The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Walter Levy.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	location	relations	created	updated
Walter Levy Walter J. Levy Walter J. Levy Jr. Walter Jay Levy W. J. Levy W. Jay Levy Jay Levy Levy	Scientists & Researchers	Person Parapsychologist Fraud Durham InstituteForParapsychology Rhine AnimalPsi 1970s	Director of J. B. Rhine's Institute for Parapsychology in Durham who resigned in June 1974 after colleagues recorded him altering the output of rat and gerbil psi experiments.	Durham, North Carolina	type with start end role fn director_of Institute for Parapsychology 1973 1974-06 laboratory director at the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, Durham; resigned after the June 11, 1974 observation 3 type with start end role fn employed_by J. B. Rhine 1973 1974 full-time researcher after graduating from the Medical College of Georgia in 1973; summer worker from 1969 3 type with start end role fn subject_of James Kennedy 1974-05-10 1974-06-11 observed and recorded by Jerry Levin, Jim Davis and James Kennedy; chart recorder installed June 9, 1974 5	2026-05-15	2026-10-05

Walter J. Levy Jr. (known as W. Jay Levy) was a medical student who began working at J. B. Rhine's parapsychology institute in Durham, North Carolina during his summer vacation in 1969. In March 1971 the Journal of Parapsychology published "Repetition of the French Precognition Experiments with Mice" by Levy, L. Allen Mayo Jr., Eve Andre and Anita McRae; the editors' note describes Levy as a second-year medical student at the Medical College of Georgia, Mayo as a Duke University zoology graduate student, Andre as a librarian in Victoria, Australia, and McRae as a research assistant at the Institute for Parapsychology. The copy of that paper is in the Central Intelligence Agency STARGATE collection.¹

Directorship

The Institute for Parapsychology, in Durham, was the successor to the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory that J. B. Rhine had moved off campus on his retirement from Duke in 1965, and was part of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.² Time reported on August 26, 1974 that after Levy graduated from the Medical College of Georgia in 1973 Rhine "hired him as a full-time researcher; soon he was promoted to director," that he had "showed an unusual talent for automating experiments and recording data," and that his experiments tested the ability of rodents to anticipate events (extrasensory perception) or to affect physical changes by will (psychokinesis). In the rat experiments, electrodes implanted in a pleasure zone of the brain delivered stimuli at random intervals from a computer keyed to the decay of atoms in a strontium 90 sample; the expected rate without influence was 50 percent, and by early May 1974 Levy was reporting 54 percent.³ James Kennedy later wrote that the Levy case came shortly after Rhine's 1974 article on researcher fraud.⁴

The 1974 exposure

The chronology written in 1974 by James Kennedy, J. W. Davis and Jerry Levin records the sequence. On Friday, May 10, 1974, Levin observed Levy at the indicator panel of the small-rodent precognition work holding wires from the random generator "in a position where he could control the target chosen"; Levin did not witness a clear-cut manipulation, and taped the wires. About a week later he told Kennedy. On Saturday, June 8, Kennedy set up a rat implantation experiment (the effect of valium on psychokinesis scoring) with the wires to the rat left disconnected without Levy's knowledge, saw Levy with his hand in the equipment several times, and on entering the room after Levy left found "a long string of hits had just been recorded on paper tape punch, which was the official record." Levy had commented several times that positive results with valium "might lead to some financial support." On Sunday, June 9, Kennedy, Levin and Davis installed an Esterline Angus chart recorder in the basement to record the output of the random generator, and decided that Davis would watch from the porch off the experimenter room.⁵

On Tuesday, June 11, in an isolation experiment officially Kennedy's, Davis noticed that the mechanical counter sounded on every trial (every four seconds) but the paper punch, the official record, did not register on every trial while Levy was in the room. Comparing the punch record with the chart record afterward, "it was apparent that when a long string of hits occurred on the paper punch record, the misses were simply not recorded." From the porch Davis saw Levy enter the room and put his hand among the wires, and from the window saw that the plug carrying the channel that recorded misses had been removed; Levy returned twice more, and the plug was reinserted before Davis went back in. The three recorded that "for at least the past few months it has been Dr. Levy's practice to spend an excessive amount of time in close proximity to the equipment during studies involving his lines of research." Kennedy added in 2005 that he had left the rat's wires disconnected because he wished to test whether the experimenter or the animal produced the apparent effects, and had initially rejected Levin's suspicions because he "could not comprehend how someone would work so hard and be so devoted to a topic that he was fraudulently producing."⁵

