of so-called eyeless sight. His stage act Bux'shead. Not only did this lengthy process Bux delighted in misleading the press
raised simple blindfold effects to a level that seemingly deprive the mentalist of his sight, about the source and extent of his eyeless
may never be surpassed— or explained. but it added a drama to his appearance on sight Once, after dazzlinga reporter with his
Bux disdained the use of plain cloth stage. Bux asked only that no one plug up his various stunts while blindfolded, Bux made
blindfolds. When he performed, he insisted nostrils, a stipulation that prompted one an elaborate show of looking for his glass-
that there be no possibility of "sneaking a psychic researcher to ask, perfectly serious- es—without them, he explained, he was
helpless. Similarly, Bux claimed:
"If I am blindfolded, I don't make
mistakes. But if I close my eyes I

ma ke the same mistakes as other

people-l collide with objects."
These statements delighted and
bemused Bux's many magician
friends, who would agree to play
a game of cards with him only af-
ter they had laid down a strict
rule: The mentalist was not per-

mitted to wear his blindfold.

Many researchers and magi-
cians were at a loss to explain
Bux's abilities. The mystery
deepened when, after a cataract
operation damaged his vision,
Bux continued to perform his act
with the same clear-eyed results.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to
Bux's skills came, quite uninten-

tionally, from three female sing-

ers with whom he once made a
tour of Britain. Assigned to a
dressing room next door to
Bux's, the women threatened to
break their contract. The reason:
"We would have no privacy.
There is only one brick wall be-
tween us and Kuda Bux."

Horse Sense
In the 1920s, a psychic phenom-
enon of a very different kind cap-

tured the imagination of the pub-

lic. Lady Wonder, the so-called

educated mind-reading horse,

was by no means the first animal
to rise to psychic prominence. In

Although swathed beneath

layers ofgauze, tape, and sticky
paste, Kashmiri mentalist
Kuda Bux remained able to read
books and to ride a bicycle,
living up to his billing as "the
Man with the X-Ray Eyes.

109
 Lady Wonder's calling card (above) in-
vites visitors to the horse's Virginia stable.
For one dollar, the animal would an-
swer questions using a keyboard (left).

George Soal in his quest to solve the mystery

the horse's predic- of mental telepathy. By 1939, Soal had con-
be chalked up to
tions of future events could ducted more than 20,000 tests on 40 peo-
1 1

1817, Toby, the Sapient Pig, startled Lon- Mrs. Fonda's knowledge of current events ple of varied background and education.
doners by correctly indicating numbers and and the propensity of the public to forget in-
words thought of by his audiences. Geese, correct prophecies.
goats, seals,and even rats have all taken to Lady Wonder herself remained quite un-
Mentalist under the
the stage to perform seemingly telepathic spooked by the controversy. As late as 956,1
Microscope
acts. Yet Lady Wonder, whose stamping the horse continued to make— and predict— Easily the most unusual of Soals subjects
grounds were just outside Richmond, Vir- newspaper headlines. was a popular stage performer by the name
ginia, was perhaps the first to warrant a full- Lady Wonder was only one among many of Frederick Marion. Born in Prague,
scale psychic investigation. mentalist performers to submit to psychic Czechoslovakia, Marion was an adept en-
The remarkable horse and her owner, testing. In the 1930s, stage mentalists and tertainer who could locate hidden objects in
Claudia Fonda, never traveled the show- average citizens alike came under the scru- a flash, even amid the most impenetrable
business circuit. Instead, interested observ- tiny of British mathematician Samuel clutter. The mentalist scored unusually well
ers visitedthem at Lady Wonder s stable,
where the animal stood poiscJ behind an
outsize typewriter, ready to peck out an-
swers to questions by nudging the keys with
her nose. For more than twenty-five years,
Lady Wonder made headlines by predicting
the outcomes of national elections, ball
games, and -perhaps somewhat less sur-
prisingly-horse races.
In 1927, the noted parapsychologist Jo-
seph Banks Rhine went to Richmond to test
the psychic horse. At first, Rhine found him-
self amazed by the horse's gifts. But after
subjecting Lady Wonder to tests similar to
those he applied to human subjects, he came
to suspect that she was responding to subtle
physical cues from her owner.
In separate tests that he conducted some
years later, the magician Milbourne Christo-
pher reached the same conclusion. Accord-
Mentalist Frederick M>. s hand ova downplaying
ing to Christopher, a luminary in the world of cards in a 1 934 experiment n was trying to • nbe the mind ofDr.
magic as both a performer and a historian, S. G. Soal (left foreground) foi Hie location of a pu cctedcard.

110
in Soal's standard battery of ESP tests, but he had her seal away in a plain envelope.
the researcher, familiar with the methods of Closing his eyes, Marion began to speak.
other performers, had a suspicion that Mar- "There isa large room, "he said, "with book-
ion was actually practicing noncontact shelves lining some of the walls. In this
thought reading. To test this theory, Soal room, a man is sitting behind a huge table. A
built a heavy wooden device he called a sen- number of documents are spread on the ta-
try box for the psychic researchers to stand He is reading something
ble in front of him.
in during their experiments. The He picks up a pen, then puts it down and
devicerestrictedbodymovements, rises from his seat to walk up and down the
thereby limiting the physical sig- room. Returning to his seat, he once again
nals that Soal and his assistants picks up the pen. As he does so, a door be-
might unconsciously transmit to hind him opens slightly. Somebody is look-
Marion. Theboxalsoshielded them ing into the room. The man writes, then
fromMarion'sviewwhileallowing takes a handkerchief from his pocket and
the mentalist the voice and eye dabs his eyes. He is crying."
contact he required. Here a gasp from Lady Asquith halted the
According to Soal, who pub- performer'snarrative. Trembling, she turned
lished a report entitled Preliminary to the audience and acknowledged that
Studies of a Vaudeville Telepathist, •
Marion had indeed read her private thoughts.
Marion lost his ability to find hid- She said: The room Marion describes is the
'

den objects when his testers were study of Number Ten Downing Street. The
shielded within the sentry box. incident occurred there in August of 9 4 At 1 1 .

such skills as muscle read-

Still, the moment Marion describes, my husband
ing could not account for all of was in the act of signing the declaration of
Marion's success, nor could the war against Germany."
laboratory contain all of his feats.
The performer frequently amazed
his audiences with his ability to re-
Seeing Through the
construct past events from the
Iron Curtain
lives of total strangers, based only In 1910, a penniless eleven-year-old Polish
on a half-dozen random words jot- boy boarded a train bound for Berlin, begin-
ted on a slip of paper. ning a psychic career that would draw in
Marion related the story of how, such figures as Hitler, Stalin, Einstein, and
during one such demonstration Freud. As the grown psychic would later tell
held at a large hall in London in the story, the boy crouched under a seat that
1934, a small, sharp-featured day in 1910, hoping to escape the notice of
woman rose from the audience the ticket collector. When the conductor de-
and accused the mentalist of em- manded to see his ticket, the boy, acting on
ploying confederates. She was a fearful impulse, handed him a worthless
Margot, Lady Oxford and Asquith, piece of paper torn from a newspaper.
wife of the former prime minister "Our glances met," he later recounted,
of England. The mentalist quickly "and with all my strength willed that he
I

rose to the challenge. Inviting his would take that piece of paper as a ticket."
critic to join him on stage, Marion Following a long pause, the conductor
asked Lady Asquith to concentrate punched the piece of paper as he would an
on an important event from her ordinary ticket and handed it back to the boy
past. Then he requested a random saying, "Why are you hiding under the seat if
sample of her handwriting, which r— you have a perfectly good ticket?"
Wolf Messing claimed that this was his
first experience of his remarkable powers of

telepathic projection, or, in his words, the

ability to cloud men's minds. It would be
some time, however,beforeMessinglearned
to put his abilities to use. The performer later
S. G. Soal demonstrates his
so-called sentry box, devised to recounted how he wandered the streets of
limit the unconscious physi- Berlin for days without food orshelter, finally
cal signals he could transmit to succumbing to a cataleptic fit, the very con-
Marion. By adding or remov-
dition that had plagued Washington Irving
ing wooden panels, Soal con-
trolled how much
Bishop two decades earlier.
ofhis body
the mentalist could see. Fortunately, although Messing's body
grew cold and stiff, the doctors v
112

1
attending the stricken boy detected a faint coming to suspect the young son of one of dered teller examined the blank slip, looked
heartbeat just as he was being dispatched to the Count's servants. Inspecting the child's atMessing in disbelief, and fell to the floor
the morgue, thus sparing him the fate of his room. Messing found himself drawn to an with a heart attack. "Luckily,' Messing
predecessor. His catalepsy brought him enormous stuffed bear, which he snatched wrote, it wasn't fatal."

good fortune, however, in that it led to his up and presented to the nobleman. When Messing reported that, impressive as his
first show-business job: lying motionless in the bear was cut open, the missing jewels demonstration was, it did not entirely satisfy
a crystal casket at the Berlin waxworks, on along with worthlessbitsof col-
spilled forth, Stalin, who proposed an even more difficult
display as a "living corpse." ored glass and other shiny objects. Evidently test. The Soviet leader owned a heavily
By the age of sixteen, Messing had devel- the boy had a fascination with glittering ob- guarded house in the country If Messing had
.

oped a mind-reading and so-called miracle- jects and hid any he came across inside the the ability to cloud men's minds, then surely
detective act in Berlin, in which he located stuffing of his toy. he could slip past Stalin's secret police.
valuables hidden among the audience. In Overcome with gratitude, Count Czartor- Messing agreed to try.
this way, Messing came before two of the yski offered Messing a large reward. Mess- The mentalist recounted that a few days
most famous, if amateur, psychic research- ing refused, asking instead for a favor. The afterward, as Stalin was working at his
ers of all time. mentalist, who was Jewish, supposedly re- desk, he looked up to see Messing stroll ca-
After a performance in Vienna, Messing quested that the Count use his considerable sually through the door, having telepathical-
recounted, he was invited to the apartment political influence to help abolish a law in- ly persuaded Stalin's guards that he was the
of thirty-six-year-old Albert Einstein. Usher- fringing on the rights of Poland's Jews. The head of the Soviet secret police. Stalin re-
ing Messing into his study, Einstein intro- Count readily agreed, and within two weeks, quired no further tests.
duced the teen-age entertainer to a visiting Messing claimed, the law was repealed. Was Messing blessed with genuine psy-
friend, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psy- Messing was living in Poland when Hit- chic powers, or was he the most successful
choanalysis. Freud insisted on testing Mess- ler's army invaded in September of 1939. conjurer and self-promoter of modern his-
ing's mind-reading ability. The young Pole Two years earlier, before an audience of tory? Ludmila Svinka-Zielinski, a foreign
happily agreed to attempt a probe of the 1,000 people, Messing had predicted that correspondent who followed Messing's ex-
Viennese doctor's consciousness. Hitler would die if his armies turned east. ploits, held that for the mentalist to have
As Messing concentrated his energy, Supposedly, news of the prophesy reached prospered under the constant scrutiny of the
however, a look of consternation spread the fiihrer, and he placed a price of 200,000 Soviet Union, he could not have dared fraud
across his face. It was not that he could not marks on Messing's head. As the German or even vain boasts. "To exist in the environ-
fathom Freud's unspoken message, Messing forces swept into the country, Messing fled. ment on such a level," she wrote, "Wolf
said later; he simply could not believe it. Fi- The performer crossed into the Soviet Messing must be thoroughly authentic."
nally, with a shrug, the mentalist went to Union hidden in a wagonload of hay. As a Messing himself waxed philosophical on
Einstein's bathroom cupboard and took out Jewish immigrant and practicing psychic, the subject: "The time is coming," he once
a pair of tweezers. Returning to Einstein, Messing's prospects in Stalin's Russia were said, "when man will understand these
Messing hesitantly explained that Freud poor. Yet, within threeyears, Messing rose to phenomena. There is nothing strange, only
wished him to pluck three hairs from the a position of prominence. what is not yet commonplace."
physicist's mustache. Smiling, Einstein prof- Messing's remarkable career in the Sovi-
fered his upper lip and, Messing later et Union began on a grim note in the city of
claimed, the mentalist carried out his task. Gomel. The mentalist later told how, in the
Radio's Mastermind
In the years that followed, Messing's midst of a sellout performance, two uni- Even as Wolf Messing solidified his reputa-

reputation spread throughout the world The . formed KGB officers stalked onto the stage, tion behind the Iron Curtain, anothercolorful
thought reader performed in such places as halted the proceedings, and dragged Mess- entertainer was stirring amazement in the
Japan, Brazil, Switzerland, Italy, and India, ing off to a waiting car. After a long, anxious United States. The son of poor German im-
ride and a thorough search of his person, migrants, Joseph Dunninger often claimed
:

where he claimed to have successfully read

the thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi. Messing found himself face to face with that his fate was sealed when, at the age of !

In Poland, Messing was able to find more none other than Joseph Stalin. seven, he was taken to see a performance by
work as a "miracle detective," placing his The Soviet leader, apparently interested Harry Kellar, one of the world's great magi-
services at the disposal of the police force. in Messing's invented a test of the
gifts, cians. Within a year, "Master Joseph Dun-
One of the notable cases that Messing mentalist's telepathic powers. Posing as an ninger, Child Magician" had secured a book-
claimed to have solved involved a Count ordinary customer, Messing was to enter a ing at a Masonic lodge in New York. By the
;

Czartoryski, a member of a wealthy and Moscow bank and present the teller with age of sixteen he was performing sleight-of-
powerful Polish family. The theft of the a blank slip of paper. Then, by projecting hand acts, and for the next ten years he
Count's heirloom jewels had left the police his thoughts, Messing had to convince the seemed destined to pursue the career of a
baffled. As a last resort, the Count flew Mess- teller to cash the blank slip as a check for stage magician, without any particular em-
ing to his castle in a private airplane 100,000 rubles. phasis on feats of mentalism.
The performer recounted how he probed The task, Messing asserted, went off In 1917, however, the twenty-five-year-
the castle grounds with his mind, soon without a hitch. He said that the elderly teller old conjurer's career hit a turning point. To
whom he approached looked at the blank draw attention to the opening of his illu
WolfMessing (opposite, right), whose slip (which had been torn out of an old show in Hartford, Connecticut, Dunninger
prophesies were said to strikefear into Adolf
school notebook), opened the bank's vault, staged a well-publicized blindfolded auto-
Hitler, demonstrates his thought-reading
act with an audience volunteer at a state uni- and counted out the money. Later, when mobile drive through the city, on hi
versity in Moscow. Messing returned the currency, the bewil- tracking down an object hidden by a com-

11:
 paper and reading
his audiences' slips of greater celebrity with an enormously popu-
mittee of townspeople. By updating the
them under the cover of a note pad. Dun- lar weekly radio program. At 6:30 on Sun-
blindfolded carriage rides of Washington Ir-
ninger denied the charge but revealed his ire day evenings, Dunninger's voice would be
ving Bishop Dunninger scored one of the
From by writing an article of his own that exposed heard apparently reading the minds of the
greatest publicity coups of his career.
the techniques of many other magicians. studio audience He heightened his effects
that point on, he devoted himself almost ex-
Eventually, the controversy led to Dun- through the clever use of telephone hookups
clusively to mentalism.
Two years later, Dunninger presented ninger's expulsion from the National Con- and remote studios, creating the impression
juror's Association. that he could read minds at any distance.
himself to a crowd of news reporters at the
In the 1950s, Dunninger moved to
Boston Press Club as the president of anj
television, which proved an even richer
apocryphal organization called the
American Psychical Society. In this ca- environment for his talents. With theaid
of remote cameras, he seemed to divine
pacity, Dunninger professed to have
the thoughts of people in distant, inac-
conducted important research into the
cessible locations, including those of a
science of telepathy. In the future, he
claimed, every man and woman on naval officer aboard a submarine and a

earth would become skilled at mind parachutist plummeting to earth.

reading, with incalculable benefits for

Although he had a standing invita-
the human race: would know the
Police tion from Joseph Rhine, the performer
plans of criminals as soon as they were never submitted to formal testing by
made, doctors would conduct psychic psychic researchers. His promotional
examinations of their patients, and literature, however, spoke of an early

communication by telephone would test by no less a scientist than Thomas

become obsolete Edison, who was quoted as saying,

In order to confirm his "purely scien- "Never have witnessed anything as
I

tific" discovery, Dunninger offered a

demonstration of these powers. Distrib-
uting sheets of paper, the mentalist
ounnmGER
Master Mind
mystifying or seemingly impossible."
His detractors doubted such claims.
As Dunninger's fame grew, so too did
asked each reporter present to jot down The the attacks from professional magi-
a name, number, or other significant of cians "Dunninger," one conjurer said
item. Then he asked them all to fold the
slipsand give them to a volunteer. Dun-
Modern bitterly, "can't read the mind of a gnat.

