Fans of rock dinosaur trivia will no doubt be aware that, prior to joining Queen, guitarist Brian May was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics at Imperial College, London. Most fans will be aware of this, but not the bartender with whom I spent two hours of my life I’ll never get back arguing over whether May studied astronomy or astrology. Try as I might to make the point that outside of the ads in the back pages of High Times no university in the world offers postgraduate degrees in Zodiac Studies, this particular bar-jock would not be moved. I came away from that exchange depressingly sober and berating myself for ignoring two fundamental maxims: 1) never argue with the man pouring your drinks, and 2) sometimes even the most seemingly obvious points of logic will merely slap like wavelets against the walls of stubborn belief. 

One of the effects of our species learning to utilize tools and outthinking the other animals to the top of the food chain is that once we got there we found ourselves with the capacity and luxury to believe in things unseen, to have faith in powers greater than ourselves - gods, God, the Devil, angels, demons, ghosts, aliens, monsters, gravity, magic, philosophy and psychology, just to name a few. And while we divide ourselves into camps based upon which almighty powers trip our triggers best and frequently go to war over them, the fact is that given an infinite universe - or, according to quantum theory, an infinite number of universes - there is room at the table for all, Jesus and Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard and the Loch Ness Monster, ancient astronauts and Dr. Phil. Unfortunately, for every believer out there, there is a skeptic who stamps his foot and demands proof, and as we all know, believing in something is a helluva lot easier than proving it. 

From 1930 to 1980, on the bucolic campus of Duke University, there was an enclave of scientists dedicated to the daunting task of securing empirical evidence of the unprovable, a remarkable story that is the subject of NPR correspondent Stacy Horn’s new book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory (HarperCollins, 2009). Though the college hoops fan in me hesitates to give Duke props for anything, the Parapsychology Lab was a bold and laudable attempt to expand the frontiers of scientific inquiry.

Among the many fads and fancies of the Jazz Age was an international mania for Spiritualism, the belief in life after death, and mediums and clairvoyants were doing a brisk business in seances and table-tapping (two of Houdini’s biographers referred to this cottage industry as the Psychic Mafia). Many of these seers were exposed as charlatans and con artists by a vigorous handful of skeptics and debunkers, and a debate raged over whether such phenomena existed or were even possible. Enter a pair of psychologists, J.P. and Louisa Rhine, who were certain that the mind had potential abilities far beyond what we know and were determined to prove it, but only through the scientific method and the accumulation of hard data. The Rhines designed a series of tests intended to identify and catalogue ESP, telepathy and psychokinesis and express them statistically, with the dual aims of finding ways to apply their findings practically and gaining acceptance of parapsychology as a legitimate field of study.

Just like any new science, however, from alchemy to quantum physics, parapsychological research had to endure an army of nay-sayers who questioned the Rhines’ credibility, their methods (including the use of the now-famous Zener cards, with their wavy lines, circles and stars - Zener himself asked that people stop calling them that), and their lack of conclusive results. Still the Rhines pressed on, testing hundreds of subjects on their ability to read, communicate and influence objects remotely and gathering impressive data. The lab’s work was significant enough to draw the attention of luminaries like Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley and later, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who attempted to apply their work with psilocybin and LSD to the Rhines’ ESP research, with mixed results. Also very interested were the U.S. military, who saw the potential of psychic spies and soldiers and wanted to counter an identical program of the Soviets’. 

One area the Rhines did not want to broach was ghosts, for the simple reason that hauntings and poltergeist phenomena are impossible to test in the laboratory. As many of the lab’s backers had donated money specifically to fund life-after-death research, however, the Rhines had no choice but to comb the mountain of letters and requests they received daily for potential ghosts, theorizing that poltergeists were actually manifestations of psychokinesis. Thus while celebrated figures like Hans Holzer and Peter Hurkos wowed crowds with psychic revelations, the Duke team were the original Ghost Hunters, making the first attempts to crack ghost cases using the methods and gear of science. 

Horn’s book is a interesting look at an early example of edge science, and while she is often a bit more credulous than she should be, she also makes a solid case for the wealth of unexplained phenomena out there and for the continually emerging theories that may yet bear out what the Rhines and their colleagues worked so hard to nail down. As we continue to be fascinated by the adventures of Ghost Hunters, Whisperers and Busters in movies and TV, it’s clear that we want very badly to believe that there’s more out there than we can see, and we want very badly for someone to to prove it.

John G. Nettles