Appendix and Notes
CHAPTER 1
Notes
This point is emphasized in I. Bernard Cohen’s excellent paper, “Orthodoxy and Scientific Progress,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Oct., 1952. The same issue also contains Edwin G. Boring’s wise and witty lecture, “The Validation of Scientific Belief,” which opened the society’s 1952 symposium on scientific unorthodoxies. See also L. Sprague de Camp’s informative article, “Orthodoxy and Science,” Astounding Science Fiction, May, 1954.
In 1952 a science crank’s paranoia led to a senseless murder. A young war veteran and self-styled genius named Bayard P. Peakes walked one morning into the offices of the American Physical Society, Columbia University, whipped a pistol from his pocket and killed the 18-year-old stenographer whom he had never seen before. After his capture he gave his reasons. The society had refused to publish his book How to Live Forever, explaining his theory of prolonging life by electronics. He believed that if he killed someone connected with the society the publicity would win recognition for this work. In 1949 he had issued a pamphlet titled So You love Physics, distributing some 6,000 copies to scientists, including ten to Einstein. “Einstein didn’t answer me,” Peakes told a reporter. “I think he’s crazy.”
One of the most delightful of these “inverted” theories is the “granular universe” of Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912), professor of Engineering at Owens University, Manchester, England. On the basis of experiments with wet sand, Reynolds concluded that space was made up of solidly packed spheres, each with a diameter of one seven hundred thousand millionth part of the wave length of light. Material particles are simply bubbles of nothing, moving about in this dense, elastic, granular medium. The larger the “hole” in the medium the stronger the distortion in the otherwise normal “piling” of surrounding grains. Gravity is a pressure that results from this distortion. See his On an Inversion of Ideas as to the Structure of the Universe, 1902, and The Sub-Mechanics of the Universe, 1903, both published by Cambridge University Press.
Bertrand Russell, in his article, “In the Company of Cranks,” Saturday Review, Aug. 11, 1956, writes:
Experience has taught me a technique for dealing with such people. Nowadays when I meet the Ephraim-and-Manasseh devotees I say, “I don’t think you’ve got it quite right. I think the English are Ephraim and the Scotch are Manasseh.” On this basis a pleasant and inconclusive argument becomes possible. In like manner, I counter the devotees of the Great Pyramid by adoration of the Sphinx; and the devotee of nuts by pointing out that hazelnuts and walnuts are just as deleterious as other foods and only Brazil nuts should be tolerated by the faithful. But when I was younger I had not yet acquired this technique, with the result that my contacts with cranks were sometimes alarming.
CHAPTER 2
Readers interested in learning more about Voliva may consult the following two articles: “Croesus at the Altar,” by Alfred Prowitt, American Mercury, April, 1930, and “They Call Me a Flathead,” by Walter Davenport, Colliers, May 14, 1927.
For historical background on Symmes’ hollow earth see “Symmes’ Theory,” by John W. Peck, Ohio Archeological Historical Publications , Vol. 18, 1909, p. 28; “The Theory of Concentric Spheres,” by William M. Miller, Isis, Vol. 33, 1941, p. 507; and “The Theory of Concentric Spheres,” by Conway Zirkle, Isis, Vol. 34, July, 1947.
It is interesting to note that Teed was the author of a novel about the future. It was published posthumously by his followers in 1909 under the title, The Great Red Dragon; or, The Flaming Devil of the Orient, and bearing the pseudonym of Lord Chester.
Teed’s hollow earth, or a theory very similar to it, has been taken up by Duran Navarro, a Buenos Aires lawyer. According to a story in Time, July 14, 1947, Navarro contends that gravity is really centrifugal force generated by a rotating hollow earth inhabited on the inside. The force naturally diminishes as you move away from the surface toward the central point where protons and electrons come together to form “fotons” that in turn produce the sun. Simultaneously with Navarro’s announcement, Time adds, comes news from Berlin that the earth does not rotate from west to east. An accountant named Valentin Herz has proved that it really rotates the opposite way.
It was also in Germany that pseudo-science recently took a drubbing. A West German patent attorney, Godfried Bueren, boldly offered 25,000 marks (about $6,000) to anyone who could disprove his hollow sun theory. According to Herr Bueren, the sun’s flaming outer shell surrounds a cool inner sphere. Covered with vegetation, the dark core can be glimpsed occasionally through sunspots which are nothing more than temporary rents in the blazing shell. The German Astronomical Society carefully ripped the theory apart and when Bueren refused to pay, the society took legal action. Incredible as it may seem, the court decided in favor of the astronomers. Herr Bueren was ordered to pay the sum he had offered, plus court costs and interest. See Time, Feb. 23, 1953.
Notes
For further details concerning the German cult and other hollow earth theories see Willy Ley’s “The Hollow Earth,” Galaxy, March, 1956.
CHAPTER 4
Of the many articles that have been written about Fort, the following are recommended: “The Fortean Fantasy,” by Benjamin De Casseres, The Thinker, April, 1931; “The Mad Genius of the Bronx,” by H. Allen Smith, Chapter 5 of Low Man on a Totem Pole, 1941; “Charles Fort,” by Robert Johnson, If, July, 1952; and “Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science,” by Miriam Allen De-Ford, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan., 1954.
Tiffany Thayer is still editing Doubt, the back cover of which continues to plug Chakotin’s Rape of the Masses, and a 425-page work by Iktomi titled America Needs Indians. I was startled to find a favorable review of In the Name of Science in a 1953 issue. “The author gets a little sore at YS [your secretary],” writes Thayer, “and took a few snipes at him, but we don’t hold that against him.”
It is not generally known that Mr. Thayer is one of the country’s top-flight advertising copy writers, working six months of each year for a Manhattan agency where he turns out radio jingles for Pall Mall cigarettes. In 1956 he published the first three volumes of his projected 21-volume novel, Mona Lisa. At the end of this trilogy Mona is not yet born, but plenty of things have been going on in the streets and bedrooms of Thayer’s Renaissance Italy.
CHAPTER 5
Since this chapter was written several dozen hard cover books on the saucers have enjoyed profitable sales. They range in quality from the works of George Adamski, that out-Scully Scully, to two new books by Keyhoe. Keyhoe does not, like Adamski, claim to have ridden in a saucer where he conversed with a voluptuous golden-sandaled Venusian. This restraint has led many reviewers who should know better to take Keyhoe’s speculations seriously. Groff Conklin, writing in Galaxy, April, 1954, found the data in Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space “ominously persuasive” and “unassailably factual.” The editors of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Feb., 1954, found the same book “uncontrovertible” and thought it likely the most important work ever mentioned in their review column.
In spite of the flood of zany books, articles, lectures, documentary films, and special magazines trumpeting the extraterrestrial saucer theory, the mania seems to have slowly abated as far as the general public is concerned, leaving saucer speculation in the hands of the occultists. Some dozen or so cults of a theosophical type have now integrated the saucers with their other beliefs, the general approach being that the space people are here to prepare the earth for a New Age. In most cases a leader or prominent member of the cult is in touch with the space people by extra-sensory perception, receiving detailed instructions which are then passed on to the neurotic middle-aged ladies who make up the bulk of the cult’s membership.