The only thing he can project is balo-

ninger tucked these papers into an
empty envelope, sealed it, and threw it
on the floor, instructing his volunteer to
MYSTERY ney." To all such charges, Dunninger
had an unvaried response: If these ma-
gicians knew how his act was done,
hold it under his foot.
Without another glance at the envel-
HERE they were free to duplicate it. "The Dun-
ninger act," he asserted proudly, "is the
ope, Dunninger took a seat across the
NEXT only thing in magic that has never been
room and-to the astonishment of all
present-promptly read off the con-
SUNDAY copied-ifit is magic'"

tents of the paper slips.

Before long, the Boston newspapers
"Close Your Eyes, Merv,
were filled with accounts of this and other A promotional card emphasizes the
and Concentrate"
Dunninger marvels. One story told of how he dramatic appearance ofJoseph Although Dunninger meant to discourage
Dunninger, who seemed to read
singled one person out of a crowd of 3,000 at imitators by these words, a young man from
minds over the airwaves.
the Boston Common after a committee had New Jersey took the challenge seriously. As
sealed away a written description of the By this time, however, Dunninger had be- a child, George Kresge had been fascinated
man. Another item told how Dunninger come too successful to be damaged by a few by the popular comic strip Mandrake the Ma-
stunned the editors of a prominent newspa- accusations. Already a striking figure, the gician. By the age of eleven, he took to the
per by spelling out a headline they had se- six-foot performer enhanced his dramatic stage with a hypnosis act— although, as he
cretly selected from their vast files. Before image by growing out his thick black hair later admitted, "I think more people fell
long, the "brilliant young investigator," as and sporting bright silk ties, a diamond asleep in the audience than on stage."
one newspaper called him, was prevailed stickpin, and white gloves and spats both on The lanky, bespectacled performer broke
upon to give a public demonstration of his stage and off. He took his show across into television in the 1960s, using the title

gifts. Thus began a quarter of a century of America, seeming to read the minds of con- theAmazing Kreskin Deeply influenced by
top theatrical billing for the performer. temporary notables such as Babe Ruth and Dunninger- he even adopted the elder per-
In presenting himself as a genuine psy- Jack Dempsey. When not appearing in pub- former's habit of doodling on a note pad
chic, rather than as a magician performing lic, Dunninger commanded exorbitant fees while receiving psychic impressions-Kres-
mind-reading Dunninger incurred a
tricks, at elite private functions given by such soci- kin also made good use of an effect pat-
predictable wave of wrath from some of his ety figures as the Astors, the Tiffanys, and terned after that of another stage psychic,
former peers One magician even drew up the Vanderbilts. Franz J. Polgar.
sketches that showed Dunninger palming In 1943, the mentalist achieved even The Hungarian-born Polgar, though nev-

114
 At a Las Vegas casino, a relieved Kreskin
plucks his paycheck from iis hiding place in
the seat lining of a car. The mentalist had
promised to surrender thefee ifpsychic im-
pulses failed to guide him to the check.

er as well known as Dunninger or Kreskin,

had a dramatic flair that rivaled both. A con-
summate muscle reader, the short, gray-
haired magician undertook in 950 to locate
1

a small silver money clip hidden on one of

the 102 floors of the Empire State Building.
Linked to a volunteer guide by a mere hand-
kerchief, Polgar found the clip within a safe
in the skyscraper's basement.

Later, he developed the effect that would

fire the imagination of Kreskin. Before each

performance, a committee would hide Pol-

gar's paycheck somewhere in the theater,
obliging the mentalist to find it psychically
or forfeit his fee. Over the years, this test
pressed Polgar to the very limits of hisability.
Once, he discovered the check sealed inside
a tennis ball. On another occasion, a Texas
police chief slipped the rolled-up check into
the barrel of his revolver.
In Kreskin's hands, the paycheck routine
became the stuff of national drama. A fixture
on television talk shows and later the star of
his own program, the blindfolded Kreskin
would take one end of a handkerchief held
by a volunteer and frantically hunt through
studio audiences in search of his check,
darting to and fro until - usually just before a
commercial break-he would fall upon the

Franz J. Polgar contemplates

the Empire State Building as he
prepares to find a money clip
hidden inside. The Hungarian
mentalist found the clip in a
locksmith 's subbasement office.

115
116
 shown
Israeli performer Uri Getter (left), so-called Geller Effect-a display of psycho- In 1973, Geller agreed to display his tal-
at the 977 Congressfor Parapsychology in
1 kinetic strength in which the young Israeli ents at the editorial offices of Time Posing as
Genoa, Italy, has won the admiration of
appeared to break spoons in half, bend a reporter, magician James Randi, a well-
audiences and the ire ofmost scientists with
house keys, even halt cable cars in midair respected escape artist, observed Geller s ef-
his affirmations ofmystic powers.
But the entertainer also proved adept at dis- fects at close quarters.
concealed check with a triumphant cry. The plays of mind reading and thought projec- An accomplished mentalist in his own
effect never failed to win applause and yield tion. For one researcher, Geller duplicated a right, Randi took issue with Geller's claims.
future bookings. pencil sketch of a sailboat despite the artist's The endorsements that Geller had won from
A engaging performer, Kreskin
friendly, attempt to shield it from him. For another, he scientists meant nothing to the magician,
deftly sidestepped a large part of who felt that scholars, believing
the controversy that had surround- themselves too smart to be fooled,
ed Dunninger by remaining vague were easily swayed by tricksters.
about the source of his ability. When Geller completed his dem-
Asked how he accomplished an onstration for the magazine's edi-
especially dazzling mind-reading tors and left their offices, Randi
effect, Kreskin told an interviewer, promptly repeated every one of the
"I would love to tell you how do it, 1
young performer's effects
but honestly don't know."
I To duplicate simple pencil
On another occasion, when he sketches, Randi explained, Geller
was asked whether he could lift a could have used a technique called
heavy object with the force of his pencil reading. Even if the person
brain waves, Kreskin was even making the sketch held the pad out
more blunt: "No," he answered, of sight, Geller would be able to re-
"that would be magic." create it by carefully tracking and
then duplicating the movements of
the artist's hand and pencil.
A Simple Twist of Plate Similarly, Geller's celebrated
Even as Kreskin chatted amiably key-warping feats were readily ex-
on America's television screens, plained. Geller, said Randi, merely
a young Israeli was preparing to buckled the key against a tabletop.
take the scientific world by storm. Owing to Randi's influence, the
In a few short years, Uri Geller, magazine article that was subse-
known as the psychic boy wonder, quently published about Geller
would skyrocket to global renown, was considerably less flattering
leaving a trail of broken spoons, than might otherwise have been.
it

twisted keys, and quarreling sci- From that point forward, wherever
entists in his wake. Uri Geller went, James Randi
Born to a Hungarian family in seemed to follow close behind.
1946, Geller often claims that his When Geller appeared on one tele-
psychic powers first manifested vision show, Randi was there to
themselves after he received a se- supervise the conditions to pre-
vere electrical shock when he was clude fraud. When Geller did mind-
five years old. By 1969, Geller be- reading stunts, Randi improved on
gan to exhibit feats of telepathy and psycho- Getter's nemesis, magician James them. Although Geller's reputation in the
kinesis in Israeli night clubs and on kibbut- Randi, has taken on Houdini's United States has faded as a result, the Israe-
zim. Finding his talents underappreciated in task of debunking psychic li mentalist maintains that Randi is merely a
claims. He says most, ifnot all,
his own country, where some critics ac- clever magician who has mimicked his re-
psychics are only conjurers.
cused him of fraud, Geller tried his luck in methods. The effects are no
sults but not his

the United States less genuine, Geller says, for having been

Geller succeeded when the prestigious projected his own image onto photographic copied by trickery.
Stanford Research Institute, a scientific 1

film seemingly by pressing his forehead The two men seem likely to remain at

think tank in Menlo Park, California, includ- 1

against the capped lens of a camera. odds for some time, the latest combatants in
ed him ongoing psychic investigations.
in its In the early 970s, it appeared that Geller
1 the struggle launched by Washington Irving
Although the results were sketchy and in- had found the acceptance and respectability Bishop a century ago. Perhaps the sagest
conclusive, Geller's apparent abilities ex- i
that had eluded his predecessors. However, words on the subject are those of Sydney
cited the investigators and conferred a legiti- ; he was not long on this pedestal Like Bish- and Lesley Piddington, an Australian
macy on the performer that made his name a i op, the Zancigs, and Lady Wonder, Geller thought-transference team popular in the
household word. was to face his harshest criticism at the 1950s. They ended their performances with

The bulk of his fame came to rest on the hands of a professional magician a simple maxim "Judge for yourselves

11/
 CHAPTER 4

Puffing Psi (o Work

former carpenter from Canada, riding through Alexandria, Egypt, in 1979, sud-
denly exclaims: "We just drove over the top of Cleopatra's palace" - a structure
that he describes in detail and locates for later excavation and exploration.
A New Jersey housewife declares in 1967 that a missing boy is dead, and
and describes where he will be found and how he is dressed; two months later,

police confirm her prediction. A Missouri woman grips a sealed envelope and
corroborates the commodities-market hunch it contains; after acting on the
hunch, her client becomes a millionaire and buys her a house. In 1 973, a retired
police official in California describes a secret satellite-monitoring station 3,000
miles away in the state of Virginia in such detail that security officers launch an
investigation to find the leak.
Some parapsychologists and others argue that such well-publicized inci-
dents illustrate the potential rewards of applying supposed psychic gifts to

humanity's endless quests for knowledge, justice, wealth, and power. Indeed,
the possibilities can appear enormously attractive, not only to the psychics

themselves and their individual beneficiaries, but to some of the largest, most
conservative institutions of modern times— universities, corporations, and
government agencies.
Partnerships of psychics and bureaucracies are uncomfortable at best.
On one side is an organization dedicated to the reduction of risk, where deci-
sions are made by committee and the most important ingredients of success
are consensus and orthodoxy; on the other is an individual with a quirky talent

whose performance is always uneven, and sometimes a bit theatrical as well.

Yet a few large institutions continue to risk their reputations-if not their sur-
vival -by turning to psychics.

One where psychic assistance seems especially appealing is arche-

field

ology, a discipline that must build on clues that are widely scattered through
space and time. To construct a picture of a society from a few shards of its

pottery, a handful of broken spear points, or a sampling of cave drawings

requires a creative imagination that almost borders on intuition. Small wonder
that an archeology lay be tempted to leap beyond the bounds of the scientific

method-asFredericr 3ligh Bond did in 1908.

118
 Bond, a thin, bespectacled, and intense man, had been might be present. His first: "Can you tell us anything about
given the job of excavating the sprawling ruins of the Benedic- Glastonbury Abbey?" According to Bond, the answer was in

tine Abbey of Saint Mary at Glastonbury, in southern England. the affirmative. During that and as many as a hundred subse-
The man and the job seemed perfectly matched. Bond was quent sessions, he said later, spirits claiming to be long-dead
one of Britain's leading authorities on medieval church ar- monks, artisans, and workers communicated detailed de-
chitecture; the Abbey of Glastonbury was an ancient pre- scriptions and annotated drawings of the original abbey
Christian ritual site where, it was said, Christianity had been buildings. Among many other things, they indicated that there
introduced to Britain— and where the legendary King Arthur had once been a large chapel on the abbey's east side.

and Guinevere had supposedly been buried. Once a prosper- In his new job at Glastonbury, Bond soon found himself
ous religious center populated by hundreds of monks (Ire- under pressure from both the church and a curious public to

land's Saint Patrick, among others) and thousands of work- produce something interesting. He took a chance, started dig-
ers, the abbey had been disbanded during the reign of Henry ging in the eastern section of the abbey, and discovered the
V1I1 in the sixteenth century. chapel just where the automatically written floor plan said it

Bond had been interested in Glastonbury for many would be. Now, relying entirely —but secretly— on his ethereal
years. The abbey was, after all, one of the most intriguing communicants, Bond went on to reconstruct several build-

archeological puzzles of his time. He had also been interested ings: the refectory, the monks' dormitory, the cloisters, the

in psychic phenomena since childhood. A longtime friend of chapter house, a pottery kiln, the monks' kitchen.
Bond's, Captain John Bartlett, was an amateur psychic who For years, Bond kept the alleged source of his profes-

had done some automatic writing- messages written by his sional inspirations a secret. Then, in 1918, he published a

hand that seemed to come from the spirit world. book, The Gate of Remembrance, in which he
One day in 1 907, the year before revealed the details of his conversa-
Bond's Glastonbury appointment, he tions with the long-dead inhabitants

and Bartlett casually tried a coop- of the abbey. Reactions were al-

erative experiment in automatic most universallyhostile. Embar-

writing. Bond put his hand on rassed church officials first

Bartlett's and addressed his named a codirector to the

questions to any entity that restoration project, then

119
appointed various supervisory committees, then slashed its colored auras flickering around people, he said, and could
budget. In 1 Bond and barred him from the
922, they dismissed move small objects merely by concentrating on them. While
abbey grounds. They stopped all excavation at the site and he was interested in these abilities, they had not diverted him
even filled in some of the existing digs. from a career as a chemical engineer.
Bond spent the rest of his life communicating with his In 1919, after narrowly escaping execution in the Rus-
company of departed monks, writing books about their al- sian Revolution, the forty-two-year-old Ossowiecki moved to
leged revelations to him, and trying to get back to work on the Warsaw. There, his family fortune gone, he made a modest
abbey. His latter efforts were stoutly and successfully resisted living as a chemical engineer and intensified his study and
by the church, and in 1 945, Bond died of a heart attack at the practice of extrasensory perception. His reputation as a clair-

age of 82 The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey remain shrouded

. in voyant grew. He helped find lost articles and missing people,
the earth, with scores of architectural and historical details and occasionally assisted in criminal investigations, but he
provided by Bond's unorthodox methods largely unchecked never accepted money for applying his psychic gifts. He read
by modern researchers. everything he could find about parapsychology and readily
volunteered to be the subject of psychic research projects
Bond is regarded as the first psychic archeologist, but he was The 1935 experiment had been created by a wealthy
far from the last. In 1935, a well-known Polish psychic named Hungarian named Dionizy Jonky, who had died eight years
Stefan Ossowiecki was put to an
odd test that would lead him
deeply into investigations of the
distant past. Born and raised in

Moscow, Ossowiecki claimed to

have discovered certain psychic

abilities as a youth. He could see

Archeologist Frederick Bligh Bond

(above) believed a monk named Johan-
nes was among the spirits of Glas-
tonbury Abbey who comm uned with
him through automatic writing.
Atop afanciful sketched portrait, Bond
directed to Johannes the question:
"Is this like you?" The monk supposed-
ly wrote this cryptic response: "I am
as in a glass. Yes, I impelled the stylus. I
benotasApollus-butlbel - what
matter? Thus I saw mine own [face] in
clear pool o' mere. Johan.
 A crude plan of a chapel was allegedly drawn
for Bond by a dead monk named William. In Lat-
in, he identified the sketch (left) as the Chapel

of St. Edgar, built by one Abbot Beere. Although

no such chapel was known for certain to have
existed at Glastonbury, Bond was prompted to
digforit. In 1 909, he photographed his dis-
covery, which he called Edgar's Chapel (below).

f^uIiLt? .iSS
C>d^-^

JbJ&tkrtJ~^J2j^ - I H t

f
t1
m

earlier. As part of a large legacy, Jonky had provided for a test

in psychometry, or object reading— the alleged ability to iden-

tify or tell something about an object by picking up thought
waves supposedly implanted by someone previously associ-
ated with the article.
m \

In his will, Jonky had devised a clever way to gauge a

psychic's object-reading skills. He stipulated that eight years
after his death a tiny, sealed package, its contents known only
to him, be presented to a psychic adept at psychometry. In
>~
addition to testing that person's abilities, the results might also
indicate whether the mental energy associated with the con-
cealed object had dissipated after the owner's death. people, events, and places with firsthand immediacy. He
In the presence of fifty witnesses, the package was claimed that his surroundings, even his body, faded into the
placed in front of Ossowiecki along with fourteen photo- background when he was in such a so-called superconscious
graphs, one of them a picture of the long-dead Jonky. "I stilled state, and that he was able to view history as if it were a film

my consciousness," said Ossowiecki later, "and moved to the running in reverse. He said he could stop it, run it forward
realm of the superconscious." again, or change its perspective at will.

