CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8

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BEHAVIOR
COVER STORY
Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier
Glendower: I can call spirits from the
vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can
any man;
But will they come when you do call
for them?
-Henry IV
For all the enormous achievements
of science in posting the universe that
man inhabits, odd things keep slipping
past the sentries. The tap on the shoul-
der may be fleeting, the brush across the
cheek gone sooner than it is felt, but
the momentary effect is unmistakable:
an unwilling suspension of belief in the
and memory? Could there be a para-
normal world exempt from known nat-
ural law?
Both in America and abroad, those
questions are being asked by increasing
numbers of laymen and scientists hun-
gry for answers. The diverse manifes-
tations of interest in so-called psychic
phenomena are everywhere:
In the U.S., The Secret Life of
Plants becomes a bestseller by offering
an astonishing and heretical thesis:
greenery can feel the thoughts of
humans.
At Maimonides Medical Center in
New York City, the image of a paint-
spoons and keys apparently with the
force of his thoughts.
In the Philippines, Tennis Star
Tony Roche is relieved of painful "ten-
nis elbow" when an incision is made and
three blood clots are apparently re-
moved by the touch of a psychic healer,
who knows nothing of surgery or of mod-
ern sanitation.
> In the U.S., the number of col-
leges offering courses in parapsychology
increases to more than 100.
> In the U.S.S.R., researchers file
reports on blindfolded women who can
"sec" colors with their hands.
In California, ex-Astronaut Edgar
HENRY GROSKINSKY
DEVICE SET UP TO RECORD OUT-OF-BODY TRIP AT AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
Questionable procedures costumed in the prim gown of laboratory respectability.
rational. An old friend suddenly remem-
bered, and as suddenly the telephone
rings and the friend is on the line. A
vivid dream that becomes the morning
reality. The sense of bumping into one's
self around a corner of time, of having
done and said just this, in this place,
once before in precisely this fashion. A
stab of anguish for a distant loved one,
and next day, the telegram.
Hardly a person lives who can deny
some such experience, some such seem-
ing visitation from across the psychic
frontier. For most of man's history, those
intrusions were mainsprings of action,
the very life of Greck epic and biblical
saga, of medicval tale and Eastern
chronicle. Modern science and psychol-
ogy have learned to explain much of
what was once inexplicable, but mys-
teries remain. The workings of the mind
still resist rational analysis; reports of
psychic phenomena persist. Are they all
planes and dimensions of experience
ing is transmitted by ESP, and seems to
enter the dreams of a laboratory sub-
ject sleeping in another room.
In England, a poll of its readers
by the New Scientist indicates that near-
ly 70% of the respondents (mainly sci-
entists and technicians) believe in the
possibility of extrasensory perception.
At the University of California,
Psychologist Charles Tart reports that
his subjects showed a marked increase
in ESP scores after working with his new
teaching machine.
In Los Angeles, a leaf is cut in
half, then photographed by a special
process. The picture miraculously shows
the "aura" or outline of the whole leaf.
In Washington, the Defense De-
partment's Advanced Research Projects
Agency assigns a team to investigate
seemingly authentic psychic phenome-
na at the Stanford Research Institute.
Mitchell, who while on the Apollo 14
moon mission conducted telepathy ex-
periments with friends on earth, founds
the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His new
mission: investigate occurrences that
will not yield to rational explanation.
In London, Arthur Koestler ex-
amines psychic research with the zeal
of the believer. Koestler, one of the fore-
most explicators of Establishment sci-
ence (The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Cre-
ation), speaks of "synchronized" events
that lie outside the expectations of prob-
ability. In anecdotes of foresight and ex-
trasensory perception, in the repetition
of events and the strange behavior of
random samplings, Koestler spots what
he calls the roots of coincidence. In his
unforgettable metaphor, modern scien-
tists are "Peeping Toms at the keyhole
of eternity." That keyhole is stuffed with
ancient biases toward the materialistic
On both sides of the Atlantic, Uri
rational
from the emerging field
of psychic research. Once skeptics aban-
accident, illusion? Or are Approved ForReleaseg4903/04/18%, SIA-RDP96-00787R000100030005-8conse-
laymen and scientists alike by bending
TIME MARCH 4. 1974

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CLOCKWISE. FROM LEFT: At Durham's Psychical Rc-
search Foundation, Robert Morris displays test in which
subject outside of room "influences" movement of a cat:
sensory-isolation and telepathy experiment at Maimonides
Medical Center in New York City: Artist and Psychic Ingo
Swann with painting completed after his "out of body" ad-
venture in outer space: gerbil in tests for precognitive pow-
ers at The Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, N.C.
