 Star, wavy lines, square, seven, seven, three. CBS Radio and its 217 affiliated stations present the CBS Radio Workshop, radio's distinguished series dedicated to man's imagination, the Theater of the Mind. Tonight, report on ESP, a study of clairvoyance, telepathy, and extrasensory perception taken from actual case records. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. John McIntyre. Extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, telepathy, pre-cognition. These are the laboratory works. But in everyday life, you and I are faced with a multitude of strange occurrences. Item, a man is about to board a certain airliner. Suddenly, on a hunch, he turns back to the ticket window and changes to another flight. An hour later, the plane he would have been on crashes into a mountainside. Item, a mother suddenly and unaccountably breaks into tears at the moment her son is killed a thousand miles away. Reason, unknown, unexplained. Today, modern scientists are delving deeper and deeper into these mysteries. In the science laboratory of a great university, a girl sits at a table and draws cards from an automatic shuffling machine. On the face of each card is one of five possible designs. A star, a circle, a cross, a square, three wavy lines. Without looking at the cards, the girl tries to identify the designs by mental impressions, by clairvoyance. At another table, a man watches dice stumble about in a revolving cage. The man calls out a number. The dice are cast. The number is six. At still another table, an experimenter stares at a photograph of a tree and tries to project the mental image of this tree to an artist at a drawing board in the next room. These are only a few of the experiments by which modern science hopes to probe into these unexplained phenomena. To solve one of life's greatest riddles. Mr. McIntyre, may I interrupt for just a moment? Certainly. My name is Lawrence Dobkin. Now, it's my intention most of these things can be explained. Properly investigated with adequate controls. Science can show a perfectly normal logical explanation for almost any of these so-called psychic phenomena. I see. Excuse me, Mr. McIntyre. I'm Russell Thorson, and I'd like to ask Mr. Dobkin a question. Go right ahead, Mr. Thorson. Mr. Dobkin, do you feel that science has been able to determine by what means certain men and women are able to consult a forked stick and discover water far underground? You mean a watered dowser? Yes. Oh, that's a superstition that goes back to the Middle Ages. I believe it's more than a superstition. I believe it's extrasensory perception. Oh, gentlemen, may I make a suggestion? Certainly, Mr. McIntyre. The workshop has included the case of a watered dowser in tonight's report. For case number one, we have invited a gentleman who can give us an eyewitness account of how a watered dowser works. Mr. Robert Ballin. To begin with, let me say that my experience is limited to the method used by one particular dowser, Mr. Henry Gross, Game Warden of Bitterford, Maine. Probably the country's best known dowser. Two books have been written about him by Kenneth Roberts, author of such bestsellers as Northwest Passage and Oliver Wiswell. As a result of reading of Mr. Robert's books on Henry Gross, I decided to employ him to find water on my farm, which is just outside Manchester, Vermont. Shortly after I bought the farm, in the fall of 1954, the spring that supplied all my water suddenly went dry. Some of my neighbors said nothing could be done about it. Some said I should call in a geologist and try to drill a well. Instead, I got in touch with Kenneth Roberts and Mr. Henry Gross. I asked if Mr. Gross would be willing to come over from Maine and dows my farm. He said he would for a fee of $500 in expenses and a day or so later he drove up to my front door. He was a man of about 60, a little less than medium height, quiet, soft-spoken country gentleman. I invited him into the house for a cup of coffee and Mr. Gross explained the conditions that I must agree to. Now, Mr. Ballin, if I tell you where to dig your well, you must dig right there at that spot and not maybe off a few feet north or south. Yes, I understand that, Mr. Gross. And don't bring in one of those big bulldozers for the digging. I hope the machine's too heavy. It makes the earth down so tight that it crushes the veins and the water off in a new direction. Yes, I could see it in my... All right, we can get started. Most of my farm is on a hillside with a good deal of natural growth. As we walked along, Mr. Gross pulled up a golden rod plant and bent it into the shape of a letter V. He took one fork of the branch in each hand and pointed it directly in front of him in a horizontal