More Old Periodical Accounts of Clairvoyance or Telepathy

Before it senselessly became a taboo to honestly and fairly report on successful results of telepathy in publications such as Scientific American, such publications would sometimes admit the existence of telepathy. My post here documents how in 1941 the editors of Scientific American confessed that telepathy was proven. 

The photo below is from a Scientific American article in 1924 that you can read here. On the left of each pair is a drawing that one person attempted to mentally transmit to another. On the right of each pair is a drawing made by the person attempting to receive such telepathy transmissions. We see some striking successes. 

One problem with tests of the type shown above is that it is hard to quantify the improbability of the result. A different type of test developed at Duke University did allow the exact quantification of the improbability of achieved results. The Duke University psychologist Joseph Rhine did many tests using a deck of Zener cards. In such tests an experimenter uses a pack of cards that all look the same on one side. The other side of a card has one of five symbols shown below. There are an equal number of each symbol in the deck. 

Below is part of a  1938 newspaper account of the work of Duke University psychologist Joseph Rhine. We have a reference to card guessing experiments involving Zener cards that  have five possible symbols on one side of the card. I have touched up a few illegible characters in the original. With such cards, each correct guess of the symbol on one card has a chance probability of 1 in 5, or 20%. 

You can read more details about Rhine's experiments with Hubert Pearce in my post here. I describe the evidence from these tests as "smoking gun" evidence for ESP. 

The account below appeared on page 90 of  the April 15, 1940 edition of Life magazine, which during its heyday was one of the three or four leading weekly magazines in the United States. We read of tests with Zener cards that have five possible symbols, on one side of the card. The chance probability of guessing one of the cards correctly is 1 in 5. 

The article correctly states the rough likelihood of guessing a sequence of 9 of these cards correctly, purely by chance. Since there are five possible symbols, each equally likely, the chance of correctly guessing a sequence of 9 of the cards is 1 in 5 to the ninth power, which is 1 in 1,953,125. The text above seems to suggest that this feat of guessing all the cards correctly occurred in two consecutive attempts to guess 9 cards in a row. The likelihood of that occurring by chance in such a series involving 18 guesses would be 1 in 5 multiplied by itself 18 times, which would be 1 in  3,814,697,265,625.  You can calculate something like that using one of the large exponents calculators online, such as the one shown below:

We read explicitly in the account that the student Linzmayer guessed correctly 15 of the Zener cards in a row. The likelihood of that occurring purely by chance in a series of 15 guesses would be 1 in 5 to the 15th power, which would be 1 in 30,517,578,125.

On page 90 the Life magazine story gives us the same claim made at the top of this post, that Hubert Pearce correctly guessed the symbols on 25 consecutive Zener cards. We get the same estimate above, that the probability of such a thing occurring by chance is 1 in 298,023,223,876,953,125. The mathematical basis for this calculation is simple. Since there are five possible symbols on each Zener card, you simply use 1 divided by 5 raised to the 25th power. The screen below shows the calculation of the number. 

The tests above were mainly tests of clairvoyance, not telepathy. What is the difference? Clairvoyance is typically described as an ability to acquire information in some extra-sensory way, with there being little or no chance of you getting the information from some kind of mind-reading of someone else who knew the information. So when a pack of cards is shuffled, and no one knows the next card until the card is turned, and someone tries to guess what the card is, that is a test of clairvoyance. But if you and I sit in separated rooms, and I try to transmit mentally a thought or image to you, then such a test is called a test of telepathy. It can actually be hard to separate clairvoyance and telepathy under some tests. For example, if I hold up a card and try to mentally transmit it to you, in some other room or some other house, if you are successful in such tests that could either be from telepathy (you reading my mind) or by some clairvoyance in which you were able to see the cards by extrasensory perception. 

