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By Root 1096 0

with great success. In fact, he had shown us samples of chicken, a pear, and an orange that he had "mummified" in his home. The chicken was like glass, the pear was shriveled and black, and the orange was hard, shrunken, and desiccated. Questioning revealed that Festa had placed these samples in the open air with a breeze blowing. In my opinion, they had merely been dried quickly, in the same fashion that American Indians prepared pemmican, without smoking or other preserving processes. In fact, I have before me at this moment an orange that my cat knocked under the furniture months ago. It is in every respect identical to Festa's orange, having naturally dried out.

After the test with the chicken breasts failed as well (with much more dramatic olfactory manifestations!), Festa announced that he was not satisfied with the test procedure, claiming that the nine untreated samples had affected the one treated sample by their proximity. In a third test, this time with veal, all samples were separated but kept under similar conditions of humidity, temperature, and so on. Again mummification failed to take place. Festa went on at length about inhibiting factors, but he was washed up as a psychic.

I believe that Professor Festa really thinks he has these powers. The fact that he had never been subjected to a controlled test before was significant. A perfectly ordinary phenomenon had become, to him, a miracle. After all, if the news in some quarters is full of ordinary persons with supernormal powers, why should the principal of a high school not be endowed with similar ability? I trust that his powers of reasoning are not transmitted to his pupils either in quality or degree.

Festa's evidence: a dried orange, chicken breast, and a pear—all psychically "healed," he claimed.

Mr. Salvatori was next in the tumbrel. It was his claim that if he projected a "target" to a subject at night, that target would enter the dream(s) of the subject. He needed to know the subject first by meeting him or her, and had to have a photo of the subject to transmit with. He said we were free to choose the subject, and we prepared a list of twenty different targets to choose from. The list contained such items as chickens, an execution, Paris, digging the garden, walking a dog, walking on the moon, and Christmas. Salvatori was shown the numbered list of the targets, and he chose from the inescapable hat a number from one to twenty. He was the only one who knew the number and thus the target, and he signed the numbered slip, mixed it among the others in an envelope, sealed the envelope, and put it into the hands of a security person along with the list. The subject had been photographed and chatted with before this process, then whisked away to dream.

Mr. Salvatori, projector of dreams via telepathy. He lost, 3 to 0.

The following day, sure that Salvatori had not contacted the dreamer, we presented the list of targets to the subject. He was to determine if there was a target there that defined or suggested strongly his dream(s) of the previous night. There were three such tests, and in all three the subject failed to find even one listed target that matched a dream. But there was an angle in this case that very much interested me. First, conversations with Salvatori revealed that it was his habit to invent his own target for transfer to the subject. This gave him a "preferred-target" advantage, since we found that he tended to choose the themes—such as flying or falling—that would most likely occur in a subject's dreams. Second, we found that Mr. Salvatori always asked the subjects to describe their dreams before telling them the target, leading them in the direction of the target and accepting any vague, peripheral connection as evidence of success. Knowing all this, I allowed Salvatori to discuss his subjects' dreams with them only after they had examined the list and arrived at a conclusion. True to expectations, he tried to match up anything in the dreams to the chosen targets. In the first case, when "an execution" had been