DIVINING AN ANSWER: J.B. Rhine’s early experiments at Duke University employed a set of cards named “the Zener deck” after its inventor, Karl Zener, one of Rhine’s collaborators. The deck consists of 25 cards, with five of each symbol: square, circle, cross, squiggly lines, and star. Here, Rhine is shown testing a woman for ESP using the cards in the presence of an assistant (right). “You shuffle the cards and hopefully randomize them,” explains Terence Hines of Pace University. “In the simplest version, I’m sitting across the table from you and you’re the subject or ‘receiver.’ I lay a card face down, you don’t know what it is, and you guess.” Although Zener cards are now considered “old hat” in parapsychology research, Hines notes, there’s no shortage of the cards online for contemporary ESP enthusiasts to work with.DUKE UNIVERISTY ARCHIVESIn 1926, American medium Mina Crandon held a séance in Boston. Well-known for her claims to channel dead relatives’ thoughts and to move objects with her mind, Crandon had drawn a following that included celebrities such as Arthur Conan Doyle and a mathematics professor and former associate editor of Scientific American, J. Malcom Bird.
However, at least one audience member at this particular séance—a young botanist named Joseph Banks Rhine—was unimpressed. Crandon, he claimed in a review of the performance, had not made a megaphone levitate, as the audience had believed. Instead, he wrote, she’d simply kicked it into the air. Crandon’s supporters were outraged; Doyle reportedly penned a scathing response containing the line, “J. B. Rhine is an ass.”
Yet Rhine, who himself had recently attended a lecture by Doyle on the evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP), was not an unbeliever in psychic powers. Far from it, says Pace University’s Terence Hines, a psychologist and author of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003). “There was great interest in showing ESP was real,” and J.B. Rhine, a scientist, believed he ...