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DEHAVIOR
don those prejudices, says Koestler hey
will be free ApprovedsFomRelease 2000/04/18:001A-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8controls necessary in a
new categorics.
That exploration is already being
conducted by a number of serious para-
normalists in a wide range of disciplines.
In his Foundation for the Research on
the Nature of Man, in Durham, N.C.,
the grand old man of paranormal stud-
ics, J.B. Rhine (see box page 70), still
keeps watch on test animals for precog-
nitive powers. At the nearby Psychical
Research Foundation, William Roll and
a research staff investigates "survival af-
ter bodily death." In studies with a "sen-
sitive" and his pet cat, Roll finds ev-
idence for a human ability "to leave"
VALERY SHUSTOV
RUSSIAN FINGER-READING TEST
Basically show biz.
the body and "visit" the animal. At the
University of Virginia Medical School,
Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson also studies
the plausibilities of reincarnation.
At the Division of Parapsychology
and Psychophysics of the Maimonides
Medical Center, Dr. Montague Ullman
directs tests in which message senders
"think" images into the brains of sleep-
ing subjects. "If we had adequate fund-
ing," says Ullman, "we could have a
major breakthrough in this decade." In
Connecticut, Businessman Robert Nel-
son directs the Central Premonitions
Registry, meticulously recording the
prophecies of the dreams and visions
that people send him.
All of these researchers believe to
some extent in the existence of some
the forms are open to wide debate. Says
Psychologist Gardner Murphy, profes-
sor at the District of Columbia's George
Washington University, and a dean of
psychic researchers, "It may well turn
out that parapsychology will be a mul-
tidisciplinary thing, owing much to psy-
chiatry, neurology ... medicine, bio-
chemistry, social sciences." One of
parapsychology's most famous propo-
nents, in fact, is an anthropologist: Mar-
garet Mcad. It was her passionate ad-
vocacy that helped give the Parapsycho-
logical Association its greatest claim to
legitimacy. After several vain attempts
to enter the eminent American Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science,
the P.A. won membership in 1969-af-
ter a speech by Mead. Her argument:
"The whole history of scientific advance
is full of scientists investigating phenom-
ena that the Establishment did not be-
lieve were there. I submit that we vote
in favor of this association's work." The
final vote: 6 to 1 in favor of admission.
.
Immense Claims. As parapsychol-
ogy gains new respectability, so do its
terms gain wide currency: "psi" for any
psychic phenomenon; "clairvoyance"
for the awareness of events and objects
that lie outside the perimeters of the five
senses; "out-of-body" experience for
seeming to journey to a place that may
be miles from the body; "psychokinesis"
for the mental ability to influence phys-
ical objects; "precognition" for the
foreknowledge of events, from the fall
of dice to the prediction of political as-
sassinations; and the wide-ranging term
ESP for extrasensory perception.
For all its articulate spokesmen and
scientific terminology, however, the new
world of psi still has a serious credibil-
ity problem. One reason is that like any
growth industry or pop phenomenon, it
has attracted a fair share of hustlers. In-
deed, the psychic-phenomena boom
may contain more charlatans and con-
jurers, more naïfs and gullibles than can
be found on the stage and in the au-
dience of ten Ringling Brothers circus-
es. The situation is not helped at all by
the "proofs" that fail to satisfy tradition-
al canons of scientific investigations. De-
spite the published discoveries, despite
the indefatigable explorations of the
psychic researchers, no one has yet been
able to document experiments suffi-
ciently to convince the infidel. For
many, doubt grows larger with each ex-
travagant claim.
To Science and Mathematics Ana-
lyst Martin Gardner (Relativity for the
Million, Ambidextrous Universe), an-
nouncements of psychic phenomena be-
long not to the march of science but to
the pageant of publicity. "Uri Geller,
The Secret Life of Plants, telepathy, ESP,
the incomplete conclusions of Koestler
-all seem part of a new uncritical en-
thusiasm for pseudo science," says Gard-
ner. "The claims are immense, the proof
nonexistent. The researchers, almost
without exception, are emotionally com-
mitted to finding phenomena. And few
Held in which deception, conscious or
unconscious, is all too familiar."
Daniel Cohen, former managing ed-
itor of Science Digest and author of the
debunking volume Myths of the Space
Age, remains unpersuaded by what he
sces through the Koestlerian keyhole.
"After decades of research and exper-
iments," Cohen observes, "the parapsy-
chologists are not one step closer to ac-
ceptable scientific proof of psychic
phenomena. Examining the slipshod
work of the modern researchers, one be-
gins to wonder if any proof exists."
