Ghosts
Page 9
Obviously, science and ESP are merely casual acquaintances at the present time. Many members of the family are still looking askance at this new member of the community. They wish it would simply go away and not bother them. But parapsychology, the study of ESP, is here to stay. ESP research may be contrary to many established scientific laws and its methodology differs greatly from established practices. But it is a valid force; it exists in every sense of the term; and it must be studied fully in order to make science an honest field in the coming age. Anything less will lead scientific inquiry back to medieval thinking, back into the narrow channels of prejudice and severely limited fields of study. In the future, only a thorough re-examination of the scientific position on ESP in general will yield greater knowledge on the subject.
The notion still persists among large segments of the population that ESP is a subject suitable only for very special people: the weird fringe, some far-out scientists perhaps, or those young people who are “into” the occult. Under no circumstances is it something respectable average citizens get involved with. An interest in ESP simply does not stand up alongside such interests as music, sports, or the arts. Anyone professing an interest in ESP is automatically classified as an oddball. This attitude is more pronounced in small towns than it is in sophisticated cities like New York, but until recently, at least, the notion that ESP might be a subject for average people on a broad basis was alien to the public mind.
During that last few years, however, this attitude has shifted remarkably. More and more, people discussing the subject of extrasensory perception are welcomed in social circles as unusual people; and they become centers of attraction. Especially among the young, bringing up the subject of ESP almost guarantees one immediate friends. True, eyebrows are still raised among older people, especially business people or those in government, when ESP is mentioned as a serious subject matter. Occasionally one still hears the comment “You don’t really believe in that stuff?” Occasionally, too, people will give you an argument trying to prove that it is still all a fraud and has “long been proved to be without substance.” It is remarkable how some of those avid scoffers quote “authoritative” sources, which they never identify by name or place. Even Professor Rhine is frequently pictured as a man who tried to prove the reality of ESP and failed miserably.
Of course, we must realize that people believe what they want to believe. If a person is uncomfortable with a concept, reasons for disbelief will be found even if they are dragged in out of left field. A well-known way of dismissing evidence for ESP is to quote only the sources that espouse a negative point of view. Several authors who thrive on writing “debunking books,” undoubtedly the result of the current popularity of the occult subjects, make it their business to select bibliographies of source material that contain only the sort of proof they want in light of their own prejudiced purpose. A balanced bibliography would, of course, yield different results and would thwart their efforts to debunk the subject of ESP. Sometimes people in official positions will deny the existence of factual material so as not to be confronted with the evidence, if that evidence tends to create a public image different from the one they wish to project.
A good case in point is an incident that occurred on the Chicago television broadcast emceed by columnist Irving Kupcinet. Among the guests appearing with me was Colonel “Shorty” Powers of NASA. I had just remarked that tests had been conducted among astronauts to determine whether they were capable of telepathy once the reaches of outer space had been entered, in case radio communications should prove to be inadequate. Colonel Powers rose indignantly, denouncing my statement as false, saying, in effect, that no tests had been undertaken among astronauts and that such a program lacked a basis of fact. Fortunately, however, I had upon me a letter on official NASA stationery, signed by Dr. M. Koneci, who was at the time head of that very project.
* * *
The kinds of people who are interested in ESP include some very strange bedfellows: on the one hand, there are increasing numbers of scientists delving into the area with newly designed tools and new methods; on the other hand, there are lay people in various fields who find ESP a fascinating subject and do not hesitate to admit their interest, nor do they disguise their belief that it works. Scientists have had to swallow their pride and discard many cherished theories about life. Those who have been able to do so, adjusting to the ever-changing pattern of what constitutes scientific proof, have found their studies in ESP the most rewarding. The late heart specialist Dr. Alexis Carrel became interested in psychic phenomena, according to Monroe Fry in an article on ESP that appeared in Esquire magazine, during his famous experiment that established the immortality of individual cells in a fragment of chicken heart.
After he had been working on the problem for years somebody asked him about his conclusions. “The work of a scientist is to observe facts,” he said, “what I have observed are facts troublesome to science. But they are facts.” Science still knows very little about the human mind, but researchers are now certain that the mind is much more powerful and complicated than they have ever thought it was.
* * *
People accept theories, philosophies, or beliefs largely on the basis of who supports them, not necessarily on the facts alone. If a highly regarded individual supports a new belief, people are likely to follow him. Thus it was something of a shock to learn, several years after his passing, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had frequently sat in séances during which his late mother, Sarah Delano, had appeared to him and given him advice in matters of state. It has quite definitely been established that King George V of England also attended séances. To this day, the English royal family is partial to psychical research, although very little of this is ever published. Less secret is the case of Canada’s late Prime Minister William Mackenzie King. According to Life magazine, which devoted several pages to King, he “was an ardent spiritualist who used mediums, the ouija board and a crystal ball for guidance in his private life.” It is debatable whether this marks King as a spiritualist or whether he was merely exercising his natural gift of ESP and an interest in psychical research.
