Author: Stacy Horn

In 1963, Morey Bernstein had a visit from astronaut Alan Shepard.  Shepard was interested in parapsychology, “But these boys have a very tight tongue when it comes to talking about ESP effects in space,” Morey wrote J. B. Rhine. In 1971, Alan Shepard would walk on the moon with astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, who would try to “send” messages back to earth. Two years later Mitchell founded The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which he established in order to scientifically study paranormal phenomena.  By the way, Mitchell has been in the news this week for saying we’ve already been visited by aliens.

Shepard didn’t want to talk about ESP during this visit, and he didn’t want to talk about a 1956 Naval report that Bernstein had just read called The Break-Off Phenomenon: A Feeling of Separation from the Earth Experienced by Pilots at High Altitude. The study reported that 48 out of 137 Navy and Marine pilots questioned described having had an out of body experience while flying, although the authors didn’t call it that and were somewhat vague on the details. Shepard admitted to working with Captain Graybiel, one of the authors of the report, but he wouldn’t say anymore.  So Morey went to Pensacola and spoke to Dr. Harlow Aides, who had also worked with Graybiel. “It is clear from my personal interview,” he wrote Rhine, “that some of the pilots find themselves out of their body, looking back at their own physical bodies which are still efficiently flying the jet plane.” Other reports followed Graybiel’s. In one, a pilot said “that he was at high level when he suddenly had the feeling that he was outside the cockpit, sitting on the wing, and watching himself fly the aircraft.”  In others, the break-off phenomena was experienced as a relatively mild feeling of unreality and separation.

There’s been some recent research that might explain the out-of-body experience.  In 2006, one possible physical explanation for out-of-body experiences was found by Swiss neurologist Dr. Olaf Blanke. Blanke discovered that when electric current was applied to the angular gyrus at the temporo-parietal junction in the brain, an out of body experience occurred. Whether or not this explains the break-off phenomena remains to be seen, but behavioral neuroscientist Todd Murphy points out that Dr. Blanke created this experience with one patient only, and this instance does not address the cases where subjects have out-of-body experiences and come back with information that they could not have obtained given the location of their bodies at the time.

Blanke was also not the first. “In the 1950’s, the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield also succeeded in eliciting an out of body experience using electrical stimulation,” Murphy wrote in a commentary on Blanke’s results, “but he was stimulating a very different area of the brain, the sylvian fissure. Dr. Michael Persinger has elicited out of body experiences through stimulation of the temporal lobes using magnetic signals derived from the EEG signature of one of the structures deep in the temporal lobes. Clearly, there is not a single ‘brain center’ that supports out of body experiences but rather a widely-distributed set of pathways.” That said, Murphy does credit Blanke’s research. “The experiment goes a long way toward providing a scientific explanation for what some believe is a paranormal phenomenon, even if the study is based on only one patient.”

I believe there’s been even more recent research, but I haven’t looked into it since I was working on this section.  

The picture is of Dr. Ashton Graybiel, who went on to have a distinguised career. There’s an Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University today. “Dr. Ashton Graybiel, whose studies on the effects of weightlessness and acceleration on human balance, spatial orientation, physiology and performance helped prepare America’s astronauts for manned space flight …” From his New York Times obituary.

Morey Bernstein was a friend of the Rhines, and he’s probably best known for his reincarnation work which he wrote about in his book The Search for Bridey Murphy.  But like many people who are exposed to something unexplained, Bernstein became interested in other areas that fell under the heading of “unexplained.”

A newspaper reporter once wrote that Bernstein looked a little like Frank Sinatra.  Rhine said he had a bit of a tennis player look about him, which to me meant he had that country-club thing going for him.  Rhine wanted Bernstein to work at the lab, but Morey said no.  He recognized that their interest and approach was just too different, and that it never would have worked.

I liked Morey.  Morey was smart.  Like many others, including Rhine, he recognized the importance of emotion in ESP work.  He once asked an artist to design a different set of ESP cards.  This particular set was going to be used for a test with psychic Peter Hurkos so they were on the lurid side.  For instance, “One card pictures an hysterical woman, bleeding from a stab wound—the knife protruding, of course,” Morey wrote to Rhine.  Hurkos agreed to the test, but then never showed up.

More to come.

I always felt bad for John Thomas, the Detroit public school administrator who brought the Rhines to Duke University and got the whole parapsychology-at-Duke ball rolling.  