The criticism that psychics find
hardest to counter comes not from sci-
entists but from conjurers. Theoretically,
magicians have no place in serious sci-
ence. But they are entertainers whose
business it is to deceive; thus they feel
that they are better qualified to spot chi-
canery than scientists, who can be woe-
fully naive about the gimmicks and tech-
niques that charlatans may use for
mystical effects. James Randi, who ap-
pears on television as "the Amazing
Randi," duplicates many of Uri Geller's
achievements with a combination of
sleight of hand, misdirected attention
and patented paraphernalia, then calls
them feats of clay. "Scientists who fall
for the paranormal go through the most
devious reasoning," Randi says. "For-
tunes are squandered annually in pur-
suit of mystical forces that are actually
the result of clever deceits. The money
would be better spent investigating the
tooth fairy or Santa Claus. There is more
evidence for their reality."
Pure Deception. Charles Reyn-
olds, editor and member of the Psychic
Investigating Committee of the Amer-
ican Society of Magicians, agrees.
"When evaluating the research, we have
found that the researcher's will to be-
lieve is all powerful. It's a will that has
nothing to do with religion; there are
Marxists, atheists, agnostics who cling
stubbornly to the ancient faith in
black magic. Only now it's called 'the
paranormal.' "
That faith is nowhere more evident
than in the U.S.S.R., which has been
beset in recent years with controversial
sensitives. One, Ninel Kulagina, was ap-
praised as capable of causing objects to
float in mid-air. As Martin Gardner
notes, "She is a pretty, plump, dark-
eyed little charlatan who took the stage
name of Ninel because it is Lenin spelled
backward. She is no more a sensitive
than Kreskin, and like that amiable
American television humbug, she is
basically show biz." Indeed, Ninel
has been caught cheating more than
U.C.L.A. Psychologist Thelma Moss ex-
plores the mysteries of Kirlian photog-
raphy-pictures believed by some to
show the "aura" of living things. Insert:
Kirlian photos of normal elbow (left) and
same elbow while experiencing mild
electrical shock.
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66

CLOCKWISE FROM LIApproved For Release.2003/04/18 A CIA-RDR96-00787R000100030002-8 fraud
the Menninger Foundation prepares a biofeedback test for a
yogi on bed of nails: Ex-Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who
experienced "altered state of consciousness" in outer space,
at his Institute for Noetic Sciences in Palo Alto, Cal .:
who duplicates psychic feats with a combination of sleight-
of-hand. psychology and theatrical gimmicks checks set of
"ESP" cards: Trinidadian "sensitive" performing card clair-
voyance experiment at The Institute for Parapsychology.
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CIA-ROR96-00787R000

!
BEHAVIOR
once by Sovict Establishmentscjesuisseti2000/04/18m(CIA-RDR96-00787R000-1000300028y meets the in-
Another Russian lady, Rosa Kulesh-
ova, can "read" with her fingertips while
securely blindfolded. James Randi, an-
alyzing photographs of Kulcshova,
promptly announced that her act was
"a fraud." To prove his point, he invit-
ed testers to blindfold him with pizza
dough, a mask and a hood. Then he pro-
ceeded to drive a car in traffic. "I won't
tell you how I did it," he says. "But it
was not parapsychologically. It was pure
deception, just as hers was." Such rev-
clations have not deterred the parapsy-
chologists in the U.S.S.R. or elsewhere.
They freely concede that many of their
subjects do sometimes cheat, but still
may have paranormal powers.
In and out of the laboratory, many
paranormalist investigators conduct ex-
periments that mock rigorous and log-
ical procedure. Claims are made, and
the burden of proof is shifted to the
doubter. Ground rules are laid down by
the psychic subject and are all too
eagerly accepted by his examiner. If the
venture proves unsuccessful, a wide
range of excuses are proffered: an un-
believer provided hostile vibrations; the
subject was not receiving well; negative
influences were present; testing rules
were too restrictive. It is all reminiscent
of the laws in Through the Looking-
Glass, where people approach objects by
walking away from them. And it cre-
ates an atmosphere in which even a gen-
uine paranormal subject might have a
hard time certifying his abilities.
No one has contributed more to the
paranormal explosion than Uri Geller,
the handsome, 26-year-old Israeli for-
mer nightclub magician who scoms
equally adept at telepathy, psychokine-
sis and precognition. "I don't want to
spend my whole life in laboratories."
Geller recently told TIME London Cor-
respondent Lawrence Malkin. "I've just
donc a whole year at Stanford Research
Institute [TIME, March 12]. Now I'll go
on to other countries, and let them sec
if they know what it is I've got."