In the fall of 1954 the saucer mania struck France, then fanned out over Europe. The French press outdid even the United States in unbridled reports of fantastic little men observed here and there stepping out of the saucers (see Time, Oct. 25, 1954; Life, Nov. 1, 1954; and the New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 10, 1954).
The wire services in this country have made two valiant but unsuccessful Fortean attempts to replace the worn out saucer craze with something new and less boring. In 1954 it was a “glasspox” epidemic—a mysterious pitting of automobile windshields. The epidemic started on the west coast then rapidly moved eastward. Even England suffered a mild attack. Then in the hot summer months of 1955 garden hoses began to burrow their way into the soil. Nobody mentioned Shaver’s “deros,” obviously responsible for this mischief.
The mania of past centuries for seeing sea serpents has many obvious parallels with the flying saucer craze and should be just about due for a revival. One or two sensational eye witness accounts, a solemn article in a mass circulation magazine, and soon half the sailors on the high seas will be bringing back reports about monsters of the deep. The recent flurry of interest in the “abominable snowman” of the Himalayas, an elusive beast who leaves giant footprints but manages to evade being captured or photographed, suggests that public interest in monsters “unknown to science” is still a lively one. (See Ralph Izzard’s book, The Abominable Snowman, 1955.)
Notes
The best discussion to date of the Shaver hoax will be found in two articles by Thomas S. Gardner—“Calling All Crackpots!” and “Crackpot Heaven”—in the science fiction magazine, Fantasy Commentator , spring and summer issues, 1945.
An enthusiastic Fortean, Arnold once sought to have the Fortean Society sponsor him on a lecture tour. This is disclosed by Tiffany Thayer in Doubt, No. 40, 1953, an issue devoted entirely to a chronological report on saucer sightings.
Father Connell provides an appendix on extra-terrestrial theology to Aimé Michel’s The Truth About Flying Saucers, 1956, a translation of a French roundup of American and European saucer data.
Frank Scully’s latest work is Blessed Mother Goose, a rewriting of the familiar nursery rhymes so that, as an advertisement has it, they “echo the Catholic way of life.”
“Dr. Gee” turned out to be Leo GeBauer, proprietor of a radio and television supply house in Phoenix, Arizona. It was he and his friend Silas Newton, Denver geophysicist, who provided Scully with the data on which his book was based. Newton and GeBauer were arrested in 1952 and later found guilty by a Denver court of swindling a Denver businessman out of some $250,000. The two men had sold their victim an electronic “doodlebug” for finding oil, and he had sunk a small fortune in worthless oil leases as a result. The machine proved to be a radio frequency changer that could be bought as war-surplus for about $3.50.
For a recent article that takes seriously the many “maps” which have been sketched of Martian canals, see Wells Alan Webb’s “Correlation of the Martian Canal Network,” in Astounding Science Fiction, March, 1956. Webb subjects these maps to an elementary topological analysis, finding them similar to networks that are man-made (e.g., airline routes), thus leading him to conclude that they have an “animal origin.” His theory has one simple fallacy. If the “maps” are merely the doodlings of imaginative astronomers, as most astronomers think they are, the topological analysis naturally still applies. A footnote credits editor John Campbell Jr. with the theory that the canals may be pathways beaten out by migrating herds of animals.
CHAPTER 6
Notes
Cy Q. Faunce (probably a Lawson pseudonym) is also the author of The Airliner and its Inventor, 1921, a biography of Lawson.
Time, March 24, 1952. After a 1954 investigation for tax dodging by a Congressional House committee, Lawson sold the University to a Detroit businessman for $250,000. It is to be turned into a large shopping center (New York Times, Nov. 21, 1954, p. 81.)
This incident took place in 1945. Edwin A. Baker, of Alexandria, La., won a court fight to “free” his daughter, age 12, from the university. The girl described the school as “nightmarish” and “full of generals.”
According to a story in the New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 25, 1954, the school tore down its large smokestack early in the year but continued to buy tons of coal. “It was rumored that Mr. Lawson had put his theory of ‘penetrability’ to work and built a maze of tile pipes leading into a big tunnel in the ground where the smoke settled. Engineers said it was impossible, but could find no trace of smoke escaping anywhere.”
See also Lawson’s Mighty Sermons, published by Lawson in 1948.
CHAPTER 7
Notes
Two classic essays in English deal with the historic Goethe-Newton battle: one by Helmholtz, in his Popular Lectures, first series, and one by Tyndall, in New Fragments. The battle was so decisively won by Newton that it is hard to conceive of any twentieth century thinker taking Goethe’s speculations seriously. But the pseudo-scientist is a man of boundless courage. Ernst Lehrs, in his book Man or Matter, combines Goethe’s metaphysical physics with the anthroposophical poppycock of Rudolf Steiner (see pp. 169, 224f). Lehrs’ most amusing feat is his revival of the ancient notion of “levity,” a force opposed to gravity. The book was published by Harpers in 1951.
It is surprising to find Prof. Michael Polanyi, writing on “From Copernicus to Einstein,” Encounter, Sept., 1955, still taking Miller’s work seriously. “The experience of D. C. Miller,” he declares, “demonstrates quite plainly the hollowness of the assertion that science is simply based on experiments which anybody can repeat at will.” Dr. Polanyi forgets that the “repeatability” of a complicated experiment does not, and could not, demand that every single person who tried it would get identical results. “Repeatability” is a matter of degree. It is always possible to find someone unable to perform an experiment.
Augustus de Morgan’s Budget of Paradoxes, recently reissued by Dover Publications, is a mine of information on early angle trisecters, circle squarers, cube duplicaters, and parallel postulate provers. The most fantastic of them all was James Smith (1805-1872), the Liverpool merchant who wrote book after book to prove that pi was exactly 3
. See de Morgan’s work, Vol. II, p. 103f, for a hilarious account of Smith’s labors and personality.
CHAPTER 9
In 1953 Mr. Roberts brought out The Seventh Sense, a sequel to his first book on dowsing. It is more of the same, its scientific value confined solely to the psychological insight it provides into the working of Mr. Roberts’ mind. An enormous number of popular magazine articles appeared in the wake of publicity attending Roberts’ two books, but they differ in no essential respect from similar articles of past centuries.
Notes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s introduction to an article on “The Sideric Pendulum,” Strand magazine, Vol. 60, 1920, p. 180, speaks of his own pendulum tests as having “never failed.” Doyle attributes the phenomenon to the same occult forces that make dowsing possible.
See also Riddick’s excellent article, “Dowsing—An Unorthodox Method of Locating Underground Water Supplies or an Interesting Facet of the Human Mind,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 96, Oct., 1952.
And sometimes the gullible investor. See footnote 5 of chapter 5, concerning a recent doodlebug swindle in Denver.
One of the few references known to me on oil doodlebugs is L. W. Blau’s entertaining article, “Black Magic and Geophysical Prospecting,” Geophysics, Jan., 1936.
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
Notes
From a letter of Price’s quoted in the booklet Miscellaneous Documents , by W. C. White and D. E. Robinson, 1933, Elmshaven Office, St. Helena, Calif.
The Phantom of Organic Evolution, 1924, p. 210.
Ibid, p. 8.
Ibid, p. 20.
Catholic World, Oct., 1930.
