THE BELIEF IN psychic phenomena—or “parapsychology” as its more dignified proponents like to call it—is as old as humanity. Not until the last century, however, were attempts made to give it a scientific, laboratory-tested foundation. These studies range all the way from obviously crackpot research to the work of sane, reputable psychologists like Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University, and Gardner Murphy at the City College of New York. In this chapter we shall focus our attention on the work of Rhine, who has done more than any one man in history to give scientific respectability to the investigation of psychic forces.
It should be stated immediately that Rhine is clearly not a pseudo-scientist to a degree even remotely comparable to that of most of the men discussed in this book. He is an intensely sincere man, whose work has been undertaken with a care and competence that cannot be dismissed easily, and which deserves a far more serious treatment than this cursory study permits. He is discussed here only because of the great interest that centers around his findings as a challenging new “unorthodoxy” in modern psychology, and also because he is an excellent example of a borderline scientist whose work cannot be called crank, yet who is far on the outskirts of orthodox science.
There is obviously an enormous, irrational prejudice on the part of most American psychologists—much greater than in England, for example—against even the possibility of extra-sensory mental powers. It is a prejudice which I myself, to a certain degree, share. Just as Rhine’s own strong beliefs must be taken into account when you read his highly persuasive books, so also must my own prejudice be taken into account when you read what follows.
Dr. Rhine was born in 1895 at Waterloo, Pa., but spent most of his childhood in a small Ohio town. As a young man he served two years in the Marines, then entered the University of Chicago where he was graduated in 1922. Later he received a doctorate in botany from Chicago, and for a time taught that subject at West Virginia University. As a youth he had intended to become a Protestant minister. But over the years his orthodox convictions evaporated and he began to look elsewhere for something to support the broad religious views he still retained.
It was in this frame of mind that he and his wife, in the early twenties, attended a lecture on spiritualism by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The lecture made a deep impression on them both. “. . . clearly if there was a measure of truth in what he [Doyle] believed,” Rhine has written, “misguided though Sir Arthur might be in details, it would be of transcendental importance. This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had for years.”
These emotions led to a long period of immersion, on the part of Rhine and his wife, in the literature and practice of spiritualism. “Psychic adventures” is a term Rhine has used for this early exploratory work. In 1927, he became a research assistant at Duke University, working on psychic forces under Professor William McDougall, formerly of Oxford and Harvard. He joined the Duke faculty in 1928, and since 1940 has been director of the school’s Parapsychology Laboratory.
Rhine’s first report on his experiments was published in 1934 under the title Extra-Sensory Perception. This was followed by New Frontiers of the Mind, 1937; Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, 1940 (of which he was a co-author); and The Reach of the Mind, 1947.1 Since 1937, he has edited the Journal of Parapsychology, probably the most important journal in the history of scientific psychic investigation, and written numerous articles for popular magazines.
In his books and articles, Rhine puts forth the claim that ESP (“extra-sensory perception,” a term including telepathy and clairvoyance) has been demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt by means of several million tests with ESP cards. These are cards bearing five easily distinguishable symbols—a square, circle, cross, star, and wavy lines. They are usually used in decks of twenty-five cards each, five cards for each symbol. In more recent years Rhine has turned his attention toward another type of “psi” phenomena (his term for “psychic”) which he calls PK, an abbreviation of “psychokinesis.” This is the ability of the mind to control matter, as exemplified in mediumistic levitations, faith healing, haunted house phenomena, and so on. By having subjects concentrate on certain faces of dice, which are shaken by hand or thrown by a machine, he claims to have found that these faces show up more often than laws of chance allow.
Both ESP and PK, Rhine reports, are curiously free of space and time restrictions. For example, ESP works just as well when the subject and cards are separated by a considerable distance. They also work just as well when the subject is calling the order of a deck before it is shuffled. The latter ability is called “pre-cognition.” As Rhine has written, “. . . there was no appreciable difference in the scoring, whether the subjects were calling the present or the future order of the cards.” The phenomenon of pre-cognition has been a great headache to Rhine, because it makes it extremely difficult to devise a test for pure telepathy. Instead of reading a sender’s mind, the subject may be “seeing” by pre-cognitive clairvoyance the final tabulated results of the test! Since every test must eventually be tabulated in some manner, it becomes an understandably difficult task to rule out pre-cognition as the explanation.
