Light Beam Stands Guard on Prison to Quell Jailbreak

A LIGHT beam as a prison deadline—a beam that when interrupted by a felon bent upon making his get-away operates a machine gun pointed directly at the victim —is the latest addition to prison jailbreak safeguards. The apparatus, consisting of a beam transmitter which shoots a small invisible ray along the prison wall, and a beam receiver which picks up and records any breaks in the light, and at the same time fires a machine gun, is being installed in many prisons housing intractable criminals. And owing to its deadliness, its reliability, its silence and invisibility, the contrivance is doing much to cut down the prevalence of prison breaks.

The beam transmitter is an instrument, similar in most ways to a motion picture machine, and has mounted on it a machine gun of the Lewis type. The transmitter projects a small beam alongside the wall close to the top which is picked up at the other end of the wall by the beam receiver, otherwise known as the “Electric eye.” The heart of the receiver is the light sensitive lube, shown in the insert in the photo at the top of the page, which registers the projected beam. At any interruption of the beam impulses are set up in the tube which are amplified to an intensity that they actuate the firing mechanism of a machine gun mounted atop the transmitter.

The machine gun is trained along the path of the beam, and when a prisoner, attempting to climb the wall to escape, crosses the path of the beam, the electric eye operates instantaneously, firing the machine gun and thus cutting down the would-be jail-breaker.

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Tracks That Violence Leaves

Are Americans becoming addicted to violence? And if so, does the violence that can be seen daily on television, for instance, contribute to the addiction? Dr. Victor Bailey Cline, a University of Utah clinical psychologist, has started a series of experiments which seem to him to point to a definite affirmative conclusion. In a one-seat theater in his Salt Lake City laboratory, Dr. Cline, left, and an associate, Dr. John Atzet, show motion pictures of kinds and degrees of violence to subjects hung with sensors that produce a physiograph (left) of their responses to what is appearing on the screen. Stylus tracings record, from top, respiration, skin moisture and two channels of heartbeat rate. Dr. Cline says that children who have watched television the most show the least response to episodes of violence. From this he has drawn some preliminary conclusions: we are creating violence addicts; the acts of violence the average child sees every 14 minutes in the 15 to 20 hours of TV he watches every week have already desensitized many of them. Beyond that, Dr. Cline believes these acts may become models which children will later imitate in real life. “I am convinced,” he says in this connection, “that any U.S. soldiers who shot down Vietnamese women and children at Mylai had been desensitized.”

Taking the test, Chris Cline, 9, one of Dr. Cline’s eight children, showed interest but little emotional response while watching a skiing short, greater reaction to a chase scene from W. C. Fields’s The Bank Dick, most of all to a brutal prizefight scene in which Kirk Douglas is battered in The Champion. Dr. Cline, who has a hard time finding non-TV-watching children for the control group he needs for his ongoing study, says that children should be limited in their TV watching (his are restricted to one hour a week) and that “General” movie ratings should be withheld for too much violence, not just for pornography.

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These Dogs Are Really “Hot”

Radioactive beagles are pointing the way to better safety devices for workers in atomic energy plants.

A PACK of 300 sad-eyed, floppy eared beagles are serving as canine guinea pigs in an unusual University of Utah project designed to investigate the hazards of industrial radioactivity. Financed by the Atomic Energy Commission and directed by Dr. John Bowers, the studies will show what happens to bone and tissue when radioactive substances are injected into the dogs. Beagles were chosen for the experiments because they are anatomically close to human beings, have a sound genetic pattern, ideal disposition and are easy to handle in the research laboratory.

Radioisotopes used in the injections are radium, plutonium, mesothorium and radiothorium. These materials have a particular affinity for bone structure. Lodging in the bones, the radioactive particles continue to emit rays which affect the marrow—part of the “blood factory” of the body—and eventually are expected to produce tumors.

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showcase baby

LITTLE John Gray Jr., three months old when these pictures were taken, has seldom been outside of this glass house in which he lives. His showcase home is temperature and humidity controlled, dirt-free and has a built-in air filter. It is partially sound-proof-he can bellow without straining the family nerves. He doesn’t catch cold;

visitors can’t pass their germs through the glass and the house’s temperature never varies from 84 degrees. At the slightest deviation, a bell rings. There are no draughts and neither is there the fear of smothering; there are no bed covers. Papa John Gray Sr. built the ingenious baby house in the workshop of his home in Sea Cliff, Long Island, New York. Only time will tell whether the child will escape the usual ills.

Safety Belt Moors Baby in the Bathtub

It’s dangerous to leave a small baby unattended in the bathtub, and yet, when the telephone rings or the doorbell must be answered, it is sometimes inconvenient not to be able to do so. Carl H. Fischer, a Council Bluffs, Iowa, engineer and father of three youngsters, solved this problem with the ingenious device pictured at the left. The baby is strapped in a harness that is attached to a metal bar. When the bar is turned, rubber pads threaded to the ends press tightly against the sides of the tub and hold the safety bar firmly in place.