Death Threats. At the Stanford
Research Institute Geller successfully
worked most of his repertoire of mir-
acles. In a film made by S.R.I., Geller
picks the can containing an object from
a group of identical empty cans, influ-
ences laboratory scales, reproduces
drawings scaled in opaque envelopes,
deflects a magnetometer and correctly
calls the upper face of a die in a closed
box-eight times in eight tries. If Gel-
ler's prowess with dice is indeed para-
normal, it raises serious and disturbing
CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT:
Psychic Uri Geller, whose reputed abil-
ity to bend objects with his mind has
stirred sharp debate; ESP test at the
American Society for Psychical Re-
search; Lie Detector Expert Cleve Back-
ster with plant that he believes can
"read" his thoughts; in psychokinesis
test, subject tries to influence sequence
in which bulbs will light.
if S.R.I.'s tests were indeed conducted
with what University of Oregon Profes-
sor Ray Hyman calls "incredible slop-
piness," then other disturbing questions
may be raised. Assigned by the Depart-
ment of Defense to report on the won-
drous happenings at S.R.I., Hyman, ac-
companied by George Lawrence, DOD
projects manager for the Advanced Re-
search Projects Agency, caught Geller
in some outright deceptions.
Unhappily for Geller, his powers
have a tendency to vanish in the pres-
ence of sleight-of-hand men. On the To-
night Show, where Johnny Carson in-
stituted airtight controls at Randi's
suggestion, nothing that Geller attempt-
ed (during an embarrassing 20 minutes)
seemed to work. After a group of Eng-
lish magicians made plans to catch him
BILL EPPRIDGE
PSYCHOLOGIST TART WORKING ESP MACHINE
Searching for a wider kind of self.
in the act during a British tour, Geller
abruptly canceled out, citing mysterious
"death threats."
In the long run, however, Geller's
friends may well be more damaging to
his cause than are his detractors. This
spring the reputable old firm of Dou-
bleday will publish a book entitled Uri
by Dr. Andrija Puharich, who brought
Geller to the U.S. from Israel. In a crude
mishmash of Mission: Impossible, 2001
and the James Bond series, Puharich
(author of a previous volume on the psy-
chedelic effects of mushrooms) soberly
describes his adventures with Geller.
From outer space, highly intelligent
computers called SPECTRA communi-
cate through taped messages, which dis-
appear. "We can only talk to you
through Uri's power," says the mystical
voice. "It is a shame that for such a bril-
liant mind we cannot contact you di-
vestigators from S.R.I., he confesses that
outer-space intelligence directs his
work. But the S.R.I. scientists are not
taken aback. One, Russell Targ, plac-
idly remarks, "The things you are tell-
ing us agree very well with things that
Hal [S.R.I. Colleague Harold Puthoff]
and I believe but we can't prove." Adds
Astronaut Ed Mitchell: "Uri, you're not
saying anything to us we don't in some
way already sense or understand." The
text raises some troubling questions. Is
Puharich indeed in touch with what he
calls "my editor in the sky"? Is his ac-
count of the S.R.I. mecting as true as
his reasonably accurate report of Uri's
mecting a year ago with the editors of
TIME? If it is, why have the S.R.I. sci-
entists failed to mention Uri Geller's
contacts with outer space? Are they
properly fearful of that most
irrefutable antidote to non-
sense: laughter? Or were
they, as they now claim,
merely "humoring" their
subject?
Almost as impressive as
Geller's rise to fame is the
phenomenal success of The
Secret Life of Plants (Har-
per & Row; $8.95), a vol-
ume that is unaccountably
placed on the nonfiction
shelves of bookstores. The
work of two occult journal-
ists, Secret Life is an anthol-
ogy of the absurd, costumed
in the prim gown of labo-
ratory respectability. In it
are researchers like Cleve
Backster, a lie-detector ex-
pert who attached the ter-
minals of his machines to
plants. Bchold! The vegeta-
tion reacted to his thoughts.
Most scientists have greeted
the experiments with open
skepticism-with good rea-
son. After his plants would
not respond for a visiting
Canadian plant physiolo-
gist, for example, Backster
offered an interesting hy-
pothesis: the plants "fainted" because
they sensed that she routinely inciner-
ated her own plants and then weighed
the ashes after her experiments.
Backster is the essence of conserva-
tism compared with the book's more ad-
venturous researchers. A New Jersey
electronics buff, Pierre Paul Sauvin, at-
tached a Rube Goldbergian machine to
his plants, and then spent the weekend
with his girl friend at a place 80 miles
away. He found that even at that dis-
tance the plants had responded to his
sexual relations with the girl. The tone
oscillators went "right off the top," he
says, at the moment of orgasm.
In Japan, Ken Hashimoto, another
polygraph expert, discovered that his
cactus could count and add up to 20.
