The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/J. B. Rhine.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations	created	updated
J. B. Rhine Joseph Banks Rhine Joseph B. Rhine Joseph Rhine Dr. J. B. Rhine Dr. Rhine	Scientists & Researchers	Person Parapsychologist Botanist Duke ParapsychologyLaboratory ESP ONR ArmyERDL Founder 1930s 1950s	Botanist turned Duke psychologist who ran the university's Parapsychology Laboratory from 1930, founded the Journal of Parapsychology, and took Army (1951 to 1953) and Navy (1953 to 1959) research money for animal ESP work.	1895-09-29	1980-02-20	Waterloo, Pennsylvania	type with start end role fn employed_by Duke University 1927 1965 research assistant 1927, assistant professor of psychology 1929, professor 1937, retired from teaching 1950 and from the faculty 1965 1 type with start role fn founded Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory 1935 laboratory established within the psychology department in 1935; Rhine's ESP experiments at Duke began in fall 1930 1 type with start role fn founded Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man 1962 established in Durham with Rhine as director; the Parapsychology Laboratory moved to it as the Institute for Parapsychology in August 1965 1 type with start role fn founded Journal of Parapsychology 1937 with William McDougall; published by Duke University Press from 1937 1 type with start end role fn contractor_to U.S. Army 1951-12 1953 Engineer Research and Development Laboratories, Fort Belvoir, contract DA-44-009 eng-1039, mine-detecting dogs 2 type with start end role fn reverse funded Office of Naval Research 1953 1959 ONR contract NR 160-244 with Duke University, under which J. G. Pratt's pigeon homing research at the Parapsychology Laboratory was done 4 true type with start end role fn reverse funded Rockefeller Foundation 1950 1954 grant to the Parapsychology Laboratory 1 true	2026-05-17	2026-10-05

Joseph Banks Rhine was born in Waterloo, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, on September 29, 1895, and died in Hillsborough, North Carolina, North Carolina, on February 20, 1980. With a doctorate in botany from the University of Chicago, he began card-guessing experiments for extrasensory perception at Duke University in the fall of 1930, was professor of psychology there from 1937, and was the central figure of the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory, established within the psychology department in 1935 and closed at Duke in August 1965 when it moved to his Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man as the Institute for Parapsychology. The laboratory's records note that most of its money came from private benefactors and, for work directed by his colleague J. G. Pratt, from the Office of Naval Research between 1953 and 1959.¹ A contract of 1951 to 1953 with the Army's Engineer Research and Development Laboratories at Fort Belvoir paid for his work on dogs that detected buried landmines.²

Education and Duke

The finding aid to the Parapsychology Laboratory records gives his chronology: service in the United States Marine Corps from 1917 to 1919; marriage to Louisa Ellen Weckesser in April 1920; a B.S. (1922), M.S. (1923) and Ph.D. (1925) in biology at the University of Chicago, both Rhines holding doctorates in botany; a research fellowship in plant physiology at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers, New York (1923 to 1924); an instructorship in botany at West Virginia University (1924 to 1926); the study of philosophy at Harvard University (1926 to 1927); and in the fall of 1927 a move to Duke on behalf of John F. Thomas, as research assistant to Thomas and William McDougall (1927 to 1929), then instructor in philosophy and psychology (1928 to 1929), assistant professor of psychology (1929) and professor (1937). The finding aid states that "the first ESP experiments conducted at Duke (1930)" are undocumented. In 1937 he founded the Journal of Parapsychology with McDougall, published by Duke University Press, and he retired from teaching in 1950. The laboratory chronology in the same finding aid dates psychokinesis research from 1934, the Parapsychology Laboratory from 1935 (with a McDougall Research Fund), its move out of the psychology department in 1947, and the founding of the Parapsychological Association "at Duke under auspices of Parapsychology Laboratory" in 1957.¹

The same finding aid records that the original research was conducted under McDougall, chairman of the psychology department, with the support of Duke's president W. P. Few; that support weakened after McDougall died in 1938 and Few in 1940; that Rhine tried from the early 1940s to have an institute for parapsychology established at Duke without success; that in 1962 university support for work on a smaller scale was considered, and "the decision to leave Duke" was part of the reason for Pratt's resignation in 1963; and that Rhine established the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in Durham in 1962, retired from the Duke faculty in 1965, and in 1979 was elected president of the Society for Psychical Research. Rhine raised the possibility of reaffiliation with Duke as late as 1979 with its president, Terry Sanford.¹

