Sixth Sense

"c. Jolly? Is C. Jolly here?"

Eyes sealed beneath a double thickness of white surgical tape and three layers of black-cotton blindfold, Dr. Richard Ireland, founder and minister of the 1400-member University of Life Church of Phoenix, Arizona, was demonstrating his telepathic gifts to a group of skeptical New York City newsmen. With his head thrown back like a blind street singer, he was answering questions written on slips of note paper collected earlier from the audience while a bearded volunteer, M. B. Shestack, then producer of CBS Radio's The World of Religion, had supervised the application of the blind-fold.

"Are you fully convinced that I cannot see now?" Ireland asked Shestack.

"Absolutely."

"Are you willing to risk a dollar? Take a dollar bill out of your pocket. If I guess the serial number on it, will you let me keep it?" As Shestack fished in his pocket for a single, Ireland, a puckish smile in his voice, said to the audience, "This is the part I like best every time."

"Hold it straight out in front of you," he ordered. "Is the serial number B90992655B?"

"It is, indeed," said an astonished Shestack.

"Of course it is," said Ireland triumphantly, snatching the bill and tucking it into the breast pocket of his dark coat, as the audience applauded and laughed.

Now Ireland was shuffling the slips of paper, calling out the names on them and answering the questions in a rapid, almost singsong flow of words.

"C. Jolly," Ireland said to a blonde girl, perhaps 20 years old, who had chirped a happy "Here!" when he called her name. "You've asked me to tell you about the future, is that right? I see an amazing six months ahead for you. Why, you just won't believe all the things that are going to happen to you! It's going to be like a roller-coaster ride for these six months. And I see money arriving, but it's not money that you're expecting or working for; it's just going to come unexpectedly. It's not a check, either, but green bills. I see these green money's fluttering down on you and I also see a man in a uniform. I don't know if the two are connected, but I think I want to tell you about this man in a uniform. That's what I see for you--six months in which all kinds of strange things happen, green money's and a man in a uniform."

Feeling the slips of paper, pressing some of them against his face, shuffling them over and over again in his hands, Ireland worked through the questions with increasing rapidity, calling out the names and answering the queries with predictions, advice and, occasionally, specific facts.

"Childs?" Ireland called out. "Ah, there you are. It's Miss Childs, isn't it? You haven't written that down, but I seem to feel that you've recently been divorced. Am I right about that? Yes, of course I am. I seem to feel also that you've been thinking of suicide. Is that right, too? Yes. Well, I want to tell you not to think about that anymore, that you've been through a dark year but that the light is not far away. I see you passing from a dark room into a beautiful sunlight, and I want to tell you to hang on a little while longer. Things are definitely going to go better for you."

Ireland crumpled the last piece of paper and pulled the three black-cotton blindfolds off his face. His eyes were still securely sealed beneath the layers of white tape. As the audience stood and applauded, he carefully removed the strips of tape one by one and, rubbing away the sticky white lines of adhesive that remained after the tape was gone, accepted the congratulations of the chattering, wondering crowd of newsmen.

• • •

Dr. Richard Ireland is either an incredibly cunning fraud or living proof of the psi phenomena. Psi, if it exists at all, implies a force of nature so rare, elusive and inexplicable within the framework of modern scientific theory and knowledge that most conventional scientists would rather not look for it. Yet psi does have adherents in the scientific community. The science of psi is parapsychology, and parapsychologists recognize at least four categories of psi:

Telepathy: Commonly called mind reading, telepathy is the process of being aware of another person's thoughts without any communication through the usual sensory channels.

Clairvoyance: Knowledge of an object or event without the use of the five senses.

Precognition: Extrasensory knowledge of another person's future thoughts (precognitive telepathy) or of future events (precognitive clairvoyance).

Psychokinesis: The ability to influence a physical object or an event, such as the fall of dice, purely by thinking about it.

Parapsychology is a young and struggling science, a victim, like the young and struggling everywhere, of social discrimination. In the main store of Kroch's & Brentano's, Chicago's largest book-dealer, parapsychology books are not displayed in the science section downstairs but hustled with the religion, metaphysics and occult books up on a balcony.

Lately, however, the parapsychologists have been getting some recognition from the Emily Posts of the scientific establishment. The Parapsychological Association, founded in the United States in 1957, was admitted to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1969. A year later, the A.A.A.S. included a panel on the techniques and status of modern parapsychology at its 137th convention in Chicago.

The symposium was held in Parlor B of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. In the room next door, there was a meeting on "Some Mathematical Questions in Biology." Loud laughter could be heard through the partition. There were no jokes in Parlor B. The parapsychologists were too insecure for humor. Their presentation was so uptight in its dignity that their most fascinating material tended to become boring.

Fascinating it was, nonetheless. Of the several papers, the one that was most compelling in making a case for the existence of psi was read by Douglas Dean, a big, sandy-haired man whose home base is the Industrial and Management Engineering Department of the Newark College of Engineering, Newark, New Jersey.

"Many scientists reject ESP because they can't see how it might work," he began. "It seems a better approach to apply ESP, to use it and not to be concerned with 'how.' "

Dean used an instrument called the plethysmograph to test for ESP. This is a device that measures the blood volume in the finger. The blood volume, which is different from the blood pressure, increases and decreases with the pulse--about 70 times a minute.

"Doing mental arithmetic or thinking of an emotion-laden name produces a rapid decrease in the volume of the finger capillary cells," Dean said. "This is called a vasoconstriction. In 1959, a physiologist named Stepán Figar found that someone doing mental arithmetic seemed to be able to produce a vasoconstriction in a distant person acting as a receiver.

"We have confirmed this with sender and receiver separated in different rooms, different buildings, 1200 miles apart--even 4000 miles apart with the sender 35 feet underwater."

