ESP Games and Academic Politics

In 1939, Rhine learned that the toy company Cadaco-Ellis was planning to come out with a game called Telepathy. The creator was said to be a psychologist named Dr. Ogden Reed.

J. B. Rhine suspected and confirmed that Reed was really Dr. Louis D. Goodfellow, a Northwestern University psychologist who had been hired by the Zenith Radio Corporation in 1937 to conduct ESP tests on the radio. Rhine had been hired as a consultant for that same program, and he had had no end of trouble with Goodfellow. Rhine felt Goodfellow had not inserted sufficient controls into the experiment and had made mistakes with the math. Goodfellow was eventually let go.

Goodfellow apparently had hard feelings toward Rhine because in the pamphlet that came with the game he wrote, “Dr. Rhine’s first experiments were full of loopholes. For example, it was found that the ink with which the cards were printed caused the paper to shrink, etc.”  As far as I know, the example Goodfellow gave was untrue, and while like any experiment, problems with Rhine’s initial experiments had to be identified and addressed, Goodfellow’s bringing it up in this way does feel a little like payback.

Commander Eugene F. McDonald, the head of Zenith, was so incensed by what Goodfellow had written that he told Rhine that he should bring action against Cadaco-Ellis and that he, McDonald, would foot the bill.

Rhine, meanwhile, had written Goodfellow and asked, “Is it proper for an academic man to use a surreptitious approach (in this case, an assumed name) to avoid having to meet the responsibility for the things he is expressing?”

Goodfellow answered that the company did use “a number of my own expressions,” however the creation of a Dr. Ogden Reed was the toy company’s idea, not his. Rhine answered that he had two signed statements from people in a position to know that Goodfellow was the sole author of the statement penned by “Dr. Ogden Reed.” If they removed the controversial matter, Rhine told him, they’d have no problem, “poor as its design really is” for telepathy. But if they released the game as is, they’d “take steps to bring you out in full light as author of an underhand attack and as party to setting up a fake “authority” as a psychologist.”

I found one funny letter referencing this incident from Robert H. Gault, a colleague of Goodfellow’s at Northwestern. Gault wrote McDonald: “Rhine and Goodfellow keep me supplied with carbon copies of their love letters. I’m not surprised that R. is up on his ear. Between you and me and the gate post, I don’t care what kind of spanking he administers to G. The latter is an excellent technical man in the laboratory and in that capacity he is useful to me. But in some other respects he is a damn fool … I’m telling him after today that hereafter I want to know what he is about, provided it is something that by any chance could affect relations outside the laboratory.” Gault went on to write books about criminology.

I found the picture of the Telepathy game on http://byemylife.com. The picture to the left is Zenith president Eugene McDonald.

While I was looking for the picture of the Cadaco-Ellis game I came across this modern telepathy game. And this one pictured below from Milton Bradley.

And speaking of telepathy games, I happened to be researching patents a few weeks ago (about something unrelated to anything paranormal) and came across a 1984 patent for a “psychic connection game.” It was developed by Laurie G. Larwood, who, if I’m googling properly, was an organizational psychologist.

From the abstract:

A game for evaluation and development of various psychic abilities between its participants. Objects are furnished which include bi-valued dimensional attributes, such as rough-smooth, solid-hollow, or heads-tails. A player concentrates on a chosen attribute and attempts to either transmit, receive, block, predict, or influence a given valued condition.

A gameboard is provided on which a player’s successes are marked by position of his player-piece or counter on the board. Counter positions are marked with the chance probability of reaching a given position from a start position in a given number of moves. Board layout is such that if the incidence of successes is greater than that expected by random chance alone, counters are moved toward another player, thereby establishing a higher degree of psychic connectivity.

This is one of the drawings that was filed with the patent.

The Sacred Mushroom

On January 24, 1961, the TV show One Step Beyond aired an episode about ESP and psychedelics which is available on YouTube. I loved hearing the One Step Beyond theme music, and host John Newland using his Ooh-I-Am-Saying-Something-Scary-voice to speak about an area that is actually pretty straightforward and not particularly spooky as unexplored (by science, then).

