TELEPATHY A “FRAUD”

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27750, 30 August 1955, Page 11

TELEPATHY A “FRAUD”

Scientist Doubts Claims

(Rec. 8 p.m.) WASHINGTON, Aug. 27. Dr. George Price, a University of Minnesota research scientist, contends that believers in mental telepathy, clairvoyance, and other psychic phenomena are guilty of a human error or deliberate fraud.

He says he will doubt their claims until there has been “just one experiment that does not have to be accepted on a basis of faith in human honesty.” Writing in a magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of’ Science, Dr. Price said the only acceptable explanations for experiments in psychic phenomena were ‘‘clerical and statistical errors, and unintentional use of sensory clues,” or “deliberate fraud or mildly abnormal mental conditions.”

The field was “well camouflaged with some of the paraphernalia of science.” but bore in abundance the “markings of magic,” he said. There was a basic similarity between claims made for psychic phenomena and those of the African witch doctor, who made a clay image and buried within it nail parings and bits of hair. When the image is destroyed, a man dies in London “to be sure,” he said. “The world of magic is a lovely w’orld. To make a silent wish—and mysteriously influence the fall of dice • . . but the way of science is different. “If our soldering is careless, our circuit will certainly be noisy, and if we make our seals poorly, our vacuum system will assuredly leak—and no incantation will help.” Dr. Price chided fellow scientists for reluctance to attribute psychic claims to fraud.

Scarcely a single scientific paper had appeared in the last 15 ’years contesting such claims, he said.