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 deceivers 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 admitted deceit. "The whole of these alleged experiments were bogus," he later wrote. The remainder of his statement has echoed to this day: "[Our hoax] originated in the honest desire of two youths to show how easily men of scientific 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, suffered 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 seek demonstration that no crow is black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow." But after 25 years of reading 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 departure of nature to remain baffling."

Other researchers had not been humble or uncertain. Late in the century, a self-styled sensitive named Henry Slade toured the U.S. and Europe making objects vanish and swinging compass needles without the aid of a magnet. 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 confessed that it was indeed all an act.

Perhaps parapsychology's most gullible proponent was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the superrationalist detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle remains the greatest proof that intelligence and scruple cannot compete with naivete and the desire to accept the paranormal 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 goblin and elves caught by a child's camera. The pictures were manifestly staged; the entire project made all but the blindest 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 literature 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 see.

From the start, Rhine was criticized for juggling numbers. (Subsequent researchers have also used questionable procedures, citing "negative ESP" when the number of correct guesses fall below average and "displacement" when subjects call the card before or after the one they are trying to guess.) H.L. Mencken summarized the early views of the dubious when he wrote, "In plain language, Professor Rhine segregates all those persons who, in guessing the cards, enjoy noteworthy runs of luck, and then adduces those noteworthy runs of luck as proof that they must possess mysterious powers." Rhine tightened his laboratory 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 offbeat: he produced pictures inside a Polaroid camera using nothing but his mind and a little hollow tube he called his "gismo." Reporters Charles Reynolds and David Eisendrath, who observed Serios at work in Denver, had little trouble constructing a device that could be secreted inside a gismo to produce all of Serios' effects. The instrument 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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