I referred to this episode in Unbelievable because the lab experimented briefly with synthetic hallucinogens and because two of the people who appear on the show are also part of the story I tell. They are Dr. Barbara B. Brown from the University of California and Riker Laboratories (who would become famous in the 1970’s for her research in biofeedback) and Andrija Puharich, a scientist Rhine never warmed up to.

On the show they conducted a couple experiments with hallucinogenic mushrooms. First a small group of subjects ate the mushrooms and they reported what happened, and later host John Newland took mushrooms and Puharich administered ESP tests.

It’s pretty astounding to watch, considering how things have tightened up since!

Part 1 - Mexico

Part 2 - ESP Tests

Part 3 - The Panel Comments

Pictures of Elizabeth Bullock’s Grave

Nancy Wallace very kindly sent me pictures of the grave of Elizabeth Bullock, whose strange story I tell here. Nancy had grown up nearby and on a recent visit home she drove to the St. Patrick’s Cemetery at Table Bluff and found Elizabeth’s final resting place.

While there she visited with John Davy, who had prepared her grave, and his wife Doris Davey, who was the organist at the church where they conducted Elizabeth’s funeral mass. John was the one who had scratched Elizabeth’s name into the concete base at the bottom of the cross. They told Nancy that “the day after Elizabeth’s ashes arrived by UPS Father Devereaux and an assistant were to go to the small town of Fortuna to pick up the cross. They waited for Father Devereaux to wake up but he slept till after 10:00AM saying that he hadn’t slept well with Elizabeth with him.”

They also said that the following Sunday, when Elizabeth was mentioned at mass, the lights in the church went out and it was so dark Doris couldn’t play.

St. Patrick’s Cemetery at Table Bluff.

The grave of Elizabeth Bullock.

The base and the inscription (it was barely legible, Nancy said).

Another view of Elizabeth’s grave.

A view to the left of the grave. It gives you an idea of how pretty this spot it.

And a view to the right.

Thank you so much for sending me these pictures Nancy, and for allowing me to share them with everybody. I believe the post with the story about Elizabeth Bullock is my most visited post.

Sad Letters to the Lab

I’ve written before about the many sad letters that would arrive at the lab every day.  Every time I read one I wondered how the scientists would manage to come up with a compassionate response to them, or if they would answer them at all. They always did though.

Here is an example of one of the letters they would respond to.

My Dear Dr. Rhine:

I have read a good deal about your experiments in psychic phenomena (or parapsychology), but I don’t think you’re getting anywhere near the truth until my own case is exposed completely and the scientific oligarchy that rules the United States by “human farming” is exposed and stopped.  I was brutally experimented on years ago and I pray and work for exposal.  This scientific gang deliberately produces fake phenomena by remote control using ultrasonics, microwaves, pulse modulation, etc.

After Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, I was broken down by government scientists (undoubtedly) by remote control using sound waves.  They used also what I call “mental telephony” on me and projected images by remote control to members of my own family.  I was reduced to poverty, forced into a state hospital because I was penniless, where they produced over a hundred heart attacks by remote control until my heart valves were defunct, then they kept me alive by pulse modulation (sound wave pressure) for years.  I had all kinds of things done to me and was attacked in four different states.

I am just a living dead woman and I know there are no spirits nor anything left after death, and some of your experiments under the circumstances are useless fakes.  You can’t experiment with parapsychology properly until the atmosphere of the United States and the world is cleared of remote control experiments by science by ultrasonics on human brains and material objects.

Why don’t you work for exposal of this gang who victimized me, if you expect to make any genuine progress in your experiments?  Otherwise, how can you know genuine results from the false?  Please acknowledge this at least.

Presentation Today!

Just a reminder that I’ll be giving a presentation about my book today at 3pm.

Then after a short break parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach will talk about “Psychical Research Today: In Life, Lab and the Media.”

Where:

Polaris North Theatre
245 West 29th Street
Between 7th & 8th Avenues
4th Floor
New York, NY
$40 at the door

See you there!