One-Man Bulldozer Builds Mountain Roads
Roads are being dug and gouged out of the sides of mountains by a one-man machine consisting of an adjustable and angle-blade bulldozer operated by a tractor. Such an outfit can build a road ten to twelve feet wide by digging off the upside of the mountain and filling in the lower side. The bulldozer can handle bowlders, undermine small trees and move seemingly impossible masses of material.

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Torture Devices of the Old Convict Ships

By C. Moran

Methods of torture used to punish convicts, in vogue in the last century, are graphically displayed aboard the old prison ship, “Success, ” used in the 1850’s to transport British convicts to Australia. The ship is now touring various American ports.

WHEN the jails of England overflowed with prisoners nearly 130 years ago, Great Britain sought to relieve the situation by chartering a fleet of convict ships to transport the “criminals” to Australia. For fifty years this practice was continued, until public revulsion against the inhumanities to which the prisoners on these ships were subjected caused its abandonment.

At that time there were more than 145 offenses for which the decreed penalty was death, but the hangmen were kept so busy that for the less heinous crimes the sentence of death was commuted to one of transportation for life, or where the crime was exceptionally trivial, in the light of the present day—as, for example, the theft of -a twopenny pie or a square of bleached linen—to a sentence of seven years, which was the minimum for a transported convict.

The convict ship Success, once more off the ways on her last American cruise, gives mute testimony of how not to solve the problem of more jails or less criminals. For forty years now, this ship, built in the year 1790, has sailed the seven seas as an exhibition in aid of prison reform. Aboard it may be seen the torture irons that broke men physically and mentally; the airless cells that rivalled the black hole of Calcutta; the branding irons which placed the ineradicable mark of the convict on prisoners.

Apart from its horrors of torture chambers, its “coffin” bath in which the wounds of lashed prisoners were swabbed with sea water, its flogging frames, its leg irons, and its punishment balls, the ship is a marvel of shipbuilding craft. Massively built of solid Burmese teak, the Success was first launched in 1790 as an armed East India merchantman with brass guns, and fitted handsomely for the reception aboard of princes, nabobs, and the wealthy traders of the Orient.

Her tonnage is 1100, and she is 135 feet long with 30 feet beam. Her solid sides are 2 feet 6 inches thick at the bilge, and her keelson is a solid teak baulk of great thickness, with sister keelsons little less massive. Her square cut stern and quarter galleries stamp her with the hallmark of antiquity, but her bluff bows show that she could never have distinguished herself for a high rate of speed.

The ship was chartered by the British Government in 1802 as one of a fleet of five convict ships to transport prisoners to Australia. Cells were constructed on the ‘tween and lower decks, and a large force of warders was employed to guard the prisoners. “Refractory” prisoners were immured in dungeons in the dark depths of the lower deck, their only exercise being restricted to one hour in every twenty-four, when they were marched from stem to stern upon the upper deck. The course they followed can still be perceived by tracing the grooved pathway worn into the original planks of the deck.

When a prisoner broke for freedom, and was captured, he was compelled to wear a heavy ball of iron, weighing 72 pounds, attached to his belt by a chain. The eyes of refractories on parade were sometimes lightly bandaged, and a “black gag” was used to silence their cries of pain, the gag consisting of a wooden bit in a leather bridle, the straps buckling around the convict’s head and neck. The blacksmith’s forge was under the fo’c’sle head, where the iron anklets and chains weighing from 7 pounds to 56 pounds were forged.

The corner cells on either side of the lower deck were the dreaded “black holes” in which prisoners who had been guilty of some breach of discipline or fractious conduct were punished by solitary confinement lasting from one to one hundred days, according to the gravity of the offense. These small and tapering torture-chambers measure only two feet eight inches across. The doors fit tight as valves and close with a swish, excluding all air except what can filter through a perforated iron plate over the bars above the door. A stout iron ring is fastened knee high in the shelving back of the cell and through this ring the right hand of the prisoner was passed, and then handcuffed to the left wrist. He was thus prevented from standing upright or lying down.

Constant applications of the “cat, ” imprisonment in the “black hole” and other punishments were the instruments relied upon for producing a reform. In each of the larger cells, on either side of the corridor, the floor is worn into hollows and grooves, close against the doorway by the constant jangling and friction of the prisoners’ leg-irons.

In 1851 the Success was permanently stationed as a receiving prison in Hobson’s Bay, Australia, but in 1857 the disclosures that had been made of the inhuman treatment accorded the prisoners created an outcry in Australia that resulted in 1868 in the abandonment of the hulk system. For some years later the Success was used as a women’s prison, then she became successively a reformatory ship and ammunition store, and later all the prison hulks were ordered to be sold on the express condition that they were to be broken up, and their associations lost to the recollection of the people of Australia.

