- Sinclair, Upton.
Mental Radio.
Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, [1930, 1962] 2001. ISBN 1-57174-235-2.
-
Upton Sinclair, self-described (p. 8) “Socialist ‘muckraker’”
is best known for his novels such as
The Jungle (which put a generation off
eating sausage),
Oil!,
and
The Moneychangers, and his
social activism. His
1934 run for Governor of California
was supported by young firebrand Robert A. Heinlein, whose 1938-1939 “lost first novel”
For Us, The Living
(February 2004) was
in large part a polemic for Sinclair's “Social Credit” platform.
Here, however, the focus is on the human mind, in particular the
remarkable experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance performed in the
late 1920s with his wife, Mary Craig Sinclair. The experiments
consisted of attempts to mentally transmit or perceive the content of
previously drawn images. Some experiments were done with the
“sender” and “receiver” separated by more than 40 kilometres, while
others involved Sinclair drawing images in a one room with the door
closed, while his wife attempted to receive them in a different
room. Many of the results are simply astonishing, so much so that
given the informal conditions of the testing, many sceptics
(especially present-day CSICOPs who argue that any form of cheating
or sensory information transfer, whether deliberate or subconscious,
which cannot be definitively excluded must be assumed to have
occurred), will immediately discard them as flawed. But the Sinclair
experiments took place just as formal research in parapsychology was
getting underway—J.B. Rhine's Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke
University was not founded until 1935—five years after the
publication of Mental Radio, with the support of William
McDougall, chairman of the Duke psychology department who, in 1930,
himself performed experiments with Mary Craig Sinclair and wrote the
introduction to the present volume.
This book is a reprint of the 1962 edition, which includes a
retrospective foreword by Upton Sinclair, the analysis of the
Sinclair experiments by Walter Franklin Prince published in the
Bulletin of the Boston Society for Psychic Research in
1932, and a preface by Albert Einstein.
January 2005 