The independence of psi phenomena from space and time makes it impossible to explain them by any known physical theory. This leads to the view, Rhine argues, that at least part of the mind is detached from the physical world—a fact which lends support to beliefs in the soul, free will, and survival after death. In addition, if ESP and PK exist, then a solid core of truth is established behind all the obvious fraud and flummery of spiritualism. Rhine believes, for instance, that mediums, Ouija board operators, and automatic writers often give out information picked up by telepathy, clairvoyance and pre-cognition.
Rhine’s work also lends support to common folk beliefs about the psychic powers of animals. In American Magazine, June 1951, he published an article called “Can Your Pet Read Your Mind?” in which he presents the case for these views. Rhine is convinced that “Lady,” a professional mind-reading horse in Richmond, Virginia, had psychic powers.2 He also tells about a dog in California that howled all day and stopped just as an earthquake occurred at Long Beach, and a collie that whimpered under a bed until an explosion at a nearby plant killed his master. In both cases, Rhine thinks, the dogs had pre-cognition of coming events. (See also his article, “The Mystery of the Animal Mind,” in The American Weekly, March 30, 1952.)
Exactly what is one to make of such startling claims? Has Dr. Rhine and his associates given psi phenomena a sound empirical basis, or is his research highly suspect by scientific standards? Since the case for his work is so readily obtainable in his books and articles, and the case against him buried in academic publications, we will summarize the most important criticisms which have been made by sceptical psychologists.
The most damaging fact against Rhine is that, with very few exceptions, the only experimenters who have confirmed his findings are men who share his strong belief in psychic phenomena. Hundreds of tests by doubting psychologists have been made, and yielded negative results. Rhine attributes this to the fact that the attitude of the experimenter has a marked influence on the subject. If the scientist is a disbeliever it will upset the delicate operation of the subject’s psi abilities. Critics of Rhine counter by accusing him of having performed his own experiments under a loose system of laboratory controls, and of having selected for publication only a small portion of the total number of tests made. H. L. Mencken (in an article on Rhine, Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 6, 1937) summed up the second criticism as follows: “In plain language, Professor Rhine segregates all those persons who, in guessing the cards, enjoy noteworthy runs of luck, and then adduces those noteworthy runs of luck as proof that they must possess mysterious powers . . . .”
This alleged “selection” is not a deliberate process, but something which operates subtly and unconsciously. To give one example, let us suppose an experimenter tests 100 students in a classroom to determine who should be given additional testing. By the laws of chance, about fifty of these students will score above average and fifty below (group tests, according to Rhine, nearly always show such over-all chance results). The experimenter decides that high scorers are most likely to be psychic, so they are called in for further testing. The low scorers in this second test are again dropped, and work continued with the high ones. Eventually, one individual will remain who has scored above average on six or seven successive tests. As an isolated case, the odds against such a run are high, but in view of the selective process just described, such a run would be expected.
A competent experimenters would not, of course, be guilty of anything as crude as this, but the illustration suggests how tricky the matter of selection is. To give a better illustration, let us imagine that one hundred professors of psychology throughout the country read of Rhine’s work and decide to test a subject. The fifty who fail to find ESP in their first preliminary test are likely to be discouraged and quit, but the other fifty will be encouraged to continue. Of this fifty, more will stop work after the second test, while some will continue because they obtained good results. Eventually, one experimenter remains whose subject has made high scores for six or seven successive sessions. Neither experimenter nor subject is aware of the other ninety-nine projects, and so both have a strong delusion that ESP is operating. The odds are, in fact, much against the run. But in the total (and unknown) context, the run is quite probable. (The odds against winning the Irish sweepstakes are even higher. But someone does win it.) So the experimenter writes an enthusiastic paper, sends it to Rhine who publishes it in his magazine, and the readers are greatly impressed.
At this point one may ask, “Would not this experimenter be disappointed if he continues testing his subject?” The answer is yes, but as Rhine tells us, subjects almost always show a marked decline in ability after their initial successes. In addition, he writes, “. . . experimenters who were once successful may even lose their gift. There are cases . . . of research workers who found evidence of psi capacities in one or more experimental series and became less successful in later ones even with the same experimental conditions. This failure is understandable . . . in view of the loss of original curiosity and initial enthusiasm, but it shows clearly the extreme elusiveness of psi.” The failure is also understandable, one must add, in terms of the laws of chance.