George De La Warr, a British engineer,
insisted that young plants grew better if
their "mother" were kept alive. Ironi-
COLOR SPREAD (TOP) DON SNYDER-HOR Approved For Release 2003/04/18 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8
PRTOGET (BOTTOM) HENRY GROSKINSKY. OPPOSITE PAGE: (TOP LEFT) BEN MARTIN, GROSKINSKY
69
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BEHAVIOR
cally, the a AbordvetPFor Release 2003/04/481 CIA-RDF96:00787R000100030002-8 is." Stanford Professor
Moss, who has taken more Kirlian pho-
tographs and donc more experimental
work with them than anyone outside
Russia.
selves to some significant facts about
botany. Plants do respond physiological-
ly to certain sound waves. Talking to a
plant may indeed make it healthier, bc-
cause it thrives on the carbon dioxide cx-
haled by the speaker.
Many psychics and their followers
believe that paranormal powers may be
dependent on mysterious auras or "en-
ergy flows," phenomena that they say
can be recorded by Kirlian photogra-
phy. The technique, developed in the
late 1930s by Russian Electronics Ex-
pert Semyon Kirlian and his wife Va-
lentina, involves introducing a small
amount of high-voltage, high-frequency
current into the subject and recording
the subsequent discharge on photo-
graphic film. The result is a photograph
showing an "energy body" -- a weird
aura-around the plant, animal or hu-
man part being photographed.
Soon, Kirlians claimed that photo-
graphing a portion of a leaf, for exam-
ple, would produce the aura of the en-
tire leaf on film. Some psychics claim
that in time the aura of a missing limb
might be discernible with Kirlian pho-
tography. Today the process is an in-
legral part of paranormal exploration.
In the U.S. the leading proponent of the
Moss, a former Broadway actress,
found her interest in parapsychological
phenomena kindled after LSD therapy.
"From the first," she recalls, "I intend-
ed to specialize in parapsychology be-
cause of the glimpses of psychic phe-
nomena I experienced during the LSD
treatments. But I certainly don't feel the
need to use drugs any more ... When
you've gotten the message, you hang up
the phone." For Moss, the message is
that Kirlian photography clearly dem-
onstrates a human aura. "We have done
work with acupuncturests and [psychic!
healers," she says, "and we find that the
corona of the healer becomes intense be-
fore healing, and then afterward is more
relaxed and less strong. We think we're
looking at a transfer of energy from the
healer to the injured person."
Others are less certain. Writing in
the Photographic Society of America
journal, Bill Zalud concluded, "All spec-
ulation hinges on obtaining photographs
of normal tissue patterns for compar-
ative purposes and, so far, no one has
really determined what a normal Kir-
William Tiller, an enthusiast of the
paranormal, is more assured about the
technical cause of Kirlian phenomena
on film. "What we're looking at," he
maintains, "is cold electron discharge."
Sickly Tissue. Says L. Jerome Stan-
lon, author of a forthcoming book on
auras and Kirlian photography: "Per-
haps some day the technique will be a
valuable diagnostic tool. Maybe sick
people do have different 'auras.' But as
of now, there is no assurance that it is at
all useful." Though not accusing Kirlian
researchers of faking effects, Stanton
notes that the famous "phantom leaf" is
casy to duplicate by double-exposing the
film, first with the whole leaf, again af-
ter a portion has been removed, and that
different voltages and conditions can
change the picture in incalculable ways.
"Working with advanced equipment,"
he says, "I could produce Kirlian effects
that would astound the unsophisticated,
and that includes a lot of scientists and
physicists. Remember, electronics and
photography are two very complicated
A Long History of Hoaxes
The first professional organization to
study paranormal phenomena was the
British Society for Psychical Research,
founded in 1882. Among its membership
were prominent scholars and scientists
-men of unimpeachable credentials
and high moral character. They soon
discovered and enthusiastically reported
on the telepathic abilities of five little
girls, daughters of the Rev. A.M. Creery.
The mentalist millennium was at hand.
Six years later, the girls were caught
cheating and shamefacedly admitted
that they had fooled the investigators.
They were the first in a long series of de-
ceivers of scientists.
The society's next major project was
an investigation of two "sensitives" from
Brighton, G.A. Smith and Douglas
Blackburn. Smith would allow himself
to be blindfolded, his ears to be plugged,
his body to be thoroughly blanketed; yet
somehow the thoughts of Blackburn
reached him. This time, it seemed, the
S.P.R. had really justified its existence.
When Smith left the S.P.R. in 1892,
no other comparable sensitive could be
found. Still, the members had seen the
telepathy performed with their own
eyes; the evidence was held acceptable.