The three reported to Rhine, who confronted Levy. Time wrote that Levy "confessed and resigned, later telling friends that he had been under great pressure to produce positive results and had been overburdened by administrative duties," insisted that this was the only time he had falsified data, and said that after failing to reproduce earlier positive tests he felt a need to force the data to reflect the results he expected; Rhine "set other staff members to work, checking the more important of Levy's earlier findings, and cautioned other psychic researchers not to rely on these data until they can be verified." The magazine called the case "the parapsychological equivalent of the famous case of the painted mice at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute."³

Annie Jacobsen writes that Levy was a Rhine assistant who was caught in 1974 cheating in an experiment in which rats were thought to use ESP to increase the number of pleasurable brain stimulations, that his research assistants found him tampering with the equipment and recorded him on videotape, and that he confessed and resigned when confronted.⁶ Kennedy's contemporaneous chronology describes a chart recorder and a human observer, and does not mention videotape.⁵

Rhine's reports and later accounts

Rhine published "A New Case of Experimenter Unreliability" in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1974 (volume 38, pages 215 to 225) and "A Second Report on a Case of Experimenter Fraud" in 1975 (volume 39, pages 306 to 325); the volume 38 index lists a comment on the first by Jule Eisenbud.⁷ Kennedy wrote that the extent of the fraud took about a year to investigate, that the investigation found evidence of fraud in all of Levy's lines of research (including a fully fabricated computerized game experiment with human subjects), and that he later posted the original summaries of three of Levy's four lines of work (maze, rat implantation and egg).⁸ Kennedy also disputed accounts by D. Scott Rogo, Chris Roe and John Palmer of who first became suspicious, whether Rhine and others suppressed reporting, and whether the fraud was confined to a single experiment.⁸

The Levy case appears in the STARGATE collection in an abstract of Werner Eeman's article "Fraud" in Psi-Forum (1985), in Parapsychology Abstracts International, which states that "we should not dramatize these uncovered frauds, such as those of Soal and Levy."⁹

Footnotes

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1. Levy, Walter J., Jr., L. Allen Mayo, Jr., Eve Andre and Anita McRae. "Repetition of the French Precognition Experiments with Mice," Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 35, no. 1, March 1971, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100021-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. Time (note 3) states Levy began working at the institute in the summer of 1969. ↩︎

2. "Rhine Research Center," Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research, https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/rhine-research-center/ (states that testing continued at Duke until Rhine's retirement in 1965, when the laboratory moved off campus and was renamed the Foundation for the Research on the Nature of Man, which included the Institute for Parapsychology). ↩︎

3. "Science: The Psychic Scandal," Time, August 26, 1974. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,944971,00.html ↩︎

4. Kennedy, J. E. "Researcher Fraud in Experimental Parapsychology," Psi Encyclopedia, https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/researcher-fraud-in-experimental-parapsychology/ (gives Rhine's 1974 article on fraud as published shortly before the Levy case and records Rhine making Levy director in 1973). ↩︎

5. Kennedy, J. E., J. W. Davis and J. Levin. "Chronology of Events in Exposing W.J. Levy," 1974, with additional information added by Kennedy in March 2005. https://www.jeksite.org/psi/fchron.pdf, linked from https://www.jeksite.org/psi/fraud.htm ↩︎

6. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎

7. The Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 38 (1974) index, listing "a new case of experimenter unreliability, 215-25," https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-parapsychology_1974_38_index; Kennedy, "Notes on a Case of Scientific Fraud in Parapsychology," https://www.jeksite.org/psi/fraud.htm (gives the 1975 report as J. B. Rhine, "A Second Report on a Case of Experimenter Fraud," Journal of Parapsychology, 1975, pp. 306-325, and notes a "surprisingly accurate article" in Time on August 26, 1974). ↩︎

8. Kennedy, J. E. "Notes on a Case of Scientific Fraud in Parapsychology," https://www.jeksite.org/psi/fraud.htm; Kennedy, "Researcher Fraud in Experimental Parapsychology," Psi Encyclopedia, https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/researcher-fraud-in-experimental-parapsychology/ ↩︎

9. Parapsychology Abstracts International, abstract 02965, Eeman, Werner, "Fraud [Part 1]," Psi-Forum, 1985, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 82-94, CIA-RDP96-00792R000400040001-9. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