An English biologist, Mivart’s outstanding work was a monumental 557-page treatise, The Cat, 1881. Some magazine articles advocating liberal theological views led to his excommunication in 1900 and he died a few months thereafter. Years later, after his friends convinced the church that his heretical opinions were not due to willful disobedience but to the diabetic, condition which caused his death, his body was given a Christian burial.
From Feet of Clay, 1949, a booklet issued by the Christian Evidence League, Malverne, N. Y.
CHAPTER 12
Lysenko’s subsequent downfall may be chronicled as follows:
In 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death, Pravda published Lysenko’s “Eulogy” of Stalin in which he revealed that the dictator had helped prepare his famous speech of 1948. “Comrade Stalin found time even for detailed examination of the most important problems of biology . . .,” Lysenko declared. “He directly edited the plan of my paper, ‘On the Situation in Biological Science,’ in detail explained to me his corrections, provided me with directions as to how to write certain passages in the paper.”
In 1954 Lysenko was severely rebuked in a speech of Khrushchev’s and later by several official party organs. He was branded a “scientific monopolist” and “academic schemer” who stifled all theories opposed to his own. He was accused of failing to make practical contributions to Soviet agriculture.
Lysenko made one last futile attempt to regain prestige. He dramatically announced a sensational new agricultural discovery by Soviet agronomist Terenty Maltsev. This “new” discovery proved to be identical with the view advocated by Edward H. Faulkner in two books published by the University of Oklahoma Press: Plowman’s Folly, 1943, and A Second Look, 1947. According to Faulkner’s highly questionable thesis, crop yields can be greatly increased by loosening the soil with a disk harrow instead of turning it over with a conventional plow. Nothing much came of Lysenko’s announcement, and in 1956 he resigned as head of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Shortly before his resignation, the Academy ordered the republication of the works of Lysenko’s old enemy, the great Vavilov who died in Siberian exile after Lysenko ousted him as head of the Academy. Although this heralds a return to Mendelianism, there is little likelihood it will be called by that name. So far, all criticism of Lysenko’s views, though identical with western criticism, has been in terms of his “perversions” of Michurinism! “If Mendelian genetics ever comes to its own again,” Abraham Brumberg prophecies in his article on the fall of Lysenko, New Leader, Aug. 9, 1954, “it will be done stealthily, unostentatiously, through the back door of pristine Michurinism.”
Nevertheless, at the moment a fresh breeze may be blowing through Soviet biology. Whether it will grow stronger or weaker in the years ahead is a question about which one hesitates to hazard an opinion.
Notes
For an hilarious documentation of Nazi party “misorganization” of science during World War II, see Samuel Goudsmit’s remarkable book, ALSOS, 1947.
A hope rapidly fading. For a time there were strong political pressures in the Soviet Union against Bohr’s principle of complementarity and other widely accepted concepts of modern nuclear theory, but even these pressures seem to have lessened since Stalin’s death. On the level of technical achievement, Soviet war research now appears to be only a step or two behind the United States.
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
Notes
CHAPTER 15
Notes
Most distinguished recent convert to Jehovah’s Witnesses is Mickey Spillane. He was baptized into the sect in 1950 and has since been preaching from house to house, selling Watch Towers on street corners, and feeling pangs of remorse over the wickedness in his best-selling sex-plus-sadism crime thrillers. See Marion Hargrove’s “The Secret Life of Mickey Spillane,” Redbook, June, 1955.
As the fatal day passed without visible signs of Armageddon, the Anglo-Israelites were not dismayed. The new age, they now argue, began imperceptibly and it may be many years until it becomes clear to everyone that we are in it. The best that Destiny could do with the Aug. 20, 1953 date was to note that on that day the Russians announced they had exploded (eight days earlier) a hydrogen bomb. (See Destiny, Nov., 1953.)
The latest occult work on the pyramid is Secret: The Gizeh Pyramids , by someone who calls himself Thothnu Tastmona. The publisher, Thothmona Book Company, Manhattan, took a full page ad in the New York Times Book Review, Oct. 31, 1954, to huckster this 144-page book at $15.00 a copy.
CHAPTER 16
Notes
Likewise discarded are Hahnemann’s views on mesmerism. In .his Organon he recommends it highly as a curative agent. “It acts in part homeopathically,” he writes, “by exciting symptoms similar to those of the disease to be cured, and is applied for this purpose by a single pass or stroke of the hands held flatwise over the body, and carried,.during moderate exertions of the will, from the crown to the tips of the toes; this process is efficacious in uterine haemorrhages, even when death is imminent.”
John Kellogg’s most massive work was Rational Hydrotherapy, 1900, a volume of more than 1200 pages. It was his younger brother, W. K. Kellogg, who became the country’s corn flake king.
There is no question that Macfadden’s death from jaundice in 1955 was hastened by a three-day fast, self-imposed in an effort to cure himself without medical aid. Dumbbells and Carrot Strips, an uninhibited biography of Macfadden by his third wife, Mary Macfadden, was published in 1953.
Medical follies, like religious sects, never completely die. The German picture magazine Quick, in its May 30, 1954 issue, featured an article on iridiagnostician Emil Stramke, of Hamburg; and in June, 1954, police in Tulsa, Okla., arrested “iriologist” J. D. Levine, to the annoyance of a crowd assembled to hear him lecture at the Alvin Hotel.
The best references on Shaw’s crank medical views are the lengthy preface of his play The Doctox’s Dilemma, and the papers collected under the title Doctor’s Delusions, Vol. 13 of the Standard Edition of the Works of G.B.S.
Dewey also penned an introduction to a work much stranger than any of Alexander’s books: Universe, 1921, privately printed by the author, Scudder Klyce, a retired Navy officer of Winchester, Mass. According to Klyce’s own estimate, “This book unifies or qualitatively solves science, religion, and philosophy—basing everything on experimental, verifiable evidence. . . . All the qualitative problems set forth by the race—by ‘religion, science, and philosophy’—are herein positively, definitely, and verifiably solved.”
Although they were friends at first, Klyce later developed a violent hostility toward Dewey’s views, resulting in his collection of angry letters, Dewey’s Suppressed Psychology, 1928. Sins of Science, 1925, is Klyce’s 432-page attack on all leading scientists and thinkers.
CHAPTER 17
At the moment, the largest cancer clinic in the United States operated by a man without a medical license is the Hoxsey Cancer Clinic, Dallas, Texas. In 1953 the Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction on interstate shipments of Hoxsey medicines, but the case is still limping through the courts. The FDA issued an unprecedented public warning in 1956 against these medicines, pointing out that some contain potassium iodide, believed to accelerate certain types of cancer.
Harry Mathias Hoxsey never got beyond the eighth grade. He began his medical career in Illinois in the twenties by peddling a cancer tonic and salve inherited from his father, a veterinarian. He was thrice convicted in Illinois for illegal medical practice and he himself boasts of having been arrested a hundred times. Eventually Hoxsey became a licensed naturopath, establishing his Dallas clinic in 1936. Most of his staff doctors are osteopaths and it is largely through osteopaths that residents of other cities obtain the Hoxsey treatment. In 1956 five of his osteopaths were suspended from practice by the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners for practicing with a layman.