In testing individuals, when a score falls to chance or below, Rhine has a great many “outs” which make use of that score to support ESP rather than count against it. Thus the subject may be scoring not on the correct card (known as the “target”) but on the card ahead. This phenomenon is called “forward displacement.” Or he may be scoring on the card behind (“backward displacement”). Such displacement of ESP may even be two or three cards ahead or behind! Clearly if one can choose between all these possible variations, there is a strong likelihood one of them will show scores above average. If no displacement is found, however, a chance score may be attributed to some disturbance of the subject’s mental state. He may be worried about his studies, or bored, or distracted by visitors, displeased with the experimenter, ill, tired, skeptical of the work, low in I.Q., neurotic, or in a state of emotional crisis. Even the experimenter, if he is in any of these regrettable states, may inhibit the subject by unconscious telepathy. All these factors are specifically cited by Rhine as contributory to low scoring. In his dice experiments, a low score may even be due, he says, to the fact that a person “dislikes” a certain set of dice! (We are not told whether the person expresses his dislike before or after the test.) As Rhine understates it, “the subtlest influences seem to disturb the operation of these abilities.”
Of course when scores are high, no one is likely to look for “subtle influences.” But if scores drop low, the search begins. Naturally they will not be hard to find. Usually if low scores continue, the tests are discontinued. If the scores are extremely low, they are regarded as a negative form of ESP. This is called “avoidance of the target.” In our previous chapter on dowsing, we reported Henry Gross’ poor scoring when tested by Rhine. Recently, however (in The American Weekly, March 23, 1952), Rhine has disclosed that Henry didn’t fail after all! He was “unconsciously rebelling,” Rhine writes, and adds, “He could not have made so many misses by mere coincidence.”
“Avoidance of the target” may occur even in the dice work. “There is a common characteristic of shiftiness of aim in both ESP and PK” Rhine writes, “. . . a tendency under certain conditions not only to avoid the target, but sometimes to fix upon the target nearest in some respect to the one intended.” The phrase “in some respect” deserves attention. Let us suppose the subject is trying to make the dice show 3’s. The results are negative. But when they are examined more closely, they may show a high number of 4’s. Now 4 is “in some respect” close to 3, since it comes after 3. Likewise 2 would be close, because it comes before 3. Or perhaps 6’s show up, a number the subject had tried to make in the previous test. This would be a “lag effect.” And of course pre-cognition might cause the subject to throw the next number to be chosen for testing. With this sort of jugglery possible, how can one lose? I myself have often noticed, in playing the “26 game” in Chicago, an exasperating tendency the cubes have of showing extremely high hits on numbers other than the one desired.
Obviously, unless all the “displaced” scores are averaged into the total picture, a statistical distortion results. If one experiment is published to show how the subject “hit the target,” and the next experiment is published to show how the subject hit some other target than the one intended, then nothing at all is proved. That the number of hits falls close to chance when all results are lumped together is strongly indicated by the following statement. “This rejection of the target depresses the scoring rate below the chance average, and if it continues long enough, as it has in a number of researches, the total negative deviation reaches the point where it cannot be attributed to chance.” A gambler would put it more simply. He would say that he often has runs of extremely good luck, but usually interspersed with runs of very bad luck.
“Sometimes the subject will score on the negative side of the mean chance line at one session,” Rhine continues, “and on the other side at the next. He may not even know what is causing the swing. Worse still, he may begin his run on one side of the mean and swing to the other side just as far by the time he ends the run; or he may go below in the middle of the run and above at both ends. The two trends of deviation may cancel each other and the series as a whole average close to ‘chance.’ ”
Here is the description of an ESP card test. “. . . the displacement was both forward and backward when one of the senders was looking at the card, and only in the forward direction with another individual as sender; and whether the displacement shifted to the first or the second card away from the target depended upon the speed of the test.” No wonder Rhine speaks of ESP as “incredibly elusive”—having a “fickleness,” “skittishness,” and “shiftiness” which makes it the “most variable ability on record.”
