A blog about the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.
This is a picture I found at the Rhine Research Center. There was no caption or explanation with it, but it looks like a picture debunking a medium or psychic. They’ve clearly caught someone raising a small table which the medium may have claimed was being raised by a spirit. Tables were so crucial last century (table rising, rapping, etc.).
Jackie Gleason was a serious student of the paranormal, it turns out. J. B. Rhine and Eileen Garrett, while being charmed by him, had mixed feelings about his involvement. Gleason was wooing Rhine about doing a show about ESP. “It will be a show consisting of a panel of experts such as yourself with a scientific background to discuss intelligently the pros and cons of psychic phenomena and extra-sensory perception …”
Rhine was friendly, but cautious, and he didn’t jump on the opportunity Gleason offered. Gleason reached out to Garrett. She conducted a sitting with him, but it wasn’t productive. “He hasn’t called since,” she wrote Rhine, but “Mr Gleason did speak of you warmly and told me rather emphatically that he hoped to produce a radio show for ESP in the spring.” (This was 1954.) “‘In this,’ said he, ‘I will of course be guided by Dr. Rhine,’ but he made the remark with gentleness and dignity. I think Mr. Gleason, however he loves publicity, is in his heart a child who needs the glitter and make-up for something that he doesn’t possess which may be peace of mind.”
A very curious assessment of Gleason. Nothing ever came of it in the end. “The last I heard about Jackie Gleason,” Rhine wrote a friend, “he was on his way to Rome to visit the Pope. I haven’t heard anything more about his ESP program for a long time. I think he probably found out that it was pretty complicated.”
Hey, I just noticed in another letter discussing Gleason Rhine mentions that Carl Betz stopped by the lab. Betz was an actor who played the father in The Donna Reed Show. “He is still chasing around the occult centers,” Rhine writes about Betz. “He brought with him an Indian professor who is interested in our field.”
I grew up watching these shows. It’s just funny. You see another side to these people. What a fun place the lab must have been though, with drop-ins like this.
I think this post might be partly an excuse to post a picture of these adorable puppies. I got it from the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a picture of dogs who are being trained to detect land mines. In 1951, the Army and J. B. Rhine conducted an ESP test using dogs to detect land mines.
It was following WWII and by the time land mines were made with plastic and plastic explosives and the Army’s metal detectors were useless. “The guys in the field were reduced to physically probing for the mines under the surface by using their bayonets to see if they would hit a solid object,” Dick Lowrie emailed me. He was a member of the Army’s Engineer and Research Development Center at the time and they were investigating the problem. “This was deadly to the guy that makes the slightest mistake,” he explained. They had another potentially lethal method which involved a metal detector mounted in a fiberglass box on the top of a jeep. “No one was eager to drive those jeeps.”
Nothing they tried was working and they were desperate to find something, anything, that would do the job. Lowrie’s section chief was the first one to bring up ESP. Lowrie had always shown an interest in the subject so he was made the project engineer. Lowrie wrote a small contract for $50,000, (small for the Army, not so small for the Lab) and he and Rhine went to work on a test to see if dogs could detect land mines using ESP.
They placed twenty mines at random locations along a smooth and breath-taking stretch of beach in Monterey. “The handlers took the dogs along the line of the beach where the mines had been planted and the dogs would sit when they sensed a mine and were given a reward if correct.” The dogs actually did better than chance, but it wasn’t reliable enough for the field where errors meant the difference between life and death. They needed a lot better than above chance.
(The picture was taken by Vinh Dao.)
From time to time I would come across these scathing, blistering, mean (but sometimes funny) assessments of J. B. Rhine which were written by essayist, journalist, critic, etc., H. L. Mencken. Mencken apparently couldn’t stand Rhine, although he was fine with Louisa Rhine and wrote favorably of her.
So I was very surprised when I came across a 1938 letter from Mencken to Rhine which said, “As you probably know, I am still in grave doubt about your results, but they certainly interest me greatly and I have one or two suggestions that may possible be of some use.”
Even Mencken, who really loathed the guy, and his good friend Upton Sinclair, was intrigued. For some reason I didn’t see fit to copy the whole letter while I was down at Duke. What was wrong with me that day?? There was so much material and I kept having to draw a line, but still. I really should grab it the next time I’m down there.
I’m going to have an ongoing series called Letters to the Lab, I’ve decided. There are just so many filled with interesting stories, sad stories etc.
There was one from Barbara Brown, Rhine’s correspondent from Riker Laboratories. Barbara Brown would go on to become famous in the 1970’s for her research in biofeedback, but she was working for Riker Laboratories at the time. Riker had a contract with the Army to look into hallucinogenic mushrooms and she was involved with that. This was the sixties!
Brown had agreed to participate in a table rapping investigation. Table rapping was an old seance thing. “Rap once for yes, twice for no,” mediums would instruct the spirits. At Aldous Huxley’s house, Brown met Andrija Puharich, (a parapsychologist Rhine was always a little leery about) and before she had a chance to get to know him better, she agreed to let them use their lab’s electroencephalograph (EEG) in a table rapping experiment.
She didn’t say much about the experiment alas, beyond the fact that it was intriguing while questionable, and “unfortunately I haven’t the time to devote proper experimental situations and designs by myself.” She was skeptical and therefore not inclined to continue. I couldn’t find anything else about it, but I’m guessing they didn’t have a lot of luck finding another lab with an EEG who was willing to experiment. But maybe I’m wrong!