In 1941 the Editors of Scientific American Confessed That Telepathy Was Proven

In 1941 the publication Scientific American announced that it was going to offer a $15,000 prize for proof of the paranormal. The announcement can be read on the page here.  Ending with a byline of "The Editors," the announcement started out with a misrepresentation which stated this:

"In JANUARY, 1923, Scientific American inaugurated an exhaustive two-year exploration of the subject of psychic phenomena, both in Europe and in America, in an endeavor to discover a basic, scientific truth upon which the wide-spread belief in spiritism might be solidly founded. Those efforts were fruitless in that no objective spiritistic manifestation of physical character, in the form of a psychic photograph or otherwise, was produced which bore sufficient authority to warrant approval by the co-operating committee, or which was not capable of duplication or explanation by Houdini, then the world’s most noted conjurer, and a member of that committee."

The statement is not an accurate summary of either the investigation that went on or the findings of the investigation that Scientific American reported in November 1924 on the page that can be read here. The page is below:

On the page we read conclusions of members of a five-man Scientific American committee that investigated reports of paranormal events in the seances of Margery Crandon (we are told the fifth member was unavailable for comment).  First we read William Franklin Prince state inconclusively that the experiments "have not scientifically and conclusively proved the exercise of supernormal powers."  Next we read the conclusion by Hereward Carrington that "I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal (physical) phenomena frequently occur at her seances."  His statement is below:

The third member of the committee (Comstock) said "my conclusion therefore is that rigid proof has not yet been been furnished, but that the case at present is interesting, and should be investigated further."  The fourth member (the magician Harry Houdini) said he thought it was all fakery, which was consistent with the bitter hostility he expressed towards all mediums for so many years. 

So clearly the statement of the editors of Scientific American in their April 1941 edition was a deceit. Instead of it being that "no objective spiritistic manifestation of physical character, in the form of a psychic photograph or otherwise, was produced which bore sufficient authority to warrant approval by the co-operating committee" it was the case that one of the four members of that committee stated that "I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal (physical) phenomena frequently occur at her seances."  Scientific American deceived its readers by misrepresenting the findings of its own committee, making it sound like the committee had delivered a negative verdict, when one of its four members had declared "I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal (physical) phenomena frequently occur at her seances." 

Moreover, the Scientific American article lied when it said "in JANUARY, 1923, Scientific American inaugurated an exhaustive two-year exploration of the subject of psychic phenomena." No such "exhaustive" investigation was carried out. Some of the main psychic phenomena that had been reported by this time were telepathy, mysterious raps and a phenomenon called "direct voice" (described here)  in which mysterious voices would be heard in seances. But in a 1943 interview describing the 1923-1924 investigation and also something it did in early 1940's, the publisher of Scientific American (Orson D. Munn) had stated this:

"We were not after just plain spirit messages. Table rappings. mental telepathy. and the ordinary oral messages have not been included in either of our investigations. We want specific evidence in physical form that the spirits do converse or try to converse with the living." 

Get the picture? So if an investigator went to a medium, and the medium started telling accounts of the investigator's experiences with his dead grandmother, experiences known only to the investigator, that would be ignored by the investigator. And if the investigator heard a mysterious voice sounding just like the voice of his dead grandmother, telling secrets only she knew, that would be ignored. And if the investigator went to a seance where mysterious raps were heard as the alphabet was recited, with the raps spelling out a message describing facts about the investigator only the investigator and a deceased person would have known, that would be ignored by the investigator, on the grounds that the investigators were looking for "specific evidence in physical form." But what sense did it make to claim that mysterious raps on a table was not  "specific evidence in physical form"?  No sense at all. Raps on a table are a physical effect.  

On the same page of the April 1941 Scientific American, we had a box describing an offer of the magazine to pay $15,000 for proof of the paranormal. Here is part of that box:

Note well item 6 in the list of conditions. We read, "Since experiments by Dunninger and others have proved telepathy to an acceptable degree, demonstrations of this nature are not eligible for the award."  That is a confession that the reality of telepathy had been proven. At the time this was written, the person who had done the most to prove telepathy was Duke University professor Joseph Rhine (whose laboratory experiments are discussed here), and other researchers such as Professor Riess (whose enormously convincing experiment is discussed here). Later researcher Louisa Rhine documented very many cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book Hidden Channels of the Mind, which may be read here. Sally Rhine Feather documented very many other cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, which can be read here.

So why in so many decades after the 1940's have Scientific American writers and Scientific American editors deceived us by claiming that there is no good evidence for ESP? Nothing happened to warrant such a change. To the contrary,  experiments after 1941 using the Ganzfeld protocol provided extremely well-replicated evidence for the reality of ESP. A paper on the Cornell Physics Paper server gives this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments run in recent decades, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. 

The only explanation for the telepathy denialism of Scientific American in recent decades is that the reality of telepathy is strong evidence against a cherished belief of the writers at that publication: the belief that the brain makes the mind.  Within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas, all such results are inexplicable.  Since the results are largely remote results produced by people separated by sizable distance, they cannot be explained by any speculative theory that the brain can act as a radio transmitter and radio receiver (a theory not supported by any neuroscience studies).  And such a radio transmitter theory makes no sense. Your head does not have any  antenna that might pick up radio signals being sent by someone else's brain, and brains don't emit anything like radio signals. 

The 1941 money offer of Scientific American was pretty much a farce. There was the arrogant requirement that only phenomena performed in front of some Scientific American committee would be considered. There was the statement sounding as if unlimited number of successful retests might be asked for, under any conditions whatsoever that some Scientific American committee might request. Then there was the statement that no matter what was observed, Scientific American might or might not publish the results.  Hardly any sensible person would agree to such conditions.  They would tend to think that no matter what phenomena was produced, that the committee would just keep asking for retests under ever-more troublesome conditions, until getting something it would call a failure. 

During the past 60 years, Scientific American has followed a "head in the sand" approach toward spooky psychical phenomena, a "lazy as it gets" approach that has been basically "ignore it and hope it goes away." In the rare cases in recent decades when Scientific American writers say anything about the topic of ESP and telepathy, they tend to sound just as if they never seriously studied such a topic; and they say things on the topic that are false and contrary to the magazine's 1941 confession of the reality of telepathy. The visual below illustrates the kind of treatment such very  important and very-well established phenomena get from the guys at Scientific American.