Another Inventor and the Afterlife: Glenn W. Watson

Watching the History’s Detectives segment about Thomas Edison reminded me of another inventor who had an interest in subjects related to parapsychology: Glenn W. Watson. From my book:

“Just before Rhine retired from Duke in 1965, a 75-year-old inventor named Glenn W. Watson started writing Clement Stone, one of Rhine’s financial contributors. He was looking for financing for Telepathy-Type, a typewriter that would type out messages received telepathically. Watson, the inventor of the radio typewriter, had come up with the idea 30 years before. AT&T had worked for years on a similar project, Watson said, but had gotten nowhere.

“Stone asked Rhine what he thought and Rhine said the idea had no merit. Engineers young and old had attempted approaching the problem this way, he said. But what they all failed to understand was “that the limiting factor is in the individual, in the deep recesses of human personality, and not in the gadgetry of transmission.” Watson’s plan was “based on a complete misconception of what telepathy is and how it works.”

“Point taken about the limiting factor. But no one really knew what telepathy was or how it worked, including Rhine.”

That came out harsher than I had intended, although technically true. I think in part I was defending Glenn Watson and all the engineers of the world. Watson might have a different take on the problem, but it was possible that the results of his efforts could have been enlightening.  In any case,  Watson died a few years later sadly, in 1969. But he has an interesting history of inventions and accomplishments.

In 1931, Watson invented something called a radio typewriter. Someone types a message on a typewriter and the message is transmitted via radio waves to a printer. He introduced his invention to the world by sending a message to Admiral Byrd who was in Antarctica at the time. Quite the showman!

A couple of years later Watson developed a machine to read aloud to the blind. Now why isn’t he more well known for that??  Did something come along soon after that surpassed his invention?

Watson also came up with he called the telepiano. The idea was a pianist would play a piano in one location, and that would be transmitted, again via radio waves, to every properly equipped telepiano which would then start playing whatever the pianist had just played. Fun, but I’m skeptical about how well the telepianos could recreate the subtler aspects of the original performance.

In the end, according to a Detroit Free Press article, Watson felt “his greatest work—the demonstration of mental telepathy—is still to be recognized.”

“I’ll put it over,’ he said with confidence.  ’I know how, but people aren’t ready for it yet. No one believes in anything new, so an inventor has to be a salesman, too.’ [True, true.] He also said he was working with “Duke University scientists who are studying extra-sensory perception.”

I don’t remember coming across anything to confirm that, but even though Rhine was skeptical about Watson’s device, it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have met with him and heard him out. While looking around to see if I had anything else in my files about Watson I found another Detroit Free Press article (August 7, 1950 ) which says Watson applied for a patent for the telepathy machine, and describes how the machine would operate.

“The machine would have a revolving belt carrying all the letters of the alphabet and other symbols to make sentences. There would be a key and when you pressed it, as the belt revolved below, it would stamp out a particular letter.

“Now to test out mental telepathy you would use two of these machines. One man, who was going to try to send a message by thought, would have a machine in a place remote from one who was to be the receiver.

“The two machines would be synchronized so the belts would be moving together—the same letters passing under the key at the same time.

“The one who was sending would look at the machine and as the letter—let’s say ‘C’—passed below his key he would send the thought ‘now’ or ‘hit it’ to the receiver.

“The receiver would just punch down his key when he thought he received a ‘thought impulse’ to do it. If mental telepathy was working he should hit the ‘C’ the sender wanted him to get.”

Watson thought he could build his telepathy machine for $2,500, but ultimately the machines would cost $97 a piece when he could build them in the thousands.

[The first picture is from Watson's obituary, Detroit Free Press November 20, 1969. The second is from Popular Science, 1931, and the next one is from Radio-Craft. The date is cut off, but it's from the thirties. The last picture is also from Popular Science, 1933, and it's a picture of Watson with his radio typewriter, not the telepathy machine, which I suspect was never built.]

Edison and the Afterlife Part 2

History’s Detectives did a very entertaining segment about Edison’s machine (thank you for the pointer, Winifer Skattebol). You can see it here. It’s the first historical mystery they try to solve and it’s really worth watching.

And, one of their Edison authorities, Paul Israel, the Director and General Editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers, didn’t try to downplay Edison’s interest in the possibility of life after death.

So there you go!