J. B. RHINE (1895 – 1980)

RUSSELL TARG (1934 - )

HAL PUTHOFF (1936 - )

ANDREJA PUHARICH (1918 – 1995)

DARYL BEM (1938 - )

ROBERT JAHN (1930 – 2017 )

CHARLES TART (1937 - )

All through the 1950s, there was an overwhelming media blitz aimed at convincing the general population that mystical mind powers actually existed and could be scientifically confirmed. On TV, quiz shows were very popular, so a quiz show based on ESP appeared, hosted by Vincent Price. After just a few weeks of contestants displaying zero ESP abilities, the quiz-show format was dropped and the program became an anthology series dramatizing science-fantasy tales of ESP and psychic wonders!

HELMUT SCHMIDT (1928 - 2011)

Samuel Soal (1889–1975), with wife

Rhine's "foolproof, perfect" ESP setup

As posed for book illustration!

The actual setup!!!!!

Magicians have been doing astonishing tricks with playing cards for as long as there have been playing cards to do tricks with. So the very, very worst possible props to use in investigating supposed supernatural ways of gaining knowledge is a set of playing cards, no matter how their faces are modified... animal rummy cards, regular poker cards, Zener cards, cards with hand-drawn designs, etc., etc., have all been used and are all equivalent in terms of being completely susceptible to the sneaky methods used in magic and mentalism.

From a famous lecture by Richard Feynman: "Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments--they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a million rats--no, it's people this time--they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science? This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent--- not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity."

The powers sought by the studies and experiments of parapsychologists are the powers of the ancient magical view of the world, in which everything is mystically connected to everything else, and material things are an illusion. Soal and Rhine were motivated by their increasing belief in the reality of the 19th Century phenomena of Spiritualism, while Targ and Puthoff were advanced students of Scientology; the claims of parapsychology are a kind of expressed wish to make various religious doctrines "real." There is no way whatsoever in which the various phenomena supposedly studied in parapsychology can be fitted into established physics, or the basic facts of human physiology, or even evolution. [If prey could sense predators in an extrasensory way, the entire structure of predator-prey relationships would have evolved to be unrecognizably different from what we see.]  Science fiction literature became increasingly popular during the 1950s, especially with the advent of original paperback novels, and one of the most common themes of these tales was the "psionic abilities" of various characters in the stories. The theme at one time became almost universal in the new novels and stories being published. So, despite the real world we live in not offering any such supernatural abilities anywhere, the ideas have penetrated the public consciousness to a dismaying extent.