Hoxsey is the author of a book called You Don’t Have to Die, published by guess who? His motto, engraved on a plaque in his office: “The world is made up of two kinds of people—dem that takes and dem that gets took.” See Time, Aug. 9, 1954, and Life, April 16, 1956.
Hoxsey’s most influential convert, Pennsylvania state senator John J. Haluska, promoted the recent founding of another Hoxsey clinic, in Portage, Pa. The Oct., 1956 issue of Search features the Senator’s picture on the cover and an article by him titled “Hoxsey Does Cure Cancer.” A similar piece by him appeared in the May issue of the same year. Search is an occult pulp magazine published by Ray Palmer to compete with his other occult magazine, Fate (see p. 60).
More fantastic than the story of Hoxsey is the story of the secret cancer drug Krebiozen—fantastic because it involves a widely respected medical scientist, Dr. Andrew C. Ivy. The story begins in Argentina in the late forties. There two Yugoslav refugees, Dr. Stevan Durovic and his brother Marko, obtained a culture from a cattle disease called “lumpy jaw” and injected it into what must have been an extraordinarily large number of horses. From thousands of gallons of horse blood they extracted, they claim, two grams of a mysterious whitish powder which they named Krebiozen or “K.” The Durovic brothers eventually settled near Chicago, dissolved the “K” in mineral oil, and began selling it as a cancer drug.
Physiologist Ivy, then a vice president of the University of Illinois and head of its department of clinical science, became an ardent booster of the drug. George D. Stoddard, the university’s president, ordered Ivy to stop using “K” in university clinics after Ivy and the Durovic brothers refused to produce samples of the drug for analysis. Dr. Ivy found strong support among the trustees (including ex-football hero Red Grange) and they eventually succeeded in having Dr. Stoddard dismissed from his post. He is now dean of New York University’s School of Education. In 1955 he published Krebiozen: The Great Cancer Mystery, a book about his sad and incredible experience.
Seven careful investigations of “K,” including one by the American Medical Association, have resulted in the charge of “worthless.” To date, no one except Dr. Durovic and his associates have been permitted to analyze the powder. The reader who wishes to read the pro-“K” side of the controversy may consult K: Krebiozen—Key to Cancer, by Chicago newspaperman Herbert Bailey, Hermitage House (publishers of Dianetics, see Chapter 22), 1955; and Observations on Krebiozen in the Management of Cancer, by Dr. Ivy and two associates, Regnery, 1956.
Notes
The Electronics Medical Foundation, founded by Abrams in 1922, is still operating. With headquarters in San Francisco, it publishes The Electronic Medical Digest, leases out oscilloclasts and some dozen other curious contraptions, and diagnoses blood samples shipped to the headquarters.
In 1954 the Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against interstate shipment of the devices. The FDA estimated that about 5,000 of the machines were in use throughout the country by osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, and other fringe practitioners. In making its investigation, government scientists submitted a spot of coal-tar dye as a sample of a woman’s blood and were told that the patient suffered from “systematic toxemia.” The therapeutic machines contain nothing but low powered short wave radio transmitters and coils capable of producing a weak magnetic effect.
Fred J. Hart, president of the foundation, raised the usual howls of persecution by the medical trusts and vowed he would continue his great work in Germany and Mexico if necessary. The foundation’s director, Thomas Colson, B.S., L1.B., and D.O. (doctor of osteopathy), is the author of Molecular Radiation, a learned book published by himself in 1953.
For an amusing chapter on Sinclair’s faith in Abrams, see H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices, Vol. 6. Mencken’s interesting thesis: the same rebellious impulses that make a political radical too often find similar outlets in quack medical opinions.
Time, April 10, 1950.
Prof. Estep is still stepping lively to avoid the law. In 1955 the Food and Drug Administration confiscated a number of his “automotrones” that were being shipped from Texas to Modesto, California, for distribution to purchasers. The automotrone, a cabinet with a sun lamp, shortwave unit, and colored slides, is used to irradiate water which is then swallowed to cure 87 different ailments. Estep is currently a fugitive from Illinois where he was sentenced to prison for three to five years for medical malpractice.
The frightening story of Ghadiali’s trial is told by Rita Halle Kleeman in her informative article, “Beware of the Medical Frauds!” Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 22, 1947.
For fascinating details on the healing power of both red and blue light, see Chapters 14 and 15 of Dr. Margaret A. Cleaves’ 827-page pseudo-scientific opus, Light Energy, published in New York in 1904. There is also a chapter on the physiological effects of N Rays (see Note 1, Chapter 21).
Color therapy also plays a prominent role in the “anthropotherapy” of cults stemming from the work of Edmund Székely. It is practiced along with phonotherapy (sound healing), aromotherapy (odor healing), masticotherapy (Fletcherism—see next chapter), cellulotherapy (fasting), and dozens of other therapies. Of Székely’s many books, perhaps the best introduction to his occult brand of nature healing is the 1948 revised edition of L. Purcell Weaver’s English translation of Cosmos, Man, and Society: A Paneubiotic Synthesis. Typographical errors and other mistakes in the earlier edition were kindly corrected by Gerald Heard.
Sugrue died in 1953 at the age of 45. Since 1937 he had been confined to a wheel chair with a painful and rare form of arthritis.
Many Mansions, 1950, by Gina Cerminara, is a detailed study of Cayce’s teachings on reincarnation and allied topics. See also Sherwood Eddy’s You Will Survive After Death, 1950, and Morey Bernstein’s The Search for Bridey Murphy, 1956, both of which take Cayce’s visions seriously.
For ten dollars Ray Palmer (see p. 60) will sell you, through his Venture Bookshop in Evanston, Ill., a pair of “Aura Goggles” for seeing auras of “the human body, animals, and inanimate things.” The goggles come complete with “pinacyanole bromide” filters.
CHAPTER 18
Notes
A striking recent example of how the public will welcome a book by a layman in spite of all protests by the medical profession is the spectacular success of Arthritis and Common Sense, by Dan Dale Alexander, of Newington, Conn. The book was privately printed by the author in 1951, but sold sc well that a Hartford publisher took over publication. In the opinion of Dr. W. D. Robinson, president of the American Rheumatism Association, Alexander’s remedy (cod liver oil mixed with orange juice) belongs to “the era of snake-oil, bear grease, and the torch-lighted medicine show.”
This illustrates one of the most elementary of statistical fallacies. People in Wisconsin tend to be long-lived and since cancer is a disease of middle and elderly years, it is a more frequent cause of death in Wisconsin than in many other states. An area low in cancer deaths is likely to be an area of poor health where inhabitants tend to die young.
One of the nation’s most colorful vegetarians was Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), the New England Presbyterian minister for whom the Graham cracker is named. In lectures and books (his most important was Science of Human Life, 1836) he railed against meat, liquor, tea, coffee, tobacco, featherbeds, and corsets. A Graham Journal of Health and Longevity was published weekly in Boston.
For an entertaining picture of Hauser’s personality and background, see “You Can Live to be a Hundred, He Says,” by Noel Busch, Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 11, 1951.