* * *
I myself receive continual testimony that ESP is a fascinating subject to people who would not have thought of it so a few years ago. Carlton R. Adams, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy retired, having read one of my books, contacted me to discuss my views on reincarnation. John D. Grayson, associate professor of linguistics at Sir George Williams University, Montreal, Canada, said, “If I lived in New York, I should like nothing better than to enroll in your eight-lecture course on parapsychology.” Gerald S. O’Morrow has a doctorate in education and is at Indiana State University: “I belong to a small development group which meets weekly and has been doing such for the last two years.” A lady initialed S. D. writes from California, “I have been successful in working a ouija board for eight years on a serious basis and have tried automatic writing with a small but significant amount of success. I have a great desire to develop my latent powers but until now I haven’t known who to go to that I could trust.” The lady’s profession is that of a police matron with a local police department.
A. P. gives a remarkable account of ESP experiences over the past twenty years. His talents include both visual and auditory phenomena. In reporting his incidents to me, he asked for an appraisal of his abilities with ESP. By profession A. P. is a physician, a native of Cuba.
S. B. Barris contacted me for an appraisal of his ESP development in light of a number of incidents in which he found himself capable of foretelling the result of a race, whether or not a customer would conclude the sale he was hoping for, and several incidents of clairvoyance. Mr. Barris, in addition to being a salesman in mutual funds, is an active member of the United States Army Reserves with the rank of Major.
Stanley R. Dean, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Florida, is a member of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on transcultural psychiatry and the
recent coordinator of a symposium at which a number of parapsychologists spoke.
Curiously enough, the number of people who will accept the existence of ESP is much larger than the number of people who believe in spirit survival or the more advanced forms of occult beliefs. ESP has the aura of the scientific about it, while, to the average mind at least, subjects including spirit survival, ghosts, reincarnation, and such seemingly require facets of human acceptance other than those that are purely scientific. This, at least, is a widely held conviction. At the basis of this distinction lies the unquestionable fact that there is a very pronounced difference between ESP and the more advanced forms of occult scientific belief. For ESP to work, one need not accept survival of human personality beyond bodily death. ESP between the living is as valid as ESP between the living and the so-called dead. Telepathy works whether one partner is in the great beyond or not. In fact, a large segment of the reported phenomena involving clairvoyance can probably be explained on the basis of simple ESP and need not involve the intercession of spirits at all. It has always been debatable whether a medium obtains information about a client from a spirit source standing by, as it were, in the wings, or whether the medium obtains this information from his own unconscious mind, drawing upon extraordinary powers dormant within it. Since the results are the main concern of the client, it is generally of little importance whence the information originates. It is, of course, comforting to think that ESP is merely an extension of the ordinary five senses as we know them, and can be accepted without the need for overhauling one’s greater philosophy of life. The same cannot be said about the acceptance of spirit communication, reincarnation, and other occult phenomena. Accepting them as realities requires a profound alteration of the way average people look at life. With ESP, a scientifically oriented person need only extend the limits of believability a little, comparing the ESP faculty to radio waves and himself to a receiving instrument.
So widespread is the interest in ESP research and so many are the published cases indicating its reality that the number of out-and-out debunkers has shrunk considerably during the past years. Some years ago, H. H. Pierce, a chemist, seriously challenged the findings of Dr. Joseph Rhine on the grounds that his statistics were false, if not fraudulent, and that the material proved nothing. No scientist of similar stature has come forth in recent years to challenge the acceptance of ESP; to the contrary, more and more universities are devoting entire departments or special projects to inquiry into the field of ESP. The little debunking that goes on still is done by inept amateurs trying to hang on to the coattails of the current occult vogue.
It is only natural to assume that extrasensory perception has great practical value in crime detection. Though some law enforcement agencies have used it and are using it in increasing instances, this does not mean that the courts will openly admit evidence obtained by psychic means. However, a psychic may help the authorities solve a crime by leading them to a criminal or to the missing person. It is then up to the police or other agency to establish the facts by conventional means that will stand up in a court of law. Without guidance from the psychic, however, the authorities might still be in the dark.
One of the best-known psychic persons to help the police and the FBI was the late Florence Sternfels, the great psychometrist. Her other talent, however, was police work. She would pick up a trail from such meager clues as an object belonging to the missing person, or even merely by being asked whatever happened to so-and-so. Of course, she had no access to any information about the case, nor was she ever told afterwards how the case ended. The police like to come to psychics for help, but once they have gotten what they’ve come for, they are reluctant to keep the psychic informed of the progress they have made because of the leads provided. They are even more reluctant to admit that a psychic has helped them. This can take on preposterous proportions.
The Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos, whose help was sought by the Boston police in the case of the Boston Strangler, was indeed able to describe in great detail what the killer looked like.
Hurkos came to Boston to help the authorities but soon found himself in the middle of a power play between the Boston police and the Massachusetts Attorney General. The police had close ties to Boston’s Democratic machine, and the Attorney General was a Republican. Hurkos, even worse, was a foreigner.
When the newspapers splashed the psychic’s successful tracing of the killer all over the front pages, something within the police department snapped. Hurkos, sure he had picked the right suspect, returned to New York, his job done. The following morning he was arrested on the charge of having impersonated an FBI man several months before. He had allegedly said as much to a gas station attendant and shown him some credentials. This happened when the gas station man noticed some rifles in Hurkos’s car. The “credentials” were honorary police cards which many grateful police chiefs had given the psychic for his aid. Hurkos, whose English was fragmentary—for that matter, his Dutch might not be good, since he was only a house painter before he turned psychic—said something to the effect that he worked with the FBI, which was perfectly true. To a foreigner, the difference between such a statement and an assertion of being an FBI man is negligible and perhaps even unimportant.
Those in the know realized that Hurkos was being framed, and some papers said so immediately. Then the Attorney General’s office picked up another suspect, who practically matched the first one in appearance, weight, height. Which man did the killing? But Hurkos had done his job well. He had pointed out the places where victims had been found and he had described the killer. And what did it bring him for his troubles, beyond a modest fee of $1,000? Only trouble and embarrassment.
Florence Sternfels was more fortunate in her police contacts. One of her best cases concerns the FBI. During the early part of World War II, she strongly felt that the Iona Island powder depot would be blown up by saboteurs. She had trouble getting to the right person, of course, but eventually she succeeded, and the detonation was headed off just in the nick of time. During the ten years I knew and sometimes worked with her, Sternfels was consulted in dozens of cases of mysterious disappearances and missing persons. In one instance, she was flown to Colorado to help local law officers track down a murderer. Never frightened, she saw the captured man a day or two later. Incidentally, she never charged a penny for this work with the authorities.
The well-known Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset has worked with the police in Holland on a number of cases of murder or disappearance. In the United States, Croiset attempted to solve the almost legendary disappearance of Judge Crater with the help of his biographer, Jack Harrison Pollack. Although Croiset succeeded in adding new material, Pollack was not able to actually find the bones in the spot indicated by Croiset through the use of clairvoyance. However, Croiset was of considerable help in the case of three murdered civil rights workers. He supplied, again through Jack Pollack, a number of clues and pieces of information as to where the bodies would be found, who the murderers were, and how the crime had been committed, at a time when the question of whether they were even dead or not had not yet been resolved!
Croiset sees in pictures rather than words or sentences. He need not be present at the scene of a crime to get impressions, but holding an object belonging to the person whose fate he is to fathom helps him.
What do the police think of this kind of help?
Officially, they do not like to say they use it, but unofficially, why that’s another matter. When I worked on the Serge Rubinstein case a year after the financier’s murder—when it was as much a mystery as it is, at least officially, today—I naturally turned over to the New York police every scrap of information I obtained. The medium in this case was Mrs. Ethel Meyers, and the evidence was indeed remarkable. Rubinstein’s mother was present during the trance session, and readily identified the voice coming from the entranced psychic’s lips as that of her murdered son. Moreover, certain peculiar turns of language were used that were characteri
stic of the deceased. None of this was known to the medium or to myself at the time.
As we sat in the very spot where the tragic event had taken place, the restless spirit of Serge Rubinstein requested revenge, of course, and named names and circumstances of his demise. In subsequent sittings, additional information was given, safe deposit box numbers were named, and all sorts of detailed business, obtained; but, for reasons unknown, the police did not act on this, perhaps because it hardly stands up in a court of law. The guilty parties were well known, partly as a result of ordinary police work, and partly from our memos and transcriptions, but to make the accusation stick would prove difficult. Then, after Rubinstein’s mother died, the case slid back into the gray world of forgotten, unsolved crimes.
* * *
Some police officers, at least, do not hesitate to speak up, however, and freely admit the importance of ESP in their work. On October 9, 1964, Lieutenant John J. Cronin gave an interview to the New York Journal-American’s William McFadden, in which he made his experiences with ESP known. This is what the reporter wrote:
In the not too distant future, every police department in the land will have extra-sensory perception consultants, perhaps even extra-sensory perception bureaus, New York Police Lt. John J. Cronin said today.
For 18 years—longer than any other man in the history of the department—he headed the Missing Persons Bureau.
“After I retire, I might write a book on ESP,” he said. “It has provided much information on police cases that is accurate.”
One of the fantastic cases he cited was that of a 10-year-old Baltimore girl who was missing last July.