It was not until 1908 that Blackburn ad-
mitted deceit. "The whole of these al-
leged experiments were bogus," he later
wrote. The remainder of his statement
has echoed to this day: "[Our hoax ] orig-
inated in the honest desire of two youths
to show how easily men of scientific
COMING OF THE FAIRIES
EXPERIMENTER J.B. RHINE & VOLUNTEERS
mind and training could be deceived
when seeking for evidence in support of
a theory they were wishful to establish."
The American Society for Psychical
Research, organized with the help of
Philosopher William James in 1885, suf-
fered similar embarrassments. Yet it
pursued its quarry with vigor. As James
had noted, "To upset the conclusion that
all crows are black, there is no need to
seck demonstration that no crow is
black; it is sufficient to produce one
white crow." But after 25 years of read-
ing psychic literature and witnessing
phenomena, James admitted that he was
"theoretically no further than I was at
the beginning, and I confess that at times
I have been tempted to believe that the
Creator has eternally intended this de-
parture of nature to remain baffling."
Other researchers had not been
humble or uncertain. Late in the cen-
tury, a self-styled sensitive named Henry
Slade toured the U.S. and Europe mak-
ing objects vanish and swinging com-
pass needles without the aid of a mag-
net. He was so convincing that a
German scientist published a book,
Transcendental Physics, devoted to
Slade's accomplishments. Again, the
psychic millennium seemed imminent.
But in his biography. A Magician Among
the Spirits, Harry Houdini reported that
the conjurer was simply a fraud with
a dazzling technique; Slade later con-
fessed that it was indeed all an act.
70
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TIME, MARCH 4, 1974

fields. Mix them and a Approved For Release 2003/04/18 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8
will remain in the dark."
The most irresponsible and odious
niche in the world of the paranormal is
occupied by the psychic healers, who
cannot operate legally in the U.S. but
lure unfortunate Americans overseas
with claims of spectacular cures. Diag-
nosing illnesses and locating diseased or-
gans by purely psychic means, they per-
form operations by plunging their hands
through what appear to be deep inci-
sions to grasp and remove sickly tissue.
In the Philippines, currently the center
for psychic surgery, a number of con-
jurers use sleight of hand and buckets
of blood and animal parts to work their
wonders. Surrounded by adherents who
have been "cured," the ill-educated and
often filthy surgeons perform "opera-
tions"-slashes of the epidermis, knives
in the eye cavity, fingers in the abdomen
-sometimes painlessly and always with
great flourish.
As one witness to such "surgery" de-
scribes it: "The healer pulled some tis-
sue from the area of the 'operation' ...
from Tony's hand ... I wanted to have
valid medical tests performed on it. The
tests, conducted in Seattle, showed that
the tissue was 'consistent with origin
from a small animal ... there is no cv-
idence in any of this tissue to suggest
that this represents metastatic carcino-
ma from the breast of the patient.'"
Tom Valentine, author of a book on per-
haps the best known of the psychic sur-
geons, Tony Agpaoa, documents the ex-
perience of a Mrs. Raymond Steinberg
of Two Rivers, Wis. Tony "made a ma-
jor production" of removing a piece of
metal and several screws that had been
surgically placed in her hip after an au-
tomobile accident. X rays later showed
that Agpaoa had removed nothing.
True Believer. But the psychics,
and those who profit from them, remain
undaunted. In a few months, the respect-
able publishing firm of Thomas Y.
Crowell will publish the story of yet an-
other psychic healer, the late great Bra-
zilian Arigo, Surgeon of the Rusty Knife.
The author: John Fuller, whose pro-fly-
ing-saucer books Incident at Exeter and
The Interrupted Journey were big sellers
during the UFO craze of the 1960s. The
afterword is written by Geller Biogra-
pher Puharich, who in Uri incidentally
tells of ex Sterrestrial intelligence as-
suring him that Arigo was not hurt in his
fatal car accident in 1971: "There was no
pain. He left his body before the crash."
No amount of demonstrable fraudu-
lence, no exposure of the fake, the ma-
nipulator, the unscrupulous, ever seems
capable of dissuading the true believer
in paranormality. James Fadiman, of
the Stanford School of Engineering, be-
lieves that "most (but not all) para-
psychologist demonstrators are also
frauds," then gives the classic rationale:
"Look at it this way. You think you have
powers of clairvoyance, and finally you
become a celebrity because of it. You're
on the stage or in an experimental sit-
uation and sometimes your powers fail
you. They do very often for most of these
guys. So what do they do? They cheat."
