Martin Gardner - On the Wild Side

It is customary among editors of scientific journals to let their readers know when a published paper is found to have been based on fraud. It is the only way to prevent the paper from continuing to mislead later researchers. Such was not the practice of Joseph Banks Rhine.

Rhine outlined his policy of secrecy, in a note titled The Hypothesis of Deception (Journal of Parapsychology, 2, 151-152, 1938) as follows: Certain friends of the research in extra-sensory perception, he began, have recently informed us of rumors ... that the subjects at Duke University and at other places were practicing deception ... and that even when caught, these deceptions were deliberately withheld from the public.... Rhine goes on to say that his researchers have become so skillful in safeguarding their experiments against both willful and unwitting deception that no magician ... is willing to attempt to work (as a magician) under such conditions. Indeed, he continues, so stringent are the controls that the mere. possibility alone of cheating is sufficient to bar data from acceptance....

That subjects and experimenters occasionally cheat is to be expected, Rhine says. It is not surprising, therefore, that his laboratory has encountered a number of phenomena which on closer investigation proved to be fraudulently produced. Should such evidence be made public? We do not feel, Rhine answers, that any good purpose could be served by the exposure, a la Houdini, of these instances.... In a word, a research project in ESP does not become of conclusive scientific importance until it reaches the point at which even the greatest will-to-deceive can have no effect under the conditions. This criterion is the very threshold of the research field. It leaves us under no obligation to concern ourselves either with the ethics of the subjects or with the morbid curiosity of a few individuals.

My morbid curiosity was strongly aroused when I recently read in Louisa Rhines Something Hidden (1983) a dramatic account of her husbands discovery that a paper he had published in his journal was based on deliberate cheating by the author. Mrs. Rhine refers to the dishonest parapsychologist only as Jim. He had contributed many earlier articles to Rhines journal, and this new work was considered one of the best of those recently reported.

Joseph Rhine (right) testing Hubert Pearce, one of his most successful subjects, in 1933.

Banks, as Louisa called her husband, intended to make Jims paper the centerpiece of a talk he was scheduled to give at a meeting of parapsychologists in Columbus, Ohio. A few weeks before the symposium, Gardner Murphy asked Rhine for Jims original records to consider for his own speech on record-keeping and -checking. Jim brought his records to Rhine a few days before the Columbus meeting. To Rhines horror, when he and two of his assistants began examining the records, they found unmistakable evidence of fraud. Jim had actually consistently falsified his records, Louisa Rhine tells us. To produce extra hits Jim had to resort to erasures and transpositions in the records of his call series. Rhine journeyed to Columbus in great anguish. He had to scrap the paper he intended to read, and deliver instead, with visible nervousness, an entirely different talk. Jims college professor, after seeing evidence of the cheating, was profoundly shocked and even blamed himself for not being more vigilant.

Jims name, Louisa Rhine writes, was never again seen in the annals of parapsychology.

This simply isnt true. Jim (I learned from a disenchanted parapsychologist) was James D. MacFarland, then a young instructor in psychology at Tarkio College, in Tarkio, Missouri. His flawed paper, Discrimination Shown Between Experimenters by Subjects, appeared in Rhines journal (JP, 2, 160-170, Sept. 1938), the issue following Rhines piece on deception. No retraction of the paper was ever published. Did references to MacFarlands research vanish from the literature on psi? It did not. J. G. Pratt in Extrasensory Perception after 60 Years (1940), refers to MacFarlands work. And Pratt was one of Rhines two assistants who originally discovered MacFarlands fudging!

In 1974 Rhine again suffered from unfortunate timing. His paper Security Versus Deception in Parapsychology, published in his journal (vol. 38, 1974), runs to twenty-three pages. In it he dismisses deception by subjects as no longer significant. Self-deceptions by experimenters is more widespread, but this too is limited, Rhine says, to novices who form a subspecies of unprepared experimenters who may soon be approaching extinction.

Turning to deliberate deception by parapsychologists, Rhine selects twelve sample cases of dishonest experimenters that came to his attention from 1940 to 1950, four of whom were caught red-handed. Not a single name is mentioned. What papers did they publish, one wonders. Are their papers still being cited as evidence for psi? Rhine is convinced that such fraud diminished markedly after 1960. We have at least got past the older phase of having to use detectives and magicians to discover or prevent trickery by the subjects. He applauds the growing use of computers, but although machines will not lie, he warns against overoptimism about their usefulness in parapsychology. Complex apparatus, he cautions, can sometimes also be used as a screen to conceal the trickery it was intended to prevent.

The warning proved prophetic. A few months after Rhines paper appeared, Dr. Walter Levy, the acting director of his laboratory and the young man he had chosen to be his successor, was caught red-handed tinkering with an electronic recording machine. The tinkering had beefed up the scores of a test he was making on the PK. ability of rats. Levy resigned in disgrace, though, again, references to his earlier papers (one on the PK powers of live chicken eggs) have not yet entirely vanished from psi literature. Rhine tried his best to hush up the scandal; but when it was obvious he could not do so, he wrote an apologetic article about it in his journal. As usual he did not mention Levys name, apparently under the naive delusion that readers would not learn the flimflammers identity.

Four years later, Englands most distinguished parapsychologist, S. G. Soal, was caught having deliberately fudged the data for one of his most famous tests. I see no sign that Soals other experiments are disappearing from the literature. Pratt, almost pathologically incapable of believing anyone would cheat, came to Soals defense. He argued that Soal may have used precognition when inserting digits into the columns of numbers he was copying down, unconsciously choosing numbers that would score hits on the calls the subject would make later. For me, this experimenter psi explanation makes more sense, psychologically, than saying that Soal consciously falsified for his own records.

I have been told on reliable authority that the files in Rhines laboratory contain material suggesting fraud on the part of Hubert Pearce, the most talented of all of Rhines early psychics. Who knows how much data of this sort is buried in the Rhine archives? Let us hope that someday someone with a balanced sense of history, under no compulsion to regard Rhine as one of psis saints, will be allowed full access to those archives and give us a biography of Banks that is not a hagiography.

Let me change the subject. Early in 1987 Random House published Intruders, by Budd Hopkins. It is one of the funniest and shabbiest books ever written about abductions of humans by extraterrestrials who visit Earth in flying saucers. Hopkins is easy to understand. He is a hack journalist of the occult. Harder to comprehend was a full-page advertisement that appeared in the