Actually, Hauser’s “system” varies widely from year to year. One of his funniest books, Types and Temperaments, with a Key to Foods, second edition, 1930, classifies everyone into basic chemical types depending on their personalities and facial characteristics. Norma Shearer and Dolores Costello are “sulphur” types (“fiery, spontaneous and talented . . . as explosive as sulphur”); Billy Sunday and Douglas Fairbanks are “sodium”; and so on. A photograph of Annie Besant, the theosophical leader, reveals that she is a “striking example of the negative body and positive head,” as well as a “harmonious balance of calcium, carbon, and phosphorus.” Each type naturally should follow a special type of diet prescribed by Hauser.
Blackstrap is far from the rich source of vitamin B that Hauser claims it is. To obtain minimum daily requirements of this vitamin one would have to drink a gallon of the stuff. Its calcium content does not come from nature at all, but from limewater used in the refining of sugar, and its iron and copper content come largely from contact with factory machinery. See A. D. Morse’s authoritative article, “Don’t Fall for Food Fads,” Woman’s Home Companion, Dec., 1951.
CHAPTER 19
I am happy to report that since this chapter was written, a detailed, authoritative, completely unanswerable book exposing the absurdities of the Bates system finally has been written. It is titled The Truth about Eye Exercises, published 1956 by the Chilton Co., Philadelphia. The author, Philip Pollack, is a Manhattan optometrist who brings to his task a comprehensive knowledge of his subject. It is a rare occasion indeed when anyone so well informed troubles to take apart a pseudo-scientific cult in such a thorough and painstaking manner. The book will not put an end to the Bates movement, but let us hope that it will at least have a dampening effect on editors and publishers who do not realize the harm that results from such pro-Bates pieces as a recent one in Coronet (Oct., 1955).
Notes
He is called “Dr.” Peppard on the title page, leading the reader to suppose he is either a medical doctor or eye doctor. Actually, as Pollack discloses in his book cited above, Peppard is an osteopath who worked for a time with Bates.
See Pollack’s book, opposite page 25, for recent photographic evidence of the change in the lens’ shape during accommodation. The proof is so simple that even a Bates practitioner can understand it.
Prentice Hall published her Help Yourself to Better Sight in 1949, and Crown issued her How to Improve Your Sight in 1953. Mrs. Corbett has never bothered to learn even the most elementary facts about the eyes. She thinks that proper breathing has a great effect on eye ailments and reports the case of one man whose cataracts temporarily vanished when he took a deep breath!
Miss Hackett’s book, Relax and See, was published by Harper in 1955. The foreword is by William Gutman, Manhattan homeopath (see p. 189).
CHAPTER 20
Notes
Dr. Montagu expanded this article to book length, publishing it in 1953 under the title, The Natural Superiority of Women.
The notion that right or left testicles determine sex is as old as ancient Greece. One of the few experiments proposed by Aristotle is that of tying or removing one testis in order to disprove this theory.
The recently published Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, by Sigmund Freud, Basic Books, 1954, discloses that Fliess, a Berlin physician and good friend of Freud, was the holder of many amusing biological views. He thought, for example, that in psychosomatic illnesses there is a close connection between the sex organ and certain disorders of the nose, and he worked out a fantastic number theory about cycles of 23 and 28 days in the health of men and women. For a time Freud was enormously impressed by these views.
Dr. Stopes’ latest book, Sleep, 1956, recommends sleeping in a north-south position. “It is comparatively unimportant whether the head or feet are at the north end of the bed,” she writes, “but it is very important that . . . the body should lie . . . south-north or north-south.”
Cf. the strange method of love-making proposed by W. J. Chidley of Australia in his little book, The Answer, or the World as Joy, 1915. Chidley believed that all the crime, madness, and misery of the race were due to a false method of coitus and that he had discovered the correct technique that would restore happiness to mankind. Havelock Ellis discusses Chidley’s theories briefly in Chapter 3 of his The Mechanism of Detumescence. See also Norman Douglas’ autobiography, Looking Back, 1934, p. 451f., for his opinion of Chidley, who called upon him one day in London. “I would have given a good deal,” Douglas writes, “if Mr. Chidley had obliged me with an oracular demonstration of his ‘correct method,’ which I hold to be physiologically impossible or else, if practicable, a sight worth seeing.”
See David Riesman’s Faces in the Crowd, 1952, for the sad case of “Henry Friend,” the name Riesman uses for a 15-year old Los Angeles boy undergoing Reichian analysis, and whose views are a crude mish-mash of Communism and Reichian theory.
CHAPTER 21
Reich’s most spectacular recent invention is a rain-making device, one of the first of his C.OR.E. (Cosmic Orgone Engineering) projects. Irwin Ross, in a long and amusing article on Reich (N. Y. Post, Sunday Magazine Section, Sept. 5, 1954) describes the device as follows:
“. . . a bank of long hollow pipes tilting at the sky and sections of hollow cable, all of which are mounted on a metal box; it resembles a stylized version of an anti-aircraft gun, and works with surpassing ease. The clouds are not sprayed with any substance; the hollow pipes merely draw orgone out of them—thus weakening their cohesive power and eventually causing them to break up.”
At that time three of Reich’s cloudbusters were operating in different sections of Orgonon, two others in North Carolina. It was raining furiously when Irwin Ross visited Orgonon, and when Ross asked Reich if his devices were responsible, the scientist modestly assured him that they were. “But did you have to produce so much rain?” Ross asked. “Well,” Reich replied, “you know, we haven’t yet learned to control it completely.”
In 1954 the Food and Drug Administration brought suit against Reich, his wife Ilse Ollendorff, and the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, to prevent interstate shipping of orgone energy accumulators and all literature mentioning orgone energy. The FDA estimated that more than a thousand of the accumulators had been rented or sold. After a series of carefully conducted tests, research scientists for the FDA concluded that “there is no such energy as orgone and that Orgone Energy Accumulator devices are worthless in the treatment of any disease or disease condition of man. Irreparable harm may result to persons who abandon or postpone rational medical treatment while pinning their faith on worthless devices such as these.”
Reich chose to ignore the injunction and an Orgone Legal Fund, headed by the cartoonist William Steig, began raising money for the trial. It took place in May, 1956, at Portland, Maine, with Reich acting as his own attorney. After deliberating twenty minutes the. federal jury returned a verdict of guilty. Reich was given a two-year prison sentence, his foundation was fined $10,000, and his associate, Dr. Michael Silvert, received a year and a day in jail. Reich is appealing of course, and each man is out on $15,000 bail.
Because the federal injunction ordered the destruction of many of Reich’s books that contain little mention of orgone energy, the case soon acquired a civil rights aspect that had nothing to do with a scientific evaluation of Reich’s work. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a rebuke and protesting letters appeared in various liberal journals (e.g. New Leader, July 30, 1956). See Steig’s letter in Time, June 25, 1956, in which he states, “Reich’s great findings are factual, demonstrable, irrefutable, as were those of Galileo. How much longer will it be before officials, the press, the public shake off their apathy, accept the largesse of orgonomy, and fight to defend it?”
Reich has expressed his opinion that there is a “Red Fascist” (i.e., Communist) group within the FDA, seeking access to his unpublished papers in order to learn the secret “Y” factor of his orgone energy motor. This motor presumably runs on orgone energy and offers promise of immense power. See A Report on the Jailing of a Great Scientist in the USA, 1956, a 20-page booklet published in 1956 by Raymond R. Rees and Lois Wyvell.