Robert Benchley once separated
people into two categories: those who
separate people into two categories and
those who do not. Parapsychologist Ger-
trude Schmeidler of New York's City
College is in the first category. Her stud-
ies show that on the issue of para-
psychology her subjects divide into be-
lieving sheep and doubting goats. The
sheep almost invariably score higher
in tests of paranormal powers. Will
the sheep ever convince the ruminating
ELIOT ELISOFON
IN EARLY ESP TEST (1940)
Perhaps parapsychology's most gul-
lible proponent was Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, creator of the superrationalist
detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle re-
mains the greatest proof that intelli-
gence and scruple cannot compete with
naiveté and the desire to accept the par-
anormal as demonstrable fact. After the
death of his son in the Great War, he
turned to spiritualism for solace. This
led, in time, to investigations of spirits,
and eventually to little winged creatures
in the bottoms of gardens. In his 1922
volume The Coming of the Fairies, Doyle
reproduced photographs of a tiny gob-
lin and elves caught by a child's cam-
cra. The pictures were manifestly staged;
the entire project made all but the blind-
GERALD BRIMACOMBE
TED SERIOS PROJECTING PICTURES
est believers wince. One who did not
was a young American botanist named
J.B. Rhine. After an inspiring Doyle
lecture on spiritualism, Rhine and his
wife Louisa immersed themselves in lit-
crature published by the Society for
Psychical Research. When Rhine later
joined the faculty of Duke University,
he began a lifelong devotion to psychic
research. It was he who coined the
terms extrasensory perception and psi
(for psychic phenomena); it was he
who gave his specialty an academic
imprimatur by compiling mountains of
statistics about psychic subjects who
could "read" cards that they could
not sec.
From the start, Rhine was criticized
for juggling numbers. (Subsequent re-
searchers have also used questionable
procedures, citing "negative ESP" when
the number of correct guesses fall be-
low average and "displacement" when
subjects call the card before or after the
one they are trying to guess.) H.L. Menc-
ken summarized the early views of the
dubious when he wrote, "In plain lan-
guage, Professor Rhine segregates all
those persons who, in guessing the cards,
enjoy noteworthy runs of luck, and then
adduces those noteworthy runs of luck
as proof that they must possess myste-
rious powers." Rhine tightened his lab-
oratory conditions in the 1930s, and
much of the criticism withered-but so
did his ESP stars.
In the 1960s a psychic superstar
came along in the person of Ted Serios,
a hard-drinking, onetime bellhop from
Chicago. Serios' gift was definitely off-
beat: he produced pictures inside a Po-
laroid camera using nothing but his
mind and a little hollow tube he called
his "gismo." Reporters Charles Reyn-
olds and David Eisendrath, who ob-
served Serios at work in Denver, had
little trouble constructing a device that
could be secreted inside a gismo to pro-
duce all of Serios' effects. The instru-
ment contained a minuscule lens at one
end and a photographic transparency at
the other. When the device was pointed
at the camera lens and the shutter was
clicked, an image was recorded on film.
The Reynolds-Eisendrath story was
printed in Popular Photography and
many of Serios' followers were shattered.
Again the millennium was deferred.
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71
-

BEHAVIOR
goats? Will the goats ever_underr
events have occurred.
Just a few years ago what smug
Western rationalist would have accred-
ited acupuncture? Yet the ethnocentric
prejudice seemed to disappear almost at
a stroke when the Western world
learned of James Reston's appendix op-
cration. The New York Times columnist
submitted to acupuncture after surgery
on a trip to China in 1971; thereafter,
the unorthodox method was examined
throughout the U.S. Today acupuncture
is under intense study at several med-
ical centers. Although some of the ben-
eficial effects of "paranormal" medicine
have been acknowledged by Western
scientists, they are still at
NATIONAL TATTLER
a loss to explain it. It was
not long ago that most
Americans attributed the
feats of Eastern yogis to
clever fakery. Yet the new
Western experimentation
with biofeedback* has
shown skeptics that the
mind can indeed control
what are normally invol-
untary bodily functions.
The Menninger Founda-
tion in Topeka, Kans.,
reports incontrovertible
proof that subjects trained
by biofeedback can con-
trol their blood circulation
and lower the temperature
of the parts of their bod-
ies at will; migraine head-
aches can be literally
wished away. The ancient
yogic mythic skills sud-
denly seem within the
grasp of everyone.
Is it not possible that
thoughts-like TV pro-
grams-can be transmit-
ted from one brain to an-
other? And if enough
energy can be generated
by the brain, why should
it not influence the roll of
dice? Or make a plant respond?
In an epoch when the new physics
posits black holes in the universe and
particles that travel faster than the speed
of light, and has already confirmed the
existence of such bizarre things as neu-
trinos that have no mass or charge, an-
timatter and quasars, why should any
phenomenon be assumed impossible?