In addition to selection of data, the possibility of “recording errors” must also be taken into account in evaluating the Duke experiments. A number of tests have been made in recent years at other universities which have demonstrated dramatically the fact that believers in ESP are prone to make mistakes in recording calls, and such mistakes almost always favor ESP. At Stanford University, for instance, a test was made with 1,000 ESP cards. The calls were recorded by a person who believed strongly in ESP. According to chance, 200 cards should have been correctly guessed. The final score showed 229 guesses. Unknown to the person, however, a sound recording was made of the experiment. When this was checked against the records, 46 spurious hits were found. This reduced the score to slightly below chance level. When the experiment was repeated, and the person knew recordings were being made, only two errors were found.
A more recent test, made in 1952 by Richard S. Kaufman at Yale, involved a PK experiment with 96 dice. Each of eight persons kept records of forty successive tosses, without being aware that a hidden camera was recording everything. The four persons who believed in PK made errors in favor of PK, while the four disbelievers made errors of the opposite sort. According to the camera, the actual results conformed to chance. But the records of two believers had enough favorable errors to indicate PK. Mistakes of this sort need not be conscious fraud. Under the excitement and tenseness of such work, the mind can play strange tricks, and it is easy to understand how mistakes would be guided by one’s bias. Incidentally, these favorable recording errors would be more likely at the beginning of a session, when interest and expectancy of success is at a pitch, then decrease as the clerks become tired and bored and start making random mistakes. This would explain the consistent decline in success which is shown in·most of Rhine’s dice tests, and which he regards as the strongest evidence in favor of PK. Dice tests also have a tendency to decline, then pick up again toward the close. Again, this is understandable. The knowledge that the experiment will soon be over could easily cause clerks to perk up a bit, and start making favorable errors once more.
The possibility of recording error runs through all of Rhine’s work. His tests have been made under hundreds of widely different conditions, the descriptions of which are usually vague.3 You seldom are told exactly who recorded, how it was recorded, or what the beliefs were of clerks who kept the records. Only in later years did Rhine tighten his controls to prevent such mistakes, and it is significant that the more rigid these controls became, the less ESP was found. “. . . Elaborate precautions take their toll,” he writes. “Experimenters who have worked long in this field have observed that the scoring rate is hampered as the experiment is made complicated, heavy, and slow-moving. Precautionary measures are usually distracting in themselves.”
In short, elaborate precautions disturb the subject’s psi ability. ESP and PK can be found only when the experiments are relatively careless, and supervised by experimenters who are firm believers. Although Rhine has found many subjects whom he regarded as psychic to a high degree, he has not found a single subject capable of demonstrating ESP to sceptical scientists at other universities. Naturally he has explanations for this, but is it surprising that “orthodox” psychology hesitates to accept the existence of psi phenomena as proven?
In connection with Rhine’s dice experiments, Clayton Rawson has pointed out (in Scarne on Dice, 1945) that a considerable PK push of some sort must be required to make a rolling die shift to another side (the size and weight of the dice have no effect on the results, Rhine has stated). Such a force could easily be demonstrated, Rawson writes, by a delicately balanced arrow, under a vacuum jar, which the subject would cause to rotate by concentrating. If mediums are capable of lifting heavy tables by PK, surely a medium should be able to set in motion such a simple laboratory device. Why, Rawson and Scarne want to know, does Rhine neglect such an unambiguous test and turn to experiments with dice which are subject to the same pitfalls of statistical error and unconscious selection that are involved in card testing?4.
Another disturbing question comes to mind. For decades Chicagoans have played the “26 game” in their bars and cabarets. Ten dice are shaken from a cup, the player betting a certain number will show up at least 26 times in 13 rolls. Obviously the tired and bored dice-girl, who tallies each roll, doesn’t care one way or another. Obviously the player is doing his damnedest to roll the number. How does it happen that these tally sheets, year after year, show precisely the percentage of house take allowed by the laws of chance? One would expect PK to operate strongly under such conditions.