Notes
The history of modern physics is spotted with reports of nonexistent radiations, and it is not unusual for the discoverer to attribute dowsing and similar occult phenomena to them. A good example is the nineteenth century discovery of a force called “Od” by German physicist Baron Karl von Reichenbach. Oddly enough, other scientists were unable to duplicate the baron’s experiments.
In 1903 Prosper Blondlot, a reputable French physicist at the University of Nancy, detected what he called “N” (for Nancy) rays. Scores of papers describing the curious properties of N rays appeared in French journals and the French Academy actually awarded Blondlot a prize for his discovery. The coup de grace was deftly executed by American physicist Robert W. Wood (best known to laymen as the author of How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers) when he called upon Blondlot at his laboratory. While Blondlot was observing and describing an N-ray spectrum, Wood slyly removed an essential prism from the apparatus. This had no effect on what poor Blondlot fancied he was seeing!
There is no question but that the French scientist was sincere. The explanation of his behavior lies in the realm of psychology—of self-induced visual hallucinations. Wood’s exposure led to Blondlot’s madness and death. See Wood’s letter on the episode, Nature, Vol. 70, 1904, p.530, and Chapter 17 of William Seabrook’s biography, Dr. Wood, 1941.
CHAPTER 22
I have made no effort to keep up with Hubbard’s views since he plunged dianetics into occultism, but the following quotations suggest the atmosphere in which he has been doing his recent research:
Issue 3-G of his journal Scientology opens with the headline, “Source of Life Energy Found. Scientology enters third echelon far ahead of schedule; revival of dead or near-dead may become possible.” The article beneath states that “The Greek gods . . . probably existed, and the energy glow and potential of Jesus Christ and early saints are common knowledge to every school boy. . . . The recovery of this energy potential and the ability to use it has become suddenly a matter of two to 25 hours of competent practice.” The same issue contains a spine-chilling piece by Hubbard on Black Dianetics, warning against misuse of the science by unscrupulous groups.
Dr. Hubbard (he has awarded himself a degree of doctor of scientology) was running his patients back .into previous incarnations long before the search for Bridey Murphy began. Each individual, according to Hubbard, has a “theta being” that has been reappearing in MEST bodies for about 74 trillion years. (See Time, Dec. 22, 1952.)
A. E. Van Vogt, in an incredible article on dianetics in Spaceway Science Fiction, Feb., 1955, takes a cautious attitude toward this work, but states that in his opinion “this is the first time that anyone has investigated this territory [i.e., the human soul isolated from the body] in a manner that can be scientifically acceptable.” Van Vogt was the first head of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation of California, Inc. “I was reluctant to become involved,” he writes, “but since doing so I have done more than 5,000 hours of Dianetic processing on other people, and have taken upward of 800 hours of training in the methods.”
Dianetics has not been mentioned in Astounding Science Fiction for many years. Editor Campbell has found something even more revolutionary—“psionics,” a combination of electronics with psi (psychic) phenomena. Campbell first wrote about it in an editorial,
“The Science of Psionics,” Astounding, Feb., 1956. The editorial asked his readers if they would like to see a series of articles about psychic electronic machines. Campbell described psionics as “honest non-scientific research,” pointing out that “Buddha, Jesus, and President Eisenhower” also are excluded from the category of “honest scientific research” since they “use methods other than those used by physicists in their laboratory work.”
After a resounding “Yea!” from his readers, Campbell ran the first article, “Psionic Machine—Type One” in his June, 1956 issue. The article was written by himself. It tells how to build a Hieronymous machine, patented in 1949 by one Thomas G. Hieronymous, at that time a resident of Kansas City, Mo., and tested with positive results by “nuclear physicist” (see p. 265) Campbell. The machine was designed by the inventor to analyze the “eloptic radiation” of minerals, a new type of radiation discovered by Hieronymous. Among electronic engineers, Hieronymous’ patent (No. 2,482,773) is passed around for laughs, and considered in a class with Socrates Scholfield’s famous patent of 1914 (No. 1,087,186), consisting of two intertwined helices for demonstrating the existence of God.
Campbell thinks Hieronymous’ theory is “cockeyed” and he has also made several basic changes in the construction of the machine. Hieronymous claimed that his detector worked on photographs of minerals. Campbell hasn’t bothered to test that. Nevertheless, the machine Campbell built did detect something “not detectable by any standard form of meter,” and he knows there is no “jiggery-poker” because he constructed the thing himself.
In a lecture on psionics at the New York Science Fiction Convention, 1956, Campbell displayed his second and “more precise” version of the Hieronymous machine. It works just as well, he claimed, without the electric power supply. But it won’t work, he added, if there is a burned-out vacuum tube! The device is beautifully subjective. You turn a dial with one hand while you stroke a plastic plate with the other. The plate is supposed to feel “sticky” when the dial reaches a certain setting, the setting varying with each individual. Some people get the proper tactile sensation the first time they try it. Willy Ley and others at the convention couldn’t feel a thing. Campbell solemnly informed his audience that the machine does not work well with either scientists or mystics. Five mystics tried it, he stated, and got only random responses. His own personal “hunch” is that the machine is detecting something “beyond space and time.” Or as he expresses it in the October, 1956 issue of his magazine, “there is a reality-field other than, and different in nature from, that we know as Science.”
Another Campbell “hunch” is that the device operates because of certain “relations” between its parts. Someone at the lecture stood up and asked the obvious question: had Campbell tried varying the circuit or even removing it altogether to see if the device still worked? No, Campbell hadn’t tried that. He was just an amateur, he explained, “having fun” with psionics, and he felt no obligation to try all the experiments that are possible, particularly without getting paid for it.
No one of course expects a researcher to perform all possible experiments with a device before he publishes results. But one does expect at least a minimum of experimentation to insure fairly adequate controls. As it is, psionics promises to be even funnier than dianetics or Ray Palmer’s Shaver stories. It suggests once more how far from accurate is the stereotype of the science fiction fan as a bright, well-informed, scientifically literate fellow. Judging by the number of Campbell’s readers who are impressed by this nonsense, the average fan may very well be a chap in his teens, with a smattering of scientific knowledge culled mostly from science fiction, enormously gullible, with a strong bent toward occultism, no understanding of scientific method, and a basic insecurity for which he compensates by fantasies of scientific power.
Notes
Prof. Schuman opens this letter by quoting Oliver Cromwell’s “I beseech ye, in the bowels of Christ, to consider whether ye may not be mistaken.” He goes on to say that the New Republic, by printing such an irresponsible review, has made itself “the laughing stock of the rapidly growing throng of people who know what dianetics is all about. Not the book, but the review, is ‘complete nonsense,’ a ‘paranoiac system’ and a ‘fantastic absurdity.’ There are no authorities on dianetics save those who have tested it. All who have done so are in no doubt whatever as to who is here mistaken.”
CHAPTER 23
Notes
A point of view held chiefly by philologists and cultural anthropologists who like to imagine that their subject-matter (words or culture) underlies logic and mathematics. See “Words, Logic, and Grammar,” by H. Sweet, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1876. Because Aristotelian logic rests upon grammatical rules peculiar to the Aryan language, Sweet argues, the “whole fabric of formal logic falls to the ground.”
