During the 1920's most scientist were very apprehensive about doing any type of Psychic research. The field was so disrespected that one University Psychologist stated that he would not even keep the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in the library or it may "Inflame the imaginations and corrupt the minds of the student's."

     The field needed someone who had credibility to take an interest in it. Then in 1920, William McDougal came from England to Harvard. He had already earned enough respect in mainstream science to make his own area of study. He openly expresses an interest in the paranormal. He later adapted the term parapsychology from German for serious exploration of paranormal areas. Among McDougal students was a bright young man, Joseph Banks Rhine, who would become the father of modern parapsychology.

     Rhine read a book entitled "The Survival of Man" by Sir Oliver Lodge, A Respected British psychologist. In the book the author claimed to communicate with his deceased son through the use of a medium, Gladys Osborne. This book changed Rhine’s life. Here is an internationally respected scientist telling people that he believes in life after death. Then Rhine read McDougal's book, "Body and Mind" which concluded that it is "unpardonable for the scientific world today to overlook evidence of the supernormal in the world - if there are such." Rhine then left and headed for Boston to meet McDougal ant to try and become affiliated with The American Society for Psychical Research.

     Rhine had missed McDougal when he got to Boston, and set out to do a little research his own. He became involved with a medium, Mina Crandon known as Margery. This medium was said to have unusual abilities and since she was the wife of a well-respected surgeon, she was seldom questioned. During a séance, Rhine studies the medium. He concluded that she was a fake and exposed her as such in a letter the ASPR. This letter set him apart from all psychic societies on both sides of the ocean. It so outraged the people involved with the organizations that Sir. Author Doyle took out an in a Boston newspaper stating, "B. J. Rhine is a monumental ass." He had the ad edged in black borders.

     Rhine was not put off by the findings of the séance. He concluded that psychic phenomena "happen and are gone, leaving nothing but memory, none of the hard reality of a meteorite or a fossil." He wanted to develop a controlled experiment that would achieve the same results over and over again. He finally got a chance to do this when McDougal returned from England to develop a psychology department at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. McDougal invited Rhine there in 1930 to work on psychic phenomena. Rhine then developed test that would start a new beginning in the era of psychic research.

     The first test Rhine used was by using an ordinary deck of cards. He would ask subjects to guess the order of a shuffled deck of cards. If they scored better than he thought, then it was assumed there was a force at work there. He decided that using 52 cards was to many cards to use and led to many ways that errors or chance could fit into the research. He went to a colleague of his, Karl Zener, who was an expert in the psychology of perception, and asked him to design a set of five cards for him. Zener designed a deck with a circle, plus sign, star, wavy line and a circle. They gave them the name Zener cards.

     The experiments with these cards were simple. They had a deck of twenty-five cards; five cards each of the same design. It was considered chance if a person could hit five of the cards correctly. Some may hit more or less but in the big picture of it all, the law of averages would make five cards the chance number. Then he began the experiments. He worked with these cards for over a year with little excitement until he came across Adam J. Linzmayer, an economics student. Linzmayer correctly got 9 of the cards in experiments over and over again. After 2 years of testing, he began to falter and started to fall down to the chance levels. Rhine was again searching for new students to test. He found it in 1932 with a very shy student named Hubert E. Pearce Jr. Pearce was able to get ten out of the 25 cards when he shuffled the deck himself. Rhine was afraid of being accused of fraud because Pearce touched the deck, so he developed another test that is still among the most impressive demonstrations of ESP today.

     Pearce sat in a library while Pratt sat in the psychics building. The buildings were 100 yards away from each other. They synchronized their watches and at a pre set time Pratt took the top card of the Zener deck and placed it face down on the table without looking at the card. The card was left on the table for a period of one minute, and then another card would be picked up and placed on the table in the same manner. When all twenty-five of the cards had been gone through, Pratt would turn them over and write down the order they were laid out in. The records were sealed and then they would meet to evaluate their respective copies. The results were remarkable. According to their records Pearce went through 12 runs with the deck. He scored as high as 13 cards per run and averaged 261 out of 750 cards against odds of nearly ten hits average, way above the chance rate of 5. These tests concluded that psychic abilities were not limited to distances. They placed Pearce in a building 250 yards away with the same results. He also guessed the approximate order of a deck also which proved his abilities were not limited by time either.