Aristotle wrote that it was probable the improbable would sometimes take place; or as Charlie Chan once expressed it, “Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring.” Considering the fact that Rhine has now supervised several million calls of cards and dice, most of which were made without adequate safeguards against recording errors, it would be unusual indeed if he had not encountered runs of incredibly high scores. In some early cases, there may even have been deliberate cheating on the part of subjects, since they are often paid for their services and only a subject showing psi ability would be repeatedly tested. (Three cards in an ESP deck are all that need be marked, by a fingernail scraped on the edge for example, to enable a subject who sees the deck to make average scores of above 7.) By treating high runs as evidence of ESP and PK, and finding plausible excuses for chance and low scores, is it possible Rhine has become the victim of an enormous self-deception?
When proponents of ESP accuse orthodox psychologists of having ignored psi phenomena, the answer is that it isn’t true. Many careful experiments have been made, and with negative results.5 To mention one outstanding example, Prof. John E. Coover, of Stanford University, made extensive and carefully controlled ESP tests which were published in detail in 1917, in a 600-page work, Experiments in Psychical Research. Recently Rhine and others have gone over Coover’s tables, looking for forward and negative displacement, etc. They insist that ESP is concealed in his figures. But other statisticians regard this as a process akin to the marvelous cipher messages which Ignatius Donnelly and other Bacon-Shakespeare scholars managed to dig out of Shakespeare’s plays. You can always find patterns in tables of chance figures if you look deep enough.
In spite of the far from conclusive quality of the evidence, however, many intelligent and prominent moderns have accepted ESP. Among philosophers and psychologists—William James, Henry Sidgwick, William McDougall, Henri Bergson, and Hans Driesch are outstanding. Among writers—Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley,6 Gerald Heard (whose book Preface to Prayer explores the role of ESP in prayer fulfillment), Jules Romains,7 H. G. Wells, Maurice Maeterlinck, Sir Gilbert Murray, Upton Sinclair, Arthur Koestler, and many others may be cited. In Koestler’s recent book, Insight and Outlook, he speaks of Rhine’s work as having ushered in a new Copernican Revolution.
It may surprise many to learn that there is a strong tendency to accept ESP on the part of psychoanalysts.8 Freud himself wrote several papers on the subject, pointing out that dreams received telepathically would be subject to the usual distortions, that fortune-tellers might pick up repressed wishes from clients, and that a patient engaged in free-associating on the couch may have his thoughts confused by telepathic contact with the analyst. Jung and Stekel were two other prominent analysts who accepted telepathy. A few contemporary Freudians, like New York City analyst Nandor Fodor, have managed to combine psychoanalysis with a thoroughgoing occultism. The results are as weird as you might imagine. Fodor’s Search for the Beloved, 1949, is a good example. The book discusses the telepathic influence of a mother’s thoughts on the mind and body of her unborn child, and even speculates on the possibility that the embryo’s mental state may be communicated by ESP to the mother. The old superstition about birthmarks is defended by Fodor, who thinks the mother’s shock experiences may be sent by telepathy to the child. He cites the case of a “coffee-colored splash on the neck of a beautiful woman whose mother had spilt hot coffee over herself while carrying the child.” In this case, the woman with the birthmark happened to have a twin sister without a mark, but Fodor is untroubled by such a fact. “. . . We know nothing about the relative sensitivity of twins,” he points out.
The book was published by the same house which later published Dianetics, and it is interesting to note that Fodor anticipates much of Hubbard’s work by his stress on the harm that can be done to an unborn child’s mind by attempted abortion. In Fodor’s view, however, most of the harm is telepathically caused by the mother’s wish to have the child done away with. A chapter titled “The Love Life of the Unborn,” in which he traces the origin of nymphomania, satyriasis, and other aberrations to the influence of the mother’s sex life on her unborn child, is surely one of the most curious in all the annals of Freudian literature. Nevertheless Fodor contributes to many respectable psychoanalytical journals.
Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio deserves comment because it is the best known and most impressive record of clairvoyance in recent psychic literature. The book was published in 1930, with an introduction by Einstein to the German edition. It is a record of a series of clairvoyant experiments by Sinclair’s second (and present) wife, in which she attempted to duplicate 290 simple drawings, most of them by her husband, made at a variety of times and under varying conditions. The tests took place while she was passing through a period of profound depression and with a heightened interest in occult phenomena. The interest was occasioned by the Sinclairs’ friendship with Roman Ostoja, a professional mind reader identified in the book only as “Jan.” This young psychic had such a standard and conventional repertory of stunts that it is hard to understand how the Sinclairs could have taken him seriously. He would remain buried several hours, for example, in an air-tight coffin. He performed what is known in the magic trade as “muscle reading.” On one occasion, in a seance, he levitated a 34-pound table eight feet over Upton’s head!9 The Sinclairs accepted all these powers as genuine.