Strictly, this is a three-valued logic with two-valued functions. But even in the more exciting multi-valued logics that have multi-valued functions, deductions remain two-valued in the sense that they must be either valid or invalid in terms of the rules of the system.
Dr. Ernest Nagel, in a letter to the New Republic, Dec. 26, 1934 (replying to protests against his unfavorable review of Science and Sanity in the Oct. 24 issue), expresses this point as follows:
“. . . it is my considered opinion that Science and Sanity has no merit whatever, and is not worth the serious attention of readers of the New Republic. Its main thesis rests on a misunderstanding of recent work on the foundation of logic. The few interesting suggestions on technical problems, to which I referred in my note, have not been systematically developed by Count Korzybski, and they play only a very inconsiderable role in his book.”
See also Paul Kecskemeti’s penetrating “Review of General Semantics,” New Leader, April 25, 1955.
Max Eastman, in his amusing piece “Showing up Semantics,” The Freeman, May 31, 1954, quotes the following pompous passage from The Mankind of Humanity: “This mighty term—time—binding —when comprehended, will be found to embrace the whole of the natural laws, the natural economics, the natural governance, to be brought into the education of time-binders; then really peaceful and progressive civilization, without periodical collapses and violent readjustments, will commence; not before.”
CHAPTER 24
Notes
For a lively account of the history of phrenology see Phrenology: Fad and Science, by John D. Davis, 1955.
If character can influence handwriting then why not vice versa? In Paris, graphologist Raymond Trillat asked himself this question, then developed what he calls “grapho-therapy”—the science of treating neurotics by teaching them how to write differently. Hundreds of French children, he claims, have been benefited by this novel therapy. See Time, April 23, 1956 for the grotesque details.
Dr. Wolfe also is convinced that the two composite faces that can be formed by placing the edge of a mirror vertically on the center of a person’s front-view photograph indicate two basic sides of that person’s personality. See his The Expression of Personality, 1943, and The Threshold of the Abnormal, 1950.
Two recent tests: the Swiss “draw a tree” test, and the test developed by Prof. David L. Cole, Occidental College, Los Angeles (“What kind of an animal would you like to be if you had to be one, and why?”)
CHAPTER 25
The most recent attack on Rhine comes from Dr. George R. Price, of the University of Minnesota’s department of medicine. In a lengthy article, “Science and the Supernatural,” Science, Aug. 26, 1955, he reaches the conclusion that many of the findings of parapsychology are “dependent on clerical and statistical errors and unintentional use of sensory clues, and that all extrachance results not so explicable are dependent on deliberate fraud or mildly abnormal mental conditions.”
Dr. Price’s article stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy. In its Jan. 6, 1956 issue, Science published replies by Rhine, S. G. Soal, and others, with a rejoinder by Price and a further rejoinder by Rhine. Physicist P. W. Bridgman also contributed a brief article suggesting that probability theory may be more complicated than scientists think it is.
It was Price’s suggestion of “deliberate fraud” that most annoyed his opponents. Yet it is hard to suppose that out of the thousands of individuals tested by Rhine, there would not be a few with the incentive and skill to cheat. This particularly applies to Rhine’s naive early work when no attempt was made to shield the backs of the cards and when some of his most sensational results were achieved. No two card backs are exactly alike, especially after the cards have been handled for a while. If a sharp-eyed subject happened to notice a faint smudge of dirt, say, at one corner of a card, he would hardly consider it “cheating” if he spotted the same smudge on later tests. Already firmly convinced of his own psychic ability, what harm would there be, he might reason, in raising his score a trifle, particularly on days when he felt that his psi ability was at a low ebb? His fondness and admiration for Dr. Rhine would forever prevent him from mentioning this later, to say nothing of the personal humiliation of confessing fraud. The history of occultism swarms with personalities possessing precisely this combination of sincerity and duplicity.
Notes
Rhine’s latest book, New Worlds of the Mind, appeared in 1953. The book differs from earlier ones mainly in its emphasis on religious speculation and its suggestions for empirically testing such beliefs as the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer. Putting spiritual reality on scientific foundations would, Rhine declares, “do for religion something like what the germ theory did for medicine. It would open the range of religious exploration to horizons beyond all present conceptions.” In the meantime, Rhine’s latest research program has to do with “anpsi” (animal psi). He cites experiments which already have shown that cats are both telepathic and clairvoyant, and hints of exciting news to come.
Rhine’s first testing of Lady Wonder, then a three-year-old filly, took place in the winter of 1927-28. He and his wife described the tests in their article, “An Investigation of a ‘Mind-Reading’ Horse,” Journal of A bnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 23, 1929, p. 449. The horse spelled out answers to questions by touching her nose to lettered and numbered blocks. Rhine was shrewd enough to perceive that the horse could read his mind only when her owner, Mrs. Claudia Fonda, was nearby. But instead of concluding that Mrs. Fonda was signaling the horse in the standard manner of all “talking horse” and “talking dog” acts, Rhine decided that Lady was getting her cues telepathically. His reason? Lady was successful on many tests in which Mrs. Fonda was kept “ignorant of the number.” Instead of sending Mrs. Fonda out of the room, however, which would have enormously strengthened the telepathic theory, she was permitted to remain at all times to aid in controlling the unruly colt!
With his usual vagueness in describing such experiments, Rhine nowhere states exactly what he means by keeping Mrs. Fonda “ignorant of the number.” It is not until we read his “Second Report on, Lady, the ‘Mind-Reading’ Horse,” in the same journal, Vol.24, 1929, p.287, that he unintentionally lets the cat out of the bag. “When he [Rhine],” he writes, “stood behind F [Mrs. Fonda] and wrote the number on a pad as he had once done with excellent results, there was now complete failure.” In other words, the numbers were written down, but since Mrs. Fonda was not permitted to see this information, Rhine concluded that telepathy was operating.
Now it so happens there are some fifty different ways a clever medium or mentalist can secretly obtain information that has been written down. Unless Rhine was aware of these methods, and there is no indication he knew any of them, his testing of the horse was valueless. There is even the very strong possibility that Mr. Fonda at times played the role of a confederate, for Rhine tells us in his first article that Mr. Fonda was present “part of the time,” but since he played a very inconspicuous role in the proceedings, “we leave him out of the account for the sake of brevity.” In brief, Rhine’s “controls” were laughably inadequate.
In 1956 my friend Milbourne Christopher, a professional magician, attended a performance of Lady Wonder without telling Mrs. Fonda what his profession was. She gave him a long pencil and a pad, told him to stand across the room and write a number. He moved the pencil in the path of a figure eight, but touched the paper only at such points that it wrote the figure three. Lady Wonder guessed the number to be eight, a clear indication that Mrs. Fonda was “pencil reading.” This is the term mentalists use for the art of guessing what a person writes by observing the motions of the pencil. Dr. Rhine could easily have used such tricks as this to determine exactly what part Mrs. Fonda played in Lady’s demonstrations, but there is no evidence that he made the slightest effort along such lines.
Rhine’s belief today is that Lady Wonder used to have genuine telepathic powers, but that by December, 1928, she had lost these powers and Mrs. Fonda had taken up the practice of signaling. For a picture story on the aged Lady, see Life, Dec. 22, 1952. Milbourne Christopher contributed an informative article on famous mind-reading animals of the past to the April, 1955 issue of M-U-M, official organ of the Society of American Magicians.