By a clerical error, this condition did not appear upon the terms of sale of the Success, hence she remains the only British convict ship afloat on the seven seas. In 1885 she was scuttled and sunk in Sydney harbor where she lay under the waters of

Fort Jackson for five years. Then she was raised to be exhibited as an educational object lesson in prison reform. Since then the Success has been on exhibition in the Australasian colonies, has twice circumnavigated England and Ireland, has made one complete circuit of American ports, and now is on her last scheduled cruise in American waters.

The exhibits on the ship include a branding iron with which convicts were branded on the palms of the hand with a broad arrow. They were chained to a triangle while this operation was being performed. Dangerous prisoners were rendered helpless by the use of a body iron with handcuffs attached. There is an iron straight jacket, and a spiked collar, the chain of which was kept short to keep the convict in a stooping posture. The “silent guard” is a ringed stone of Australian blue granite to which twenty convicts were chained at a time. With wrists and ankles fastened to the flogging frame, the prisoner was at the complete mercy of the convict flagellator.

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THE COMPUTER DATA BANK: WILL IT KILL YOUR FREEDOM?

All around the U.S., computer centers may be talking too much about everybody and everything

BY JACK STAR

LOOK SENIOR EDITOR Did your sister have an illegitimate baby when she was 15? Did you fail math in junior high? Are you divorced or living in a common-law relationship? Do you pay your bills promptly? Are you willing to talk to salesmen? Have you been treated for a venereal disease? Are you visiting a psychiatrist? Were you ever arrested? Have you taken an airplane trip in the past 90 days; with whom: and in which hotels did you stay?

The answers to these intimate questions and hundreds more like them have always been available to a persistent investigator with enough time and money to sift the paper trail we leave behind in file cabinets around the country. But now, for the first time, in this age of computers, it is becoming possible for any snooper to get such information quickly and cheaply, without leaving his office chair.

Since the early 1950’s, tens of thousands of computers have gone into service in America. Some keep track of payrolls and others mail out bills or help an architect design a skyscraper. Increasingly, hundreds of computers serve as data banks: electronic file cabinets with phenomenal memories and instant recall. Such banks can be located a great distance from their users—with information often fed into them from thousands of miles away or retrieved from thousands of miles away. There is nothing to keep a network of computers from being tied together by telephone lines that will link all their memories.

“Everybody is commencing to use such data centers,” warns Rep. Cornelius E. Gallagher (Dem., N.J.), whose Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy has been worrying about this for the past two years.

“Computer data banks are at the same stage of development as the early railroads and the first telephone companies, which took a number of years to link themselves together in a nationwide network. Welfare departments, credit bureaus, hospitals, police departments and dozens of other institutions are putting their files into hundreds of relatively small data centers. No matter what you call them, they’re still data centers, and they can be linked.”

What bothers Representative Gallagher and Sen. Edward V. Long (Dem., Mo.), whose Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure has also been looking into the matter, is that the centers are emerging without any regulation or controls. “There are no safeguards,” complains Gallagher. “Nice people are putting these files together, and always for good purposes, but what we’re actually embarking on is the recording of every human transaction.”

(Our Social Security number has become the key in the registering of these billions of transactions: it accompanies every dividend payment or payroll check for recording in Internal Revenue’s giant computer banks, and it is used, possibly illegally, to record hundreds of other commercial and governmental activities. The armed forces are even phasing out serial numbers in favor of Social Security numbers; 400,000 sailors and marines now have only their Social Security numbers in military computer records.)

It disturbs Representative Gallagher and Senator Long that the information accumulating in computer files may be misused. “I don’t worry about today,” says Gallagher, “but how do we know who will be in power five or ten years from now? I’m concerned about fascism.”

Arthur R. Miller, professor of law at the University of Michigan, has said: “The computer, with its insatiable appetite for information, its ‘image’ of infallibility, its inability to forget anything that has been put into it, may become the heart of a surveillance system that will turn society into a transparent world in which our home, our finances, our associations, our mental and physical condition are bared to the most casual observer.”

The innocent American Airlines computer outside New York City typifies the problem. It is connected to 1,700 terminals with keyboards like an electric typewriter’s that can query the computer from every part of the continent. One hundred and twenty terminals are in the offices of travel agencies or large corporations. This computer system makes it possible for a traveler to get instant reservations and vastly improved service. It also, on occasion, invades his privacy.

American’s computer can be queried about any traveler’s movements in the past two or three months. In a furious burst of speed, the electric typewriter spews out a dossier: name, flights traveled, seat number, time of day, telephone contact, hotel reservation, car reservation, fellow travelers, etc.

Donald Moore, a computer expert for the airline, says that 10 to 15 investigators a day (Federal, state, local and others) are permitted to delve into the computer for such information. Some of them want (and get) a print-out of the entire passenger list of a certain flight to see who might be traveling with a particular person.

Although special coded numbers have to be fed into the computer to extract this data, Moore admits that an unscrupulous employee at any one of hundreds of distant points could come up with juicy material for a private detective or a divorce lawyer.