Reviewing the photographs, Ossowiecki identified the Those around him hardly knew what to make of his re-
picture of Jonky as the man who had prepared the package. ports from the past; they needed an expert in prehistory to
After describing the dead man's life and interests and identify- evaluate what Ossowiecki was seeing. And in March 1 936, the
ing the professor who had had custody of the package for the psychic was introduced to Stanislaw Poniatowski, a fifty-two-
past eightyears, the psychic turned to the package itself. "Vol- year-old professor of ethnology at the University of Warsaw. It

canic minerals," he mused. "There is something here that was a fateful meeting.
pulls me to other worlds, to another planet." He was holding Poniatowski had long been interested in archeology. He
fragments of a meteorite, he said, adding that he also sensed wanted, as he put it, to find out "what links existed between
sugar. The parcel was opened; it contained pieces of a mete- the most primitive and uncivilized contemporary societiesand
'

orite, enfolded in a candy wrapper. their counterparts in the oldest prehistoric cultures ' Moreover,
Later in 1935 came experiments in which Ossowiecki he had been thinking about using psychics to probe the dis-

seemed to travel to prehistoric Egypt and Europe, observing tant past and had worked out a rigorous procedure for such en-

121
deavors. So,when he met what Ossowiecki reported
Ossowiecki, he knew that was not then known but was
the time had come. Frederick Bligh Bond's dig at Glastonbury Abbey confirmed by much later re-
unearthed a skeleton with a skull between its ankles. Bond's dead
The psychic and the spirits supposedly identified the remains: One enemy
search: the fact, for example,

academician began a series slew the other and, years later, was buried atop his victim. that prehistoric people used

of controlled experiments in oil lamps. On the other hand,

psychometry. Poniatowski assembled a group of scientists still later research contradicted many of his descriptions of
from several disciplines -astronomy, mathematics, and geo- early human appearance and culture.

physics as well as archeology-and asked them to submit de- By February of the year 939, Ossowiecki had described
1

tailedcomments on what they observed during the session. and sketched eleven distinct prehistoric cultures. Poniatowski
Poniatowski would hand Ossowiecki an object to read and kept meticulous records— of the sessions, the artifacts used,
would guide the psychic's observations by asking questions. and the comments offered by the committee of observers —for
This last was a radical departure from usual procedure, in later verification. He even went so far as to attempt cross-
which the psychic was presented with a question and left un- checking Ossowiecki by employing another psychic but al-

disturbed until the session was over. most immediately gave up in disgust; this backup psychic
When everything was ready, Ossowiecki was handed a could only give Poniatowski vague ramblings and broad
flint tool. For about twenty minutes he said nothing while he guesses-which were based, he suspected, on the psychic's
put himself in the proper state of mind. The others in the room secret readings on the subject.
did as he had asked them; they chatted about other subjects Then German forces invaded Poland and the years of
and tried to avoid focusing their attention on him. At length brutal occupation began. Hitler ordered the extermination of
Ossowiecki spoke: "Thick, thick forest. Such a strange forest, "the Jews, the intelligentsia, the clergy and the nobility of Po-
black leaves, such dark cole Vast distances. Yonder there land." Yet neither Ossowiecki nor Poniatowski fled the coun-
are places where there is no forest, clearings, and on them try, as many other notables did. Ossowiecki worked day and
mushroom-like squat houses made of twigs smeared with night, making as many as thirty psychic readings a day for
clay. see them well in this moment."
1 those who came to him inquiring about the fate of missing
For the next hour, he described in meticulous detail the relatives and friends.
people who he said had made the flint implement 1 0,000 years In 1 94 1 , while the Gestapo officials were busy dragging
before-their appearance, customs, houses, and tools-until people from their homes for execution in the streets, the two
he complained of tiredness and a "weight in the head." time travelers resumed their work. Ossowiecki and Ponia-
At regular intervals for the next three years, Ossowiecki towski were certain that they would be shot if discovered by
took some object in hand and lofted himself into his special the Germans. Nevertheless, they met regularly, compiling vo-
dimension, from which he reported in convincing detail on the luminous notes on eight more early cultures. Bowing to war-
lives of people who had lived as long ago as 300,000 years. In time conditions, Poniatowski gave up his plans for field exca-
the main, what he described was consistent with what arche- vations and began writing a book about the revelations.
ologistsknew about these early societies. Of course, he went But the fate so long deferred caught up with them at last.
far beyond their general conjectures, and in many respects, The Gestapo arrested Poniatowski in the fall of 1942 and de-
what he claimed to see was unverifiable: the way two early tained him in prison until the war was almost over in 945, at 1

humans copulated, for instance, or how a feather ornament which tir. t h ;• shot him. By the time Poniatowski was killed,
was worn. It is claimed, however, that in many particulars his friend and partner in psychic archeology was already

122
dead: In the fall of 1944, with the Russian and Allied armies J. Norman Emerson had watched with detached bemusement
pushing their way into Poland and Warsaw in open revolt, the as his wife, Ann, began attending meetings of a study group
Germans had rounded up nearly 10,000 Polish citizens, in- interested in the work of the late psychic Edgar Cayce. Senior
cluding Ossowiecki, herded them into a public park, and professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, vice-
mowed them down with machine guns. ("I see that shall die a
I president of the Canadian Archaeological Association, teach-
terrible death," Ossowiecki had foretold not long before, add- er of nearly ninety percent of Canada's professional archeolo-

ing "but I have had a wonderful life.") gists, and a preeminent expert on Ontario's Iroquois Indian
In the years that followed Ossowiecki's gruesome death, history, Emerson was, as he said later, "a hard-nosed re-
other psychics continued to try their hands at archeology. searcher who had spent most of my adult life trying to apply
However, more than two decades would elapse before an- the best scientific methods to my chosen field." His wife's
other partnership between an academician and a psychic growing interest in the arcane world of psychic affairs was
would produce notable results. "O.K. for a Wednesday evening meeting," he supposed, "but
In the late 1960s, the distinguished Canadian educator had nothing to do with me."
became friendly
Despite any disinclinations, Emerson
with Lottie and George McMullen, a couple that Ann Emerson
had met at the Cayce group. George McMullen claimed to pos-
sess psychic abilities, but the educator was indifferent to them
until Ann Emerson asked McMullen for advice about her hus-
band's deteriorating health. McMullen responded, she re-
called, "with great specificity

and considerable authority. He

said things he couldn't have
known about Norm and made
recommendations which a
man with his grade-school
education couldn't possibly
have guessed."
Those recommendations
made sense to Emerson. "Bet-

ter yet," he said later, "they

worked. When you are con-
fronted with the prospect of an

Clairvoyant Stefan Ossowiecki,

shown in this 1895 photograph as a
cadet at St. Petersburg Technologi-
cal Institute, often sketched what
he saw in men tal probes of the past.
While psychometrizing a Stone Age
tool, he drew a large-skulled crea-
ture he saw associated with it.

\
 Psychics Search flic Sea

If some psychics claim to be able to tween eighty-two and ninety-three sub could not get oriented on the sea
see across vast distances, why not be- years before, they said, a wooden sailing bottom. Finally, a radio homing device
neath great depths 7 To explore that ship with a steam engine on board was dropped into the target zone.
possibility, Stephan Schwartz, director of had suffered an explosion amidships Soon, Taurus's manipulator arm dug into
the Mobius Society, a Los Angeles and sunk at that very spot. Its re- the sand and extracted the first relic
parapsychology research group, devised mains would be found there at 277 feet. from the sunken ship.
the first undersea test of psychic ar- In June, Schwartz and two of the Three days of diving yielded al-

cheology: Deep Quest. psychics set out in a cabin cruiser to test most all the objects the psychics saw, in-
In the spring of 1 977, Schwartz the accuracy of the mental probes. cluding the ship's wheel and the
mailed sets of four Pacific navigation Their equipment included the Taurus I, a strange stone slab. The distribution and
charts to five volunteers. None thirty-two-foot-long submarine type of charred wreckage suggested
was a professional psychic, but all The evening before the first dive, one a wooden ship had exploded. Marine
claimed psychic powers. They were psychic reported new impressions. growth on the artifacts indicated they
to use remote viewing to locate and de- Among those she sketched were a ship's had been in place for decades. A federal
scribe shipwreck sites. Working in- wheel, attached to a shaft, and a marine-sites expert concluded that
dependently, they picked several loca- large stone block. no known record could have cued the
tions on the various maps. According Three hours into his first psychics to the shipwreck's location
to Schwartz, four of the five chose a sin- dive,however, Taurus pilot Al Witcombe beforehand.
gle site on a chart showing some ten had seen nothing His
square miles of ocean near Santa Cata-
lina Island. Be-

psychics.
views remains found by
b. '
arinerAl Witcombe

124
extended, serious illness and then you try something and get As a result of this eavesdropping, according to Emerson,
well - it makes an impression. You respect the source no mat- McMullen was able to "assess the age of the site, describe the
ter how crazy, imponderable or un-understandable it may people, their dress, their dwellings, economy and general be-
be." The experience turned out to be the beginning of an un- haviour" with eighty percent accuracy.
likely but fruitful association. Convinced that McMullen's psychic abilities were real
George McMullen was a former carpenter and wilder- and that the information they produced was useful, Emerson
ness guide who proclaimed himself "an average guy. " He was resolved to share this new source of knowledge. He did so at
hesitant about using his apparent psychic gifts. Small wonder. the March 973 annual meeting of the Canadian Archaeologi-
1

Once, as a child, he had innocently-and accurately-predict- cal Association.

ed the death of a neighborhood boy in a motorcycle crash. His Coming from the man known as the father of Canadian
family and friends reacted with horror; his mother beat him, as archeology, it was a stunning declaration: "It is my conviction
if to drive out some demon, and the local minister accused him that I have received knowledge about archaeological artifacts
of having dealings with the devil. and archaeological sites from a psychic informant who relates
For much of his later life, McMullen had kept his alleged this information to me without any evidence of the conscious
powers to himself. But when, at the age offorty-nine, he found use of reasoning." He concluded that "by means of the intu-
his gifts attracting the interest of a respected educator, he will- itive and parapsychological a whole new vista of man and his
ingly responded. past stands ready to be grasped."
Beginning in 1 97 1 Emerson and McMullen conducted a
Emerson's colleagues were shocked and skeptical. But
,

series of object-reading sessions much like those held in War- given the credentials of the speaker, they were inter-
saw thirty years before. Emerson limited his inquiries to Iro- ested. That evening, one of their number asked for a
quois history so that he would be able to evaluate McMullen's demonstration. He produced a crude carving of a hu-
responses. In a typical early example, Emerson produced a man head in black stone, confiding to Emerson that it

tapered clay cylinder, apparently a fragment of a larger piece had been found in an Indian site on the Queen Charlotte Is-

of unknown shape and function. lands off the coast of British Columbia, Canada 's westernmost
McMullen looked at it, felt it, and began to talk. First he province. However, McMullen, who had accompanied Emer-
told Emerson what the scholar already knew— where the frag- son to the meeting, declared that it had been carved by a black
ment had been found and how old it was. Then he identified it African from Port-au-Prince in the Caribbean who had been
as part of the stem of a ceremonial pipe, described exactly how taken to the west coast of Canada as a slave.
it had been crafted, and sketched the entire pipe along with its Emerson, having just staked his reputation on a man
decorations. Emerson immediately recognized the sketch as a who was now speaking nonsense, was mortified. As far as he
typical pipe of that age and locale. or anyoneelse knew, no blacks had lived in British Columbia

Many similar sessions followed, and for the next two before modern times. The embarrassed Emerson borrowed
years, McMullen roamed various Iroquois sites and relayed to the carving and had McMullen read it again later. He even tried

Emerson what he sensed there. Explaining how he gathered other psychics but claimed that he always got the same ac-
his information, McMullen said he could hear people talking, count of its African creator. Then a colleague supplied some
sometimes so many at once that it was difficult to know which support. One of his former students, involved in cataloguing
one to listen to. When someone asked him if they were dead an extensive museum collection of West African art, was
people, the people said, according to McMullen: " Whoisdead? shown the enigmatic head and told nothing of its background
'

You are the ones who are dead because you are so unaware
.

Without hesitation, he identified the piece as African in motil

126
Finally, two years later, anthropologists conducting an unre- and archeologists later validated by exploration of a structure
lated blood analysis of Indians in British Columbia found defi- that had stood there more than 1 ,000 years ago.

nite evidence in one tribe of a Negro ancestor. To be sure, the revelations of psychic archeology have
Emerson died in 978, but McMullen continued to assist
1
not gone unchallenged by skeptics. Frederick Bligh Bond is

other archeologists with their projects, in Canada as well as in said to have had abundant visual and historical clues for his

other countries. It was while he was on an expedition to Alex- finds at Glastonbury Abbey; he was, after all, an expert on
andria, Egypt, in 1979 that he informed his companions that medieval churches. And as American archeologist Marshall

they had just driven over the long-buried remains of the queen McKusick has pointed out, the spirits consulted by Bond did
Cleopatra's palace. not communicate in the idioms of their own day, but in "mod-
"See the lighthouse out there?" he asked, while the oth- ern English larded with anachronisms, and such verbal awk-
ers looked out at an empty sea. Excitedly, McMullen told of a wardisms and archaic words as were fashionable among
'

grand palace with white columns and marble statues that nineteenth-century poets. ' (Bond supporters, of course, could
spread from the city out into the water. He even described argue that ghosts capable of surviving over many centuries

large glass beads on the floor of the palace - all of which divers would presumably have within their powers the ability to

Clairvoyant Gerard Croiset points to where in Holland's

Vliet Canal,heforesaw, the body ofsix-year-old Wimpje Slee would befound.
Croiset's prediction in the 1 963 case proved correct.

126
speak in any fashion they the two best-known extrasen-
might choose.) As for Stefan sory detectivesof the twentieth
much of the origi-
Ossowiecki, century have been Gerard
nal documentation for his Croiset and Peter Hurkos. Both
work was destroyed during were born in the Netherlands,
World War and critics have
II, just two years apart, and had
observed that a large part of his early premonitions of later
psychic archeology seemed to psychic talents. Apparently,
be based on misconceptions they met only once, and their
current in the late 1930s. The careers were quite different.
unlettered George McMullen's Croiset, born in 1909,
performances in Egypt and had a turbulent childhood. Of-
other Middle Eastern countries ten deserted by his natural fa-
may be difficult to explain fully The theatrical clairvoyant Peter Hurkos claims his ther, and for a time abandoned
on the basis of prior knowl- psychic revelations are 87. 5 percent accurate. Critics accuse
by his mother, the young Ge-
him ofambiguity and ofmisrepresenting hisfailures.
edge or interest, but his read- rard was raised in a succession
ings of Canadian Indian arti- of foster homes, including one
facts might well have stemmed from his exposures to Indian in which the favored form of discipline was to chain the boy to
cultures when he was a wilderness guide. Indeed, McMullen a stake in the floor. He was often hungry for food, and always
himself has balked at being called a psychic: "I hate that word. starved for affection.
To me, you link those with mediums and fortune-tellers. I As a young man, Croiset had been unable to hold even
don't do those things. I'm an intuitive." menial jobs and had failed as a grocer. But in the late 1 930s, he
Whatever its practitioners might be, psychic archeology began to gain a reputation as a psychic who had an uncanny
continues to fascinate. One enthusiast has been moved to ability to peer into both past and future by way of psychometry.
propose that the archeological team of tomorrow may include He made an uncertain living as a clairvoyant throughout the
"biofeedback technicians, a staff parapsychologist, and of German occupation of Holland, during which he was twice
course, a team of psychics"— all using methods "whose so- arrested and released by the Gestapo.
phistication will be as incomprehensible to us as the world of In 1 945, the moderately well-known but aimless Croiset
electricity was to nineteenth-century man." met Willem Tenhaeff, an unpaid lecturer in parapsychology at

the University of Utrecht. Tenhaeff was an enthusiastic re-

While there is great academic interest in the distant past, the searcher into the abilities of apparent psychics, and Croiset
demand to know what has happened more recently is often was willing to be studied: "I decided that the best use could I

far more urgent - to police departments, for example, or to the make of my empty life," he said later, "was to do all these
families of missing or murdered people. Public pressure and scientific tests that Professor Tenhaeff wanted."
private desire for results can become so extreme that stymied Tenhaeff put Croiset through a series of psychiatric and
detectives often seek out the services of psychics despite the psychic examinations at the university. The professor had
potential for embarrassment. analyzed dozens of psychics- whom he termed paragnosts, a
Any number of supposed psychics have stepped for- word meaning "beyond knowledge"-during a period of

ward, or have been recruited, to help investigate crimes, but twenty years, but he pronounced Croiset the most gifted of

127
 A police artist's sketch, based
on the psychic Joan's impres-
sions of a suspected child
does not seem to
killer (far left),
resemble the man 's mug
shot. Joan herself thought the
face should have been long-
er, the nose more pug. Never-
theless, the sketch led police
to the suspect. At his trial, a Cali-
fornia judge overruled de-
fense objections that the arrest
was illegal because it was
based solely on information
from a psychic.