The sender would look at 3" x 5" index cards. Some were blank. Others had names with emotional significance to the receiver. The receiver did not know which card was being looked at. The pen of the plethysmograph recorded a wavy line which was measured by someone who did not know whether the sender was looking at a card with a name on it, a blank card or no card at all.

The engineer showed a slide of the plethysmograph tracing. There was a little dip in the wavy line when the sender was looking at a blank card--and, on the average, a significantly larger dip when the sender was looking at a card with an emotionally significant name on it.

The only way to argue with this demonstration of ESP was to call Douglas Dean a faker and a liar. But Dean is not a faker or a liar, he's the archetypal engineer. The only other explanation was coincidence. It would have to have been some hell of a coincidence.

Dean then briskly went on to describe another experiment: Sixty-seven highly placed executives, most of them corporation presidents, were asked to choose any number from zero to nine. They had to make the choice 100 times, each time punching the appropriate slot on an IBM card.

After the executives were finished, an IBM computer, programmed to operate at random, selected 100 digits, against which each executive's card was matched. An average score would be ten percent right.

The men who had doubled their company's profits in the past five years had a mean score of 12.3 percent--well above the average for the entire group. Those who garnered losses or low profits for their companies scored only 8.3 percent. The results were confirmed in a subsequent series three years later by Professor John Mihalasky.

"The probability of identifying a superior profit maker on the basis of the ESP test was better than two out of three," Dean said. "It should be noted that this test cannot be faked as can many other tests used."

All of these experiments were doubleblind: None of the people involved in the actual operations knew the significance of his role. Thus, there could be no conscious or unconscious bias.

This is impressive stuff, but not everyone is impressed. Most physical scientists would probably agree with Dr. George R. Price, formerly of the University of Minnesota, who wrote: "My opinion concerning parapsychologists is that many of them 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 mildy abnormal mental conditions."

Which one could take to mean, parapsychologists or their subjects are incompetent, fraudulent or crazy.

Until the middle of the 17th Century, all of the phenomena we now group under the umbrella of psi were pretty much accepted as fact not only among the masses but also among the educated. As the strength of scientific rationalism grew, however, the witches, sorcerers, alchemists and oracles of the old order were dismissed. There was no room for them in the elegantly precise and mechanical theoretical model of the universe constructed by Newton and filled in by scientists such as Darwin and Faraday, who believed that everything that (continued on page 214) Sixth Sense (continued from page 136) happened could be known and explained by the Newtonian physics.

Telepathy, prophecy and related forces seemed to be so unlikely in view of existing knowledge that there was no point in bothering about them. Toward the end of the 19th Century, Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz, then the greatest living expert on sensory communication, expressed the scientific attitude of his time toward ESP:

"Neither the testimony of all of the Fellows of the Royal Society nor even the evidence of my own senses, would lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sense."

In the years since Helmholtz made that statement, classically oriented scientists have remained almost equally skeptical. As late as 1951, McGill University psychology professor D. O. Hebb, writing in the Journal of Personality, echoed Helmholtz:

"Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense.... ESP is not a fact, despite the behavioral evidence that has been reported.... My rejection ... is--in a literal sense --prejudice."

In a 1954 Life-magazine article, Aldous Huxley commented on Hebb's statement:

"That a man of science should allow prejudice to outweigh evidence seems strange enough. It is even stranger to find a psychologist rejecting a psychological discovery simply because it cannot be explained. Psi is intrinsically no more inexplicable than, say, perception or memory; it is merely less common."

There is nothing unusual about the fanatical resistance to psi. Almost all new ideas are rejected at first. No one wants to be a fool, least of all the scientist. Lavoisier and Laplace both refused to believe in the existence of meteors. As Lamarck said, "to assure recognition for a new truth is often much more difficult than to discover it."

But psi is not a new idea. It is a very old idea. And that may be the main reason why the modern scientist hates it so much. Psi is a survival of primitive days when the world was strange and unpredictable and filled with the terror of the unknown. The scientist would like to believe that those days are gone, conquered by technology and logic.

Today, the Newtonian physics has been replaced by quantum mechanics, but the scientist's habit of thought has not adjusted accordingly. He sees the universe as a kind of windup clock--a very complicated clock, of course, but one whose actions can be predicted if you know the rules of the system. The trouble with psi is that it doesn't seem to obey any of the rules of physics. Therefore it is dismissed--not because the evidence for its existence is any less compelling than the evidence for the existence of other forces of nature, but because it doesn't make any sense.

The main effort of parapsychology is to make psi make sense. This has not been an easy job. The inclusion of the parapsychology panel at the A.A.A.S. convention was a major victory. The battle is far from over, but at least the parapsychologists are being heard.

To understand why it took so long, we have to look at the nature of the evidence. The data on which psi rests falls into two categories--anecdotal and experimental. Throughout history, stories of mysterious supernatural events have fascinated adults and children alike. Even today, collections of ESP tales occasionally find their way onto the best-seller lists; but however good reading they may make, they rarely provide the kind of objective evidence that will convince a reasonably sophisticated reader.

An example from a recent book by Ruth Montgomery illustrates the problem. Miss Montgomery tells the following story in A Search for the Truth:

On a rainy January night in 1943, the wife of General Nathan F. Twining [former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] was asleep at her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, when a sound "like a clap of thunder" awakened her. Opening her eyes, she "saw" her husband standing at the foot of the bed, although she knew that he was halfway around the world, commanding the 13th Air Force in the Pacific Theater of war.

"I saw Nate's face and hands clearly, even to his West Point ring," Maude Twining recalls. "Then, as I watched, his fingers lost their grip on the footboard, and he gradually disappeared. The experience was so eerie that the hair literally stood up on the nape of my neck."

The next day Mrs. Twining received a long-distance call from a friend, whose husband was also an officer in the South Pacific, asking if she could come down to visit for a few days.

