Telepathy, Genuine and FraudulentBaggally, W. W. (William Wortley)
Science
Telepathy, Genuine and Fraudulent
Baggally, W. W. (William Wortley)
Parapsychology -- Investigation; Telepathy
"Independently of the more thorough investigations of Mr.
Baggally, I myself was favoured with a private interview
with the Zancigs, who were friendly and considerate and
helpful; and I tried the experiment of having Mrs. Zancig
outside the room, though with door open, and Mr. Zancig with
me and quite silent. I wrote five or six figures on a slate,
taking care to make no noise, and Mrs. Zancig failed to get
them correctly. Zancig seemed distressed at that, and after
a little time groaned out, 'Oh, surely you can do this';
almost immediately after which Mrs. Zancig came into the
room with the correct figures written on her slate. It was
difficult to see how the sentence had conveyed the figures,
but it was instructive to find that utterance of some kind
seemed necessary. It was partly this, and partly the
manifest difficulty of eliminating all possibilities of code
between a pair of performers accustomed to go about
together, with years of experience behind them, that
prevented me from doing what I probably ought to have done,
though circumstances did not render it very easy, namely, to
make a serious study of the Zancig phenomena.
"Moreover, I questioned Mr. Zancig about codes, and found
that he was familiar with a great many. He was quite frank
about it, and rather implied, as I thought, that at times he
was ready to use any code or other normal kind of assistance
that might be helpful, though he assured me that he found
that he and his wife did possess a faculty which they did
not in the least understand, but which was more efficient
and quicker than anything they could get by codes. On the
whole, I think this extremely likely, but the rapidity and
the certainty and dependableness of the power went far
beyond anything that I could imagine as possible between
people who depended on supernormal faculty alone. But if
there was a mixture of devices between people so skilled, I
despaired of bringing the genuine part of the phenomenon to
a definite issue.
"I do not think that either this or the weight of my other
avocations are a sufficient excuse for this neglect, but it
certainly was not easy to get opportunities for careful
investigation. One of the main difficulties was that they
were not free agents, having entered into contracts with
managers whose financial interests partly depended upon the
continued uncertainty of the public as to the causes
underlying their very remarkable performance. Moreover, I
knew that so skilled an investigator as Mr. Baggally was
more favourably impressed with them than I was myself, and
was able to give to them some considerable time and
attention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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