The next generation of computers, emerging in the early 1970’s, will make it easier and cheaper to put in data, and storage capacity will be far greater. Alan Westin, a Columbia University professor who has made a specialty of privacy problems, reports that a laser memory process will permit the storage of a 5,000-word dossier for each of 200 million Americans on a single, 4,800-foot reel of one-inch plastic computer tape. It would take no longer than four minutes to find an individual file, and a print-out would follow in moments.

This is something the experts should remember when they set up the new city and county data banks. Santa Clara County, Calif., for example, is compiling a computerized record of its million residents. The computer, in San Jose, will answer an inquiry from a remote terminal with the following information: name, age, address, birth record, drivers license data, voting and jury status, and property holdings. It will also call attention to any paper records on a person that might be on file at the county hospital, welfare office or police station.

“You’re damn right privacy is a concern of ours,” says Howard Campen, county executive. “If you want to see somebody’s police, welfare or hospital record, you have to go down to the police, welfare or county hospital and convince them you have a legal right to see those records.”

Such a disclaimer is not enough for men setting up other data banks. They are worried that the very knowledge a treasure trove of data exists will be enough to tempt the curious. “What we need is a Federal law to protect our files,” acknowledges Richard Simmons, Jr., director of the Mayor’s Committee for Human Resources Development, a Detroit agency that monitors antipoverty programs. Simmons’s agency has computerized the most intimate problems of 46,000 poor people in Detroit. The intent, he says, is not to keep a dossier on them but to make sure they are being properly served by the poverty programs. But, alas, what goes into the computer with an identifying name or number can be extracted from the computer by an investigator interested in a particular person. So far as he knows, says Simmons, this has not happened, but he agrees that the most stringent laws cannot always keep it from happening. (Witness the intimate disclosures from confidential records about Lee Harvey Oswald or the suspected killer of Martin Luther King.)

Advertised good intentions aren’t good enough when it comes to safeguarding files. Another social agency, in another city, virtuously proclaims it never knows whose IBM card is being processed for such sensitive items as arrests, school dropouts, evictions, etc. The enthusiastic guardian of this system assured me that punch cards bearing the name of a subject contain only an identifying number. These cards are always kept locked up, he said, when other cards with data on the individual, are being processed. Thus, it is impossible to link a man’s name to the data about him in the files. When I asked to be shown, the guardian twirled the dial of his safe with a flourish and extracted some keys. Then he went into the data-processing room, where he flushed pink as we saw both sets of files already out of their cabinets and being processed at the same time. “How the hell did this happen?” asked my embarrassed guide.

Urban data banks will greatly improve city life, but they will also pose privacy problems. Example: New Haven, Conn., which is working with IBM researchers to set up what may become a model for computerized cities. When a fire alarm rings in New Haven, a computer printer at the firehouse will type out an entire information file about the burning building even while the firemen are sliding down the pole: What sort of a store is on the first floor? Any paint or varnish stored there? Sprinkler system? Skylights? Apartments upstairs? Any invalids or children? Then the computer automatically notifies the electric company to shut off power and the police to block the street.

New Haven’s computer will record a great deal more data than the one in San Jose—detailed welfare files, current school grades of children, hospital-clinic records of welfare patients, etc. Because of this, City Controller Kennedy Mitchell, who is helping to set up the system, wants to make it a felony for anyone to misuse the computer. To minimize abuses, he and the IBM planners are thinking of furnishing city employees with small metallic identity cards, changed every month, that would operate the computer. They would be imprinted with magnetic codings permitting a social worker to turn on her terminal keyboard and get from the computer any one of the scores of files on her own welfare clients, but not those belonging to another worker. Nor would she be able to check computerized police, school or hospital records except by calling up those agencies.

The New Haven planners are taking advantage of the accessibility of remote computers to Touch-Tone telephones. A policeman in his squad car could telephone the computer and tap out the license number of an apparently abandoned car on his telephone keyboard, to determine if it had been stolen. A doctor awakened at night to make an emergency call at the home of a welfare patient he had never visited before could telephone the computer, tap out the patient’s identity number and get a voice-recorded abstract of the patient’s medical history.

All these uses may be salutary, but they also threaten privacy. At the RAND Corporation, a research organization that does much top-secret work for the armed forces, several scientists are greatly concerned about these emerging problems. Computer expert Paul Baran says: “All remote terminals are connected by phone lines, and these can be tapped, If you have a friend at the police, he’ll get you a criminal record. As for categories of sensitivity and compartmentalization of data, when you have a large number of people having access to a system and different files, you soon get people trading information.”

It is Baran’s belief that “records are a valuable commodity—make the reward great enough, and they’ll be sold.” This is also the view of Dr. Kerr . White, professor of medical care at Johns Hopkins University, who says: “I have been told that, in some large cities, access to any medical record can be obtained, if you pay enough.”