As Mental Radio stands, it is a highly unsatisfactory account of conditions surrounding the clairvoyancy tests. Throughout his entire life, Sinclair has been a gullible victim of mediums and psychics. His first article, written at the age of twenty, was contributed to a theosophical magazine. His latest writings, the ten novels of the Lanny Budd series, are marred throughout by frequent intrusions of psychic matters. The last volume, O Shepherd Speak!, is filled with eulogies of Dr. Rhine. It also describes a faith cure performed by Lanny, and seances in which Lanny speaks to the departed spirits of Bergson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The title of the book comes from the FDR seance, at which Roosevelt apologizes for his agreement with Stalin at Yalta—surely the most embarrassing scene in all of Sinclair’s novels.
Of the 290 pictures used in the tests with his wife, Sinclair estimates that she successfully duplicated 65 of them, with 155 “partial successes,” and 70 failures. The paired drawings reproduced in the book, showing Mrs. Sinclair’s sketch next to her husband’s, are strikingly similar, though on a few the similarity requires that one drawing be turned upside down. It is not necessary, however, to assume clairvoyance in order to explain these results. In the first place, an intuitive wife, who knows her husband intimately, may be able to guess with a fair degree of accuracy what he is likely to draw—particularly if the picture is related to some freshly recalled event the two experienced in common. At first, simple pictures like chairs and tables would likely predominate, but as these are exhausted, the field of choice narrows and pictures are more likely to be suggested by recent experiences. It is also possible that Sinclair may have given conversational hints during some of the tests—hints which in his strong will to believe, he would promptly forget about. Also, one must not rule out the possibility that in many tests, made across the width of a room, Mrs. Sinclair may have seen the wiggling of the top of a pencil, or arm movements, which would convey to her unconscious a rough notion of the drawing. (Many professional mentalists are highly adept at this art.)
Very few of the “partial successes” are shown. Are they as successful as Sinclair says they are? Again, we are told that 290 drawings were used in the tests. Can we be sure this is an accurate total count of all drawings tested? It is easy to find excuses for “not counting” an attempt—a headache, an upsetting event, or others. There would be little incentive to save such attempts, if they were failures, and Sinclair is certainly capable of losing them and forgetting about them. Successes, of course, would be carefully preserved. In many such ways an unconscious selective process may have operated.
One can only wish that the tests had been supervised by competent psychologists familiar with the subtle ways experiments of this sort can go astray. Like Conan Doyle, Sinclair is a persuasive writer on psychic subjects, but we must remember that like Doyle, he is also exceedingly naive about the safeguards necessary to insure a controlled experiment. As a consequence, it is as impossible to rely on Sinclair’s memory of the crucial details as to rely on Doyle’s account, say, of his investigations of spirit photography. Later, when Mrs. Sinclair’s health was better, she was tested by Prof. William McDougall, under better precautions, and the results were far less satisfactory. Since Sinclair ran for Governor of California in 1934, she has made no more experiments with ESP, though occasionally she startles her husband by some spontaneous manifestation of apparently psychic insight.
Thomas Edison is another good example of the self-styled psychic expert. He not only believed in telepathy, but on one occasion was completely taken in by a professional mountebank, Dr. Bert Reese, who had no more genuine mind-reading ability than modern stage mentalists like Dunninger, whose methods are well-known to magicians. 10 Edison was so impressed, however, that he wrote a letter to The Evening Graphic, in New York City, in which he stated his conviction Reese was a genuine psychic. The recently published Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, reveals a theory of the human mind surprisingly similar to the menorgs and disorgs of Alfred Lawson! Edison expressed his belief that in the human brain are millions of submicroscopic intelligences whom he called “little peoples.” They rush about performing the desired mental functions, and are under the control of “master entities” who “live in the fold of Broca.” Before he died in 1931, Edison was working on a sensitive piece of apparatus for communicating with departed spirits.