Psychic
Crime Hghferc
Clairvoyants often seem stymied by
high-profile crimes, but they have helped
police in less-publicized cases. When a
seven-year-old L os Angeles boy disap-
peared in 1978, forexam^';, investiga-
tors called in a psychic whose legal name
was simply Joan. She said the boy had
been murdered, and she described the kill-

er. Joan thought the resulting police

sketch not quite true to her vision, but the
missing boy's father identified it immedi-
ately. The suspect, a family acquaintance,
was eventually convicted of murder.
In another California case, in 1981,

Mountain View police asked psychic Kay

Rhea to help identify a woman whose
skull was found in a city dump. A police art-
ist sketched Rhea's impressions. Inde-

pendent of that effort, a forensic anthro-

pologist made a plaster cast of the skull.
It matched the sketch remarkably. Pictures
of both appeared in newspapers, but the
victim was never identified.
 them all. For the next two decades and more, TenhaefF would
spend much of his timestudyingandpromotingCroiset'sabili-
ties. During this time, Croiset's fame became national, then
international; and Tenhaeff became the world's first professor
of parapsychology and the director of the University of
Utrecht's pioneering Parapsychology Institute.
With increasing frequency, police departments in the

Netherlands, other European nations, and eventually even the

United States and China asked Croiset, through Tenhaeff, to

Psychic Kay Rhea 's description resulted in a police sketch of a

assist in particularly perplexing cases. Few of these cases
decapitation victim whose skull had been discovered in a city could be hailed as triumphs of psychic crime solving, yet some
dump in Mountain View, California (opposite page). The
sketch bears a marked resemblance to an an thropologist's plas-
of them have remarkable elements nevertheless. In 1961 , for
ter reconstruction of the skull (below). Both renditions were example, four-year-old Edith Kiecorius of Brooklyn, New
widely circulated, but the victim remains unidentified.
York, had disappeared on the afternoon of Feb-
ruary 22- when she had not been found three
days later, police were assuming the worst. Pub-
lic interest in the case was intense, and on Feb-
ruary 25, an official of KLM, the Dutch airline,
located Croiset and offered to fly the psychic to
New York if he would help solve the mystery of
Edith's disappearance. "1 have never been to

New York," said Croiset. "If I go there now, I

would choke on all the impressions and would

not be able to see a thing." Instead, he asked
that further information, a photograph of the
child, a map of New York, and an item of her
clothing be flown to him in Holland.
But before hanging up, Croiset began to
talk about the case. The child was dead, he de-
clared, and he described in general terms the
location of the body (a tall building with a bill-

board on top, near an elevated railroad and a

river) and the man who murdered her (small,

fifty-four or fifty-five years of age, south Europe-

an, sharp-faced, wearing gray). The next day
Croiset went over the materials flown from New
York and refined his descriptions. The building
in which the body lay "has, I think, five floors.

On the second floor I get a strong emotion The

man I described yesterday is a little older, be-

tween fifty-four and fifty-eight years of age. He

has a small, sharp, tawny face."
About six hours later, as part of a general
search unconnected with Croiset's clues, police
broke into a second-story room in a gray build-

ing near an elevated railroad and the Hudson

River-and found the child's body. The landlord identified the

renter of the room, who was soon arrested and convich

the crime. He was small, sharp nosed, and swarthy, and

 Representing one of Gerard Croiset's psychicfail-
ures, this hole ina suburban backyard turned out not
to be the grave ofJudge Joseph Force Crater.
Crater's celebrated disappearance in 1 930 made news
again in 1 959 when Croiset claimed the prominent
m
judge had been urdered at a house in Yonkers, New
York, and buried behind it. The story squared with
old clues involving the house, which had been owned
by one of Crater's political cronies. However, when
the backyard was excavated, no remains werefound.
Crater's fate is unknown. Here the home's 1 959
still
owner peers into the empty "grave.

dressed predominantly in gray checks. There were discrepan- consciousness four days later, he had amnesia, but when he
cies, to be sure: The building was four, not five, stories in heard his wife's voice, he cried, "Bea, what are you doing here?
Where 's Benny' The whole room is burning with Benny. Five
'

height; there was no billboard; the culprit was from England, '

not south Europe And while Croiset had been more often right
. days later their son Benny was trapped in a fire, and was
than wrong in what he said about the case, the police had rescued just in time from a burning room.
solved it without his help, and his role was not mentioned at Hurkos never recovered his full mental faculties after the
the time. A number of critics have pointed out that many of accident; he remained unable to concentrate long enough to

Croiset's alleged contributions to crime solving were grossly do ordinary work or even read a book. But he began to dem-
exaggerated by his mentor, Tenhaeff. In one notable example, onstrate apparent psychic abilities and soon began to use
the Dutch investigator Piet Hein Hoebens found that facts them in theatrical presentations. He was far more visible and
about an attempted murder case, reputedly perceived psychi- self-promoting than Croiset, and seldom consented to the su-
cally by Croiset, had in fact been published in Dutch newspa- pervision of researchers such as Tenhaeff.
pers five days earlier. But Croiset's reputation continued to According to Hurkos, he was asked in 1947, soon after

grow-thanks largely, perhaps, to the fact that English- launching his show-business career, to help with an unsolved
speaking commentators, unable to read Dutch, relied on the murder of a young coal miner in the Dutch province of Lim-
enthusiastic Tenhaeff for their information. burg. Hurkos reportedly fingered the victim's coat, then told
This lack of clear-cut results is characteristic of psychic police that the miner's stepfather had done the shooting The
detective work. Indeed, however accurate and valuable the murder weapon, he said, was on the roof of the dead man's
clues provided by a psychic may be, they cannot be presented house; police found the gun and obtained fingerprints from it

in a court as evidence, and no police officer will make an that led to the stepfather's conviction.
arrest or declare a case solved solely on the basis of such 1948, after Hurkos had become famous in Europe as
advice. The usual official response is to listen and wait, and the man with "radar eyes'' and an "X-ray brain,'' he
when the case is resolved, the contribution of the psychic may Inmoved to the United States. There, with his thick Dutch
be almost impossible to divine. accent and flamboyant ways, he became as well known
Sometimes, it seems, a psychic may even lead police in America as he had been in Europe. If his successes
astray, as apparently happened when Croiset's fellow Dutch- were modest, his publicity was voluminous; he received credit
man and psychic Peter Hurkos became involved in a celebrat- for cases he did not solve and blame for failures in cases to
ed American murder case in 1964. After nineteen-year-old which others thought he had made useful contributions. The
Mary Sullivan became the eleventh victim of the notorious Boston Strangler case was perhaps typical.
Boston Strangler that year, Massachusetts Attorney General By that time Hurkos was living in Hollywood, California,
Edward W. Brooke appointed a special state investigative where he was doing a lucrative business as a psychic adviser
team to work together with the Boston police. And, willing to to various movie stars, including Marlon Brando and Glenn
do anything in order to stop the killing and catch the strangler, Ford. He agreed to work on the Boston Strangler case with
he called in Peter Hurkos. some reluctance, because he found criminal cases, especially
Hurkos's career as a psychic had begun in 1941 , when nt ones, highly disturbing.
the thirty-year-old laborer had fallen four stories from a build Aware that public knowledge of their foray into psychic
ing he had been painting in The Hague. Taken unconscious to ling might cause an outcry, the special investigative
a hospital, he was diagnosed as having a brain concussion stered Hurkos under a false name in a suburban
and possibly severe neurological damage. When he regained Be lotel. On January 30, 1964, the investigators brought

130
 ''
• !*PCn
x . i-

PwP '
'

> j(j M
in two large boxes of objects for Hurkos to psychometrize.
'''
j-^ These items included nylon stockings and scarves that the
Strangler had used to kill his victims, along with nearly 300
* iVf iS/ iHb^B police photos taken at the crime scenes.

1 For the next six days, Hurkos immersed himself in the

case. He ran his fingers over the backs of the photographs, and
M 'is without looking at them, described the circumstances of the
murders depicted and the identities and backgrounds of the
& victims. He angrily discarded one picture, unconnected to the

case, that had been included as a test. He kept at it for eighteen

*•«/ hours a day, and at night often slept with an item of clothing
y*.
from one of the murdered women. Then one day, grasping a
1 ifpwm.'^
small comb that had belonged to a victim, he ran it across a
map of Boston. Stopping at Boston College, he exclaimed:
"Here you find the killer."

Police later showed him a letter written to the Boston

College School of Nursing by a man who rambled on about
> wanting to interview a typical nurse for a possible magazine
'
article and eventual matrimony. Hurkos held the letter, then
excitedly announced that its writer was the Strangler— a ho-
-
mosexual woman-hater, about fifty-two years old, who spoke
with a French accent and had thin, receding hair, a pointed
nose, and a prominent Adam's apple.

1
Hurkos said he began to dream about the murderer. "I

hear two voices," he explained, "my normal voice and his high
voice, and then was fighting mad." He said the killer, a former
I

monk, slept "on a cot, on springs, without mattress" in a room

"like a junk pile." The man took showers with his shoes on,
said Hurkos, and he kept a diary that would prove his identity

as the Boston Strangler.

Hurkos's description eventually led police to the apart-

• *
jar ment of a man they referred to as Thomas P. O'Brien - his real
name was withheld. The man, his surroundings, background,
and habits answered Hurkos's description
aspect. Lacking tangible evidence for a
vestigators insteadmanaged to get the man temporarily com-
in virtually

murder warrant,
every
in-

«• - mitted to a mental hospital for observation. He responded by

voluntarily committing himself indefinitely, a move that also

made it legally impossible to try him for murder

131
 Months later, a maintenance man named Albert De- Several were called in when Patricia Hearst, daughter of
Salvo was arrested for a series of rapes, diagnosed to be a newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped in
schizophrenic, and committed to the same mental institution 1975. The first was an energetic New Jersey housewife named

that was treating the man called O'Brien DeSalvo soon boast-
.
Dorothy Allison. Once again, the results were indeterminate.
fully confessed to the eleven Boston Strangler killings, plus Although Allison could not tell exactly where the missing girl

two more, and provided enough detail about the individual was, she was credited on several occasions with advising au-
cases to convince the police that he was telling the truth. Ironi- thorities correctly about Hearst's general location and the na-
cally, DeSalvo was beyond prosecution— having been de- ture of her activities.

clared insane-and the case of the Boston Strangler was Like marry of her colleagues, Allison had done far better

closed without a conviction or even a trial. on more obscure cases. She had become known as a
first

His perceived failure in the Boston Strangler case - a fail- psychic after she announced in December of 1967 that she
ure he never admitted, always insisting that he had identified had dreamed about the fate of a missing New Jersey boy, five-
the real Strangler-discredited Hurkos for a time. His seeming year-old Michael Kurcsics. Michael was dead, she said, and his
knowledge of the crimes derived from photographs he never body was caught in the drainpipe of a pond; his shoes were on
looked at, and his description of the bizarre "O'Brien" derived the wrong feet, and he wore a green snowsuit with a religious
from dreams, were obscured by the equivocal outcome of the medal pinned to it. In the background, she saw a gray wall, a
case. Indeed, it seems that well-publicized crime cases have building with gold lettering, and the number eight.

never been fruitful for alleged psychics. Two months later, the boy's body was discovered in a

Hie Search for a Missing Girt

In December of 976, a desperate

1 letter "I see two people involved," she said.
made its way to the New Jersey home of "Their names are Ronald and Robert or
Dorothy Allison. "Please help me if you Richard, I'm not sure of the second one.
can,' it begged. "I don't know what else we [She would later settle on Richard] I see one
can do." The writer was Jane Kline of of their last names as having double let-
Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. Her daughter, ters in it." She said a hill and a line would
Deborah Sue Kline, had been missing for somehow figure in the case. In a call to
almost five months. Peiffer several days later, she sounded a
The pretty, eighteen-year-old hospi- tragic note. "Debbie is dead," the psy-
tal worker, recently graduated from high chic said. "I know that. When come down I

school, had le<\ her new job on a warm there, we will be looking for a body."
July evening and had not been seen since. The search began when Allison arrived
Months of police work had yielded no in Waynesboro on January 22. Accom-
trace of the girl. As Christmas neared, her panied by Cox, Peiffer, and a state trooper,
parents hung Debbie's stocking on their the psychic toured the area where Deb-
mantle-a forlorn hope. The Klines were bie had lived and had more psychic pic-
Dorothy Allison focuses on the missing Deb-
near despair. Then Jane Kline read in a tures. She mentioned several times that
bie Kline's class ring. Allison says she has
tabloid about Dorothy Allison, a supposedly been clairvoyant since childhood and believes fire was important to one of the abductors.
psychic housewife who specialized in she inherited the powerfrom her mother. Both men had run afoul of the law often,
finding missing children.
she said, and both were already in jail on
Allison telephoned the Klines after re- family would not be able to pay much. other charges. Both were rapists. Both
ceiving their letter. At the Kline home the "Now you listen to me," Allison said. had double letters in their names. The vic-
night of the call was a newspaper pho- "Your money is no good. don't want it.
I I tim's body would be found on a hill's
tographer, Kenneth Peiffer. Along with re- won't take it." Then she asked to talk to summit and would be "not completely
porter Robert Cox, Peiffer had been cov- Peiffer. Skeptical of all psychics, the pho- buried-not deep." Allison said she envi-
ering the case for the local newspaper, the tographer felt what he later described as sioned something about the color yellow, a
Record Herald. Jane Kline was happy to "an unmistakable sensation of charged en- dump, a shoe, a plastic swimming pool
hear that Allison planned to come to ergy" as he listen^ 'ison give par- All would be important.
Waynesboro soon but warned that her ticulars about the case Then she made another prediction-

132
 drainpipe in Clifton, New Jersey. He was wearing a green rate. One, the appropriately named John Catchings, concedes
snowsuit, and when police removed his rubber boots, they that only one in five of the clues he provides is completely
found that his sneakers were on the wrong feet. Nearby were a correct-and that he is able to be of help in little more than half
gray concrete building, a factory with gold lettering on the the cases he takes on. Dorothy Allison says she has worked on
front door, and an elementary school- P. S. 8. 4,000 cases but claims credit in only seventy-six of them.
Allison's association with the Hearst case may not have Few cases displayed the supposed strengths and obvi-
been a resounding success, but it was almost a triumph com- ous weaknesses of psychic police work more starkly than did
pared to her work on another famous case five years later. In that of the Yorkshire Ripper. Over a five-year period beginning
1980, Atlanta police were unable to solve a series of brutal in 1 975, thirteen women were violently murdered in northern
murders of young blacks, and were increasingly desperate as England. The slayer, dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper, would kill

the case took on racial overtones and national celebrity. They two or three women within a period of several days, slashing
received some 1 ,300 offers of help from self-styled psychic their bodies and crushing their skulls with hammers. Then he
detectives and eventually decided to consult Allison, among would disappear for months.
others. Afterward, an Atlanta police officer described Allison During the long hunt for the killer, the police received far

as "that wacko broad who had come up with forty- two possi- more psychic help than they could use. One clairaudient
'

'

ble names for the murderer— but not the correct one. named Doris Stokes listened to a tape recording reportedly
Such failures tend to discredit psychic crime solvers, de- made by the killer and came up with a description of sorts: He
spite the fact that they themselves seldom claim a high success was five feet eight inches tall, his name was Ronnie or Johnnie,

an odd one, since there were no new leads

in the six-month-old case. They were

about to solve it, she said. One suspect

would confess and implicate another.
In fact, police had gotten several breaks
in the case about the time Allison en-
tered it. Stories from three informants led
them to a man already in custody on an
unrelated charge. His name was Richard
Lee Dodson. Owner of a long police
record, Dodson had once been awaiting
sentencing on a rape conviction when
his home burned down, killing his wife and
three children. He escaped unhurt. On
January 26, Dodson confessed and named
i Ronald Henninger as his accomplice in
the murder of Debbie Kline. Henninger's rap
sheet included rape and manslaughter.
Dodson led police to the body. They
traveled up a mountain road marked by
highway signs warning of the steep
grade. The signs were bright yellow. The
snowy top of Fannettsburg Mountain,
150 feet from a county line, was a dump
site. There a trooper saw a shoe protrud-

ing from the snow. When the snow was re-

moved, Debbie Kline's body lay half- Police and coroners view the body of Debbie Kline, found half-buried in a moun-
buried beneath debris. It was partly covered taintop dump in rural Pennsylvania. Following Dorothy Allison 's clues, two report
by a blue plastic swimming pool. ers were only minutes behind police in locating the body.

