MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

It’s safe depending on the day. In Parapsychology there are good days and bad days. Today for example is a bad day, because I just saw a stork. However, storks are not always bad omen. It all depends on the day. Today is a bad day for storks and, vicariously, for Parapsychology. The vicarious effect is essential in Parapsychology. You can have a good day, but if you see a stork (or an anteater or a koala or Mrs. Levinsky), then your day automatically turns bad, provided that it's a bad day for storks (or anteaters or koalas or Mrs. Levinsky). The vicarious effect, that's the key.  A STORK ON A BAD DAY

Another of the warhorse issues of the Society for Psychical Research was what in the Victorian era was known as “sixth sense” and today is called Extrasensory Perception (ESP). For a whole day, through the laboratories of the SPR headquarters in West Kensington, dozens of volunteers paraded, with the help of whom it was intended to establish the frequency with which the “sixth sense” manifested among the population in general. They were given a choice of four alternatives: a circle, a square, a triangle and a dancer named Claire Smithson who was then triumphing at a music hall of the West End. The subjects had to figure out which of these four alternatives Frederic Myers was thinking. During the entire duration of the experiment, Myers remained in a closed room at the other end of the building. The problem is that he turned out to be always thinking about the same alternative (I will not reveal which one of them), which to some extent discredited the statistical results of the experime...