Project: Alpha

With the passing of April, and hence the setting aside of the A-Z challenge - I'll be keenly following Lee's review of what went well, and not so well, with that - it's time for me to find some other structural hook to hang my ramblings upon.

In need of a new Project, it occured to me that I could do a Project on Projects - it may or may not be another alphabetical set, but it gives me the kind of theme I can work with.

Today's subject is, fittingly for a first choice, Project Alpha. This was the brainchild of magician James Randi, a man who freely admits that the various illusions and feats of prestidigitation he performed were the result of sustained and practiced cheating: misdirection, fraud, chicanery, and deception. He offers no apology for it - the essence of Magic, after all, is knowing something the audience does not, and most people who attend a magic show understand that the performer is hoodwinking them somehow. The allure is in trying to work out just how he does it.

As his career progressed through the Twentieth Century, Randi increasingly found himself competing for airtime with supposedly authentic paranormal talents like that of Uri Geller. Not perturbed by the competition, Randi was affronted that people - even apparently intelligent scientists in supposedly rigorous experimental laboratories - took Geller and his ilk at their word and believed they produced their effects through "psychic energy." As an experienced stage magician, Randi was by nature and training much more inclined to believe that Geller and Co. were simply tricking people: they were, he felt, no more paranormal than he was, and he took offence at the superstitious and mystical interpretation of acts like Geller's spoon-bending trick. The following video demonstrates some of the evidence for a more prosaic interpretation: Geller is simply a skilled flim-flam artist with a penchant for cutlery.

Randi set out in the 1970s to investigate and challenge Geller and other purported psychic talents, a stance adopted by other self-confessed tricksters and illusionists like England's Derren Brown and the venerable Harry Houdini. He encountered serious difficulties - not because he was unable to replicate Geller's effects; he was, quite easily - but because people wanted to believe in psi. At one demonstration, Randi was angrily accused of being a fraud. He smilingly admitted this was so - everything he had accomplished had been done by sleight of hand, trickery, and misdirection. No, no, his interlocuter angrily replied: he was a fraud because he actually was using psychic powers, and only claiming to be a charlatan!

(Houdini got the same treatment from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of whose propensity towards belief in such matters we shall speak another time.)

Randi might have expected this sort of thing from the rubes who pay to be entertained by magic shows, but he was deeply dismayed to find similar levels of credulity - and dismal levels of scientific rigor - among those parapsychologists who attempted to 'test' the abilities of psychics like Geller. It was this dismay that led Randi to set up Project Alpha, which, in 1979, infiltrated two Randi stooges into a research project, conducted at Washington University and handsomely funded by the board chairman of McDonnell Douglas - himself a believer in the paranormal. Randi also wrote to the researchers warning them to be on the lookout for fakes, and suggesting methodological refinements that might catch such tricksters in the act. He even volunteered his services as an observer; these were declined. The researchers were employing a two-stage approach: in the informal stage, they wanted everything to be as cosy as possible for the putative psychics.

Randi's stooges, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, sailed through the first stage despite resorting to grossly obvious manipulations of the tests - for example, they 'read' messages in sealed envelopes by simply unsealing and resealing them, and moved objects in 'sealed' containers by blowing through holes in the containers. In one test, they altered the dimensions of spoons by the simple method of swapping the labels attached to spoons of different sizes. Incredibly, these clumsy frauds went unnoticed by the researchers, who proved so obliging in their efforts to facilitate trickery that even Shaw and Edwards were surprised. Although Randi had instructed them to confess their deception if they were ever asked about it directly, they never were during a period of almost 2 years. During the second stage of the process, under more rigorous laboratory conditions, their psi abilities faded dramatically; still, the researchers were unwilling to conclude that they were deliberate frauds, speculating instead that such conditions might inhibit psychic abilities.

Meanwhile, Shaw and Edwards had become minor celebrities in their own right, dazzling other paranormal researchers with their abilities even as the Washington University team cooled on them. Eventually, after two years, Randi pulled the plug, revealing the whole deception in an article in Discover magazine. Many parapsychologists were outraged, much as the fawning courtiers of the Emperor with No Clothes were furious at the little boy who remarked upon the Imperial nakedness; some, however, thanked Randi for his service to their cause.

