Amazing things happened in the harsh 1970s in our Soviet fatherland (who would have thought?)! It is difficult for the current generation to imagine that a parapsychology laboratory headed by Professor Leonid Leonidovich Vasiliev (the author of the books "Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche" and "Mental Suggestion at a Distance") would officially function at LSU (Leningrad State University), so that academic conferences devoted to the problems unidentified flying objects to hold official meetings with foreign ufologists and parapsychologists. By the way, the grandson of the famous American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce came to visit us, and he shocked us with the statement that a huge number of his grandfather's prophecies had not yet been deciphered! And at one of these meetings we learned about a manwho has a fantastic gift to imprint his mental images into photographic materials!
What does alcohol have to do with it?
This man's name was Theodore (Ted) Judd Serios (1918-2006). He learned about his amazing gift in adulthood quite by accident.
From then until the end of his days, Ted Serios remained in the field of attention of the luminaries of science, but they were never able to unravel the secret of his amazing abilities.
Ted Sernoe at the time of shooting a mental image
The life of this man was unusually varied. At times he worked as a waiter, taxi driver, sailor, hotel bellboy and even served a freight elevator. Pauline Ohler, an Illinois psychiatrist, first spoke about him to the public in the 1960s. She sent a copy of her article about Serios in Faith (Fate, Rock) to the renowned Denver psychoanalyst Dr. Julie Eisenbud. The doctor at first did not take this information, calling it "nonsense." but later changed his mind abruptly. He invited Serios to his place in Denver and began systematic research on the phenomenon.
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The experiments lasted for two years, during which the unique one reproduced the mental images on film using a Polaroid Land camera hundreds (!) Of times. A characteristic feature of the experiments was the mandatory drunken state of Ted Serios, and from time to time he brought a bottle of whiskey to his lips and took a few sips! One can imagine what a deafening impression these films made on the Soviet audience! As it turned out, it was only when Seriosos absorbed a substantial dose of alcohol that the images on the photograph were reproduced quite clearly! By the way, Julie Eisenbad wrote a book about his work with a unique one.
Experiment technology
Each experiment, which lasted no less than eight (!) Hours, was not easy for the participants. The subject, being drunk, jumped up, ran around the room and uttered wild cries and curses. According to Dr. Eisenbad, Ted Serios was even registered with the police because of his antisocial behavior. This circumstance was mercilessly exploited by "skeptics" who accused the only one of falsifying their experiments. Moreover, Ted often threw off his clothes, and sometimes his shoes, and fiercely bit his fingers. It was all filmed on film. And precisely at the moments of the loudest cries of Serios and the appearance of his terrible grimace (these moments were chosen by the subject himself) the experimenter pressed the shutter of the camera. By the way, a strange detail: Eisenbad's sessions often ended in bleeding from the subject's mouth and attacks of severe headaches.
The sleeping woman in the mental photograph of Theodore Serios
As Serios's fame grew, hordes of skeptics developed activity, looking for signs of "sleight of hand" in him. The American journalists Charles Reynolds and David Eisendrath, who “settled” on the pages of Popular Photography magazine, were especially successful in this. These skeptics tried to explain the unprecedented abilities of Ted Serios by "natural causes." However, this explanation did not satisfy the magazine's publishers and they escorted the skeptics to Denver for new evidence of their case.
Scandal around a cardboard cylinder
During his first meeting with Dr. Eisenbad, Ted Serios pointed the Polaroid Land camera at his face and pressed the shutter. The guest immediately took the camera and extracted a print from it. Imagine the doctor's amazement when he saw on the print not the subject's face, but … a certain stone building!
This was followed by a whole series of similar experiments in different versions. They were attended, in particular, by representatives of various fields of knowledge, who brought their own cameras and photographic films. Skeptics pinned great hopes on the exposure of the unique due to a kind of device in the form of a cardboard cylinder, which Serios called "gizmo" and each time raised it to his eyes so as, as he said, "to avoid accidentally pressing the camera shutter." But the "exposure enthusiasts" suspected the presence of tiny lenses in the cylinder, projecting mysterious images onto photographic film. Nevertheless, in hundreds of experiments, not only with the removed cylinder, but even without a camera (the impact was made in absolute darkness directly on the photographic material!), Not a single breakdown happened!
The well-known and still "exposer of anomalous phenomena" James Randi, a professional illusionist, suggested that before the experiment, Ted Serios was hiding a cylinder somewhere in his clothes. But the experts categorically rejected this version, since the only one came to the experiment in a shirt with short sleeves, and sometimes appeared from the next room half naked! The only condition for the success of the experiment was the presence of the subject in Eisenbad's laboratory.
American psychiatrists J. Pratt and Ian Stevenson conducted about eight hundred (!) Experiments with Ted Serios, and once they discovered a fact that fundamentally undermines the "cylinder theory". This refers to the mental image of a certain building, imprinted by Serios into the photographic material. The Americans took apart the inscription on the building and were amazed to see grammatical errors in it! The artificial origin also produces the image of Yuri Gagarin's Vostok spacecraft, obtained by Serios. On the print, you can see a broken cigar with a lurid inscription "East"!
And yet an incomparably stronger impression is left by the experience staged by Serios on May 27, 1967 at the Natural History Museum in Denver. The unique burst through with his inner gaze in prehistoric times, typing into the photographic material an image of a Neanderthal, squatting and trying to strike fire, hitting a stone on a stone!
… the "Neanderthal" imagined by Serios
For the sake of fairness, it should be said that in our country there were and, probably, there are people with similar, but, of course, not with such bright abilities. I will name only one name of such a person who, in the old days, was capable of imprinting into film, however, only geometric figures - this is the pearl of Russian parapsychology, Ninel Kulagina (1926-1990).
Gennady Lisov. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 11 2010