When Serios was in his mid-30s and working as an elevator operator in a Chicago hotel, he began to experiment with hypnosis. During this period, he found that he could produce images onto film, at first using an ordinary box camera, and then eventually onto Polaroid film. After several years of demonstrating his apparent gift to various people and some researchers in the Chicago area, Serios came to the attention of Denver psychiatrist and psychical researcher, Jule Eisenbud. From May 1964 until June 1967 Eisenbud supervised thousands of trials, witnessed by at least one hundred different observers, most of them scientists and academics, and some of them experienced conjurors. These trials yielded around one thousand anomalous Polaroid photographs, the entire collection of which now resides in the Special Collections section of the Library at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Eisenbud reported this research in detail in his book, The World of Ted Serios. That work exists in two editions, which differ enough to make acquisition of both mandatory for students of the case. 2 Randi has been quoted as saying, with respect to the possibility that someone might succeed at the challenge, ‘I always have an out.’ He later asserted that the full quote was, ‘Concerning the challenge, I always have an out: I’m right!’ 18 Testing Dowsers

As to the usually blurry nature of Serios’s images, Eisenbud himself reasoned that this may have been the effect of the workings of Serios’s unconscious on the transmission of the images. At any rate, nearly all experiments in extrasensory perception (ESP) produce some degree of distortion on the subject’s part—the target image of a cat produces a drawing that looks like a dog, or the target letter “E” looks like an “F” when drawn by the experimental subject. In 1967, Denver psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud published an account of his detailed investigations of demonstrations of ‘thoughtography’ by Ted Serios. 27 Randi claimed on the Today morning television program that he could reproduce these feats by sleight-of-hand, and under the same conditions that Serios had been subjected to in controlled conditions. It is not clear whether Randi understood that this would have meant being strip searched, including a thorough examination of body orifices, then clad in a monkey suit and sealed in a steel-walled, lead-lined sound-proof chamber. Pressed to make good on his claim, Randi subsequently declined to be tested, as correspondence – suppressed by Randi at the time – now clearly shows ( see here). 28 Tina Resch Ted Serios was “discovered” in Chicago where he was working as a bellhop or elevator operator in one of the large hotels. His career began when a fellow employee, George Johannes, an amateur hypnotist, discovered that Serios was an excellent subject. Johannes knew of work that had been done years ago called “traveling clairvoyance.” This technique involves inducing hypnotized subjects into mentally traveling to various places and reporting on what they observed. The procedure is akin to what is known as “remote viewing” today, but under hypnosis the entranced subjects would get startlingly accurate visions of details.In 1986 Peter Popoff, a televangelist and self-described faith healer, was definitively exposed by Randi and others by means of a radio scanner at a public event. This revealed that the information about audience members which he appeared miraculously to know was being fed to him by his wife through an earpiece. Recordings of the deception were played by Johnny Carson on his The Tonight Show, leading to Popoff’s (temporary) disgrace and bankruptcy. 12 Public Hoaxes Many claims by Randi to have exposed paranormal claimants, accepted as definitive by many sceptics, are considered by critics to be weakly evidenced, speculative or invented (Randi agreed in an interview that he sometimes lied for effect, whether consciously or unconsciously he was not always sure). 22 Uri Geller As Watson relates, from 2010 she began to complain of sexism in the sceptical movement, campaigning for the male majority to be ‘more accepting of (or at least to stop randomly groping and awkwardly propositioning) women’. She complained that she got no help from Randi, who she said criticized her to others about trying to change the culture of the movement he founded.