Dr. White has begun a major study of the computerized medical histories of 955,344 residents of Saskatchewan, where most transactions under the provincial medical-care plans are computer-recorded. Dr. White says he doesn’t know the names of the patients or their doctors—all he gets is a code designation. In Regina, the capital, the identities are known, and the computer periodically sifts through the rec ords to see which doctors are “deviating from acceptable standards.” Dr. Robert G. Murray, chairman of the Medical Care Insurance Commission, says: “But as far as the patients go, nobody—and I mean nobody —gets their records. Not without an order from the attorney general.” Yet he acknowledges that there is a temptation for the inquisitive to probe: “We have had to fight off our Internal Revenue.”

Several U.S. hospitals are already computerizing their operations, and it will be a matter of only two or three years before regional medical data banks open for business. The benefits will be great. Suppose a Chicago traveling salesman suffered a heart attack in New York. All of his previous medical records, including electrocardiograms, could be transmitted instantly from a data bank in Chicago. Such information might well save his life. But that information, if extracted from the computer by an unscrupulous person, might also destroy him.

The same potential for evil lurks in the police computers being acquired by many cities, even though they promise to make life harder for criminals. By the end of the year, all 50 states and Canada will be connected to the FBI computers in Washington, which currently store data on 20,367 wanted persons; 152,792 stolen, missing and recovered guns; 168,006 stolen vehicles; 88,022 stolen articles bearing identifying numbers; and 45,306 license plates.

A Texas state trooper driving along a lonely road many miles from his police station can now radio the number of a car with suspicious-looking occupants to his headquarters in Austin, where an operator can in turn query the FBI computers. Instantly, an unbelievable batch of information pours back out of the printer: The license belongs to a car stolen in California; description of car; car was used in a robbery; descriptions or names of the suspected bandits, and sometimes even their fingerprint classifications. The computer provides other help too. In the past, when a policeman found a television set or other identifiable merchandise in the trunk of an out-of-state car, it was almost impossible for him to determine if it had been stolen. Now, he can learn in seconds if it was stolen anywhere in North America.

FBI officials deny there is any intent to feed dossiers into their computers, but others are apprehensive. Paul Baran of RAND says: “What discourages the FBI from storing dossiers is the high cost. But soon, it will be much easier and cheaper to store such information” Professor Westin of Columbia has testified before a Senate committee: “…The FBI National Crime Information Center has never been the subject, to my knowledge, of any congressional review …no official of the FBI has ever been brought before a congressional committee… to explain where the FBI plans to go with its computerization___”

A number of states have computers communicating with the FBI’s, but so far, the only one that stores dossiers is New York’s. The New York State Identification and Intelligence System has already put into its computer 540,000 of its six million fingerprint records. It also stores information on associates of crime-syndicate figures.

The problems of keeping such information confidential are tremendous (police files are notorious for their leakage to credit and insurance investigators) . Any of New York State’s 3,600 criminal-justice agencies—including 611 police departments, justice of the peace courts and district attorneys—has access to the files, and their invasion is inevitable.

One fingerprint record I saw being checked in Albany illustrated the problem: A man had been arrested in New York on a charge of second-degree assault. His fingerprints arrived on a facsimile machine and were checked in the files. The man’s “record” went back, again via facsimile, to the New York police. Perhaps it is nobody’s business that the man had only been fingerprinted before because he happened to apply for a job in a state hospital and, at another time, visited his brother in a state prison. There would also have been a “record” if he had ever been an inmate of a state mental hospital, was inducted into the armed services from New York, had applied for a banking license, liquor license or pistol permit, or had worked as a cabaret entertainer or taxi driver. All these details might prove of great interest to someone not in law enforcement, or a policeman without the need to know.

You don’t have to be a policeman to use the contents of private intelligence banks, which operate without any controls at all. A New Jersey firm has assembled computerized dossiers on thousands of doctors for the use of pharmaceutical salesmen who call at their offices. Besides listing public information on the doctor—his education and type of practice—the computer supplies “private information” gleaned from the drug companies: the doctor’s prescribing habits, his willingness to see drug salesmen and whether or not he likes to get samples.

The rapid computerization of credit-company files is leading to a national network, with ready information on nearly every family. The 4,200 credit bureaus and collection agencies that belong to Associated Credit Bureaus of America, Inc., are starting to draw on the computers of their associates in Dallas, Houston, Chicago and other cities. By 1970, there will be at least ten interconnected computer credit centers in major metropolitan areas. Large department stores will have direct connections to the computers.

Besides financial information, memory banks are able to paint a sociological picture of divorces, lawsuits and other “derogatory” so-called “public information.” Sometimes, the information can be misleading. It is easy for the credit bureaus to record filed lawsuits, but expensive for them to note their disposition. The Credit Bureau of Greater New York, which is as yet uncomputerized, has files on 8.5 million people and records 780,000 items a year affecting their reputations. But 500,000 of these items are lawsuits, whose disposition never gets recorded.