"I had difficulty suppressing my alarm, because I felt that she was being sent to me for some reason connected with Nate," [Mrs. Twining] confesses, "but her three-day stay was uneventful. Then, two hours after she left, I received official notification that Nate had been missing for over three days at sea. Although she and I had not known it at the time, her husband was in charge of the widespread search for Nate's plane, which had gone down the night of my vision."

An oil slick, and pieces of the airplane in which General Twining and 14 others had been traveling from Guadalcanal to Espiritu Santo airbase, had finally been sighted the day that Mrs. Twining was notified. The following day, searchers spotted two life rafts lashed together, and a navy hydroplane managed to rescue the severely sunburned, ravenous men after four days on the stormtossed seas.

General Twining knew nothing of his wife's strange vision on the night that his plane went down, but in his first letter to her after the ordeal, he wrote that just before the plane crash-landed in the angry Pacific during a raging typhoon, he clearly "saw" her looking in at him through the rain.

Undoubtedly, this happened exactly the way Miss Montgomery and Mrs. Twining tell it; but before accepting it as evidence, a skeptical investigator would want to ask a few questions. Did Mrs. Twining tell anyone about her vision before she was notified of her husband's crash landing? Or, perhaps, did she have a diary in which she noted the event while it was fresh in her mind? Had she ever had other similar visions that had no such dramatically mystical sequels? Had General Twining seen her face appear before him at other times?

In other words, given the authenticity of the Twinings' simultaneous vision, was there anything about the incident that could not be explained by coincidence? And was it so unlikely a coincidence for a woman separated from her husband by war to dream about him at night? That on one of those nights, her husband, an Air Force general directing an air war, should go down at sea? That what might have been his last thoughts on earth should include his wife's face?

Until the end of the 19th Century, the evidence supporting ESP consisted entirely of such raw, unverified stories of inexplicable events that, if true, required an enormously painful faith in coincidence or, worse yet, ran counter to the known principles of physics, chemistry and biology.

Some British scientists, however, suspected that there might be something of value in the irritatingly persistent reports of mysterious happenings. In 1882, a number of them founded the Society for Psychical Research to rigorously examine the events taking place beyond the borders of orthodox science.

Three years later, a similar society was formed in the U. S. Today, there are psychical-research groups in at least a dozen countries. Parapsychology research, as it is now known, is conducted in a number of universities and, in some schools, higher degrees are awarded.

With the declared purpose of studying all psychic phenomena without offering any opinion on their nature, the psychical-research societies winnowed out the obviously fraudulent cases and earned a reputation for integrity.

"Were I asked to point to a scientific journal where hardheadedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources of error might be seen in their full bloom, I think I should have to fall back on the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research," said psychologist William James.

In addition to investigation of ESP cases, the English society undertook a certain amount of statistical research. In fact, its first project was a survey of 17,000 persons to determine how many had received sensory impressions while awake that could not be explained by any apparent physical cause. About ten percent answered yes, and similar surveys have produced approximately the same response over the years.

• • •

Until the arrival of J. B. Rhine on the parapsychology scene, there was little rigorous laboratory experimentation to determine ESP. Psi has always been difficult to pin down; it happens when it happens, which may or may not be in a laboratory. Rhine's great contribution was the creation of the first series of experiments designed to detect and measure psi.

Rhine was a Chicago botanist who, with his wife, Louisa, had become interested in parapsychology after hearing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lecture on spiritualism. In 1926, he joined the Harvard University psychology department as a research assistant. The chairman of the department was William McDougall, a former president of the British Society for Psychical Research. McDougall left Harvard and went to Duke University in 1927 and Rhine followed.

In 1934, Rhine published Extra Sensory Perception, in which he detailed his research at Duke and claimed to have found overwhelming evidence of the existence of ESP. In 1940, the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory was established, with Rhine as director. Until 1965, when Rhine retired and left the University, Duke was the most important parapsychology center in the world. The lab's work is continued by Rhine's Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, which has headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, a $2,000,000 endowment and ESP research projects in India, Sweden and Czechoslovakia, among other places.

In a typical experiment at Duke, the percipient--the person being tested--would guess the symbol on a card that lay face down in front of him. There were 25 cards in the specially designed deck, each carrying one of five different symbols. According to the laws of probability, the percipient would be expected to guess five cards correctly by chance alone. In any particular run through the deck, he might guess as many as eight correctly and still be within the reasonable limits of chance. If he were to guess 15 correctly, we would be surprised, since as a chance occurrence, this would be expected only about once in 70,000 runs.

If he were to guess consistently above five in a long series of runs, we would begin to suspect fraud or recording error--or the presence of ESP. To test for ESP, then, Rhine theorized, all you had to do was eliminate the possibility of fraud or recording error.

Most of the subjects Rhine tested scored at the level of chance, but some individuals scored consistently higher than others, averaging eight or nine correct guesses over a large number of runs. And one percipient, Hubert E. Pearce, a student in the Duke School of Religion, averaged eight correct guesses per run in over 690 runs. The probability of this occurring naturally is astronomical.

The publication of Extra Sensory Perception made ESP a household word, but psychologists elsewhere found that they could not duplicate Rhine's results when they repeated his experiments. In the following years, Rhine was criticized for sloppy technique. It was found that the ESP cards' symbols could be read from their backs in a certain light because the printing showed through. In some high-scoring series, there were errors in recording. As the objections were raised, Rhine tightening, his procedures; with each tightening, the ESP factor declined. As more and more trials were undertaken with the same subjects, scores fell closer and closer to the chance level, an effect Rhine attributed to monotony, but which his critics claimed was the inexorable working of probability.

Although Rhine and others continued the card experiments for a number of years under varying conditions, scientists outside the field of parapsychology began to take the results less seriously.

