BOGUS MEDIUM EXPOSED

Evening Star, Issue 19663, 16 September 1927, Page 11

BOGUS MEDIUM EXPOSED

DOCTOR DESCRIBED AS LUNATIC

How a medium made herself responsive to magnetic currents was one of the secrets revealed in a lecture on occult phenomena given before the Austrian Medical Society by Professor I)r I’ilez. This woman would sit blindfolded in a circle of steel posts, to which those present could apply a powerful magnet. Her “occult powers enabled her on every occasion to say exactly in what position the magnet was held, and to point out tho lines of magnetic force. Sceptical docti/rs, however, placed her behind an X-yay screen _ immediately after lire scs'/fon, when it was found that before each sitting she swallowed a hollow steel hall. When the magnet was brought into action, tho ball sprang against the lining ol the stomach, and in (his painful way revealed to the medium exactly from what direction the force came.

The professor expressed his entire disbelief in palmistry. He related how a Vienna palmist gave a demonstration before the psycho-analytical clinic in Vienna, reading the hands of the doctors which were thrust through a curtain. A few days later the palmist repeated, her performance at an asylum for the. insane, giving her opinion on the state of mental health and possibilitics of recovery of the patient. She road one hand thrust through the cniv tain as that of a hopeless mental degenerate, in the last stages of general paralysis of the insane. Unfortunately it was the hand of the head of the asylum, from whose hand she had foretold a brilliant future throe days bciore in the clinic. Mass suggestion, said Professor Pilez, was frequently the explanation m suealled “occult phenomena.” One local medium had achieved great fame by projecting herself, according to the signed statement of a number oi coldblooded scientists who were present, through a. fourth-story window and floating backwards and forwards like a vampire in the light of the brilliant full moon. The document was entirely convincing, but uulortunately someone looked in the calendar and discovered that on the dale of the performance the new moon had just begun its career. This, lie said, was also the explanation of the Indian fakir’s rope trick. Two sceptical doctors had witnessed such a, performance, where the fakir threw a rope in the air. The rope remained upright while, a boy climbed up it and was lost in space. While one doctor watched, the other paid no attention to the performance, hut took a einematograph film of it. When it was developed it was found Unit the fakir had indeed thrown the rope into the air, hut that it had promptly fallen to earth again after the manner of ropes, while the small boy, after the maimer of small boys, had continued to cat his apple sitting on the ground throughout the performance.