The Associated Credit Bureaus’ customers include not just business firms but also the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the Veterans Administration and other Government agencies. Local police draw on the files in some cases without even paying for the privilege. Michigan’s Prof. Arthur R. Miller says credit bureaus are “a ready source of detailed information about an individual’s finances and many aspects of his private life, making accuracy of the records crucial; an honest dispute between a consumer and a retailer over a bill may produce an unexplicated and practically unexpungible ‘no pay’ evaluation in the computer network that can be flashed to an inquirer anywhere in the country.”

Should personal information we confide for a single purpose—say to buy a television set on time payments or to get a bank loan—be used for another purpose? Some of Associated Credit Bureaus’ members welcome the computer as a means of sifting their files to find persons in certain income brackets and with consumer needs, in order to sell the names to various businesses as prospective customers. Government agencies, and others, use the files to see what sort of persons we are. Credit Data Corp., which has computerized records of nearly 24 million Americans, is currently battling Internal Revenue’s attempts to examine its files. “What Internal Revenue has demanded,” says Dr. H. C. Jordan, company president, “does pose a threat to the individual’s privacy.”

While computers rarely make mistakes, the people programming them do. John W. Joanis, president of Sentry Insurance, says that his company’s computers are wrong two to three percent of the time. He recalls: “One day, we canceled 8,000 homeowner and auto policies. Our policyholders were outraged. It was a programming error.”

Joanis’s advice to persons who use computers: “The computer should be a triggering device rather than a decision maker. It shouldn’t be allowed to cancel insurance policies, for instance. When the computer comes up with derogatory information, it should be up to a human to make the decisions.”

In the past two years, there has been much discussion about setting up a national data center in Washington. The center would incorporate computer records of 21 Federal agencies, including the Census Bureau and Internal Revenue. Critics denounced the plan on the grounds that, in effect, dossiers would be kept on every American. Because of congressional criticism, the plan is being revamped so that national statistics can be used to better advantage, but without invading privacy.

However, a caution about the data center comes from Burton E. Squires, Jr., assistant professor of computer sciences at Pennsylvania State University: “… If the Internal Revenue Service is allowed access to the census data, and if the Federal Bureau of Investigation is allowed access to social security data, and so forth, or if these data are contained on magnetic tape so that they can be easily transmitted from one Government computer installation to another…. Then such a data center could come into existence in effect even if not in name….”

How do we keep the computer from divulging information to persons not entitled to it? A congressional committee asked this of Dr. Emanuel R. Piore, vice president and chief scientist of IBM. His answer is simple: “One day… a user will probably be able to identify himself to a computer by letting the machine verify his voice or his thumbprint or his signature. But… in the end, preservation of privacy… will still depend upon people: operators, service personnel, supervising officers and all those who decide what information to put into a computer and how to use it.”

There is a prophetic quality in Dr. Piore’s warning: “Machines have no morals, no ethics; men have ethics and morals. A machine is an idiot device, and it does what people tell it to do.”

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• THE NATIONAL DATA CENTER AND PERSONAL PRIVACY (Jun, 1968)

Music Sheet Has Radium Notes for Television Artists

TELEVISION performers, working in almost complete darkness, except for the flying spot, have found difficulty in reading music when they were broadcasting a program. To remedy this difficulty and enable the performers to see better the music manuscripts from which they are singing, Elliott Jaffee, a New York recording artist, has devised a luminous manuscript on which the characters are painted on black paper with radium paint. This invention eliminates one of the greatest difficulties the performers have encountered. Now, however, the music is as plain in the darkness as the figures on a radium watch.

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Scientology: A growing cult reaches dangerously into the mind

The lights in the hall go dim, leaving the bronzed bust of the Founder (spotlighted) at center stage. From the loudspeakers comes L. Ron Hubbard’s voice, deep and professorial. It is a tape called “Some Aspects of Help, Part I,” a basic lecture in Scientology that Hubbard recorded nearly 10 years ago.

No one in the intensely respectful Los Angeles audience of 500—some of whom paid as much as $16 to get in—thought it odd to be sitting there listening to the disembodied voice. Among believers, Scientology and its Founder are beyond frivolous question: Scientology is the Truth, it is the path to “a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war . . .” and “for the first time in all ages there is something that . . . delivers the answers to the eternal questions and delivers immortality as well.”

So much of a credo might be regarded as harmless— practically indistinguishable from any number of minority schemes for the improvement of Man. But Scientology is scary—because of its size and growth, and because of the potentially disastrous techniques it so casually makes use of. To attain the Truth, a surrenders himself to “auditing,” a crude form of psychoanalysis. In the best medical circumstances this is a delicate procedure, but in Scientology it is undertaken by an “auditor” who is simply another Scientologist in training, who uses an “E-meter,” which resembles a lie detector. A government report, made to the parliament of the state of Victoria in Australia three years ago, called Scientology “the world’s largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.” As author Alan Levy found out by personal experience (pages 100B-114), the auditing experience can be shattering.

How many souls have become hooked on Scientology is impossible to say precisely. Worldwide membership —England, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S.—is probably between two and three million. In the U.S. (offices in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and seven other cities), the figure may now be more than several hundred thousand. What is astonishing— and frightening—is the rate of growth in the U.S.: membership has probably tripled or quadrupled in the past three years.