The rational criticisms of Rhine and his followers fell into four main categories:

Statistical: The statistical principles used to demonstrate the existence of ESP are technically wrong. Or, granted that results deviate from chance to a significant extent in isolated cases, unusual events sometimes occur, without any apparent reason, despite statistical improbability--perfect hands at bridge, for example.

Theoretical: No physical hypotheses have been adequately developed to account for events that, if true, violate all the laws of modern physics and that usually can be explained by other means.

Psychological: Psi phenomena are probably the result of cooperative hallucination between researcher and subject, especially since the most successful experiments have admittedly involved situations in which either or both have shown a predisposition to believe in psi.

Fraud: In instances where fraud-detection devices such as motion-picture cameras and tape recorders have been either covert or overt observers of statistically oriented psi experiments, the results have been shown to be either conscious fraud or unconscious fraud in which errors in observation or record keeping favored the bias of investigator and/or subject.

In 1966, C. E. M. Hansel, professor of psychology, University of Wales, published a detailed review of the experimental evidence, ESP: A Scientific Eualuation, and observed: "In the case of each of these conclusive experiments, the result could have arisen through a trick on the part of one or more of those taking part.... A great deal of time, effort and money has been expended, but an acceptable demonstration of the existence of extrasensory perception has not been given."

One extensive recent experiment tends to support the critics of ESP. In a yearlong study undertaken by the United States Air Force, subjects were asked to guess numbers generated by a random-number device called VERITAC. It was a completely mechanized experiment in which the possibility of fraud or human error appears to have been eliminated. No one was able to demonstrate a significantly better than chance ability.

Despite the disappointing results from the statistical approach to ESP, a number of scientists believe that a case can be made for telepathy on an experimental basis. They may not be convinced that such a case has yet been made, but they do not entirely reject the work that has been done so far.

Bernard Berelson and the late Gary A. Steiner, authors of Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings, a book that attempts "to present as fully and accurately as possible what the behavioral sciences now know about the behavior of human beings," had these comments about the psi debate:

"Judged by the scientific standards ordinarily applied in other areas of psychology, the evidence is often persuasive, although at the same time it is not as reproducible as one would wish in a scientific discipline.... There has even been some allegation of trickery or fraud in the conduct or reporting of ESP studies. But it is fair to say that there is no substantiating evidence for such criticism."

At the A.A.A.S. symposium, one of the speakers, Dr. Montague Ullman, director of the department of psychiatry at Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, N.Y., said, "To my mind, the charges of fraud will eventually redound to the support of parapsychological research. The idea that over a 100-year period, in so many different countries, men with the same credentials as their colleagues in other sciences have engaged in a worldwide international conspiracy risking their reputations and devoting their lives to tricking their colleagues, is a less tenable hypothesis than psi itself."

Dr. Robert Van de Castle, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, pointed out that the statistical argument would seem to have been settled in 1937 when the annual meeting of the American Institute of Mathematical Statisticians concluded:

"Dr. Rhine's investigations have two aspects: experimental and statistical. On the experimental side, mathematicians, of course, have nothing to say. On the statistical side, however, recent mathematical work has established the fact that, assuming that the experiments have been properly performed, the statistical analysis is essentially valid. If the Rhine investigation is to be fairly attacked it must be on other than mathematical grounds."

The parapsychologists believe that their experiments have reached the point where they can no longer be attacked on procedural grounds either. The best of their research, like the best experiments of the physical scientists, is now subject to strict controls designed to eliminate the kind of errors that used to occur. They want to be judged on the basis of their results.

Those results have been slender and marginal, but consistent. They have had a slender and marginal effect on scientific opinion. Berelson and Steiner report that the majority of psychologists are not convinced, but they also point out that most psychologists have not studied the subject. They summarize four surveys of members of the American Psychological Association, "showing some increase, over the years, in the willingness to accept ESP as a possibility, but very little acceptance of the concept as an 'established fact.' "

As might be expected, younger psychologists showed the greatest inclination to believe in the possibility of ESP. Only four percent thought it was an established fact, but 27.8 percent felt it was a likely possibility. In each survey, the majority thought that ESP was either a remote possibility or merely and unknown.

Scientific arguments are as tedious as most legal arguments and just as difficult to follow. The scientists, like the lawyers, seem to prefer it that way. It keeps the amateurs out of the game. In attempting to make mathematical sense out of psi, the statisticians reduced a miracle of nature to an accountant's nightmare. It may have made no more sense in this translation, but at least it wasn't entertaining any more.

This was a great contribution to the future of parapsychology. The work of Rhine and his followers did not do much to help the scientific community to understand psi, but it did begin to make the subject respectable. Anything that dull had to be respectable. By casting psi in the obscure symbolism of the scientific equation, Rhine engaged the attention of the scientist and forced a new level of debate.

At this new level, the parapsychologists have been able at last to present their results to a jury of their peers, rather than to a kangaroo court of academic bigots. The outcome of the trial is still in doubt. There is too much research still to be done. But it is no longer an act of heresy to speak positively about psi.

Maybe heresy seems too medieval a word to use in this context, but a little history should help establish its appropriateness. In 1922, Sigmund Freud had begun to explore ESP in "Dreams and Telepathy," an article published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He planned to read a full-length essay, Psychoanalysis and Telepathy, to the International Psychoanalytic Congress that year. It never happened. Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer and a pioneer in the psychoanalytic movement, convinced him that it was too dangerous.

In a letter to an American psi researcher, Freud wrote, "If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than psychoanalysis." In 1924, he wrote Jones that recent telepathic experiments had persuaded him "to lend the support of psychoanalysis to telepathy." Again, Jones convinced him to remain silent.

It is perhaps possible to extrapolate what the attitude of science was to ESP if Sigmund Freud, who was not afraid to speak freely about the darkest urges of human sexuality, could not reveal his definitive thoughts about psi. Psychoanalysis and Telepathy remained unpublished until after his death.