Publicity and funding

Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) brought him international attention, according to the finding aid; in the fall of 1937 a series of ESP experiments sponsored by the Zenith Radio Corporation was broadcast while New Frontiers of the Mind was chosen as a main selection by the Book of the Month Club, the first manufactured ESP cards were produced and offered to Zenith listeners and Book of the Month Club members, and the Journal of Parapsychology began to be issued by Duke University Press. The finding aid names early critics, R. R. Willoughby and J. L. Kennedy among them, and records Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years (1940), written with Pratt, Burke Smith, Charles E. Stuart and J. A. Greenwood, as an attempt to answer them.¹ Annie Jacobsen wrote in Phenomena that Rhine first popularized ESP in the 1920s, that his work became so fashionable that by the 1940s it was included in the Psychology 101 course at Harvard, and that Martin Gardner, in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952), devoted a chapter to Rhine's work and concluded that it was the product of "an enormous self-deception," criticizing loose laboratory controls, skewing of data and the premise that the attitude of the scientist could affect the subject.³

According to the finding aid, the laboratory "was supported by Duke to some extent," but "most of its funding came from private sources," with benefactors including Ellen A. Wood, Florence Anspacher, Marie Higby Avery, Henry W. Belk, W. P. Bentley, Frances Bolton, Chester F. Carlson, Eileen Garrett, Gertrude Maurin, O. K. Merritt, Charles E. Ozanne and W. Clement Stone, "many of these persons" being "more interested in the question of spirit survival than they were in the experimental problems the laboratory investigated." It adds that the laboratory "also received grants from private foundations and government agencies, notably the Rockefeller Foundation (1950-54) and the Office of Naval Research (1953-59), the latter for research on homing pigeons conducted under Pratt's direction." Rhine's correspondents after 1935 listed in the finding aid include Warren Weaver, George Estabrooks, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Margaret Mead and Henry Margenau, and, after the war, Gertrude Schmeidler, Karlis Osis, Charles Honorton, Stanley Krippner, Ian Stevenson, Charles Tart, Milan Ryzl and the Soviet researcher E. K. Naumov.¹

The Army and the mine-detecting dogs, 1951 to 1953

The historian Robert Kirk, writing from the Rhine papers and the Zuckerman archive, reports that in late 1951 the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Laboratories at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, began an investigation of mine-detecting dogs in which the American team was Rhine, the Duke anatomist Joseph E. Markee and the biochemist Luman F. Ney of the Stanford Research Institute. The work, under Army contract DA-44-009 eng-1039, was "premised on the capacity of dogs to detect landmines through extrasensory perception (ESP)." Rhine built model minefields on a sandy California beach, with mines in raked trenches and the field under a shallow layer of seawater, and found that dogs showed an initially high ability followed by a decline "to the point that success rates fell below that expected by chance," the pattern Rhine took as the mark of ESP. The British scientist Solly Zuckerman visited the American team in April 1952, returned with "a resoundingly positive view" of the experiments, and wrote that he had learned from Rhine "how to avoid the pitfall of self-deception." In a grant renewal request of 1953, Rhine said overcoming the decline effect would require support over "a matter of some years," and that the factor was of "importance to a military power who first acquired understanding of it." The Army laboratory shifted its support to a mechanical approach and Rhine's funding ceased in 1953; his final report to the commanding officer at Fort Belvoir is dated July 10, 1953. Kirk's note records that all records of the contract "were returned to the Engineer Research and Development Laboratories (Fort Belvoir, Virginia) and destroyed in 1969 after declassification," that Rhine overspent the grant and was reproved by Duke's vice-president Paul Gross on February 7, 1952, and that Rhine's support of Pratt "proved lucrative in that it led to a decade of further funding by the Office of Naval Research."²

Jacobsen wrote in Phenomena that in 1952 the Army started a secret program with Rhine's laboratory on ESP and animals, exploring whether dogs could find land mines underwater and studying the homing of pigeons, and that Rhine also experimented on whether humans could communicate telepathically with cats. Rhine returned to the subject in "Location of Hidden Objects by a Man-Dog Team," Journal of Parapsychology (1971), written in the context of the Vietnam war, which Kirk cites for Rhine's conclusion that "it was perhaps the team and not either man or dog alone that produced such results."³²

The Navy and the pigeons, 1953 to 1959

Pratt, who had served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1946, ran the pigeon homing studies. The finding aid lists "ONR records, 1953-1961" and "ONR contract" files in the financial papers, correspondence files headed "General: ONR" for each year from 1953 to 1957, homing records and writings for 1951 to 1958, and the "Wayland pigeon project" of 1953 to 1956.¹ Pratt's paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology of March 1955, "Homing Orientation in Pigeons in Relation to Opportunity to Observe the Sun Before Release," states: "These experiments were aided by a contract between the Office of Naval Research, Department of the Navy, Washington, and Duke University, NR 160-244 and by a grant of funds from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University," with travel for R. H. Thouless paid by the Fulbright Commission and releases made from state forestry look-out towers in North Carolina and Virginia. A paper of February 24, 1956 in Science (journal) by Gustav Kramer, Pratt and Ursula von St. Paul, "Directional Differences in Pigeon Homing," states that "these experiments were conducted under contract NR 160-244 between the Office of Naval Research, Department of the Navy, Washington, and Duke University," Pratt's affiliation being the Parapsychology Laboratory and von St. Paul's the Max Planck Institute for Marine Biology.⁴⁵ Kirk adds that the zoologist Donald Griffin's parallel study of pigeon homing was also funded by the Office of Naval Research, with copies of Griffin's reports and correspondence with Pratt in the laboratory's records.²