His goal was to use science to find evidence of life after death, but that was all in order to communicate with his beloved dead wife Ethel. When the Rhines decided to focus on ESP instead of mediums it seemed to push that hope and Ethel further and further away.  Thomas died without any real answer, but just before he died a medium said she got this message from Ethel about him:  “My position to him is altered.  I am nearer to him.  I am nearer to him than I have ever been before.”

I’ve been on the lookout for a picture of John Thomas, and Sally Rhine Feather spotted this one when I was scanning pictures at the Rhine Research Center last month.  That’s John Thomas on the left, Professor William McDougall in the center and an unidentified woman on the right (I love her outfit and hat).

A few years before she died Mary Craig Sinclair, wife of Upton Sinclair, wrote J. B. Rhine about growing old and losing so many friends who had died. “I look out across the world and it is peopled with strangers!” Mary Craig had conducted experiments in telepathy which further galvanized Dr. William McDougall’s support of J. B. Rhine. She made an important contribution to parapsychology.  But she had such a horrible end.

I pieced together the last year of her life based on letters, articles, Upton Sinclair’s autobiography, and a most excellent Upton Sinclair biography called Radical Innocent by Anthony Arthur.

The Sinclairs were living in near-seclusion towards the end.  Western Union telegrams had to be thrown over a high fence that Sinclair had constructed in order to provide a “serene, undisturbed atmosphere” for Mary Craig, who had a heart condition.  A rare visitor said “deeply shrouded electric lamps, with bowls of pink camellias, stood in every corner of the room, while his wife, who was scarcely able to move, so frail her heart was, sat in the semi-darkness like a heroine of Poe.”  At one point Upton described cooking over 3,000 pots of rice for Craig as part of a special diet. He was looking after her and reading to her “almost constantly,” he so desperately didn’t want her to leave him and did everything he could to keep her alive. 

It was just downright painful reading about her final days. “I do not have any relief from constant and most uncomfortable fibrillation,” she wrote Rhine.  Upton described it as a distressing and “endless quivering of the heart” that made it impossible for her to sleep.  Craig asked Rhine to suggest hypnotists who could give her “curative suggestions,” but Rhine knew few hypnotists, and none in her area.  Mary Craig died a little over a month after writing Rhine, and she was terrified right up until the end.  “Her fears dominate her whole being,” Upton wrote his son.  In a particularly harrowing chapter in his autobiography, Sinclair described her in her last days as a “hideously tormented human being.”  He begged the doctors to end her suffering, but they refused.  “It was life.  It is our human fate.  It happened to me and it could happen to you.  The universe is a mystery to me.  How beauty, kindness, goodness should have such an end visited upon it will keep me in agony of spirit for the rest of my days on this planet … why she should have died in such untellable horror is a question I ask God in vain.”

She died on April 26, 1961.

A 1926 visit to the famous medium Margery introduced the world to J. B. and Louisa Rhine.  I tried to imagine what it was like for the very serious and relatively conservative J. B. Rhine to walk into a scene like the one depicted below, although Mina didn’t get naked this time (Mina Crandon was her real name).  The Rhines thought they were there to conduct a scientific investigation and were instead offered glasses of champagne. This picture shows Mina with the ectoplasmic hand of her dead brother Walter laying on her stomach. 

The Rhines wrote a scathing report of their visit which was first published in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and then picked up by newspapers everywhere. Margery been denounced before, but not like this.  The outcry from people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a champion of Margery’s, brought the Rhines overnight fame and eventually led them to Duke University. 

Even more difficult to imagine is what is must have been like for Dr. William McDougall, the man who approved the Rhines coming to Duke and later the creation of the Parapsychology Laboratory.  McDougall had investigated Margery before the Rhines, while he was still at Harvard, and he was an older British gentleman who was even more conservative and serious than J. B. Rhine.  I read this great description of McDougall, about how unnerved he was at first teaching classes at Duke because there were almost as many female faces staring up at him as male (go Duke!!).  About Mina and the ectoplasmic hand, McDougall said, “The more interesting question is—How did it come to be within the anatomy?”  Mina never permitted the kind of inspection required to try to answer that question.

I actually felt a lot of sympathy for Mina, and I go into that in the book.

[The picture came from the catalogue for the 2005 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled, “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.”]