Today, the atmosphere has changed. There are reputable scientists outside the field of parapsychology who are convinced that the strange abilities of people such as Richard Ireland are not necessarily conjuror's fakery but possible evidence of natural forces as yet unknown but not unknowable.

Among them is Dr. Henry Margenau, professor of physics and natural philosophy at Yale, who told a meeting of the American Society for Psychical Research: "It would seem just as unreasonable for me to doubt what ... psychologists of high repute tell me about parapsychology as it would be to doubt the reports of highly esteemed astronomers such as Dr. Allan Sandage about quasars. As a matter of fact, I am as disturbed in my own mind, and at the same time fascinated, by the things I read about quasars as I am by clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition."

• • •

Although American parapsychologists have come very far with very little help from their evidence, it may be that they could have gone further still if they had not been so anxious to be more scientific than the scientists. In order to provide the kind of data that the orthodox scientist might be more inclined to accept as fact, they restricted themselves almost completely to the quantitative, statistical method.

According to Russian psi expert Dr. Lutsia Pavlova, who has used the electro-encephalograph to study brain-wave patterns associated with psi, Rhine's technique, which is the basis of most American research, may be the most difficult way of generating and examining ESP.

"We found it best not to send telepathic signals too quickly," she reported in a scientific paper published in Moscow in 1967. "If different telepathic bits come too rapidly, the changes in the brain associated with telepathy begin to blur and finally disappear. The ESP card tests are built on the idea of transmitting a great many telepathic bits of information in a very short time to build up statistical evidence."

For a long while, Americans were mainly concerned with proving the existence of psi. They did not bother themselves very much about how it worked. Rhine never claimed to offer any theories explaining ESP. Even today, there is a kind of studied ignorance, a professional innocence, a refusal to speculate. The American parapsychologists seem to be too unsure of their own work to claim that they understand what they are doing. But in order to make sense out of psi, the parapsychologist has to do more than prove its existence, more than translate behavioral observations into mathematical equations. Where psi threatens to destroy existing scientific structure, new structure must be created. Wherever possible, the concepts of psi ought to be integrated into the existing structure. It would seem to be the responsibility of the creative parapsychologist to make it easier for the scientist to accept the facts of psi.

To date, little such help is available. As a result, it's easier to find excuses for rejecting psi than it is to find excuses for accepting it. Yet there seems to be enough information available to begin to create a theoretical framework on which the facts of psi may be hung.

For example, Karlis Osis, of the American Society for Psychical Research, described an experiment to test the strength of telepathy over a distance. The results indicated that psi does weaken with distance, but not in the same way as other forms of energy.

This is an extremely significant discovery. One of the main scientific objections to psi is that it does not appear to obey any of the laws of physics. Does it obey any laws of its own? Osis' experiment hints that it may. It may be that the laws of psi will be found to have no relationship at all to the laws of physics. But if a consistent logic of psi can be demonstrated, the physical scientist will at least have something that he can begin to understand, if not accept.

While most researchers are unwilling to hazard any guesses on the nature of ESP, some believe that the future may show that psi is an electromagnetic process similar to radio. The foremost proponents of the electromagnetic theory of telepathy have been Russian. "We must ... understand telepathy in the light of materialism," one Russian scientist told Chicago Tribune reporter Norma Lee Browning. "The brain is the emitter of radiations with various wave lengths and thus the source of electromagnetic fields."

The best-known experts in Russia were Dr. Bernard Kazhinski, an electrical engineer whose book Biological Radio Communication was published in 1962 by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and Leonid L. Vasiliev, former head of the Leningrad University physiology department.

In 1963, Vasiliev claimed to have conducted successful long-distance telepathy experiments between Leningrad and Sevastopol, a distance of 1200 miles, with the aid of an ultra-short-wave radio transmitter. Vasiliev was convinced that his experiments and those he conducted jointly with the Bechterev Brain Institute offered scientific proof of telepathic communication. His next goal was to identify the nature of brain energy that produces it.

"The discovery of such an energy," he said, "would be tantamount to the discovery of nuclear energy. Long-distance suggestion could be of gigantic significance for science and life." Unfortunately, death intervened.

Recently, the Russians reported in some detail the results of other, newer telepathy experiments. Messages have been sent over distances of 1860 miles, said Dr. I. M. Kogan, head of the project. Yury Kamensky, the transmitter, sat in a Moscow office thinking hard about pictures of six objects on a table in front of him, staring at each for 15 minutes. In Novosibirsk, the receiver, Karl Nikolayev, concentrated on receiving the broadcasts. According to Dr. Kogan, Nikolayev then sketched objects almost identical with those transmitted by Kamensky, including such distinctive shapes as a coil spring and a coffeepot.

The status of parapsychology in the Soviet sphere of influence is not clear. In the summer of 1968, two young women writers, Sheila Ostrander, a Canadian, and Lynn Schroeder, an American, visited Soviet Russia, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia to explore psychic research in the socialist countries. When they returned they wrote a book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. This is one of those girlishly breathless pieces of journalism in which lots of exclamation points and enthusiastic descriptions of chattering computers do not quite hide the authors' almost total ignorance of science. As a result, it is difficult most of the time to figure out what the girls saw behind the Iron Curtain. Craig Vetter, playboy Staff Writer, spoke to them when the book was published.

"They said everyone's got an aura," Vetter reported. "You know, like a halo. Only it isn't a halo, exactly. It has these prongs. Everyone has them, they said. If you're sick, it's because one of your prongs is bent, and what you have to do is go to see this lady who specializes in straightening prongs. She straightens your prong and you're just fine."

The closest thing in the book to what Vetter is talking about is Kirlian photography. "Basically, photography with highfrequency electrical fields," the authors explain in a not-very-helpful description. Nowhere in their published account is there a lady who straightens prongs.