Recruits to Scientology are most often young, intelligent and idealistic. They become fanatics on the subject, impervious to argument, quick to cut themselves off from doubters. Many young people have been instructed by their Scientology organizations (”orgs,” they are called) to “disconnect” from their families. “Disconnect” means exactly that: sever all relations. Such estrangements can be deep and lasting, leaving heartsick parents no longer able to speak rationally with their children.

Scientology is expensive. To reach the first meaningful stage costs the beginner $650 in tuition. To become an Operating Thetan, Class VIII – the highest present classification—can raise the all-in cost (books, tuition, equipment, board and lodging at Scientology centers during advanced training) to as much as $15,000. The high costs have the effect of turning many young Scientologists into permanent parts of the apparatus. To finance their own advanced studies they take low-paying jobs within the org—and in the end find themselves alienated from life outside of Scientology.

Scientology is nominally a religion, and the figure of Hubbard has taken on religious implications. The Nebraska-born author of the 1950 best-seller Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health is now adored and remote. The literature hints at persecution. In 1963 agents of the Food and Drug Administration raided Scientology’s Washington headquarters and seized a number of E-meters. Scientologists still speak of the raid on the “church.” Scientology has been banned from the state of Victoria in Australia. In England, where Hubbard established the world headquarters of Scientology at Saint Hill, the government has looked with increasing disfavor on Scientology. Asserting that Scientology is “socially harmful,” the government recently barred from entry a number of would-be participants in a world Scientology congress. Hubbard himself departed from England in the summer of 1966 and now lives on a 320-foot converted passenger ferry called the Royal Scot Man, cruising mostly between ports in the Mediterranean. There, although he claims to have given up his official ties with Saint Hill, he continues to train and send out super-Scientologists to all parts of the world.

An exploring writer becomes personally involved

‘A TRUE-LIFE NIGHTMARE’ by ALAN LEVY

CLEAR is the name of a button on an adding machine. When you push it, all hidden answers clear and the machine can be used for a proper computation.

“So long as the button is not pressed, the machine adds all old answers to all new efforts to compute and wrong answers result.”

This message, blown up in a wall-mounted advertising display case at a busy mid-Manhattan subway exit, was a pitch for Scientology—a curious cult about which my store of information was very limited: People I knew seemed to know people who were taking it up. Scientology had overtones of psychiatry. It promised to make a better person of you. And, in some way, it involved a device that worked like a lie detector. That was all I knew… I read on—and, as I did, the language of the ad seemed to take an odd and threatening spin: “People who have old fixed answers reacting when they try to think get wrong answers to their current problems. Such old answers are not cleared. Rollo is still solving the tantrums of his mother who has been dead for years. Mary-belle is still running away from the tramp who attacked her when she was 10 years old. So Rollo stays home as the solution to the women of the world. And Mary-belle runs madly about as a solution to all the uncouth men she sees. Their friends think they’re a bit odd. Their doctors prescribe pills. And we clear the answers which won’t let them live.”

I began to wonder how, and thus, without the faintest idea of what I was getting into, I embarked upon an adventure in mind-bending that took me from a ballroom in Manhattan to a 100-year-old brownstone off Fitzroy Square in London to a 30-room Georgian manor house in Sussex that could have passed for SMERSH headquarters. The last was, actually, the home of a Nebraska-born prophet named L.” Ron Hubbard, who in the 1950s invented a best-selling, but soon discredited, “science” of mental health called Dianetics and who then resurfaced with the far more sinister “religion” he calls Scientology.

I have Hubbard to thank for a true-life nightmare that gnawed at my family relationships and saddled me with a burden of guilt I’ve not yet been able to shed. Scientology does indeed use a machine similar to a lie detector, and the most menacing moments on my odyssey toward CLEAR had come when—inextricably plugged into the electroencephaloneuromentimograph, or “Hubbard Mark V E-meter” for short—I explored some nooks and crannies of my own psyche that I wish to God had never been unearthed.

I did not confront the electronic heart of Scientology—the E-meter —until I had invested three evenings listening to introductory lectures. The Church of Scientology of New York occupied the Grand Ballroom of the Martinique, a tackily renovated hotel near the new Madison Square Garden. Ablaze with light and encircled by mirrors, this ballroom-church had an aura of crystal clarity. So did the giant studio portraits of Scientology’s founder—a stern but fatherly type with steely eyes and an out-sized chronometer on his wrist— that lined the walls and were for sale at $5.50 apiece. The dance floor had been cut up into offices, cubicles, displays, bulletin boards, bookstore, a stand selling picture postcards of Saint Hill Manor in Sussex, and reception desks— all staffed round-the-clock by a couple of dozen “Pre-CLEARs” working shifts to pay their own fees for being “audited,” as Scientology processing is called.