133
his last name started with an M and he lived in
Tyneside or Wearside. He had, she said, a "scar
below his left eye which twitches when he gets agi-
tated. " She also reported a telepathic conversation
with the Ripper's mother, who said her son was
separated from his wife.
Gerard Croiset joined the quest, too. When he
envisioned the Ripper, the renowned Dutch psy-
chic agreed with Stokes's characterization, adding
that the killer had long hair cut straight across the

neck, limped because of an injured knee, and lived

in the heart of Sunderland. Other psychics contrib-
uted additional details over the years The Ripper was a
: man of time a police department faces increasing pressure to solve an
average build with dark hair; he wore a black duffel coat bear- especially notorious crime, it will receive advice from psychic
ing the white letters RN; he lived in Barnsley or Sheffield; he counselors. Some of the guidance will be useless, and some of
was a washing-machine mechanic; he sometimes disguised it will be surprisingly accurate. All the police will have to do is

himself as a woman. figure out which is which.

As it turned out, virtually every one of these particulars
was wrong. Included among the mistakes was the claim by If psychic information about the past can yield knowledge or
one Nella Jones, from Kent, that the killer was a transvestite. justice, a sense of the future could lead to something many
Jones was much closer to the mark in other areas, however. In people desire even more passionately— money. And psychics
a series of predictions given to journalists between October are sometimes consulted not only by individuals looking for a
1979 and January 1980, she suid name was
that the Ripper's tip on the stock market or a secret route to wealth, but by giant
Peter, that he was a truck driver working for a company whose corporations deciding where to drill an oil well or whom to

name began with the letter C, and that he lived at No. 6 on a appoint as a top executive.
street in Bradford, Yorkshire. When the killer was tracked In fact, links between extrasensory perception and the
down in January 1980, he turned out to be Peter Sutcliffe, a hard-nosed, no-nonsense business world are being recog-
truck driver for a company called Clark Transport, who lived nized with increasing frequency. Many executives believe
at No. 6 Garden Lane in Bradford. there ismore to their decision making than logic and calcula-
The mixed results, the lack of evidence that will stand up tion. As Alfred P. Sloan, one of the towering figures in the
in court, and the lurid publicity are all powerful arguments history of General Motors, once put it: "The final act of busi-
against police department use of psychics. Indeed, few law ness judgment is intuitive."

enforcement officials care to admit that they consult these For instance, the founder of Budget Rent-a-Car, William
unconventional sleuths, and a 1979 study conducted by the Sechrist, has said he sometimes makes use of a sixth sense in

Journal ofPolice Science and Administration at the Los Angeles business. He recalled that in the early days of his enterprise he
Police Department concluded that psychics had not provided once came across a rental contract, in a stack of others, that
significant additional information leading to the solution of just did not seem right. He checked on it, and discovered that
any major crimes. the customer had written a bad check and had provided bogus
Despite all these problems, one thing is certain: The next telephone numbers. He immediately ordered the rental car re-

134
trieved. On another occasion, he dreamed that a key employ- pletely useless nor accepted as infallible, what maybe needed
ee at a distant office was not working as he should have been; is a rational technique for dealing with a welter of predictions.
on checking the next day, Sechrist confirmed that the man had now available was devel-
Perhaps the best such system
taken the previous day off to move and someone else had oped shortly after World War when the Air Force retained the
II

punched the time clock for him. Rand Corporation, a prestigious research organization, to pre-
There are indications that Sechrist's experiences are far dict the number of atomic bombs that an enemy would need to
from unusual. A ten-year study completed in the 1970s con- deploy in order to cripple the United States. When the work of
cluded that a high proportion of successful executives believe Rand mathematicians Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey was
in some kind of extrasensory perception. The research, con- declassified years later, researchers were less interested in the

ducted by John Mihalasky and Douglas Dean at the Newark answer they came up with (150 to 400 bombs) than in the

College of Engineering in New Jersey, also concluded that the technique they used, which was later employed to solve civil-
strong, dynamic, get-things-done sort of executive scored ian problems as well.

consistently higher in tests of ESP abilities than did the more They called it the Delphi method, after the legendary
easygoing type. As a result of this and other studies, the two Greek oracle at the temple to Apollo at Delphi. The procedure
researchers advised corporations to include testing people for was to ask a large number of experts to make individual pro-

extrasensory abilities in their executive-selection process. jections in response to a question. (An example: What will be
Such studies of how ESP the total payroll of the automobile industry in a certain future
Newspapers ballyhooed alleged has been used in business in year?) Later the forecasters were shown their colleagues'
psychic contributions to the
Yorkshire Ripper case. A Sunday the past offer no help in pre- work and asked to refine their own predictions. The consen-
People sketch (left) inspired by a dicting the value of a current sus that emerged after several such rounds was found to be
clairaudient in no way resem-
bled the real Ripper. The Daily hunch or precognition. If sup- significantly more accurate than any individual forecast. In
Star's so-called psychic draw-
posedly psychic insights can
ings of alleged Ripper in timates
were equally offbase. be neither dismissed as com- CRAVE
FROM BE YOND THE
THAT COMES
AMAZING DOSSIER
DAILY STAR

fHtWORLD by ELLEN
PETR'E

WPPtR i
tn« po«n.»
or j»e on m« -

1 MOTHER SS^SfSKE-
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K1LLE* OF
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NAME
HOME HELP"

135
the case of the auto industry payroll, the Delphi prediction was ply of coffee to dwindle. Two years later, Dixon was a million-
within eight percent of the actual figure. aire, and out of gratitude he bought Jaegers a $60,000 house.
Enthusiasts have suggested that the Delphi method The success brought Jaegers a great deal of fame-and
seems to work so well because it makes full use of both sides much mail asking her to guess whether individual stocks
of the brain. Recent research indicates that the brain has two would go up or down. Her method was simple. She advised
largely independent hemispheres of activity: a left side that clients to place the name of a stock or commodity on a piece of
deals in logical analysis and a right side that works through paper, fold the paper, and place it in a sealed envelope. Jaegers
intuition. According to this view, the initial Delphi forecast would then hold the envelope. "If it's a good stock," she ex-
draws on the respondent's intuitive right brain, and the later plained, "the envelope feels hot."

analysis and revision make use of left-brain abilities. In 1982, the St. Louis Business Journal pitted Jaegers
However it works, the Delphi method has become one of against nineteen stockbrokers who were asked to select five

the most widely used of modern forecasting techniques, and is stocks that they expected to gain in value during the following
applied regularly by large corporations and government six months. When the time was up, the Dow Jones Industrial
agencies. While it cannot be regarded as a Average-the widely used barometer of
truly psychic procedure, it does represent a stock market trends - had fallen by eight per-
large-scale effort to incorporate elements of cent. The portfolios selected by sixteen of the
intuition, precognition, and extrasensory brokers had lost value. The stocks that had
perception into American business. been picked by Jaegers, on the other hand,
Individual psychics, meanwhile, have had increased in value by 1 7.2 percent-a re-

had more spectacular involvements with big sult that lost only some of its luster when
business. One such association began when compared with the performance of the one
ayoung Missouri woman nar ied Beverly Jae- broker who bested her with a stock selection
gers, who had gained some renown as a psy- that gained 1 7.4 percent.
chic detective, war, asked to take on a differ- Also in 1982, the seasoned psi investi-
ent kind of assignment. In December of gators Russell Targ and Keith Harary turned
1 974, commodities broker John Peters Dixon their attention to psychic money-making.
presented her with a sealed envelope, as she With a third partner, California investor An-
had instructed him was a ques-
to do. Inside thony R. White, they formed Delphi Associ-
tion about a tantalizing dream. As Jaegers later told the story, ates, a firm designed to convert parapsychological findings
she ran her hands over the envelope and soon saw "a tree, into hard cash. Their first venture, to predict the course of the
covered with reddish-colored berries." Dark-skinned people silver futures market, proved profitable, they said. But later,

in big hats were picking the fruit, but their large baskets con- when they tried for higher stakes, things turned sour. "It was,
tained only a sprinkling of shriveled berries. Dixon was ecstat- said White, "a difficult blow for all of us."
ic. He had dreamed that London coffee futures would rise to Delphi Associates also expressed interest in another
£2,900 from their then-current, long-time level of £600. As far business application of ESP-locating oil and mineral depos-
as he was concerned, Jaegers had confirmed his hunch. And there was a strong indication that human psychic
its.

Dixon scraped together all the money he could and in- power could do at least as well at such potentially lucrative
vested it in coffee futures; not long afterward, a sudden freeze searches as could other methods In a survey of all the oil fields
in Brazil and political unrest in Angola caused the world sup- discovered in the United States from the 1880s to the 1960s,

136
 Peter Sutcliffe (left), the Yorkshire Ripper,
turned out to be a truck driver working/or a
company whose name began with the letter
C, just as psychic Nella Jones foretold. She was
also correct about his first name, though she
missed the mark on several other particulars, in-
cluding his appearance—as shown by her
sketch of him (opposite). Skeptics contend some
ofJones's so-called hits were no more than in-
ferences that recycled old news.

Nella Jones (above) claimed a

clairvoyant vision of the Ripper's
house. Well before the killer was
identified, she said he lived in a
•OQQQOp*
>DOO OO CK
large home in Bradford, No. 6
on its street. The address was, in
fact, No. 6 Garden Lane, Brad-
ford (right). She added that the
house was elevated above the
street behind wrought-iron gates
and had steps leading up to its
front door-all true. Other would-
be psychic detectives on the case
misidentified the killer's hometown
and tended to place him in far
less savory quarters - usually in
cramped slum dwellings.

137
 A dowser huntsfor water with aforked stick. On reaching its target, the stick should point sharply toward the earth.

Dowsing: Die Psi Connection

Practitioners of the age-of art of seen objects transmits itself to the pool of consciousness. Responding
dowsing seldom speculate on how the instruments used by the dowsers or to to information from this cosmic matrix,
phenomenon works. They contend the dowsers themselves. The force the dowser's muscles react involun-
only that it does work— that a person has been variously and vaguely de- tarily to cause a wand to dive or a pen-
can find water or any number of oth- scribed as emissions, vibrations, dulum to rotate. The instrument
er subterranean or submerged items electromagnetic waves, or radiation. But might act as an amplifier for the infor-
with no more than a forked stick or a this theory fails to explain map dows- mation or perhaps only as a focal
bent rod as a guide. Prehistoric rock ing, in which the dowser eschews walk- point for the dowser's concentration In
paintings in Algeria suggest that hu- ing over terrain with a forked stick in fact, some dowsers use no instru-
mans dowsed before they could write favor of dangling a pendulum over a ment at all They simply "know" where
Ancient Chinese and Egyptians may map. In successful map dowsing, the to find what they seek.
have used the search method as well, pendulum swings or spins vigorously to Traditionally, the principal use of
though written accounts of dowsing indicate the location of whatever dowsing has been to locate water.
do not appear until the Middle Ages. is being sought. However, the psychic notion that all ob-
Whatever the origins of dowsing, Map dowsing argues for a psychic ex- jects, animate and inanimate, project
there is no doubt that the practice is planation of dowsing as a whole. The a so-called aura, or energy field, coin-
widely done today— and with consid- psychic theory posits that the dowser's cides with some dowsers' belief that
erable apparent success. stimulation is not external but arises their art can be used to find almost any-
One attempt at a physical explana- in some mysterious way from con- thing-oil, buried treasure, archeo-
tion holds that dowsing works be- sciousness itself That individ- logical relics, lost possessions, and even
cause some force emanating from un- ual's mind attunes itself to sal missing people.

138
Do-it-yourself dowsing with
ordinary coat hangers

Alternative instruments to dowsing's forked stick are two

metal rods, which can easily be made from a pair of wire coat
:?;::=
hangers. Operating without official sanction, Marines ^^5
sometimes employed similar devices in Vietnam to locate en-

—
emy tunnels and buried weapons. Seasoned dowsers rec- ___s „

ommend the use of the rods as follows:

Grasp the short ends lightly, holding the long ends paral-
lel each other and to the ground (right). As you walk over the
to
search area, hold a mental question about what you seek. If
you are looking for water, for instance, keep asking: "Is there
water here?" The rods will indicate a positive response by
swinging away from each other to either side or swinging to-
gether and intersecting.
Searching: rods parallel the ground and each other.

In each coat hanger, make

two cuts, as shown above. Dis-
card the section with the
hook, and with the remaining
wire, bend the short end to a
right angle (below).

Over the target: rods may swing apart.

Alternate positive reaction: rods cross and intersect.

 Soviet scientist Leonid Vasiliev
experimented with the idea that
electromagnetic radiation
served as a vehiclefor telepathy.
He concluded it did not. One of
Vasiliev 's chief interests was
mental suggestion— telepathic
transmission aimed at influenc-
ing a target subject's thoughts or
behavior. An obvious military
use would be mind control of
enemy personnel.

geologist H. William Menard had found that the scientific

methods- test drilling and magnetometer and seismographic
studies-were about as effective as "what would have been
achievedhad the sedimentarybasinsbeen drilled at random."
But was the Israeli psychic-showman Uri Geller who
it

got the most widespread credit-and, by his own account,

earned the most money- for psychic explorations into oil and
mineral locations. According to Geller, he pinpointed a major
coal deposit for South Africa's Anglo-Transvaal mining com-
pany simply by indicating a spot on a map. Many oil compa-
nies, he reported, have used him as an "airborne divining rod,
flying him over suspected oil fields until he gets a feel for where
a well should be drilled. Whatever the facts of his psychic in-

volvement with the world of commerce and industry, Geller is

making a good living at it and predicts that a comfortable

future lies ahead. "Big businesses," he has said, "are begin-

ning to listen to people who think they can deliver something

with their sixth senses."

Like police departments and corporations, national govern-

ments have also found the potential payoffs from extrasensory
perception too attractive to ig^ore-despite the possibilities of
failure and, even worse, embarrassment. Thus, psychic pow-
ers have been enlisted in the contest between the United
States and the Soviet Union. As recently as the spring of 987, 1

in fact, a group of U.S. government officials reportedly assem- story, the images drawn on board the submarine corre-
bled in an obscure room of the Capitol to hear Uri Geller tell sponded to the visual impressions being sent from Baltimore
what he knew about Soviet psychic development. 70 percent of the time. The inference was that a potent new
The psychic arms race first heated up in February of military capability-communications that were undetectable,
1 960, when the French magazine Science et Vie reported that unstoppable, and unlimited -was about to be deployed.
the United States government had been successful in sending The United States quickly denied the story: The skipper
and receiving telepathic messages. Twice a day for sixteen of the Nautilus observed that the ship had not yet left the dock
days during the previous July, according to the story, a Duke during the time of the supposed tests. Later, the author of the
University student at a laboratory near Baltimore had attempt- article said he had determined that the story was a hoax and
ed to transmit visual impressions by telepathy to another indi- regretted publishing it. But the denials only convinced the So-
vidual. The second man, who at the appointed times concen- viets that something was going on. " It caused quite a turmoil,"
tratedon receiving the messages and drew the images he said a refugee Soviet physicist who was a graduate student at
thought were being sent, was reported to be submerged at ne. "The name Nautilus was on everybody's lips."

sea aboard the submarine Nautilus. According to the French No one was more delighted with the Nautilus tale than

140
the highly respected Soviet physiologist, Leonid Vasiliev. To can space program, so the spurious story of the Nautilus ex-
the sixty-eight-year-old chairman of physiology at the Univer- periment stimulated the Soviets to develop psychic weapons.
sity of Leningrad, holder of the Lenin Prize and member of the While the U.S. had not conducted the experiment that
Soviet Academy of Medicine, the fact that the Americans were started the furor, neither had it been ignoring the possibilities

experimenting with ESP for military use was neither shocking of psychic contributions to the cold war. As early as 1 952, the
nor disheartening. It was cause for celebration. State Department was experimenting with exercises to in-

Vasiliev had been quietly researching telepathy, espe- crease the intuitive powers of certain employees. That same
cially the effects of mental suggestions at a distance, since the year, an internal Central Intelligence Agency memorandum
1920s. Marxist orthodoxy denied the existence of anything recommended pushing psychic research "in the direction of
connected with a spiritual world, and the study of psychic reliable applications to the practical problemsof intelligence."

powers was forbidden as counterrevolutionary. Now Vasiliev But the official dabbling remained casual until reports of

saw that reports of American competition, along with the progress began to leak from the Soviet Union. Then a small-
promise of military benefit, could lead to a renaissance* "We scale but classic arms race began to develop, with each side
must again plunge into the exploration of this vital field," he what it was afraid the other was doing. This see-
reacting to
declared at a scientific conference shortly after publication of saw process got its next major impetus with the publication of
the French article. "The discovery of the energy underlying a book titled Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.
ESP will be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy." During the mid-1960s, freelance journalists Sheila Os-
Vasiliev soon received official approval from the faculty trander and Lynn Schroeder reported that they found increas-
of the University of Leningrad to head a special parapsychol- ing evidence of Soviet psychic research. In academic confer-
ogy laboratory for telepathic phenomena. Just as the launch of ences and journals, some of the leading intellectuals of the
the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 had energized the Ameri- country were discussing possible applications of telepathy,

Declassified documents from the De-

fense Intelligence Agency indicate Ameri
can concern over psi research in the
Eastern bloc. Nevertheless, sporadic ru-
mors ofmassive U.S. spending aimed
at winning the so-called psi war remain
only that— rumors.