position. He aimed slowly to the right, then to the left. Suddenly the branch dipped down. Yes, it looks like your old spring, the one that dried out, is straight up the hill. I didn't tell you where it was, did I? No, it didn't need to. That's where my rod's visit is. That's why it dipped. In other words, if the rod points down, that indicates water? Or if I'm asking the rod a question, it means yes, if it doesn't dip, that's no. Can the rod tell how near we are to the spring? I'll ask it. How far away is the old spring? More than a hundred yards? We wait a moment, and then the rod dipped again. More than a two hundred yards? Another pause? Then another dip? More than five hundred yards. This time it was motionless. Seems to be less than five hundred. Is it four hundred and fifty yards? Is it four hundred and sixty yards? The questions continued until the rod indicated the old spring was four hundred and fifty-eight yards up the hill. We then paced off the distance and found it to be four hundred and fifty-seven yards. Now, considering that a man's stride cannot be exact, the rod's accuracy was phenomenal. You know why this spring went dry? It was off on a tributary, and this long gout passed it out. You think the main vein is still flowing? Just a question of finding it. We worked our way down the slope until the divining rod dipped again. Then Mr. Gross began walking back and forth and asking the rod questions. Finally we had worked ourselves almost up to my back door, and then Mr. Gross laid the rod aside. Balan, you've got a good vein. It comes down from the top of that hill. It's about twenty feet wide. The deepest part is seven feet, and behind your house it rises to within four feet of the surface. Now this is the place to dig. You'll find it's excellent drinking water. Fine. It's only four feet. I can dig it myself. Sure. Be good exercise. Mr. Gross, two or three times where you were working, you seemed to break into perspiration and tremble. It happens now and then. It takes a little out of you when you feel the water. You say feel? That's the only way I can describe it. Then you must be able to find the water without using a divining rod. I do sometimes. That rod is a help. Tell me, do you think other dousers feel water the same way you do? You can't say, but I do know that most of us who are outdoor folks will at home in the woods and fields. I think that's important. Very important. I followed Mr. Gross's instructions and started digging in the spot that he had indicated. The top earth was dry and caked. But at about 18 inches the soil was damp. At two feet it was moist. At three feet water seeped into the hole. As far as we could tell, the water vein was exactly at the depth that Mr. Gross had predicted. And now I'd like to present in person the gentleman who participated in this remarkable phenomenon. Mr. Robert W. Ballin, the vice president of the world's largest advertising agency, the J. Walter Thompson Company. Mr. Ballin. Thank you, Mr. McIntyre. Would you care to make any comments on this case? No, I don't think so, except to say I realize that my experience with Mr. Henry Gross was quite impossible, except for one thing. It actually happened through no other device than one man's unusual powers. Thank you, Mr. Ballin. As you'd know that in preparing this program, the workshop has inquired as to Mr. Henry Gross's recent activities as a water douser. He has been employed by the city of Fredericksburg, Texas by landowners on the island of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands by such firms as Bristol Myers Chemical Laboratories, the A.C. Lawrence Leather Company, a subsidiary of Swift & Company, by two large electronic factories in New Jersey, and by Canada's largest munitions plant. May I just make a comment? Certainly, Mr. Domkin. Thank you. Now, science has investigated water dousing. It appears that when that rod twists and dips in the douser's hands, well, that's actually caused by an unconscious muscular action. Now, if that's correct, there's no mystery about it. But there is. There most certainly is. In what way, Mr. Thorsten? Well, even if the douser should control the rod by this unconscious muscular action, what is it that affects his muscles? If the douser has some strange affinity for water, how does he feel it? And how is it that Mr. Gross, over a flowing vein of water, can hold two dousing rods, each slightly off-center, and have one rod work frontward and the other backward? Muscles can't do that. But now you're getting off into the supernatural. The supernatural or the natural in a way not yet understood by science. In every era since the age of ice and of the mastodon, man has believed in the miraculous. He turned to the witch doctors, the soothsayers, to the astrologers, the magicians, to the frauds and the cunning chiefs. Again and again, his faith was betrayed, and yet he believed. He believed because there was something, something that was beyond his knowledge. In the Bible there are miracles. Bell Shazer feasted with a thousand nobles and a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, many, many take all you farsen. And in that night was Bell Shazer, the king of the Chaldeans' slave. Pharaoh dreamed a dream of seven fat years and seven lean years. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, slept and saw a vision of himself humbled as unto the beasts of the field. What are these dreams, these visions? To be exact, sir, they're phenomena of pre-cognition. That is to say, the knowing of the event before it actually happened. Well, now it's not just a minute. Yes, Mr. Don. At times, you know, science finds it difficult to accept biblical stories as literal fact. They are very effective, yes, as literature. But we can't possibly prove that these things actually did occur. Nor can we prove that they did not, sir. Yes, well, all right, now equibly. How about some modern examples? Would you accept them? That depends on the quality of the evidence. We all know that certain people are given to telling some very remarkable things, which are either pure imagination or events that have been poorly observed and wrongly interpreted. Mr. Don, can I doubt if you would charge fraud or mistake in the two cases I'm proposing? They're both a matter of public record. Mr. McIntyre, would you please? With pleasure. Case number two, which might be called pre-cognition. The year was 1858. The Mississippi Riverbolt, Pennsylvania, was laying over at St. Louis. Among the crew were Henry Clemens and his older brother, Sam. Samuel Clemens, who had one day right his way to fame under the pen name of Mark Twain. While the steamboat loaded cargo, Sam went ashore to stay overnight at the home of his sister, Pamela. Early the following morning, Pamela was awakened by a noise downstairs and a voice. Henry! Henry! Pamela reached for her rope and hurried downstairs. She entered the city room to find her brother, Samuel, staring wildly about. Sam, what are you doing up at this hour? It seems so. So real. What? I was so sure of it, I jumped out of bed and came down to look at him. Sam. When he wasn't here, I thought they'd moved him. Who, Sam, moved who? Henry. He was dead. Oh, Sam, you were just having another one of your nightmares. It was as real as you are, Pamela. I saw Henry stretched out here in this sitting room. He was in a metal coffin. There was a bouquet on his chest. White flowers. All white. Except for one red rose in the center. It was so vivid. Sam, it was just a dream. Yes. A few weeks later, on June 13th, 60 miles below Memphis, the boilers of the steamboat Pennsylvania exploded. Among the 160 dead was Henry Clemens. In a Memphis warehouse, the victims were laid out in a long line wooden coffins. There was but one metal coffin. Samuel Clemens stood beside it and gazed down at his brother's body. On the chest was a bouquet of white flowers. All white. Except for one red rose in the center. Case number three. Seven years later, in the second week of April, 1865, another man dreamed a dream. Afterward, he told it to his wife and to his best friend. I assumed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I was both puzzled and alarmed. I kept on until I arrived at the east room. There before me was a cattle-folk on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it a strong of people sumgazing mournfully upon the corpse, others weeping bitterly. I asked one of the soldiers there who is dead in the White House. The president, he said, he was killed by an assassin. That same week, in April, the man who dreamed that dream, Abraham Lincoln, attended a play at Ford's Theater. Later his body lay in state in the east room. Yes. Well, gentlemen? Well, first I'd like to ask Mr. Dobbkin if he questions the validity of those two dreams. No, no, no, Mr. Thorsten. I accept the miscorrect statements of actual events. Thank you. But now, tell me, have you never had a dream of dying or falling downstairs or being an auto-accident? Oh, I imagine I have. I know I have. Well, let's suppose that everybody in the United States has had at least one dream of accident or disaster. That's 165 million dreams. That's the global law of averages. Guarantees that some of those dreams will come true. I think this is a good time to quote Dr. Sigmund Freud. He said, if one regards oneself as a skeptic, it is well from time to time to be skeptical about one's skepticism. And on clairvoyant