One of Rhine’s vaguest descriptions is his account in New Frontiers of the Mind, p. 94, of the historic occasion on which one of his subjects scored 25 correct “hits” in a row. This was the most sensational test Rhine ever personally observed and one that he returns to again and again in his later lectures and writings. Here is a partial list of important questions that one would wish to have answered before evaluating the test. (1) How many cards were in the pack used? (2) What exactly does Rhine mean when he says that each card was “returned to the pack and a cut made?” (If this means that each card was placed on top, then cut to the center, this procedure would tend to keep bringing the same few cards back to the top each time.) (3) Did Rhine look at each card before it was named, or after? (4) Did Rhine show each card to the subject after it was named? (5) Was it a pack the subject could have handled on previous occasions? (6) Were the cards examined later by card gambling experts to determine if they were marked in any way? (7) Was a careful check made of the room to insure against possible reflections of the cards in shiny surfaces? (8) Exactly how many cards were incorrectly called before the run of 25 correct hits? (It is clear from the text that there were at least seven misses, possibly more.)
There is an obvious and suggestive analogy between parapsychology’s preoccupation with purely statistical evidence, with all its murky aspects, and the preoccupation of mediums with phenomena that for some odd reason take place only in darkness.
For an excellent recent example see “A Methodological Refinement in the Study of ‘ESP,’ and Negative Findings,” by Kendon Smith and Harry J. Canon, Science, July 23, 1954.
See Aldous Huxley’s two articles, “A Case for ESP, PK, and Psi,” Life, Jan. 11, 1954, and “Facts and Fetishes,” Esquire, Sept., 1956.
See his Eyeless Sight, translated by C. K. Ogden, Putnams, 1924. This ridiculous work is devoted to Romains’ extensive experiments proving that microscopic rudimentary organs of vision are present everywhere on the body in cells of the skin. The skin is thus able to “see” both form and color, providing a physical explanation of certain types of clairvoyance.
An anthology of psychoanalytic papers dealing favorably with telepathy, Psychoanalysis and the Occult, edited by George Devereux (see Note 6 to the next chapter), was published in 1953. See also New Dimensions of Deep Analysis, 1954, by Jan Ehrenwald; The Use of the Telepathy Hypothesis in Psychotherapy, 1952, by Jule Eisenbud; and two articles by Eisenbud, “Psychiatric Contributions to Parapsychology: A Review,” Journal of Parapsychology, Dec., 1949; and “Telepathy in Psychoanalytical Treatment,” Tomorrow, Winter, 1952-53.
In reminiscing about Einstein, Saturday Review, April 14, 1956, Sinclair tells once more the story of this table tipping. The levitation occurred in a darkened room under familiar seance circle conditions. A later attempt was made to repeat the performance, Sinclair reveals, with Einstein and several other physicists present, but owing to a “hostile influence” in the room, nothing happened.
The following amusing excerpt from Frank Joglar’s column in a magic trade journal (Hugard’s Magic Monthly, Aug., 1953), should give the astute reader some insight into Dunninger’s methods:
One of his [Dunninger’s] best recent stunts was a twist on his familiar sealed prophecy test. In this one he wrote in advance the name and address of an envelope later to be selected, also the sender’s name and address and the postmark. He sealed the cardboard in an envelope and passed it to three newsmen. If you didn’t recognize Bob Dunn, the method may have puzzled you. On the screen the postmaster of the N. Y. Post Office was seen by a conveyor belt. Sacks of mail went past. He selected one. Opened it, spilled but the letters. Then he chose one. The camera took a closeup. The three newsmen made notes of what was written on it, then Dunninger’s prediction was opened. Success! The information was the same!
CHAPTER 26
Notes
The silliest of these books is You DO Take it with You, by R. DeWitt Miller, 1956. The “it” in the title has reference mainly to sex.
See Herbert Brean’s picture article, “Bridey Murphy Puts Nation in a Hypnotizzy,” Life, March 19, 1956.
From his delightfully written article, “Bridey Murphy: An Irishman’s View,” Fantasy and Science Fiction, Aug., 1956. The article criticizes the book, on internal evidence alone, for picturing “an Ireland that never was, save in the minds of the uninformed and the vulgar.” See also editor Anthony Boucher’s shrewd comments in the earlier, May, 1956 issue.
From Campbell’s unfavorable review of A Scientific Report on “The Search for Bridey Murphy,” edited by Dr. Milton V. Kline, Julian Press, 1956.
The Chicago American articles were syndicated by the Hearst papers. In New York City they ran daily in the Journal American from June 10 through June 18, 1956. The finding of Bridey was reported in Time, June 18, 1956 (“Yes, Virginia, There is a Bridey”) and Life, June 25, 1956.
For an amusing example of wild psychoanalytical-anagrammatical-numerological speculation, see the discussion of these and other names in George Devereux’s pompous article, “Bridey Murphy: a Psychoanalytic View,” Tomorrow, Summer, 1956 (an issue devoted primarily to pieces on Bridey). Devereux finds “crushing evidence” that Bridey’s imaginary husband, Sean Joseph Brian MacCarthy, is a symbol of Bernstein. The initials of Brian MacCarthy, reversed, are the initials of Morey Bernstein. Two names have a “y” ending, and the other two end in “ein” and “ien” (provided we spell Brian “Brien”). If we cross out the letters both names have in common we take care of all except A,C,C,A,H in the husband’s name, and O,E,E,N,S in Bernstein’s name. Devereux conveniently ignores the excess letters in the husband’s name, then goes on to point out that three of the excess letters in Bernstein’s name are to be found in “Sean.” The remaining two letters, O,E, appear in “Joseph.” “Interestingly,” Devereux adds, “they are set apart from the other letters since they are the only two vowels in that name . . .” (italics his).
Shades of Jung and the ancient Cabbalists! My own opinion is that Virginia identified her imaginary husband with George Devereux. If we take the husband’s name to be Joseph McCarthy (spelling it with an “Mc”) then we find that “Joseph” and “George” both have six letters and “Devereux” and “McCarthy” both have eight, the total being fourteen which is also the total for “Morey Bernstein.” Surely one cannot expect chance to account for this astonishing similarity. Moreover, we find that “George Devereux” and “Joseph McCarthy” have only three letters in common, E,R,O; three of the four letters of “Eros,” Greek god of love. Even the missing S is accounted for if we use the French spelling, “Georges.”
Devereux also holds the opinion that “Bridie” is the diminutive of “bride,” hence Virginia thought of herself unconsciously as Bernstein’s “little bride.” Apparently it no more occurred to Devereux than to Bernstein that Virginia might have known a Bridie Murphy. Nor did he consider the startling possibility that Virginia’s memory of scratching paint off her bed could have been a memory (firmly implanted by a strapping) of scratching paint off her bed. “. . . we are dealing here,” he writes delicately, “with a so-called screen-memory . . . a fictitious ‘memory’ made up to blanket a real and less presentable memory of what had, in fact, taken place.” I cite only the more plausible parts of Devereux’s involved symbolic analysis. It is surprising that the initials of Bridey Murphy did not suggest an anal complex to the learned doctor.