LlC
^'CE AGr .

SOVIET AMD"
PARAPSYCHOLOGY
PAR
^-^^T^ fOSLOVASIAI
«r.=>**-Cx-

:
- -iw

^ n,/i-
'ATIOM •' i
:
 Eyes covered by cotton batting and a
blindfold, Poland's Bogna Stefanska dem-
onstrates dermo-optical perception —
literally, "skin sight. "Subjects with this al-
leged power seem to perceive color,
shape, size, and mass without using their
eyes. Stefanska, ten years old in this
1973 photograph, appeared able toper-
form, even when the material to be
"seen " was under a pane ofglass.

rejecting Marxist criticism of psychic research, and urging fur- couraged the military to go beyond the study of Soviet efforts

ther work on parapsychology. and pursue its own research. The main beneficiary of this ini-
The two writers began to follow the subject, communi- tiative was California's Stanford Research Institute, which in
cated with Soviet parapsychologists, and in 1 967 attended an the mid- 1 970s received several contracts to study the applica-

international ESP conference in Moscow. It was hosted by tions of psychic abilities.

Soviet biologist Eduard Naumov, whom they later described as The U.S. Navy engaged SRI to try to determine whether
one of the "guiding energies of Soviet parapsychology." The psychics could detect remote sources of electromagnetic en-
writers said they eventually collected more than 300 pounds of ergy. If so, they could help in the difficult task of tracking deep-
research materials, and in 1970 they published their book. ly submerged enemy submarines. SRI claimed that the tests,

and Schroeder claimed the U.S. was "fifty which involved asking psychics to sense when a light was
Ostrander
years behind the Russians in psychic research. " The flashing in a distant room, were successful. But the 1978 re-

Soviets were spending as much as $2 1 million a year port remains classified, and the navy will say nothing about it.
on parapsychology research, while the U.S. had al- Subsequent reports that the navy had as many as thirty-four

located virtually nothing. The popular book— it went psychics on a paid retainer to report the location of Soviet
to at least five hardback and thirteen paperback printings submarines were never confirmed.
stimulated American interest in psychic warfare. The SRI researchers were occasionally embarrassed;
At the same time, the book may have curtailed the Soviet experiments involving Uri Geller were later said to be charac-
program. Angered that Naumov had given so much informa- terized by "incredible sloppiness," and the institute failed to

tion to foreigners, the Soviets refused to allow him to run a deliver on an $80,000 NASA contract to develop a machine
subsequent conference. Eventually the government decided that could teach astronauts to use ESP. But the work kept
that Naumov had revealed military secrets and sentenced him coming, and in 1973, SRI took on its most celebrated assign-
to two years in a labor camp. Hewas released after serving ment- Project Scanate. The mission ; to study remote-viewing
half his sentence but was not allowed to resume his work. techniques for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Soviet parapsychology research ostensibly came to a halt. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, the two physicists who
Meanwhile, the book helped convince many influential had become leading researchers at SRI, conducted the experi-
Americans that the Soviets had the upper hand and that the ments. Working primarily with the well-known psychic Ingo
U.S. had better catch up. Money began to flow, at least three Swann and retired police official Pat Price, they staged a num-
major reports on the status of Soviet efforts were commis- ber of tests of the psychics' ability to view distant locales.
sioned by government agencies, and publication of the results During one session, which was closely monitored by the
during the following few years helped heighten concern. CIA, Price gave a detailed description of a secret, underground
In the words of a 1972 study conducted by the Office of military facility in Virginia. Asked to project himself there
the Surgeon General, Russian success in the field might permit again and look for information about code words, Price recit-

the Soviets to "know the contents of top secret U.S. Docu- ed nine words or phrases that he said were on papers on top of
ments, the deployment of our troops and ships, and the loca- a desk and on file folders inside a cabinet. He also gave the
tion and nature of our military installations; mold the thoughts names and ranks of three of the installation's top officers.
of key U.S. military and civilian leaders, at a distance; cause The government, of course, did not publicly confirm
the instant death of any U.S. official, at a distance"; or "dis- "'rice's disclosures. But according to a later report, security
able, at a distance, U.S. military equipment of all types, includ- :ials at the installation-the function of which was to
ing spacecraft. " Such darkly fanciful prospects apparently en- ec .drop on Soviet satellites- conducted an investigation to

142
143
find out how Price had got the information. He, meanwhile, implications of deploying the Pershing II missile in Europe and

had obligingly gone on to describe a similar Soviet listening the administrative logistics of war readiness. Included, too,

post in the Ural Mountains half a world away. was a dissertation with an intriguing, two-level title— "The
Some critics insisted that Project Scanate was a totally New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock"-that suggest-
worthless enterprise, and support for such efforts began to ed military scholarship while referring to a popular science-
wane. Samuel Koslov, the navy's assistant secretary for re- fiction television series.

search and development, pronounced SRI's psychic investi- The writer, Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander, stated
gations a waste of taxpayers' money and ordered the navy's flatly that "there are weapons systems that operate on the
contracts with the firm cancelled. But new life was soon in- power of the mind and whose lethal capacity has already been
jected into the so-called psi war controversy by the Soviets— demonstrated." He discussed the ability to transmit disease

in an incident that was either a clumsy blunder on their part or over distance and said that illness or death had been success-
a clever bit of manipulation. It began in June of 1977 with a fully induced in lower organisms such as flies and frogs. "The
phone call from Soviet biophysicist Valery Petukhov to Robert present capacity for human death," he said, "is still debated."
Toth, Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Petuk- Nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson re-
hov offered Toth a news release containing the latest informa- sponded to the colonel's article with a pair of columns report-
tion about Soviet research into parapsychology, and Toth ing that the U.S. was using psychics "to spy on the Soviets by
agreedtomeethimonaMoscowstreet.ButwhenTothaccept- projecting their minds outside their bodies" and that the CIA
ed a twenty-page document, both men were rushed by KGB was considering deploying "psychic shields'' to protect
officers, arrested, and taken away for questioning. American secrets from the Soviets. The columns, researched
Accused of receiving state secrets about parapsychol- by Anderson 's associate Ron McRae, ridiculed such "futuristic
ogy, Toth was interrogated at length but eventually released. fantasies" and "voodoo warfare." In the wake of the frenzy
In trying to explain to his nevvspaper what the flap had been produced by the columns, the Soviet Embassy put out a rare
about, the reporter said he had learned that "the Russians press release trumpeting its achievements in psychic warfare;
were trying to use extrasensory perception and other psychic and McRae went to work writing a book on the subject.
phenomena for military purposes." Toth had notbeen particu- There is little in the record of psychic contributions to the
larly interested in parapsychology: "It seemed laughable until military-as is the case with academia, criminal justice, and
now," he said. But the Soviets, by accident or design, had finance- to convert a believer or a nonbeliever. Skeptics can-
reminded many Americans of the subject-and convinced not totally discredit every favorable psychic result, and the
many of their presumed lead in psychic- weapons research. most ardent enthusiast cannot claim consistent success. But
The U.S. Defense Department continued to deny, as it the successes are reported often enough, and the potential
always had and still does, any interest in psychic matters. But rewards are great enough, to encourage repeated attempts.
the denials appear to be exercises in semantics: One 1978 In the midst of the flap over Anderson's columns, while
study, titled "Novel Biological Information Transfer Systems," busily denying any Defense Department involvement with
was in fact a report on Soviet ESP. At any rate, occasional psychic warfare, Pentagon publicists posted a reminder about
revelations continued to testify to continued military and the danger of unqualified pronouncements on such subjects
intelligence-community concern about psychic weapons. It was a statement made by Admiral William Leahy, chief of
Confirmation came in the December 1980 issue of Mili- staff to Pres. :nt Roosevelt during World War II. "The A-bomb
tary Review, the professional journal of the United States Army. is the biggest I 1 thing," said Leahy in early 945. "The bomb
1

The issue contained articles on such things as the strategic will never go ort and speak as an expert on explosives."
I

144
 The Kirfian Eliccf

n 1939, a Soviet electrician

named Semyon Kirlian was working at a hospital in the city of Kras-
nodar when he happened to see a high-frequency physiotherapy ma-
chine in operation. A spark jumped between an electrode and the
patient's skin, and Kirlian, a part-time inventor, wondered how the
spark might appear if photographed. To find out, he fixed electrodes
to one of his hands, pressed it onto a photographic plate, and pulled a
switch. He burned his hand. But when he processed the film, he found
his handprint surrounded by a halo similar to the one shown above.
From this serendipitous event sprang a new use of the photographic
medium— one that would hold great interest for parapsychologists.
Several methods are used in Kirlian photography, as the process
is called. A typical one involves putting film atop a flat metal plate. An

object is placed on the film and photographed while a high-voltage

electrical charge pulses through the plate. No camera is involved.
Animate subjects produce auras that vary in color, size, and shape in
sequential photographs; inanimate objects display more regular, un-
varying halos. Some examples appear on the following pages.
Kirlian photography enjoyed a vogue in the United States dur-
ing the 1970s. Some enthusiasts contended it confirmed at last the
aura psychics had long described surrounding living things. They
also believed that these auras, or so-called Kirlian effects, revealed
clues to an individual's emotions and physiology. Skeptics argued
that the auras were only a sort of "laboratory lightning" created by
electrically ionized air.
 Red, white, and blue, typical in KirHan color photos,
predominate in this picture ofa human ear. Kirlian enthusiasts call the
halos auras; scien cists prefer "corona discharge imagings.

m
 The hand ofpsychic Olga Worrall is shown in
its normal state (left)
and while trying to generate healing energy. In
this heightened state, red intensifies andyellow appears.

'f'i*3rr " *

Two individuals'fingertips appear as black dots

with aurasfrom blue to red. The black between the corona patterns is said
to reflect an emotional barrier between the two persons.
 Daisy petals shoot white rays through a violet glow.

Psi proponents say the rare "phantom leaf " phenomenon

hints at a mysterious energy matrix holding templates/or all
life.The tip of the ivy leafshown below was severed before
itwas photographed, yet the missing part persists in the pic-
ture as an afterimage. Critics say the whole leaf is pressed
onto thefilm before any part is amputated, and the "ghost" is
residuefrom the severed section. Most serious investiga-
tors insist the leaf is cut before any part of it touches the film.
 .

-
 A drop of tangerine juice appears as a mottled black
circle with a pink and white aura and radiating white tendrils. Supposedly, each
differentfruit juice has a unique Kirlian pattern.
 In this Kirlian photograph, a steel ball dropped on a
high-energyfield becomes a deep pink circle, projecting spectacular lightninglike rays
against a background of red, blue, and violet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The index was prepared by Lynne R Hobbs. The Dunne, Princeton, N J Patric V Giesler, Dept. of
,
Austin, Tex., James Randi, Sunrise, Fla.; Milan
translations of the quotations of Stefan Osso- Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Ryzl,San Jose, Calif; Jean-Claude Seconde, Presi-
wiecki and Stanislaw Poniatowksi that appear Mass , Paola Giovetti, Modena, Italy, Keith Harary, dent du Centre Francais du Magnetisme, Paris;
on pages 121-122 of this volume are taken from Institute for Advanced Pyschology, San Francisco; Giorgio di Simone, Centra Italiano di Parapsicolo-
The Secret Vaults of Time, 1978 by Stephan A.
'
Charles Honorton, Psychophysical Research Lab, gia, Naples; Rolf Streichardt, Institut fur Grenzge-
Schwartz, and are reprinted with the author's Princeton, N J ; Irene Hughes, Chicago; Peter Hur- biete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Frei-
permission kos, Studio City, Calif; Joicey Hurth, Cedarburg, burg, West Germany; Russell Targ, Lockheed
Wis ; Robert G Jahn, Princeton University, Prince- Research and Development, Palo Alto, Calif; Jea-

The editors wish to thank: Dorothy Allison, Nutley, ton, N J ; William Kautz, Center for Applied Intu- nette Thomas, Edgar Cayce Foundation, Virginia
N.J.; American Society of Dowsers, Danville, Vt ition,San Francisco; Stanley Krippner, Saybrook Beach, Va Jean Tixier, Ingenier E.C.P., Sainte
;

Jean-Claude Arrati, St Cloud, France, Professor Institute,San Francisco; Emilio Lorenzo, Gif-Sur- Catherine de Fierbois, France, Susana Valadez,
Hans Bender, Director, Institut fur Grenzgebiete Yvette, France; Robert Lund, American Museum of Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and Traditonal
der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Freiburg, Magic, Marshall, Mich Donna McCormick, Amer- ,
Arts, Oakland, Calif; Jean-Marie Vergerio, Grand
w>st Germany; Richard Bennett, Winnipeg, Cana- ican Society for Psychical Research, New York, Conseillerde L'Ordre de la Rose-Croix, A.M.O.R.C,
da; Christopher Bird, Molokai, Hawaii; Richard S Mankind Research Foundation, Silver Spring, Md ,
Paris; Maria de Via-Lorenzo, Gif-Sur-Yvette,
Broughton, Foundation for Research on the Nature Lewis Matacia, Dunn Loring, Va Jorgen Meldga- ;
France. Alberto Villoldo, Four Winds Foundation,
of Man, Durham, N.C.; Adam Chism, Springfield, ard, National Museum, Copenhagen, Thelma Sausalito, Calif; Timothy White, editor. Shamans
Va Jerome Clarke, Fate, Highland Park, III Marie-
; , Moss, North Hollywood, Calif, R Jeff Munson, Drum. Berkeley, Calif and in England David
,

Veronique Clin, Directeur Adjoint, Centre Jeanne Foundation on the Nature of Man, Durham, N.C.; Bronwich, Robert Cracknell, Hilary Evans, Melvin
D'Arc, Orleans, France; Eileen Coley, Director, National Spiritual Science Center, Washington, Harris, John Lindsay, Jo Logan, Steve Speed. Roy
Parapsychology Foundation, New York; Brenda J DC ;
H E Puthoff, Institute for Advanced Studies, Stemmon, and John Christopher Travers

PICTURE CREDITS
The sources for the pictures in this book are listed be- Psychical Research 4 1 Department of Archives and University of Missouri, Western Historical Manu-
shown from lefi to right arc-
low. Credits for pictures SpecialCollections, University of Manitoba, courtesy script Collection, Columbia State Historical Society
separated by semicolons; credits from top 'o bottom American Society for Psychical Research 42-47 of Missouri Manuscripts 79 Jack Savage, courtesy
are separated by dashes. Courtesy American Society for Psychical Research Western Historical Manuscript Collection 80 Su-
49: Art by Alfred T. Kamajian 51 52 Courtesy Foun- ,
sana Eger Valadez 81 Mariano Valadez, 1986 '