Does the success of charlatans like Randi, and the suspicions over successful entertainers like Geller, mean there are no genuine paranormal talents out there? The James Randi Educational Foundation promoted a One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anybody who enjoys a measure of celebrity and the support of a reputable academic for their claimed paranormal abilities; to date, nobody has won the prize.

G is for ... Ghoul

A ghoul, colloquially, is a person with a macabre interest in death or destruction - the tendency to slow down and rubberneck when driving past the scene of an accident is a ghoulish impulse. The term originates with the Arabic ghul, from ghala, to seize, and describes a variety of djinn that ate the dead and could change its shape - a monster that lured unwary travellers to their deaths in the desert.

This morbid prolegomena, happily, need concern us no longer; the ghoul I wish to discuss today is a ghoul of an entirely different kind - a highly idiosyncratic definition, coined by a highly idiosyncratic man.

Tom Lethbridge not only shared Timothy Leary's initials: like Leary, he is now deceased; like Leary, he worked within a university; like Leary, he dwelled in Cambridge; and, like Leary, his unusual interests led him down a path that yielded an elaborate pseudoscientific theory at the cost of his academic credibility. There, however, the similarities end. Lethbridge was keeper of Anglo-Saxon antiquities at the Archaelogical Museum of Cambridge, and his Cambridge was in England, not Massachussets. Where Leary's theories - behold, it rhymes - concerned opening what Aldous Huxley would call "the doors of perception", Lethbridge's researches concerned an entirely different mode of perception altogether: dowsing.

For those unfamiliar with the term, dowsing involves using a rod - traditionally, a Y-shaped twig of hazelwood was used by English dowsers - to locate, or 'divine,' hidden underground deposits of minerals, water sources, and other entities. The dowser holds the twig by the arms of the Y, slightly under tension, and passes the rod over the ground. Upon identification of the desired substance, the rod responds by moving or twitching, much in the way a fishing float does when a fish takes the bait. More violent movements have been reported, with the divining rod acting as if magnetized by a powerful field.

A traditional dowser complete with rod

As mentioned above, dowsers claim to be able to locate all kinds of things with the rods, and indeed use all kinds of rods to do so - modern dowsers often use L-shaped metal or wire rods, for example. The successes they have demonstrated are not explicable in terms of conventional science; fortunately for conventional science, they are also sufficiently inconsistent that they can be rejected as hoaxes or misinterpretations of natural phenomena. Such "explanations" are no more than an oblique restatement of the mechanist-materialist credo; Lethbridge, to his credit in my opinion, attempted a genuinely open-minded research into the subject.

Lethbridge's method of dowsing was a little different from the traditional "witching rod" - he employed a pendulum, and, by varying the length of the string, he was able to 'tune' his pendulum to divine different materials. He'd set off walking with his pendulum, and when he reached a place where the appropriate material was, the pendulum would commence gyrating. Gradually, Lethbridge fleshed out a whole "language" of pendulum swings at differing lengths, and developed a highly sophisticated interpretation of these. One fascinating aspect of this was his assertion that the pendulum responded to 'vibrations' or emanations from objects
not perceptible by us at all - things in other realms of existence. One of Lethbridge's more startling conclusions was that entities continue to exist, in a form measurable by an appropriately 'tuned' pendulum, after their physical death; not only that, but he identified further realms beyond that.

There is a striking similarity between Lethbridge's contention of invisible emanations around us, and Leary's of unopened circuits in our consciousness; perhaps the two had something else in common, after all.

Although Lethbridge did believe the soul was immortal, he did not accept that ghosts were the restless spirits of the departed. Rather, his research into ley lines - originally described in Alfred Watkins' The Old Straight Track - led him to conjecture that elements within the English landscape channeled and concentrated the scientifically undectectable energies to which his pendulum responded, and that there existed places where these energies allowed for the recording of more vivid impressions that could be accessed by a sufficiently sensitive individual at a later time as direct sensory experiences. Lethbridge himself experienced the mildest such experience when he identified a specific area near his home that was associated with a profound and irrational mood of depression; dowsing the area, he was able to map its contours. He called the region that induced this mood a "ghoul," and later elaborated his theory to suggest that more vivid experiences - sightings of ghosts, and even the totally immersive experiences known as "timeslips" - might be the influence of more powerful "ghouls," deceiving the senses and luring the unwary into ... All of a sudden, I have a strange feeling of deja vu...