     The Team at Duke then developed experiments hoping that they could distinguish between clairvoyance, the perception of unseen objects or events from telepathy, the grasping of another’s thoughts. In an exercise called BT, before touching, subjects looked at a card face down, mad a guess, then turned it over to see if they made a hit. Another was DT, down through, in which subjects had to guess the order of a pack of cards without touching them. Because there was no other mind activity involved, clairvoyance was said to have been better demonstrated if better than chance scores were achieved.

     Rhine and the rest of the staff could not explain their results. The found that mood affected the psychic results. The subjects would do better when they were encouraged or challenged. The subjects also did more poorly when they were tired, depressed, self-conscious or bored. The scores would also drop due to over testing the subjects for prolonged periods. Finally after three years of testing and 100,000 individual test, Rhine went public. He needed a title for his experiments so he invented the title, "Extrasensory Perception." It was his hope that the title would help other psychologist recognize ESP as a type of perception. Millions read the book. Newspapers knew people loved the paranormal and papers like The New York Times and The Herald played it up for years keeping the publics attention. In the academic world, ESP was herald as "epoch making". Rhine had overcome the objections of scientists by maintaining constant results.

     The skeptics came out of the walls. They found many things wrong with the experiments. Rhine realized what he had one wrong, got a machine to shuffle the cards, removed people from the room with the test subjects and made many changes. Still the biggest criticism was that the results could not be repeated. That made widespread doubt about parapsychology as a science and even doubts about ESP being real. McDougal obtained funds from an Ohio Philanthropist and established the country’s first parapsychology laboratory in a building near Duke University. He put Rhine in charge as it’s founding director.

     Rhine’s book came to the attention of many including Carl Jung who wrote him congratulations with the following, "There are things which are simply incomprehensible to the tough brains of our race and time. One simply risk being taken for crazy or insincere, and I have received so much of the other that I learned to be careful in keeping quiet." It was a little too late for him to do that though.

     In 1969, ESP researchers finally got some recognition. The Para psychological Association they had formed 12 years before was admitted to affiliate status in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the leading origination of U.S. Scientist. They felt that even though ESP hadn’t been fully proven, they could at least claim an area of scientific research. This was short lived as the acceptance was reversed due to fraud within Rhine’s own people. A man named David Levy was caught coming into the lab at night and forcing the computer to record hits. Davis discovered what levy was doing and told Rhine who promptly fired him. Rhine had no choice but to make public what had happened. He then came under attack from John A. Wheeler, the founder of the theory of the black hole. Wheeler delivered blast against PSI at a meeting of the AAAS stating, "Every science has hundreds of hard results, but search fails to turn up a single one in parapsychology." He then called for stripping the association of its affiliation. He also claimed that Rhine had altered the results of test when he had worked for McDougal many years earlier.

     Rhine was recovering from a heart attack when he heard of the report. He got a copy of it and realized how many errors were in Wheelers statements. He called Wheeler on his statements. Wheeler retracted that Rhine had cheated, but stool firm on his statement that parapsychology was not a legitimate science. Rhine died in 1980, just a few months after Wheelers accusations. Still a half-century of his work had spread over the world and gave scientist a legitimate way to study parapsychology. Today parapsychology is taught in hundreds of U.S. schools as well as France, The Netherlands, Germany, India, Japan and the Soviet Union. The old Zener tests have been replaced by high tech computer tests that help to remove the errors. They have developed Random Events Generators which help in determining random numbers picked most often, for example in choosing a number between one and 10, most people pick seven.