dreams, he said, just a minute, Mr. McIntyre, would you oblige me again? Certainly. In Vienna in 1925, Dr. Sigmund Freud, the great pioneer in the science of psychoanalysis, had this to say, if there are such things as telepathic messages, the possibility cannot be dismissed of their reaching someone during sleep. The further possibility arises that telepathic messages received in a course of the day may only be delved with during a dream of the following night. I hope you paid particular attention to that last part, Mr. Doggin. There is a possibility that telepathic messages might come to a person only in a dream. Yes, yes, I got that point. All right. Doesn't that suggest something to you? At the very time of President Lincoln's dream, John Wilkes Booth was planning his assassination. Using Freud's theory, Lincoln might have picked up Booth's murderous thoughts by telepathy, therefore the dream. Well, it's a startling idea, certainly, but again, there's no possible proof. The world is filled with things difficult to prove. Their mere existence is our proof. We scientists have spent centuries studying the animal world. What do we come up with? Mystery. Item, the homing pigeon. The homing pigeon can find its way back to its home loft over distances up to 100 miles. In some cases, the distance is approached 1,000 miles. Means by which the bird determines latitude, longitude, curvature of the earth are known. Item, household pets. Dogs and cats have been separated from their owner and have returned on foot over distances of many hundreds of miles. Bobby, a collie, travels almost 2,000 miles between the states of Indiana and Oregon. Means of determining direction unknown. Item, the European eel. The European eel swims from inland rivers into the Atlantic. Makes its way 2,000 miles to a deep off the West Indies. There it spawns and dies. The baby eels born off the West Indies return across the Atlantic and ascend the same rivers from which their parents had come years before. Method of finding their way unknown. Well, this is all very interesting, Mr. Thorson, but these are things that we call instinct. Yes, and what is instinct? Can science explain it? Well, we're investigating it. And we still don't know. I say that instinct includes clairvoyance and telepathy at work at an animal level. Yes, but that is simply argument. Mr. McIntyre, may we have the case of Lady the Wonder Horse? Certainly. Case number four, an example of clairvoyance, as told by Mr. Stuart Wyatt. Well, it was back in the fall of 1950, late October. My wife Nancy and our 12-year-old boy Billy and I went up to spend a weekend at our mountain cabin. This was back in Eastern Tennessee on the shore of a small lake. Late Saturday afternoon, Billy went out on the sailboat. I told him not to because it looked like there was a storm blowing up or, you know, how kids are. Well, anyway, the wind kept getting stronger and stronger. Nancy and I got worried. We saw Billy trying to take in sail, but he couldn't do it fast enough. And the mast broke and the boat capsized. I swam out to the wreckage, but there was no sign of Billy. So we telephoned the nearest forest ranger station and they sent over a couple of men with a search boat. They couldn't find anything either. At night in the pouring rain, we had over 200 volunteers combing the woods in the shore. They even brought in bloodhounds. After two days of this, the chief ranger, Anderson, was pretty discouraged. We've dragged the lake three times, Mr. Wyatt, and still nothing. I'm afraid the body must be caught under the ledge or something where our equipment can't reach it. Looks like there's nothing more we can do. I told that to my wife. It's a funny thing, Mr. McIntyre. She just suddenly stopped crying. She said, all right, now it's time to try that horse she'd read about. She was supposed to be able to find missing children and his name was Lady. I told her it was ridiculous, but, well, we'd tried everything else. The horse which Mrs. Wyatt had read about is Lady, owned by Mrs. C.D. Fonda of Richmond, Virginia. Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt found the 25-year-old mare waiting for them in her barn. In front of her was a strange contrivance of levers and wooden blocks with letters of the alphabet and numbers running from one to ten. Following instructions, the Wyatt's asked Lady a test question. Lady, tell me, what was my maiden name? The horse moved toward one of the levers. She pressed her nose against the lever and the block with a letter L came into view. L. E. That's right, Lee, Nancy Lee. Oh, this is impossible. Nobody around here knows your maiden name. Lady does. Well... Lady, is my son Billy alive? Lady? Alive. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Lady, Lady, where is Billy? Lady, where is Billy? A. E. E. E. He's in the cave. Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt telephoned from Richmond to Chief Ranger Anderson back in Tennessee. They told him to search for a cave. The following is from the official report of Ranger Anderson. The white boy was found in a small cave approximately one and one-quarter miles northeast of the lake. He was unconscious. Dr. Warner gave him a blood transfusion and he was removed to the hospital. When I was able to question him, the white boy stated these circumstances. After the sailboat capsized and sank, he swam to the nearest shore. While attempting to return home through the woods, he stumbled into an animal trap. The trap broke his left leg and he began to lose blood. In a state of fright and confusion, he then began to crawl in a direction away from the lake. He discovered the cave and decided to stay there until the rainstorm was over. Sometime during the night, he lost consciousness. He remembered nothing more until reviving in the hospital. He was discharged there from on October 28th, fully recovered. Case is similar to that of the white boy in which the horse lady has guided searchers to the recovery of the bodies of missing children may be read in Newsweek magazine. The issues of October 25th, 1948, December 22nd, 1952 and February 16th, 1953. In Time magazine, issue of December 15th, 1952. In Life magazine, issue of December 22nd, 1952. And in Popular Mechanics magazine, issue of March, 1952. Yes, the dramatization you just heard was a composite of several such actual cases. Item, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Emmanuel Swedenborg, scientist and philosopher in September, 1759. Saw an Awaking Dream at a disastrous fire which was burning at that very moment in the city of Stockholm, 50 miles away. He specified the houses which were then in flames and gave the correct hour at which the fire was extinguished. Item, Leo Tolstoy. In 1910, Count Leo Tolstoy, famous author, sent a message to the Tsar of Russia, the German Kaiser and the King of England, in which he described his dream of World War I, four years before it occurred. He stated when the war would begin, where it would be outlined its horrors, foresaw the League of Nations. Now gentlemen, any questions? You, Mr. Thorson? I rest my case. You, Mr. Dobkin. I rest my case. A girl sits at a table and draws cards from an automatic shuffling machine. By the mathematical laws of chance, she should correctly identify without looking at the cards, five out of every 25 drawn. This girl has scored as high as nine and 15 cards consecutively correct. In one such experiment, the score has exceeded the laws of chance by odds of 400,000 to one. In still other cases, the odds have risen to the astronomical ratio of one trillion and one quadrillion to one. In laboratories and universities throughout the United States and Europe and South Africa, the research goes on. New light is being shed on the phenomena of telepathy and clairvoyance. The day may be not far distant, when science will establish the principles of extrasensory perception and its operation as firmly as the laws which govern nuclear fission. The ideas advanced by Professor Sigmund Freud and by other investigators may yet be proven fat. That long before man's first crude stammering, long before he first chiseled his ideal graphs into stone, man communicated to fellow man through thought. Tonight, the CBS Radio Workshop has presented report on ESP, directed by Jack Johnstone. Research and script by Leonard St. Clair. John McIntyre was the narrator. The cast included Lucille Meredith, Billy and Bayef, Don Diamond, Lauren Stotkin, Russell Thorson, Stacy Harris, Robert Ballin, Forrest Lewis, Sam Edwards, Raymond Burr, and Bird Holland. Original music for tonight's program was composed and conducted by Amarigo Marino with vocal by Norma Zimmer. The CBS Radio Workshop is produced in Hollywood by William Frug. This is Hugh Douglas inviting you to join us again next week when we present COPS and Robbers, a unique experiment in which real-life detectives use actual police methods to solve a fictional crime presented on the CBS Radio Workshop. On the New York Philharmonic Symphony broadcast, presented by most of these same stations this Sunday, you'll hear the second of two All Mozart programs. Bruno Valder will conduct the Mozart Symphony No. 25 in G major and then will present the rarely performed Mozart Requiem. That's this Sunday on CBS Radio. Stay tuned for five minutes of CBS News to be followed on most of these stations by The Jack Carson Show. America listens most to the CBS Radio Network.