Edison’s friend, Luther Burbank, is another example of a man who held curious occult views even though he achieved greatness in one field of practical science. Burbank communicated often with his sister by telepathy, had visions of his departed mother, and was firmly persuaded that plants had a sensitive nervous system capable of responding to love and hate. The Indian Yogi Paramhansa Yogananda, in an autobiography, quotes his friend Burbank as saying, “Yes, I have often talked to my plants in order to create a vibration of love. . . . One person will plant a flower, attend it carefully, and it will wither. But under identical physical care, a second person may develop that same flower into a healthy thriving plant. The secret . . . is love.”
A book worth noting in this connection is Secret Science Behind Miracles, 1948, by Max Freedom Long, issued by the Kosmon Press of Los Angeles. Long is the director of the Huna Research Foundation, devoted to the study of Polynesian and Hawaiian Kahuna mystic lore. The book deals with the influence of the mind’s vital force (which the Kahunas call “mana”) over matter. To test the power of mana, Long recently has been experimenting with growing plants. He has discovered that if you talk to plants, as Burbank did, giving them love and attention, they grow faster and more luxuriantly than neglected plants. Similar work with corn and soy beans has been reported by Edgar Block, a Huna associate in Indianola, Indiana, and Dr. Rhine recently disclosed in The American Weekly (April 20, 1952) that a French doctor and his wife were able to stimulate plant growth by mental efforts. Dr. Littlefield’s work with evaporating salt solutions, described in Chapter 10, may be regarded as still another variety of PK phenomena.
Charles Fort accepted both ESP and PK, in spite of his own private experiments which were not too successful. One month he made a thousand attempts to “see” clairvoyantly the contents of a store window before he had walked close enough to inspect it. Only three of his attempts met with success, the most striking being the first. He was walking along West Forty-Second Street when he concentrated on a window ahead and immediately thought “turkey tracks in red snow” (Red snow was one of Fort’s special interests at the time.) The window proved, he reports in Wild Talents, to have in it track-like lines of black fountain pens against a background of pink cardboard.
On another occasion Fort experimented with PK. “The one great ambition of my life,” he writes, “for which I would abandon my typewriter at any time—well, not if I were joyously setting down some particularly nasty little swipe at priests or scientists—is to say to chairs and tables, ‘Fall in! forward! march!’ and have them obey me. I have tried this. . . . But a more unmilitary lot of furniture than mine, nobody has.”
Nevertheless Fort regarded PK as one of the “wild talents.” “Teleportation” was his term for it—a term now common in science fiction. Objects, people, ships—anything could be teleported (moved from place to place) by individuals who possessed the power. Cargoes might be teleported commercially. Space ships might be teleported from planet to planet. It was Fort’s belief that intelligences in other worlds frequently picked up human beings, perhaps for research purposes, and teleported them away. “I think we’re fished for,” he wrote. His books are filled with press accounts of men and women who vanished mysteriously and were never seen again. In 1910 a girl disappeared from Central Park. On the same day, Fort discovered, a swan appeared on the Park’s lake near 79th Street. Could there be a connection? Ambrose Bierce vanished from Texas. An Ambrose Small vanished from Canada. “Was somebody collecting Ambroses?” Fort asked.
Not only are people teleported off the earth, Fort thought, but perhaps inhabitants of other worlds are teleported here. They would be throwbacks—men with affinities for our barbarisms. “They would join our churches. . . . They’d lose all sense of decency and become college professors. Let a fall start, and the decline is swift. They’d end up as members of Congress.”
“Poltergeists” are mischievous spirits who are supposed to cause the disturbances in bewitched houses. (Haunted People, a Freudian study of poltergeist and related phenomena, by Nandor Fodor and Hereward Carrington, was published by Dutton in 1952.) One of Fort’s “acceptances” was that poltergeists are children with the powers of teleporting objects. Perhaps such children could be used in time of war. Not even Dr. Rhine, who in his latest book speculates on how increased psi powers might make war obsolete (since no military secrets could be kept), has equaled this Fortean vision:
Girls at the front—and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm—the enemy is advancing. Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate—-and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum.
A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls—it pours upon the battlefield.
The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.