On page 92 the same Life magazine article tells us of the remarkable success in a long-distance test carried out over a span of 250 miles. It is a test that can be considered either a test of clairvoyance or a test of telepathy:

The wording is ambiguous, leaving us in doubt whether the 16 out of 25 result was obtained on two consecutive days, or whether it was one result of 16 out of 25 spanning two days. I cleared up the ambiguity by searching in the writings of Joseph Rhine, to find his account. It occurs on page 60 of his book Extra-sensory Perception. We read this:

So the results on the first three tests were:

Test 1: 19 out of 25 correct

Test 2: 16 out of 25 correct

Test 3: 16 out of 25 correct

Rhine does not do a good job of explaining how unlikely this result is. But by using what is called a binomial probability calculator, we can estimate that. The first three tests add up to being 51 successes out of 75, in a test in which the expected chance result is about 15 (which is one fifth of 75). Using the Wolfram Alpha binomial probability calculator, we can calculate the chance of that level of success, by using the inputs below:

The probability of getting a result as good as this by chance is calculated above. It is roughly 1 in 10 to the 19th power or 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000.

 The Life magazine also discusses on page 95 tests of clairvoyance and ESP that Joseph Rhine did with the medium Eileen Garrett.  These were very unusual, in that the medium would go into a trance, and then start speaking as if she were another personality called Uvani. Often when this occurs with mediums, there is an impression of communication with some unearthly realm, such as an afterlife realm.  Instead of quoting the Life magazine summary, I will quote the original report of these tests, which appear at the beginning of this edition of the scientific journal Character and Personality, the December 1934 edition (Volume 3, Issue 2). On page 100 we read this report by Rhine:

"The experimentation with the Mrs. Garrett personality began on April 10 and lasted until April 28, approximately three weeks. During this period 14,425 tests or trials were given her in the normal state in clairvoyance and telepathy combined.

The work with the Uvani personality in clairvoyant and telepathic perception began on the 17th of April and lasted until the 25th. The amount of work per day, as well as the number of days, was limited by Uvani’s disinclination toward the experiments, which was in contrast to Mrs. Garrett’s willingness and patience. Only 1,575 trials were obtained with Uvani.

In all there were performed 16,000 trials at clairvoyant and telepathic perception. This number includes all the results, high scores and low. The most probable number of hits expected by chance for this number of trials would be 3,200 but the actual results were 4,018, or 818 hits above the chance mean. This gives an average per 25 of 6.3, and when evaluated for anti-chance significance, a value of X (i.e., deviation divided by probable error) equal to 24.0. This gives odds against the chance hypothesis of such a huge number—one with well over 50 digits—that it is beyond a moment’s question that chance is not the explanation."

Although he states very exactly the experiment's results, Rhine is not expressing very clearly how above chance these results are. But with a binomial probability calculator, a more clear idea of the improbability can be revealed. Using the Wolfram Alpha binomial probability calculator, the improbability can be calculated using the inputs shown below:

The tests involving guessing the symbol shown on a Zener card with 5 possible symbols. The tests were done with a deck of cards with an equal number of each of the five symbols. The probability of guessing correctly 4018 or more out of 16,000 cards is 1 in 7.7  times 10 to the 56th power. This is a probability of less than 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. We would never expect chance to produce such a result, even if you spent half of every person's life doing telepathy tests on them. 

The reported test result is one of the best test results ever achieved in a test of telepathy. I can recall only one better result: the result of the Riess test, reported here. 

The experimental evidence for the reality of telepathy is overwhelming. Also, we have two hundred years of well-documented evidence for the reality of clairvoyance.  The refusal of today's materialists to seriously study such evidence is a sign of how fatal such results are to the dogmas taught by such materialists. 

Another page of Life magazine reveals the appalling "head in the sand" attitude of scientists toward telepathy. By 1952 the evidence for telepathy was overwhelming. But in that year Lucien Warner sent out a questionnaire to 515 members of the American Psychological Association. Of the 360 who answered, one sixth said that ESP was either an established fact or a likely one. But why so few, despite such a wealth of evidence? The reason was that two-thirds of those responding confessed that they had never read a single paper on the topic.  So there was a "head in the sand" majority who refused to even look at the evidence, and a group of 60 who apparently had studied some of the evidence and were convinced.