What is wrong with Physicist Sir James
Jeans' attempt to give coherence to an
unruly cosmos: "The universe begins to
look more and more like a great thought
than a great machine"?
The psychic adherent's reply is sim-
ple: anything is possible. But simply say-
ing that it is so and then supporting the
contention with shoddy or downright
fraudulent evidence, is not enough. Psy-
chic phenomena cannot be accepted on
*A process by which one can learn to control in-
voluntary bodily functions (such as heartbeat)
through the visual or aural monitoring of physi-
ological data.
tive researchers. To date, those demon-
strations have not been made.
Any close examiner of psychic in.
vestigators and reporters will find a new
meaning for Koestler's roots of coinci-
dence. A loose confederacy of parapsy-
chologists parodies the notion of the sci-
entific method. Harold Puthoff, one of
the two S.R.I. investigators of Uri Gel-
ler, is singled out in The Secret Life of
Plants as a reputable scientist who has
been experimenting with the response ..
of one chicken egg to the breaking of an-
other. He is also a promoter of the bi-
zarre and controversial cult of Scientol-
ogy, which Ingo Swann, another psychic
PSYCHIC SURGEON OPERATING IN PHILIPPINES
Sometimes painlessly, always with flourish.
tested by S.R.I., also practices. William
Targ, a Putnam executive, recently con-
tracted to publish Astronaut Ed Mitch-
ell's forthcoming book, Psychic Explo-
ration, A Challenge for Science. At the
signing. Targ stated that "the real race
now between the Russians and us is in
the area of sciences like ESP." Mitch-
ell's Institute of Noetic Sciences helped
to fund S.R.I.'s Geller research, which
was conducted largely by Puthoff and
Russell Targ, who happens to be Editor
Targ's son.
The questionable connections of
many psychic researchers, in addition
to the paucity of objectively verifiable re-
sults in their work, has made it difficult
to raise funds for research; parapsychol-
ogists barely squeak by with money from
a few foundations and gifts and encour-
agement from occasional philanthro-
pists like Stewart Mott and Manhattan
Realtor John Tishman. There is only
one academic chair on parapsychology
Should the findings prove depress-
ingly negative, it is unlikely that acad-
emies or foundations would encourage
more chairs, or promote further psychic
investigations.
In a way, it is rather a pity that the
shecp cannot get together with the goats.
At the very least, the paranormal es-
tablishment has questioned the dogma,
emphasized the ignorance and under-
lined the arrogance of modern medicine
and science. Indeed, modern doctors
have scarcely breached the frontiers of
the mind. Science has all too frequently
destroyed the layman's sense of wonder
by seeking materialistic explanations for
all phenomena.
As C.P. Snow says: "Scientists re-
gard it as a major intellectual virtue to
know what not to think about." Com-
plains one S.R.I. spokesman: "The so-
ciety we live in doesn't give you per-
mission to have psychic abilities. That
is one reason that so much talent is sup-
pressed." As Martin Gardner believes,
"Modern science should indeed arouse
in all of us a humility before the im-
mensity of the unexplored and a toler-
ance for crazy hypotheses."
As for the parapsychologists who
make many of those hypotheses, they
could learn the most valuable weapon
in the arsenal of the truth seeker: doubt.
One hundred and fifty years ago Charles
Lamb observed that credulity was the
child's strength but the adult's weakness.
That observation is even more valid to-
day, when shoddy or ignorant research
is used to lend legitimacy to the most
extravagant tenets of the psychic
movement.
That is not to say that parapsychol-
ogy ought to be excluded from serious
scrutiny. Some first-rate minds have
been attracted to it: Freud, Einstein,
Jung, Edison. The paranormal may ex-
ist, against logic, against reason, against
present evidence and beyond the stan-
dard criteria of empirical proof. Perhaps
there are reasons why the roll of the dice
and turn of the cards sometimes appear
to obey the bettor's will. Perhaps the
laws of probability are often suspended.
Perhaps Geller and other magicians can
indeed force metal to bend merely be-
cause they will it. Perhaps photographs
can be projected by the mind. Perhaps
plants think.
Perhaps not.
There is only one way to tell: by a
thorough examination of the phenom-
ena by those who do not express an a
priori belief. By those for whom proba-
bility is not a mystique but a compre-
hensible code. By those who have noth-
ing to lose but their skepticism. Until
such examiners are allowed to play the
psychic game, it is unlikely that the
paranormal will escape the ambiguous
utterance against it in Leviticus: "Do not
turn to mediums or wizards; do not seck
them out, to be defiled by them .. . " And
that most wondrous and mysterious of
entities, the human mind, will remain
an underdeveloped country.
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the faith of Approved ForRelease 200304 |CA-RDP96 00787RO00100030002-8University of Virgin-