Kirlian photography sounds wonderful. So does everything else in the book. But it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this book is about as credible as the stories the girls are telling about prong straightening.

Despite this, it is possible to pick up some interesting insights. One Soviet scientist suggests that telepathic impulses are radiated along the lines of bits of information in a cybernetic system. Another is working on the idea of time as energy, speculating that psi may be propagated through a supposed time-energy system rather than the electromagnetic field.

It is gospel among Western parapsychologists that the Soviets are investing heavily in psi research, backing it with complete academic and financial support. That may indeed be true, but one experience reported by Ostrander and Schroeder tends to cast a distinct fog of doubt on this: The girls had gone all the way to Moscow for what was billed as an international conference on parapsychology. The star attraction was to be Nelya Mikhailova, a woman whose ability to move small objects by staring at them has been studied and filmed repeatedly by Soviet scientists. The day the conference opened, an attack on Nelya Mikhailova appeared in Pravda. She was forbidden to attend the meeting. The conference was thrown out of the House of Friendship and the second day was canceled.

Most of the reliable evidence indicates that there are as many skeptical Russian scientists as there are American. Among them is Dr. N. P. Bechtereva, granddaughter of V. M. Bechterev, the physiologist who confirmed the success of telepathic experiments performed with animals in the Thirties by Durov and Kazhinski.

"We have had no proof of telepathy yet," she told Miss Browning. "But there is no doubt that the riddles of the brain are going to be solved by physics, mathematics, engineering, cybernetics. The approach has to be physiological, not psychological."

Miss Bechtereva is undoubtedly right about this, but at the moment the closest we have come to any understanding of the way in which psi works has been psychological. The physical mechanism may yet be hopelessly unclear, but a general theory of psi and personality is not far away.

At the A.A.A.S., Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, professor of psychology at the City College of the City University of New York, said, "A well-established theory of ESP is that it functions like other psychological abilities. A person is more likely to succeed either at ESP or at other tasks when his attitude is favorable, his motivation is high, but not too high, and his mood is right."

Dr. Schmeidler explained that her work was based on two ideas. One is that all responses to an ESP test are meaningful. A low score is just as significant as an unusually high score. The second is that everyone is ambivalent about ESP.

"Its implications of being able to know distant events, and of being able to see directly into others' minds or into the future are attractive but frightening," she said. "Given all these mixed feelings, prediction about any subject's scores demands information about his attitude toward the particular ESP test he is taking, and also about his feelings or mood.

"Dozens of experiments have examined this general issue and by and large have given gratifyingly consistent data. For example, years ago I asked subjects whether it was possible for ESP to occur in the particular experiment they were doing. I found first at Harvard and later at CCNY that those who gave a flat, unmodified 'No!' tended to have lower ESP scores than the others. I called it separating the sheep from the goats."

Dr. Schmeidler described a number of studies that produced similar results: Withdrawn children, defensive subjects, those who habitually set up strong barriers between themselves and the world--all showed lower ESP scores than their opposite personality types. Therapy sessions that showed good progress were followed by higher scores than sessions where progress was poor. Pupils who liked the class and the teacher had higher scores than those who did not.

When pairs of friends were tested in an ESP game, the dominant member usually won. When subjects went through two different ESP tests, they made higher scores on the one they preferred.

"Correlational studies indicate that confidence, good social adjustment and an outgoing attitude tie in with higher scores," she reported. "Depressive drugs like sodium amytal tend to lower ESP scores.

"Two years ago," Dr. Schmeidler said, "a swami visited my experimental psychology class. The class made a set of ESP calls. The swami then gave them an inspirational talk and a short breathing exercise. Immediately after, the class made a second set of ESP calls. Scores on the first set were near chance, but the second set had significantly high scores.

"In short, what we are doing at CCNY these days is trying to find personality concomitants of ESP success and failure. Our hope is that when they have been satisfied in adequate detail, we will be able to predict with considerable accuracy when ESP success will occur."

The great significance of Dr. Schmeidler's findings is not that they demon strate the existence of ESP, but that they appear to demonstrate an order and pattern that fit in with what we already know.

• • •

But how does it work? The only explanations that ring true sound uncomfortably mystical. They are involved in riddles about the nature of individuality. Individuality seems to be a modern invention, something that has to do with names and mirrors and pictures. You cannot discuss that with a scientist. He does not want to feel for even one moment that the separation of one personality from another, one mind from another, is only an illusion. And neither do we. We love our special identities too much to part with them for even a moment.

It may be that, in becoming civilized, we have lost the ability to understand how we really communicate with each other. Among the primitive peoples who exist without birth certificates and photographs and newspaper announcements of birth, marriage, death, there is no doubt about telepathy. It is accepted as an ordinary fact of life. Many American Plains Indians have told researchers that smoke signals were used merely to attract the attention of those they wished to contact. The rest of the communication took place by telepathy.

The aborigines of Australia, probably the least talkative people on earth, are said to be able to stay in touch with tribe and family members no matter how far the distance. They, too, use smoke signals to announce their whereabouts, but communicate with one another so adeptly by more mysterious means that Australian government officials, police officers and anthropologists are convinced the aborigines have telepathic powers.

The aborigines' standard explanation --"Dreamin' "--refers back to the "Dream Time" of the past in which the "Earth Mother Goddess" and the "Rainbow Serpent" were created. The Rainbow Serpent made "the road" and the Earth Mother brought everything else into existence. The Dream Time seems similar to Carl Jung's collective unconscious, a state of mind in which past, present and future exist in simultaneous potentiality.