In the CIA's files

An unsigned paper, "The World of the Supra-Sensory," held in the CIA's STARGATE collection and undated but citing events as late as 1965, describes "the Duke complex" as "probably the best known ESP research center in the world." Its author, who describes himself as a behavior scientist and a member of a legitimate ESP organization, wrote that the laboratory "served as a training ground for many of the parapsychologists throughout the world," that Rhine "has been perhaps more prominent than may have been in the best interest of ESP," and that "his influence has encompassed research methodology and funding allocation more than might be customary." It states that Rhine's laboratory "was and is influential in other parts of the world because of its scholarship and fellowship funds"; that Milan Ryzl of Prague "has been supported by funds from Duke for three years" and "has kept Dr. Rhine briefed (by letter) on ESP research in some of the Iron Curtain countries"; that Soji Otani, an assistant professor of psychology at the Japanese Defense Academy, spent a year at Duke; and that Pratt, who had worked with Rhine for 25 years, had visited Ryzl twice in Prague and made two trips to Russia to discuss ESP with Professor Leonid Vasiliev. It names Schmeidler of City College of New York among "the better known individuals" associated with the Rhine group and the Parapsychological Association.⁶

The Time cover story of March 4, 1974, "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," placed Rhine at his Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in Durham, North Carolina, "the grand old man of paranormal studies" who "still keeps watch on test animals for precognitive powers."⁷ SRI's article in the Proceedings of the IEEE in March 1976, held in the same collection, cites New Frontiers of the Mind, Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years and Rhine's 1974 article "A new case of experimenter unreliability," and states that "parapsychological researchers themselves recently exposed fraud in their own laboratory when they encountered it."⁸

The Levy affair, 1974

The finding aid chronology records that Helmut Schmidt (parapsychologist) became director of the Institute for Parapsychology in 1971 to 1972, that Walter Levy, called Jay Levy, was director in 1973 to 1974, that Rhine resumed the directorship in 1975, and that K. R. Rao became director in 1977.¹ Rhine published "A New Case of Experimenter Unreliability" in the Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 38, June 1974, pp. 215-225, the article Puthoff and Targ cite for their statement that parapsychologists "recently exposed fraud in their own laboratory."⁸ Jacobsen wrote that one of Rhine's assistants, Levy, was caught cheating in an experiment involving rats, a scandal that became fodder for skeptics.³

Footnotes

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1. Guide to the Parapsychology Laboratory Records, 1893-1984, RL.00992, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University (340 linear feet, about 250,000 items), collection overview, chronology of J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt, scope notes, and container lists (Box 524, ONR records 1953-1961; Box 658 to 662, General: ONR; Box 669 and 670, Rockefeller Foundation grant, ONR contract; Box 705, Pratt homing records). Read in the Wayback Machine capture of 2019 of https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/paralab/ (the current finding aid is at https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/paralab). ↩︎

2. Kirk, Robert G. W. "In Dogs We Trust? Intersubjectivity, Response-Able Relations, and the Making of Mine Detector Dogs." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 50, no. 1, December 2013, pp. 1-36, section "Joseph B. Rhine: Working with Minedogs in a Shared World" and notes, citing the Zuckerman Archive, University of East Anglia (SZ/CSA/188: Rhine to the Commanding Officer, ERDL, Fort Belvoir, July 10, 1953; Goff to Zuckerman, July 9, 1952), the Joseph E. Markee Papers (Duke Medical Center Archives, Box 2, folder 27), and the Records of the Parapsychology Laboratory, Duke (Box 132, Administration Folder; Box 524). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3908362/ ↩︎

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

4. Pratt, J. G. "Homing Orientation in Pigeons in Relation to Opportunity to Observe the Sun Before Release." Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 32, no. 1, March 1955, pp. 140-157, footnote to the title, read in the archive.org scan of the issue, https://archive.org/details/journal-of-experimental-biology_1955-03_32_1 ↩︎

5. Kramer, Gustav, J. G. Pratt, and Ursula von St. Paul. "Directional Differences in Pigeon Homing." Science, vol. 123, no. 3191, February 24, 1956, pp. 329-331, note 1, read in the archive.org scan of the issue, https://archive.org/details/sim_science_1956-02-24_123_3191 ↩︎

6. "The World of the Supra-Sensory," unsigned and undated paper, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400040032-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

7. "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," Time, March 4, 1974, as held in CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

8. Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." Proceedings of the IEEE 64, no. 3 (March 1976), pp. 329-354, introduction and references 9 to 14, read in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP81B00401R002600010013-2, archive.org. The article cited is Rhine, J. B., "A new case of experimenter unreliability," Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 38, pp. 215-225, June 1974. ↩︎