ABSTRACT
An underwater photograph shows two divers, one male and one female, harnessed with scuba tanks. Their faces are obscured by masks, bodies stalled in uniformly murky light, anchoring themselves by grasping what might be a rock or a log as they are photographed by a third diver. The divers in this image are floating in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida, but their minds are elsewhere. An experiment is in progress. Eight thousand miles away, in Zurich, a subject of a telepathy experiment named Douglas Dean relaxes in a chair in a laboratory. His physiological responses are being closely monitored. Simultaneously, at the bottom of the ocean, one of the scuba divers, Pamela de Maigret, is attempting to mentally ‘transmit’ a list of names to Dean, some of which are of personal importance to him. The United States Navy is also co-operating with this trial, helping to synchronise the timing, assuring that the physical changes in Dean’s blood volume that seem to occur when de Maigret pauses on a name important to the subject is indeed perfectly timed with her attempts at mental transmission. The underwater image described contains no implication of the event in progress, but rather, depicts what most would consider an otherwise mundane image (Bowles et al. 1978: 68).