Cover: Art by Jack Pardue. 7: Art by Wendy Popp, dation for Research on the Nature of Man 54, 55 Shamans Drum 83 Art by Alfred T. Kamajian 85
on pages 12,
detail of picture 13. 8-13: Art by Wendy NASA, courtesy Foundation for Research on the Na- Henry Groskinsky 86 Courtesy Ingo Swann 88,
Popp. 15: Art by Alfred T. Kamajian 16: Mark ture of Man, NASA 57 ' Estate of CG Jung, courte- 89 Mary Evans Picture Library, London/Society
Twain Home Board, Hannibal, Mo 18: Roger-Viollet, sy Manuscript Department, William R Perkins Li- for Psychical Research 90, 91 Edgar Cayce Foun-
Paris. 19: Art by Linda Benson 22,23: Art by Jeffrey brary, Duke University 58, 59 Fred Bruemmer; dation 92-101: Kay Ritchie, London 103 Theater
Adams 24, 25: From Mental Radio by Upton Sinclair, Merlin D. Tuttle, Bat Conservation International - Arts Library, Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Charles C Thomas, 1962, Springfield, 111, except David Doubilet 60: Kenneth Lee 61 Hella Hammid Center, University of Texas at Austin 104 From
bottom right, David Sinclair, courtesy Lilly Library,
i

62CourtesyRussellTarg(2) - Howard Sochurek - Confidences dun Prestidigitateur by Jean Eugene

Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind 26: Mary courtesy Keith Harary, PhD (2) 63: Courtesy Grant Robert -Houdin, Lecesne. 1858. Blois, courtesy Bi-
Evans Picture Library, London/' Sigmund Freud; '
L. Robertson (3) - courtesy Russell Targ (2) 64, 65: bliotheque Nationale, Pans 105 Courtesy General
Philippe Halsman 27: Ron Galella. 28, 29: Courtesy Milan Ryzl; art by Bobbi Tull 66 National Institute of Research Division, The New York Public Library,
Society for Psychical Research, London. 30, 31: Mental Health 67 Henry Groskinsky. 68, 69: Henry Astor. Lenox and Tilden Foundation 106 Dick
Sygma; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute 32, Groskinsky, courtesy Psychophysical Research Stevens, courtesy Robert Lund, American Museum
33: John Topham Picture Library, Edenbridge, Kent Lab - Cameron Davidson/Bruce Coleman; Michal of Magic; courtesy C McCord Purdy 107, 108 Dick
35: Courtesy American Society for Psychical Re- Heron 70-73: Art by Douglas R Chezem 75 Jack Stevens, courtesy Robert Lund. American Museum
search, detail of photo on page 44. 36-39: Courtesy Savage, courtesy Western Historical Manuscript of Magic 109: Mary Evans Picture Library, Lon-
American Society for Psychical Research. 40: De- Collection, detail of drawing on page 79 76, 77 don/Harry Prrce Collection, University of London
partment of Archives and Special Collections, Uni- National Museum of Denmark. Department of Eth- 110: UPl/Bettmann; Milbourne Christopher Collec-
versity of Manitoba, courtesyAmerican Society for nology 78: lack Savage, courtesy Western Histori- tion-Harry Price Collection, University of London
Psychical Research; courtesy American Society for cal Manuscript Collection (2) -Joint Collection, 111 Harry Price Collection, University of London

152
1 12: Courtesy Henry Gris. 1 14: Dick Stevens, cour- courtesy Library of Congress. 123: c Marian J. Leeds. 138: Library of Congress. 139: Art by Fred
tesy Robert Lund, American Museum of Magic. Swida, courtesy Stephan Schwartz. 124: c 1987 Holz. 140: Leif Geiges, Staufen. 141: Courtesy Mar-
115: John Vachon; courtesy Kreskin. 116: Dufoto, The Mobius Society. 126: Walter Sanders for LIFE/ cello Truzzi. 1 43: From Psychic Observer & Chimes,
Rome. 117: Courtesy James Randi. 119: Art by Pix Inc. Stephany Courtney. 128: Courtesy
127: June 1975, courtesy National Spiritual Science
Alfred T. Kamajian 120: Dora Head, from the James Crenshaw(2)— drawing by Thomas F Ma- Center 145: Manfred Kage, Weissenstein, Kirlian
Quarterly Transactions of the British College of Psy- cris, courtesy Kathlyn Rhea. 129: Courtesy Kathlyn photo of thumb. 146: Georges Hadjo, Bougival.
chic Science, January 1924; from The Quest for Rhea 131: Walter Sanders for UFE/Pix Inc 132, 147: Courtesy John Hubacher (2) — Michael Bur-
Glastonbury by William W. Kenawell, Helix Press, 133: Kenneth L. Peiffer 134, 135: John Frost His- gess/Science Photo Library, London. 148: Manfred
1965, New York. 121: From The Gate of Remem- torical Newspaper Service, London. 136: Drawing Kage, Weissenstein— Robert Wagner, courtesy Dr
brance by Frederick Bligh Bond, B. H. Blackwell, by Nella Jones, courtesy Shirley Davenport, Thelma Moss. 149; Manfred Kage, Weissenstein.
1918, Oxford. 122: From Somersetshire Archaeolog- Thames Ditton, Surrey 137: Camera Press, Lon- 150: Georges Hadjo, Bougival. 151: Henry Dakin/
ical and Natural History Proceedings, 1908-1909, don—John Beckett, London; the Yorkshire Post, Science Photo Library, London.

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INDEX
Numerals in italics indicate an il- clairvoyance, 85; founding of, 24; ASR. See Altered States Research Behaviorist psychology, school of,

lustration of the subject mentioned. and Ingo Swann, 83; and medi- Association for Research and En- 49
ums, 36, 38-39, 40; and obsession, lightenment (ARE), and Edgar Beraud, Marthe (pseud Eva C )

study of, 43; and Pearl Curran, Cayce, 93, 95 and ectoplasm, 40
Abbot Beere, and Chapel of St. investigation of, 42; and remote Astral messages, 42 Bessent, Malcolm (psychic), 16

Edgar, 121 viewing, 85; and spirit photog- and Eileen Garrett,
Astral travel: Bird, J Malcolm, and Scientific Ameri-

Aberfan (Wales) coal-waste ava- raphy, 44-45, 47 86;and Ingo Swann, 82-83 can's tests of mediums, 38-39

lanche, 32-33, 34 Anarqaq (shaman), 76-77 Astrology, use of, 94-95 Bishop. Eleanor. 105

Age of Aquarius, 98 Animals, and extrasensory per- Automatic writing: description of, 42; Bishop, Washington Irving (men-

Akashic records, 95 ception, 58-59, 110 and Frederick Bligh Bond, 19, 1 talist), 103, 105; and Anna Eva Fay,

Anomalistic psychology, 74 120, and John Bartlett, 9; and fakery of, 06- 1 07; catalepsy
Alexander, John B., psychic re- 1 1 1

search, military applications of, Apollo 1 space voyage, and unoffi-

4 Marguerite Du Pont Lee, 44-45 and death of. 04 and Jean Eu
1 ;
-

144 cial ESP experiment, 54-55 Autosuggestion, description of, 24 gene Robert- Houdin, 05; and 1

Allison, Dorothy (psychic), 732-133 Archeology, and psychic powers, Lambs Club demonstration, 104,

Altered States Research (ASR), 69 118-127 B thought-reading act of, 103-

American Association for the Ad- ARE. See Association for Research Barker, J C and Aberfan coal-
,
105

vancement of Science, 27, 57 and Enlightenment waste avalanche, predictions of, 34 Blackburn, Douglas ^Confessions

American Society for Psychical Re- ASPR. See American Society for Psy- Bartlett. John, and automatic writ- ofa Famous Mediur
chical Research ing. 19 jght
search (ASPR), 35, 50; and 1

155
 transference of, 26-27; telepathic Chapel of St. Edgar, vision at, 121 voyance of, 126, 127, 129-130, Dream state, 68
tests of, 28-29 Chicago warehouse fire, and spirit 131; and psychometry, 127, Dunninger, Joseph (mentalist), mind-
Black Elk (medicine man), visions of, photography, 46 and Yorkshire Ripper case, 34 1 reading act of, 1 13-/74
78-79 Christopher, Milbourne (magician), Crystal ball, use of, 98-99

Blindfold Carriage Test, 103, 107, and Lady Wonder, 1 1 Cumberland, Stuart (mentalist),
108,114 Churchill, Winston, psychic experi- mind-reading act of, 107 Ectoplasm: description of, 38-39, 40;

Boa, Bien, apparition of, 40 ence of, 20 Curran, Pear\ (Telka), mental linkage production of. 40-41
Bocock, Kemper, spirit photo- Church of Saint Catherine (Fierbois, of, 42 Einstein, Albert: and telepathy, opin-
graphs 44,45
of, France), and Joan of Arc's Czartoryski. Count, and Wolf Mess- ion of, 26; and Wolf Messing,
Bolton, Frances T and Parapsy- : sword, 18-19 ing, 113 113
chology Foundation, 86; and psy- Clairaudience: description of, 18; Electromagnetic radiation, and
chic research, 56 and Joan of Arc, 1 7, 18, and York- telepathy, 140
Bond. Frederick Bligh (The Gate of Re- shire Ripper case, 133-134 Dalkey, Norman, and Delphi method, Electromagnetism, and psychic
membrance), 126; and auto- Clairvoyance, 7, 24, 35, 69, 85; and 135 phenomena, 70-71
matic writing, 1 19, 120; and Glas- Aberfan coal-waste avalanche, Darwin, Charles, theory of evolution, Emerson, J. Norman (quoted), and
tonbury Abbey, excavation of, 32-34; and Carl Gustav Jung, 2 1
49 psychometry, tests of, 123-127
118-120, 120-122 definition of, 6; and Delphic
1 Davis, James, and psychic research Emlen, Stephen T. (quoted), and
Boston Society for Psychic Re- oracle, 1and Eileen Garrett, 87-
7, test data, 60 extrasensory perception in birds,

search, 38 88; and Emanuel Swedenborg, Djuna (psychic healer),

Davitashvili, 58
Boston Strangler case, and Peter 8-9; and physical laws, 70; and and remote viewing, 63 Escape artists, 03 1

Hurkos, 130-132 Stefan Ossowiecki, 120-123; Dean, Douglas, and extrasensory Eskimos See Iglulik Eskimos
Brice, Fannie (comedic actress), tests of, 51-52, 53; and Titanic di- perception, study of, 135 ESP See Extrasensory perception
and mind reading, 107 saster, 27-32; use in police in- Decline effect, of psychic ability, 53, Estabrooks, George H and psy- .

British Premonitions Bureau, 34 vestigations, 128-137 63 chic research, 49

Brown, J. Randall (mentalist), and Clemens, Harry, 14-15, / 6 Deep Quest, and psychic archeology, Eva C See Beraud, Marthe
Washington Irving Bishop, 105 Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain), psy- 124 Extrasensory perception (ESP), 24;
Brown, Mrs. Sybil, and Aberfan coal- chic experience of, 14-15, 16 Deities, communication with, 75, 76- and animals. 57, 58-59; busi-
waste avalanche, 33 Cold reading, 98, 102 77, 78, 80-81 ness applications of, 1 34- 1 40; and
Business, and extrasensory percep- Coley, Eileen (quoted), and Eileen de Kerlor, W (quoted), psychic pre- decline effect, 53, 63; descrip-
tion, uses of, 134-140 Garrett. 84 dictions of, 28 tion of, 1 6, 54, 58; and ganzfeld re-
Bux. Kuda (mentalist), eyelesc sight Collective unconscious, Jung's Delphi Associates, and extrasensory search, 68. and hypnosis, 64-
act of, 1 08-/ 09 theory of, 2 perception, business applica- 65; reproducing experiments of, 56;
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur (quoted): tions of, 136-140 tests of, 5/ -52, 53,61-62,63;
and B Rhine, 50, and spiritual-
J Delphic oracle, clairvoyance of, types of. 16
Canadian Archaeological Founda- ism, 50, 87; and Zancigs' 17 Eyeless sight act. and Kuda Bux,
tion, 123, 125 thought-transference act, 108 Delphi method applications of, 1 08-/09
Carson, Lord Edward, 10-11 Coover, John E., and psychic re- 135- 136; development of. 135
Catalepsy: and Washington Ir- search. 48 Dermo-optical perception, 143
ving Bishop, 104; and Wolf Mess- Corona discharge imaging. See DeSalvo, Albert, and Boston Stran- Fay, Anna Eva (mentalist): fakery
ing, 111-113 Psychic auras gler case, 132 of, 106-107; mind-reading act of,
Catchings, John (psychic), and police Cosmic consciousness, 2 Dingwall, Eric J (quoted), and Eileen 106-107
investigations, 133 Cox, Robert, and Kline disappearance Garrett, 86 Finger. Irene See Hughes, Irene
Cayce, Edgar, 84,90-9/, 123; abili- case, 132-133 Dixon, John Peters, and extrasensory Fonda. Claudia, and Lady Won-
ties of, 91-96; belief in reincar- Craig. Mary, telepathy of, 20-2 1 ,
24- perception, business applica- der, 1 10
nation, 94; and hypnotism, 92; and 25 tions of, 136 Fortune tellers, 97
life readings, 94-95; medical Crandon. Le Roi Goddard, 38-39 Dodson, Richard Lee, and KJine Free Soul movement, beliefs of, 96
readings of, 93-94; and New Age Crandon, Mina (pseud Margery), disappearance case, 133 Freud, Sigmund and dreams. 66;
movement, 101 mediumship of, 38-39, 40, 50 Dowsing how to, 139; and psy- mystical beliefs of, 26, and para-
Cayce, Leslie B., and Edgar Cayce, Crater, Judge Joseph Force, disap- chic emissions, 138; for water, 138 psychology. 2 and Wolf Mess- 1 ;

90-91 pearance of, 131 Dream research: and psychic ing. 113
Central Premonitions Registry. 34 Croesus (king of Lydia), and Del- abilities, 69-74; and REM activity,
Chandra. See Harto, James S phic oracle, 17 66; and sensory deprivation,
Channeling, 84,96, 97 Croiset, Gerard (psychic): clair- 67; and telepathy, 66 Ganzfeld research, 68-69

156
Garrett, Eileen, 88-89, abilities of, 84- writing, 43, and Zancigs' psychic beliefs of, 2 (quoted) Leonard, Gladys Osborne (medi-
1 ;

9 1 and astral travel, 86; clair-

; thought-transference act, 108 and psychic research, 56; and psy- um), 50
voyance of, 87-88; and New Age Hughes, Irene (psychic), and pre- chology of the medium , 2 Levy, Walter Jay, psychic experi-
movement, 101; precognition cognition, 98-99 ments, falsification of, 57-60
of, 88-90; and R-101 seance, 87-88 Huichol Indians of Mexico, 75: rain- K Lincoln, Abraham: psychic dream
Geller, Uri (mentalist), 142; and making ceremony of, 80-81; Kaygee (spirit guide), and Irene of, 22-23, psychic experiences of,
extrasensory perception, business shamans and spirits of, 80-8 Hughes, 99 17-18
applications of, 40; powers of,
1 Hurkos, Peter (psychic): and Bos- Keeler, William M., spirit photography Lindsay, John, palmistry, numerology
103 ,1 16, 1 1 7; and Soviet psychic ton Strangler case, 130-132; clair- of, 44-45 and tarot, use of, 96-97
abilities, 140 voyance of, 127, 1 30- 1 32 Kennedy, James, and psychic re- Linzmayer, Adam J., telepathy of, 52
GifFord, R. Swain, and obsession, 43 Hurth, Mrs. Joicey, telepathic experi- search test data, 60 Lodge, Sir Oliver (The Survival of
Glastonbury Abbey: and Freder- ence of, 12-13 Kiecorius, Edith, disappearance of, Man), 2 1 ; and spiritualism, 50
ick Bligh Bond, 118-120; spirits of, Hypnotism, 35, 69; tests of, 64-65 and psychometry, 129-130
119-120, 120-122 Hyslop, James H., psychic investi- Kirlian, Semyon, and psychic auras, M
Grant, Ulysses S., and wife's psychic gations of, 44 145 McBean, Monica, clairvoyance of,
experience, 1 8-20 Kirlian effects: on fruit juice, 150, on 34
Green, Clay, and Washington Irving I humans, 146-147; on metal, Macdonald, Colin, and Titanic di-
Bishop's Lambs Club demon- Iglulik Eskimos, 76-77; shamans 151; on plants, 148-149 saster, psychic premonition of, 29
stration, 104 and spirits of, 75-77 Kirlian photography, and psychic McDougall, William (Body and
Illusionists, powers of, 103 auras, 145, 146-151 Mind): and extrasensory perception
H Indians. See Huichol Indians of Mexi- Kline,Deborah Sue, disappear- in animals, 57; and psychic re-
Hall, G. Stanley (quoted), and psy- co; Oglala Sioux Indians ance of, 132, 133 search, 48-49, 50
chic research, 48 Industrial Revolution, 35 Kline, Jane, 132-133 McLaine, Patricia (psychic advis-
Hallucinogenic drugs, and psy- Koslov, Samuel, and psychic re- er; quoted), 98; and intuition, use
chic powers, 75, 80 J search, military applications of, of, 97-98; readings of, 97-98
Hammid, Hella, and remote view- Jaegers, Beverly, business advice 144 McMullen, George (psychic), and psy-
ing, 62, 67 of, 136 Kresge, George (pseud. Kreskin; chometry, 123-127
Hamon, Count Louis, psychic pre- James, Henry (the elder), psychic mentalist): mind-reading act of, Maimonides Medical Center, and
dictions of, 28 experience of, 2 114, 115- 11 7; powers of, 103, dream research, 67, 74
Harary, Keith: and extrasensory James, William: and American 115 Map dowsing, 138
perception, business applications Society for Psychical Research, 24; Kreskin. See Kresge, George Margery. SeeCrandon, Mina
of, 136-140; and remote view- and mediums, 24; and me- Krippner, Stanley (quoted), and Marion, Frederick (mentalist),
ing, 62 diumship, 36, and psychic phe- dream research, 66, 74 thought-transference act of, 1 10-