Braude began by studying the laboratory evidence for psi and laid out his findings in his first book, ESP and Psychokinesis, published in 1979. At that time, he still ‘accept[ed] uncritically the received view that laboratory evidence was inherently cleaner, and more respectable and reliable, than the non-experimental evidence’. 4 But this was soon to change. A few years later, he had been ‘bowled over’ by the historical evidence for macro-psychokinesis (PK), 5 and he became one of parapsychology’s staunchest advocates for the importance of spontaneous psi phenomena. A spirit photograph supposedly showing the ghost of Abraham Lincoln with Mary Lincoln by William H. Mumler (1869) (via Wikimedia) And yet, at the same time, Braude also points out that the psi abilities of discarnate agents would presumably be at the mercy of the same complex causal nexus, making it similarly puzzling how discarnates would be able to communicate so reliably through a medium. He concludes that the idea that any agent’s intentions would be able to consistently trump all potentially thwarting intentions and produce a reliable channel of psi information is impressive on both the living-agent psi and survival hypotheses. 35 a b Stein, Gordon (1996). The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal (2nded.). Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. p.517. ISBN 9781573920216.The hypnotist began a series of sessions with Serios in which Serios produced numerous pictures. This therapist suggested that Serios point the camera at himself, which became his standard procedure from that point on. More importantly, hypnosis lost its effect on Serios during this time and he could only produce pictures in his waking state. Lowenstein, Adam (2015). Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media. Columbia University Press. pp.124–. ISBN 9780231538480 . Retrieved 6 December 2017. Thalbourne (1995). See also Phillips (2022). Randi’s account of Project Alpha can be found in Randi (1983a) and Randi (1983b). Thalbourne, M.A. (1995). Science versus showmanship: A history of the Randi hoax. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 89, 344-66.

Criticisms of Braude’s defense of the living-agent psi hypothesis include Robert Almeder’s charge that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, 41 to which Braude has replied that, while it is unfalsifiable in a strict sense, it is still ‘weakly’ falsifiable in the sense that there can be evidence that makes it appear less likely to be true than the survival hypothesis, all things considered. 42 Melton, J. Gordon; Shepard, Leslie (2001). Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (5thed.). Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company. p.865. ISBN 081039488X. Randi's point was driven home in 1984 when Masuaki Kiyota, hailed as the Japanese Uri Geller, revealed in a television interview that he had faked the phenomena that had been verified by both American and Japanese researchers. Alt URL Colin Brookes-Smith. (1968). Review of The World of Ted Serios by J. Eisenbud. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 44: 260-265.

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Randi, J. (1982). The Truth About Uri Geller. New York: Prometheus Books. [Originally published 1975 as The Magic of Uri Geller; New York: Ballantine Books]. Brugioni, Dino A. (1999). Photo Fakery: A History of Deception and Manipulation (1sted.). Dulles, Virginia: Brassey's. p. 160. ISBN 9781574881660. David H. Lund has argued that ‘the appeal to the merely possible existence of super-psi, independently of positive evidence that super-psi is in fact being exercised in the case in question, fails to show that the survivalist interpretation of these cases is not the most plausible one’, 43 but this point appears to be consistent with Braude’s own emphasis on considering the ‘needs, interest, history, and behavior of the principal figures’ in the particular case at hand. It appears that Braude and Lund simply come down in different places regarding how much motivation for living-agent psi they see evidenced in their surveys of the case material.

Henry Gordon. (1988). Extrasensory Deception: ESP, Psychics, Shirley MacLaine, Ghosts, UFOs. MacMillan Of Canada. ISBN 978-0771595394 John Sladek. (1974). The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Science and Occult Beliefs. Stein and Day. p. 218. ISBN 978-0812817126 Modern psychical phenomena, recent researches and speculations". Internet Archive. 2010-07-21 . Retrieved 2016-12-17.David Eisendrath. (1967). "An Amazing Weekend with Ted Serios: Part II". Popular Photography (October): 85–87, 131–33, 136. In 2014 and 2016, Braude published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration reports of his investigations of the Felix Experimental Group (FEG), a physical mediumship circle organized in 2005 by Kai Mügge of Germany, who became the circle’s medium and began deriving his living from public demonstrations. 18 With the help of various co-investigators, Braude supervised several sittings withMügge: three in Hanau, Germany, in August 2012; four in Austria in May 2013; and another four in Hanau in October 2015.