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By Root 975 0

to parapsychology long ago. Back in the early 1960s, the technology was applied to ESP testing by the United States Air Force Research Laboratories. A specially designed computer setup dubbed VERITAC was used to test thirty-seven subjects with 55,000 randomly generated numbers to determine once and for all whether psi powers existed. Psychologist C.E.M. Hansel, in closing his book ESP, A Scientific Evaluation, remarked, about the then-just-started series of tests, "If twelve months' research on VERITAC can establish the existence of ESP, the past research will not have been in vain. If ESP is not established, much further effort could be spared and the energies of many young scientists could be directed to more worthwhile research." When VERITAC tests, supervised by an electronics engineer, a psychologist, a mathematician, and a physicist, were completed, they proved—once again—that subjects do not have the ability to guess or to influence events any better than chance would have it. The team of scientists involved carefully pointed out a fact that in the decade to follow became blatantly evident: Parapsychologists tend to throw out "nonsignificant" data and report the "positive" material.

The "energies of many young scientists" that Hansel hoped could be directed more usefully are still being squandered on the pursuit of nonsense, VERITAC was thrown out as "nonsignificant."

Dr. Thelma Moss has got to be awarded some kind of medal for sheer nerve. The evidence that she is eligible is quite obvious in the discussion of "levitation" in one of her books, The Probability of the Impossible. The instructions on how to achieve this miracle are explicit. We are told to seat a person in a chair and have four others stand at the corners of the chair, and then the magic ceremony begins. We need a mystic chant, we're told, and Dr. Moss, in her scientific study of this process, has discovered that the words "hot fudge sundae" are just fine, as is the term "chocolate cake." Her attempts to use "abracadabra," however, have shown that expression to be unsatisfactory.

Each standee holds his or her index fingers together, side by side. Then those standing at the shoulders of the levitee insert these fingers under the armpits, from the rear, and the other two insert their fingers under the knees of the seated person. All chant the magic words of choice and then heave. Lo, the seated person wafts upward and is said to be "levitated"!

If it sounds just like the stunt you used to do at summer camp or at birthday parties, I wouldn't be surprised at all. That's just what it is. Mind you, there are all kinds of variations—placing the hands over the head while chanting, counting backwards from ten, and so on—but it's the same old trick. Did I say "trick"? Not according to Thelma, who goes on in her book to describe other miracles of like nature, calling such things "feats for which science has as yet no explanation." She says the levitation trick "may be a variant of the extraordinary feat performed by 123-pound Mrs. Maxwell Rogers, who, in 1960, lifted one end of a 3,600-pound automobile." Right on, Dr. Moss! May we have further details about this feat, or should we merely choose to believe, as you have done?

And just how mysterious is the "levitation" she describes? Really, if science has no explanation, I fear for that discipline. Any high school student could tell Dr. Moss that a person is easily lifted when the individual's weight is divided equally among four others, all lifting together on cue and having enormous advantages of position to obtain great leverage.

The forefingers are placed in position beneath the "levitee."

Lifting straight upward simultaneously, four people easily levitate a fifth.

But Dr. Moss is not alone in her delusion concerning the stunt. Colin Wilson, in his book The Geller Phenomenon—which has the distinction of being liberally strewn with errors—relates an account of the former superstar attempting a "levitation" with Colin himself. Says Wilson, "Uri, Shipi, Trini and another woman tried