Harto, James S. (pseud Chandra), nomena, 24; and psychic re- Kurcsics, Michael, disappearance of, 111
and thought reading, 106 search, 48 and clairvoyance, 132-133 Marshall, Mrs Jack, and Titanic disas-

Healers See Shamans Joan, clairvoyance of, 128 ter, psychic premonition of, 29

Heame, Keith, and lucid dreams, 66 Joan of Arc, clairaudienceof, 17, 18- Mary M. and ectoplasm, 40
,

Hearst, Patricia, disappearance 19 Lady Wonder (horse): performance Mead, Margaret, and psychic re-
of, and clairvoyance, 132 Johannes (spirit), at Glastonbury Ab- of, 1 10; psychic abilities of, 57 search, 27
Helmer, Olaf, and Delphi method, bey, 120 Lammer, Arthur, and Edgar Cayce, Medicine men, 75, 78-79
135 Jones, Eryl Mai, clairvoyance of, 32- 94 Mediums, 35, 36, 88-89; demonstra-
Henninger, Ronald, and Kline dis- 33,34 Lamon, Ward H., and Abraham Lin- tions of, 36, 37, 38-39, 40; pow-

appearance case, 133 Jones, Nella, and Yorkshire Ripper coln, 17-18 ers of, 24

Hitler, Adolf, and Wolf Messing, case, 134, 136, 137 Lancaster, Maude (mentalist), mind- Medoff, Marc (quoted), and New
113 Jonky, Dionizy, and psychometry, reading act of, 107 Age movement, 101
Hodgson, Richard, bogus spirit test of, 120-121 Layne, Al C. (hypnotist), and Edgar Menard, H William (quoted), 140
photograph of, 44 Journal ofParapsychology, founding Cayce, 92 Mentalists, powers of, 103- 1 17

Honorton, Charles, and ganzfeld of, 56 Leahy, William (quoted), and the A- Mental suggestion, 140, 14!
research, 68-69 Jung, Carl Gustav (Psychology of the bomb, 144 also Telepathy

Houdini, Harry (A Magician among Unconscious): and the collective Lee, Bettina,and astrology, 94-95 Mercedes, Joseph (mentah-
the Spirits): mind-reading act of, unconscious, 2 1
; and dreams, 66; Lee, Marguerite Du Pont: and second sight j
106; and Scientific American's and exploding knife, 57; and J. automatic writing, 44; and spirit Mesmer, Anton, and h;

tests of mediums, 38-39; and slate B. Rhine's psychic experiments, 57, photography, 44, 45 dev<

157
Messing, Wolf (mentalist): and Obsession: description of, 42; study demonstration of, 10-1 1; descrip- 121-122; tests of, 121-127;use
Adolf Hitler, 1 13, catalepsy of, 111- of, 43 and Eileen Garrett,
tion of, 7; in police investigations, 127,

11 3;and Joseph Stalin, 113, Oglala Sioux Indians, 75; and spirit 88-90; and Eryl Mai Jones, 32-33, 129-132, 133. See also

(quoted) and mind-reading ability, visions, 78-79; spiritual sym- and Irene Hughes, 98-99; and Clairvoyance
113; prophesies of, 1 12; and bols of, 78 physical laws, 70; testing of, 62; Psychophysical Research Laboratory
telepathic projection, 111,113 Oracles, 7, 17 and Titanic, 30-31; and W. T. (Princeton, N.J.): and extra-

Middleton.J. Connon (quoted), Ossowiecki, Stefan (psychic): clair- Stead, 27-32 sensory perception, testing of, 62;

and Titanic disaster, psychic pre- voyance of, 120-/23; and psy- Precognitive dreaming, demon- and ganzfeld research, 68-69
monition of, 29 chometry, experiments in, 121- stration of, 74 Puthoff, Harold, and remote viewing,

Mihalasky, John, and extrasensory 122, 127 Price, Harry, and National Labo- 63-67, 142-144
perception, study of, 135 Ostrander, Sheila (Psychic Discoveries ratory of Psychic Research, 87

Milden, Mrs. C, clairvoyance of, 33, Behind the Iron Curtain), and Price, Pat, and remote viewing,
34 Soviet psychic research, 1 41 - 1 42 tests of, 60-61, 63-67, 142-144 Quantum mechanics, and psychic
Millman, Robert (quoted), and New Ouija board, 42 Prince, Walter F .: and Pearl Cur- phenomena, 70, 73, 74

Age movement, 99 Out-of-body experiences, and Ingo ran, investigation of, 42; psychic

Miss J. K, hypnosis of, 64 Swann, 82-83 investigations of, 44-45; and

Mitchell, Edgar D., and telepathy, Scientific American's tests of medi- Rain-making ceremony, of Huichol
tests of, in space, 54-55 ums, 38-39 Indians of Mexico, 80-81
Mobius Society, and psychic ar- Palmistry, use of, 96-97, 98-99 Process-oriented research, and Randi, James (magician), and Uri
cheology, 124 Parapsychological Association, extrasensory perception, test- Geller, 117
Moon, Edward Gibson, psychic 27, 60-61 , 74; founding of, 57 ing of, 62-63, 67 Random Event Generators (REGs),
experience of, 10-11 Parapsychology, 17; defining the Project Scanate, and remote 62
Morgner, A. V (medium), spirit study of, 70; science of, 1 6; and viewing, 142-144 Rapid eye movements (REMs),
photograph of, 45 Sigmund Freud, 2 1 ; study of, Psi, 56, 74 and dream research, 66
Multidimensional geometry, and 24-26,61 Psi research See Psychic research Rasmussen, Knud, Eskimo stud-
psychic phenomena, 70, 72 Parapsychology Foundation, 86, 91 Psychic abilities, 15-16; and Al- ies of, 76

Murphy, Gardner, and psychic re- Pearce, Hubert E., Jr., telepathy of, tered States Research, 69; and de- Reincarnation, and Edgar Cayce,
search, 49, 56 53 cline effect, 53; motivation of, beliefs of, 94
Muscle reading, 105 Pecoraro, Nino (medium), 36, 37 53; and sleep, 69-74 REMs See Rapid eye movements
Kenneth, and Kline disap-
Peiffer, Psychic advisers, 84, 92-99; hier- Remote viewing, examples of, 60-63,
N pearance case, 132-133 archy of, 97 85; and Hella Hammid, 67; mili-
National Laboratory of Psychic Re- Petukhov, Valery, and Soviet psychic Psychic archeology, demonstra- tary applications of, 142-144; and
search, 87 research, 144 tion of, 124 Pat Price, 60-61, 63-67, testing
Naumov, Eduard, and Soviet psychic Peyote, psychic uses of, 80 Psychic auras, 86, photography of, of, 63-67
research, 142 Phantom leaf effect, and psychic 145, 146-151 Retrocognition: and Alex Tanous,
Nautilus (submarine), and telepathic auras, 148-149 Psychic healing, and Edgar Cayce, 99; demonstration of, 10-11; de-
experiment, 140-141 Photography, of psychic auras, 90-91 scription of, 7
Needleman, Jacob (quoted), and New 145, 146-151. See also Kirlian Psychic phenomena: acceptance of, Rhea, Kay, clairvoyance of, 128, 129
Age movement, 101 photography 1 and electromagnetism, 70-
7; Rhine, Joseph Banks (Extra-
Neihardt, John G., and Oglala Sioux Piddington, Leslie and Sydney, 71, and multidimensional geome- sensory Perception), and Eileen
Indian spirit visions, 78 thought-transference act of, 1 1 try, 70. 72, and quantum me- Garrett, 86;and extrasensory
New Age movement, 84, 95, 99; be- Piper, Lenora (medium): methods of, chanics, 70, 73, and scientific re- perception animals, 57, and
in
liefs of, 96; criticisms of, 101; 36, possible telepathy of, 36 search, 84 hypnotism, 69; and Joseph
publications of, 96-97 Polgar, FranzJ. (mentalist), mind- Psychic readings, 102; and Edgar Gaither Pratt, 53; and Journal of
Newmann, C. A. George (mental- reading act of, 1 \ 4-1 15 Cayce, 90-91; and Patricia Parapsychology, founding of,
ist), blindfold carriage act of, Police investigations, and clairvoy- McLaine, 97-98 56; and Karl Zener, 52; and Lady
/ 07- 108 ance, use of, 126-137 Psychic research, 48-74, 103; and Wonder, 0; and psychic re-
1 1

Numerology, use of, 96-97 Poniatowski, Stanislaw: death of, Margaret Mead, 27, military appli- search, 49-61 and Walter Jay Levy,
;

123; and psychometry, test of, cations of, 140-144, 141, in So- 57-60
121-122 viet Union, 141-142; at SRI. 142 Rhine, Louisa Weckesser, 49, 50;
Object reading. See Psychometry Pratt, Joseph Gaither, and J B . Psychokinesis, 83 and psychic research, 69
O'Brien, Thomas P., and Boston Rhine's telepathic tests, 53 Psychometry: demonstration of, 92- Richet, Charles, psychic research
Stranglercase, 131-132 Precognition, 69; definition of, 1 6; 93, and Stefan Ossowiecki, of, 40

158
Robert- Houdin, Jean Eugene thought transference, 26-27 Svinka-Zielinski, Ludmila (quoted), Travers, John Christopher, crystal
(mentalist), second-sight act of, Smith, Rev. Msgr. William B. and Wolf Messing, 13 ball, palmistry and tarot, use
1
of,
704-105, 108 (quoted), and New Age movement, Swann, Ingo (psychic; quoted), 84; 98-99
Robertson, Morgan (Futility; quoted), 101 and astral travel, 82-83; and Troland, L. T., and psychic re-
28; Titan and Titanic, similari- Soal, Samuel George (Preliminary out-of-body experiences, 82-83, search, 48
ties of, 28, 30-3 Studies of a Vaudeville Telepa- psychic abilities of, 82-84; and Turvey, V. N., and Titanic disaster,
Ryzl, Milan, and hypnotism, tests thist): and Frederick Marion, 10- 1 psychic auras, 86; and psycho- premonition of, 29
of, 64-65, 69 111; and psychic research, 56; kinesis, 83; and remote view- Twain, Mark. See Clemens,
and thought transference, 7 70, 7 7 7 ing, 83, 85, 142 Samuel
s Society for Psychical Research Swedenborg, Emanuel, clairvoy-
Saints, 7, 18 (SPR), 35, 48; founding of, 24; and ance of, 8-9 u
Schmeidler, Gertrude R .: and Ingo mediumship, 36; and thought Ullman, Montague (quoted), and
Swann, 83; and process- transference, demonstration of, dream research, 66, 74
oriented research, 62-63 26-27 Tanous, Alex (psychic), and retro- Universal pool of consciousness,
Schmidt, Helmut, and precogni- Socrates, and oracles, 1 cognition, 99 and dowsing, 138
tion, tests of, 62 Soviet Union, psychic research in, Targ, Russell: and extrasensory Uvani (spirit guide), and Eileen
Schroeder, Lynn (Psychic Discov- 141-142, 144 perception, business applications Garrett, 87
eries behind the Iron Curtain), and Speed, Steve, and psychometry, of, 136-140; and remote view-
Soviet psychic research, 141- 92-93 ing, 63-67, 142-144 V
142 Spirit photography, 44-47; and Tarot, use of, 96-97, 98, 1 00- Vancho, Eileen Jeanette See Gar-
Schwartz, Stephan, and psychic Marguerite Du Pont Lee, 44, 45 101 rett, Eileen
archeology, 124 Spirits: communication with, 75- Taurus I (submarine), 124 Vasiliev, Leonid, and telepathy,
Scientific American, and mediums, 77, 78-8 1,120-122; vehicles of, 42 Telepathic projection, 111,113 740-141
studies of, 36, 38-39 Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, and Telepathy: and Adam J. Linzmayer,
Sechrist, William, and intuition, spirituality, development of, 96 52; definition of, 16; demon- w
134-135 Spiritualism, 16-17,48,50, 104; stration of, 72-73, 35, 36; descrip- Warcollier, Rene, and psychic re-

Second sight, 7, 16. See also Clair- definition of, 35 and Edgar Cayce, 95;
tion of, 7; search, 49
voyance; Thought transference Spiritual symbols, of Oglala Sioux Einstein's opinion of, 26; and elec- Watson, John, and behaviorist
Seers. See Shamans Indians, 78 tromagnetic radiation, 140; and psychology, 49
Sensory deprivation, 67 SPR. See Society for Psychical Hubert E. Pearce.Jr 53; and Mary , Wheeler, John A. (quoted), and
Shamans, 7; powers of, 75-77, Research Craig, 20-2 1
; military applica- parapsychology, 60-6
80-81 Stage mentalists, performances tions of, 141-144; and physical William (spirit), and Chapel of St
Shipwreck sites, and psychic ar- of, 103-117 laws, 70; tests of, 24-25, 28-29, Edgar, /27
cheology, 124 Stalin, Joseph, and Wolf Messing, 1 13 54-55; and Zener cards, 57-52, 53 Witcombe, Al, shipwreck sighting
Sidgwick, Henry, and Society for Stanford Research Institute (SRI Temay, Ulu (shaman), and Hui- by, 724

Psychical Research, 24 International): and psychic re- chol Indians of Mexico, 80-81 Worrall, Olga, psychic aura of,
Sinclair, Mary Craig. See Craig, search, 142; and remote view- Tenhaeff, Willem, and Gerard 747
Mary ing, tests of, 63-67; and Uri Geller, Croiset, study of, 127-129, 130 Worth, Patience (spirit), and Pearl

Sinclair, Upton (Mental Radio; study of, 1 1 Third eye, 7 Curran. 42

quoted), 27; and cosmic con- Stantone, Mademoiselle, second- Third mind, 24
sciousness, 2 1 ; telepathic tests sight act of, 707, 108 Thompson, Frederick, obsession
of, 20-21,24-25 Stead, W. T., and Titanic disaster, pre- of, 43 Yorkshire Ripper case, and clair-

Sixth sense, 7 cognition of, 27-32 Thought transference, 24, 108; voyance, use of, 1 33- 34, 734-
1

Skin sight. See Dermo-optical Stefanska, Bogna, and dermo-optical and Douglas Blackburn and G A 137
perception perception, 143 Smith, 26-27; and stage men-
Slate writing,42,43 Stepanek, Pavel, hypnosis of, 69 talists, 104-109
Slee, Wimpie, disappearance of, Stokes, Doris, clairaudience of, Titan, and Titanic, resemblance Zancig, Agnes and Julius (mental-

726 133-134 to, 28, chart 30 ists), and thought-transference

Sleep: and psychic abilities, 69- Subjective validation, 103 Titanic (ship) 30-3
, 1; disaster pre- act, 705
74; stages of, 66-67. See also Sugrue, Thomas (quoted), and Edgar monitions of, 27-32; and Titan, re- Zener, Karl, and telepathic test-

Dream research Cayce, 95 semblance to, chart 30 ing, cards fi i

Smith, G A. (hypnotist; quoted), 27; Sutcliffe, Peter, and Yorkshire Ripper Toby, the Sapient Pig, perform

110 tfs!
telepathic tests of, 28-29; and case, 134, 736 of,

159
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