In the context of this explanation, it is not surprising that the drugs most closely associated with telepathy should be those that produce psychedelic experiences. The shamans of American Indian tribes of the Southwest regularly used Datura or Jimson weed, which contains atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, to produce telepathic, clairvoyant and prophetic states of consciousness. They called it "grass that talks," and claimed it helped them find the location and number of their enemies during war, or of their quarry when hunting. Datura was used also to find lost properly, diagnose sickness and recommend therapy. The deadly nightshade, henbane and other plants containing these alkaloids have been used by witches throughout the world since prehistoric times.

Some of the South American Amazon tribes believe they find telepathic powers in Banisteriopsis Caapi, a jungle vine containing a drug sometimes called telepathine, found also in the seeds of Syrian rue, Peganum Harmala. Others add to this the extract of another liana, Banisteriopsis Rusbyana, to prepare a brew they call yajé, containing dimethyltryptamine.

In Mexico, the seeds of a plant of the morning-glory family, Rivea corymbosa, containing six chemicals related to LSD, were considered divine food by the ancient Aztecs because of their ability to produce extrasensory perceptions. The Zapotec Indians of Mitla, who call the plant bador or "little children," say that one who drinks an infusion of the leaves or eats 13 seeds will fall asleep and be visited in his dreams by the plant children, who will tell him about lost property, future events and other important matters.

In addition to peyote, which contains mescaline, the Indians of Mexico use teonanacatl, the sacred mushrooms, for divination. Among the Mazatec Indians, there are professional seers who earn their living by eating teonanacatl to locate stolen property, unlock secrets and give advice.

The prophetic power of teonanacatl when used by the curandero has not been easy for scientific investigators to reproduce in the laboratory or in the jungles, but most experts on the psychedelic drugs tend to believe in telepathy and other psi effects--as a strong possibility, if not as a proven fact. Dr. Sidney Cohen, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and pioneer in the study of the hallucinogens, who has maintained a generally cautious and conservative attitude, has written: "It is hardly necessary to invoke supernatural explanations for the mind's more exceptional activities.... Intuition, creativity, telepathic experiences, prophecy--all can be understood as superior activities of brain-mind function." And some studies indicate that drugs such as LSD do, in fact, enhance ESP. R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston report that, in a picture-match test, "Out of 62 subjects [who had taken LSD], 48 approximated the ... image two or more times out of ten. Five subjects approximated ... seven and eight times out of ten." In a paper read before a meeting of the Western Division of the American Psychiatric Association and latter reprinted in The Psychedelic Review, Los Angeles psychiatrist Margaret A. Paul described an experience with a psychedelic drug in which some of her patients, hundreds of miles away, experienced emotional disorientation at the time that she had affected a similar disturbance in herself with a dose of a broth made from the mushroom Amanita pantherina.

Dr. Paul and her husband, Dr. Kurt Fantl, also a psychiatrist, participated in an experiment in Carmel, California, designed to test the ability of a hallucinogen to enhance telepathic sensitivity. It took place on a Friday. For three hours at the peak of the drug's effect, Dr. Paul completely lost touch with reality, cycling through a death and rebirth hallucination over and over again, before finally returning to normal consciousness. On the following Monday, Dr. Paul says that she saw patients as usual, one of whom, a 30-year-old bachelor clinical psychologist, told her he had been depressed and unable to work or think straight after an episode of amnesia lasting three hours--at just about the same time the psychiatrist had her psychedelic experience.

On Tuesday, the doctor reported, another patient, a 28-year-old unhappily married woman, complained of having a three-hour spell of amnesia the previous Friday--again, at almost the same time as the psychiatrist's hallucinogen-induced trance.

"These incidents," Dr. Paul concluded, "are of no great importance in the field of parapsychology, because more dramatic events are being reported daily; nor are they important in the field of psychedelic research, since almost every subject feels he has great clairvoyant powers. But they may be important in the field of psychiatry, since they suggest the possibility that one mind may influence another at a distance even to the extent of producing temporary psychoticlike symptoms. Perhaps many unaccountable moods and impulses stem from telepathic communications, and they may remain unaccountable because we have not learned where or how to look for their source. This sounds uncomfortably like witchcraft but may, indeed, be a phenomenon which must be incorporated into our diagnostic system. Certainly I never expected to be involved in witchcraft, even less to be a witch and, least of all, an unwilling witch."

Dr. Montague Ullman has been doing work that appears to be related to Dr. Paul's experience. With psychologist Stanley Krippner, he has been searching for evidence of telepathy in the dreaming mind, exploring Freud's speculation that telepathic messages might be received by the unconscious, but distorted by the conscious, waking mind.

Using techniques of dream investigation discovered by Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman and others at the University of Chicago, Ullman set up the dream laboratory at Maimonides. Volunteers were put to bed in an isolated room with electroencephalograph electrodes attached to their heads and sensors to their eyes. Through characteristic EEG readings and rapid eye movements (REMs), the researchers were able to determine when the sleeping volunteers were dreaming. At the end of each dream sequence, the subjects were awakened to dictate their dreams into a recorder.

In a nearby room, another person fixed his attention on a target object, such as a painting, and attempted to transmit an impression of the target to the sleeping subject by telepathy. In one experiment in which the target object was José Clemente Orozco's Zapatistas, a painting of Mexican revolutionaries marching along a road with mountains in the background, the volunteer said he dreamed about New Mexico, where he once lived. He mentioned the mountains, the landscape and the Indians coming into Sante Fe for the fiesta.

In another case, a Gauguin painting, The Moon and the Earth, which showed a nude, dark Tahitian girl, was linked with a young secretary's dream of wearing a bathing suit and, subsequently, her dream of a fair-skinned girl who wanted to get a tan. When Gauguin's Still Life with Three Puppies was used, the volunteer dreamed of dogs and saw dark-blue bottles. The goblets in the Gauguin painting are blue.

