James Randi vs J.B. Rhine
It should be of no surprise that I am a fan of the paranormal. That is to say, I find the topic interesting and do not dismiss it outright. But I am very quick to point out that 99% of the paranormal crap you’ll see on TV and in one bedroom studio apartments belonging to some gypsy are full of shit. Ghosthunters, Crossing Over, all fake and for entertainment purposes only. Don’t believe it.
Now, does that mean it’s all untrue? If one hundred people in a train station are asking for money because their wallet was stolen, are they all lying? Ok, probably, but there is always the chance that they are not. However slim that chance is, it’s still there.
James Randi is a scientific skeptic and big time debunker of all that is paranormal. There was a challenge on his website once for anyone to prove they had psychic abilities, no one ever won. If it weren’t for this one little book I read on amazon I would probably have hung up my paranormal shoes for good and never looked back. After all, with the amount of camera’s that now populate our society, the amount of paranormal researchers out there in the world, you would think that concrete proof would have happened by now. It hasn’t and so therefore it’s all bunk. Right?
Enter J.B. Rhine. This much maligned scientist was someone that had a very curious mind. He conducted, over the course of years, thousands of experiments in the attempt to prove that some type of psychic ability does really exist. Well guess what, he actually did it.
Now is the point that all the skeptics in the world will hammer down my blogdoor and call me an idiot. Not that they would be wrong, but after reading and doing a little research, I had a very hard time finding any scientific body that actually disputed his results. Sure, they disputed him, they disputed his methods, and some did dispute his findings, but that’s all they did. They disputed it rather than point to any specific experiment and say “AHHA! Gotcha Rhiney!”
The book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory (P.S.), delves deep into Rhine’s experiments and comes out scratching it’s head and saying “hey, no one said he was wrong”.
Now, don’t go thinking you can be a Jedi warrior, or even a member of the First Earth Battalion, but according to Rhine, the idea of telepathy isn’t so far fetched.
Here’s where we have to put the breaks on, however. Rhine and his group did not explore the entire body of the ‘paranormal’ . That’s just not feasible. One thing you simply must do is define what it is you are looking at. Rhine did that. He conducted experiments just about telepathy, nothing else, at least nothing else with conclusive evidence. He did find that over the course of perhaps a million tries, some people could determine an answer without having prior knowledge better than randomly guessing.
A bit of a let down isn’t it? I know we were all expecting jedi mind tricks “I am the man you are looking for ms. hot bikini model”, but no, all that he showed was evidence on minor telepathy.
Keep in mind he never really produced a theory, never said it was aliens, or god, or anything else, other than showing that the phenomena did exist. Which is really pretty freaky.
I don’t know if it really makes me a believe of anything, but the evidence, which I haven’t found has ever been disputed by any scientist or scientific body on the merits of the data itself, really makes you think about it. Now adays the subject is muddled in entertainment and charlatans and its really hard for anyone to do any real research on the subject, which is a shame. Perhaps that will change one day. And wouldn’t it be neat if it did?
Have you found where this was ever disputed? Do drop a note if you have.
