Sinclair, Mary Craig, 1883-1961; Sinclair, Upton, 1878-1968; Telepathy; Telepathy -- Case studies
Prof. William MacDougall, who had been head of the Department of
Psychology at Oxford University and later head of the Department of
Psychology at Harvard—and who had won the title of “Dean of American
Psychology”—came to see us in Pasadena soon after the publication of
this book. He told Craig that he had just accepted the job of head of
the Department of Psychology at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,
and would have at his disposal a considerable fund for research. He had
read _Mental Radio_ and had written the preface which is in this book,
and he said that he would like to be able to say that he himself had
witnessed a test of the genuineness of Craig’s telepathic power.
Craig had always shrunk from anything of that sort because her power
depended entirely upon solitude and concentration; but her respect for
MacDougall was great, and she told him she would do her best. He said
that he had some pictures in his inside coat pocket, and he would like
to see if she could describe them. She sat quietly with her eyes closed
and presently said that she saw a building with stone walls and narrow
windows, and it seemed to be covered with green leaves. MacDougall took
from his inside coat pocket a postcard of one of the buildings at Oxford
covered with ivy.
Other tests with him will appear later. Here I add one more story, how
we took the good man for a test with Arthur Ford, who was then head of a
spiritualistic church in Los Angeles. I had picked out four letters or
postcards from well-known persons, one of them Jack London and another
Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, highly respected. I wrapped each of
these documents in a sheet of green paper to remove any possibility of
holding them up to the light or otherwise getting a glimpse. I showed
this to MacDougall, and he agreed that the concealment was effective. We
then sealed them in four numbered envelopes, and in a little ante-room
of the church Arthur Ford lay back in his chair, covered his eyes with a
handkerchief, and put the envelopes one by one on his forehead.
I subsequently wrote an article about the experiment which was published
in the _Psychic Observer_, but I do not have the text at hand. Ford told
us significant things about the contents of all those envelopes, and I
remember that afterwards MacDougall, Craig and I strolled down the
street and stopped at a little kiosk where we ordered lemonade or orange
juice. I said, “Well, what do you think of it?” and MacDougall’s answer
was, “I should say that it is undoubtedly supernormal.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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