Salvador Dali's The Last Supper was associated with a dream of "a glass of wine, very unusual wine," and of a group of people of whom "one was not good." When Van Gogh's Boats on the Beach was used as the target, the subject said his dream "had something to do with a painter. It makes me think of Van Gogh, perhaps."

"We're encouraged," Doctor Ullman told Science News writer Patricia McBroom, "but we don't feel we have proved anything." The correlations between the dream material and the target objects, said Ullman, are significant enough to warrant further study and experimentation by serious scientists. "The important thing," he said, "is to take the mysticism out of telepathy and study it on a rational basis."

The dream laboratory is facing serious financial difficulty and may have to close for lack of funds, but there are some people already involved in the possible practical aspects of clairvoyance and telepathy. Dr. Richard Ireland, for example, claims he made $1,000,000 before he was 30--through ESP.

"I would be walking by a vacant corner," Ireland says, "and I would have this vision of a nice brand-new supermarket rising from the bare ground. If I happened to buy that lot and then some company came along and told me they were going to put a supermarket on it, I wouldn't tell them I already knew that. I would just say thank you and take their money."

Nowhere, of course, does the ESP phenomenon have greater credence than among gamblers; nowhere also does ESP provide more ambiguous results than at the dice table. In the psychedelic world, there is a widespread but as-yet-unauthenticated belief that LSD-induced telepathy and/or psychokinesis has been used successfully by gamblers. In a case reported by Masters and Houston, an amateur gambler felt a strong urge to play blackjack halfway through an LSD session. Several friends accommodated him and while the game was in progress, he realized that the other players were transmitting "all kinds of subliminal signals" and that he, too, was telegraphing his cards. By correcting his own psycho logical game and picking up the others cues, he supposedly found it extremely easy to win again and again.

Clairvoyance has had a considerably greater history of practical application in modern times, from the use of the dowsing rod by early prospectors and well diggers to the periodic efforts of police to solve crimes with information produced by clairvoyants. A notable example of the use of clairvoyance in police investigation was the work of Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos in the Boston Strangler manhunt. According to Gerold Frank, author of The Boston Strangler, Hurkos was brought into the case at the suggestion of a local industrialist after all orthodox police measures had failed to locate the killer.

Frank describes one display:

At [one] point--it was now late afternoon--a detective arrived, apologetic for being late. His car had broken down on the way from Boston, he said. Peter perked up. He rose from his chair, cigar in hand, walked up to the newcomer and pointed a deliberate finger at him. His voice was strong again.

"You not late because of car; you late because you get fucked!"

The detective's jaw dropped.

"You think I kid you, eh?" Peter addressed himself to the entire room. "I tell you what happened, you laugh. His boss tell him two, three hours ago, 'You go to Lexington, work with this fellow, this nut, this Hurkos.' He say, 'Gee, boss, I got date, I don't want to work.' Boss say, 'You got to work.' So, what you do?" He stared accusingly at the detective. "You call girlfriend and say, 'Honey, I got to work tonight, I can't see you,' and she say, 'Aw, why you not come over on way to work?' so you go to her house, she very pretty girl, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, she divorce her husband, he give her house, you say, 'I got to work with that mind reader, that faker, that Hurkos guy.' Right? Right?"

The other's mouth hung open.

"She say, 'Before you leave, honey, you have cup of coffee.' You go into kitchen with her, she bend down to get coffeepot in cabinet, you grab her, you push her on kitchen table and you fuck her. Then you come here. That why you late. Right?"

There was absolute silence. Every man in the room seemed frozen in his place, all staring at the detective. If only he would laugh in Peter's face and walk away, so that all things would be as they were before. But he was like a man in shock. His eyes widened, and continued to widen until the whites showed all around, as if someone had placed toothpicks between his lids. He managed to close his mouth, then open it again to utter a choked, "Ahhhhh. ... Ahhhhhh."

Peter looked at him. "That girl pretty damn good, eh? You see, I no faker," and walked back to his chair.

It was almost half an hour before the detective could recover. He sat in one corner, surrounded by fellow detectives, repeating to every question dazedly, "That's right! That's right!" He would not--or could not--say more.

Without prior knowledge of the details of the case, writes Gerold Frank, Hurkos repeatedly identified and described evidence taken from the murder scenes--despite the fact that it was concealed in sealed envelopes. He also reenacted some of the murders, sometimes providing information unknown to the police at the time but later revealed by the Strangler in his confession. His descriptions led to two men, both of whom he had apparently never seen, even though he was able to give almost perfect physical and psychological portraits of them. Neither of them, however, proved to be the man on whom the murders were eventually pinned. Yet, in some important respects, the man who finally confessed fit the description Peter Hurkos gave the detectives many months before the case was solved.

The Boston Strangler, Hurkos said, would have a long, pointed nose, a scar on his left arm from an injury and would work with diesel engines. Early in 1965, Albert DeSalvo, an inmate being held at Bridgewater mental hospital in connection with a series of hundreds of sex offenses, confessed to the 11 murders and to two more the police had not connected with the Strangler. He has a long, pointed nose and a scar on his left arm from an injury, and he had worked with diesel engines.

• • •

Ultimately, this is what everyone is really afraid of. There are all those dirty little secrets. Who wants to be naked all the time? Even if it should turn out that personal privacy is an illusion, many of us would prefer to retain the illusion.

Back in 1953, Alfred Bester published The Demolished Man, a fine sciencefiction novel about the 24th Century, when ESP has become an established force in society. The telepaths have their own guild. They have their own games, their own ethics, their own satisfactions. They call themselves Espers and they have made crime impossible. They are the perfect detectives.

Then there is a murder. The manhunt begins. The criminal isn't a lovable person, but by the end of the book it's hard to avoid rooting for him and it's hard to avoid hating the smug mind cops.

Recently, Alfred Bester was asked if he believed in ESP.

"Of course not," he said.