Every one of these people—male and female, mostly young, and a few middle-aged—had a peculiar smile that was sublimely sincere, but seemed to exist independently of the face it was affixed to. They didn’t walk amidst the hotel’s potted palms, they floated. Across their eyes hung a beatific film that I wanted to snap my fingers at. Only now and then, when they spoke about Scientology, could I perceive a flashing silver glint behind the film—an evangelical commitment, perhaps. Otherwise, the personal data I offered—that I lived in Greenwich Village; that I had a wife and two kids; that I worked in “publicity” (a half-truth which would offend only a journalism professor)—all evoked ethereal acknowledgements of “Perfect!” or “Beautiful!”

This same enviable inner serenity bloomed unblushingly from one of my introductory lecturers, a soft-spoken and radiantly pretty young woman in her late 20s named Mishka O’Connor. Her style was personal and conversational: “I’m married to a stained-glass artist who just went CLEAR at Saint Hill. He’s been home a month now and he’s making four times as much money as he used to— and not working as hard.” Mishka had gone to Saint Hill with her husband, “But I had to come home before I could finish my processing. My husband’s trying to build up his business so I can go back for CLEAR. Then he’ll sell the business so we can both go into Scientology professionally. And I’m sure we will, because it’s amazing how resourceful you become. . . . My husband knows exactly who and what he is. He can be emotionally stable or volatile as he so chooses!” Mishka took a deep breath and concluded fervently: “He’s beautiful!”

The lectures—which immersed me in Scientology’s basic tenets and jargon, while spelling out the eight distinct levels one must pass on the route to CLEAR— were free. The sample “audit” with an E-meter cost me $5. It lasted two hours and gave me much more than I had bargained for.

The E-meter was an unimposingly compact box resting on a plain table in the middle of a bare, windowless cubicle behind the ballroom. The machine, apparently battery-powered, was equipped with a gauge and a moving needle, several control knobs and wires leading to two unadorned tins.

“Why, they look like beer cans!” I exclaimed to my “auditor,” a sallow middle-aged man with features as austere as his auditing cell.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, suddenly twinkling, “they were V-8 juice cans.”

“And it works like a lie detector?” I said dubiously.

“Well, we call it a truth detector.”

I found his answers modestly disarming. Now he had me remove my watch and wedding ring to “prevent interference by outside metals.” When I gripped the cans and sat facing him, he turned the box so that only he could see the needle.

“I’m going to ask you each question twice,” he said. “Once just to ascertain that you understand it. . . . Then, when we’re both sure you do, I’ll ask it again. This time, you can answer or you don’t have to. The E-meter will show how you react.”

Did I have a criminal record? Was I addicted to drugs? Had I, as instructed, abstained from drugs and drink for the past 24 hours? “Hmmm. The needle shows a ‘read’ on that.”

Well was about to take an aspirin last night—but then I remembered.”

“Good. Let me ask the question again. . . . Now you’re clean.”

Did I have a good night’s sleep? How did I evaluate my relationship with my wife?

What would I like from Scientology?

I hadn’t expected such a question. “To work harder, work better, do better work, do different work—to write plays—to be more relaxed, and a better husband and father.”

“Good. Now what would Scientology have to do to convince you it worked?”

To my own surprise, I snapped back: “I’d have to write a successful play within a year.”

“Thank you,” he said. “But I still get some ‘charge’ on that. Is there something more you want to say about this question?”

“Yes’ I confessed. “I’m starting to feel terribly vulnerable. It’s as if I’ve just been asked what price I’d take for selling my soul to the devil.” My auditor nodded sagely and unsmilingly but said nothing, so I rambled on: “Besides, my answer was unfair to Scientology. I mean, none of you is David Merrick.”

“O.K. . . . Now it shows you’re clean.”

A “read” on “Do you have too much of anything?” finally disappeared after I admitted to “happiness I may be tampering with here.”

And then: “Are you connected with a suppressive person?”

My auditor winced. “The needle almost went off the machine,” he announced. Then he produced a battered copy of the 36-page Scientology Abridged Dictionary, put it in front of me and asked: “Do you know what ’suppressive’ means?”

As I had guessed, a suppressive person was someone out to destroy or damage Scientology. Because I knew that Scientology had a reputation for secretiveness, I had not mentioned that I planned to write an article about my experiences. While my auditor reread the definition to me, the names of my agent and the editor with whom I had discussed the possibility of the story irresistibly paraded up and down in my head. Eventually my auditor said: “Suppose you pick up the cans and tell me who you’ve been thinking of.”

Repressing the two names in a truth-detector interrogation was an awesome struggle. Simultaneously I had an equally strong impulse to shout my own name— denouncing myself as a suppressive infiltrator. With schizoid detachment, I wondered which of the three names would cross my lips first.

To my absolute astonishment, the name I spoke was my wife’s. Well, yes, we had bickered over the time I was spending on Scientology. Improvising desperately, I explained that my wife wasn’t really suppressive so much as concerned. When I was all talked out, my auditor put the “suppressive person” question to me again. This lime the E-meter said I was “clean.”

Nevertheless, he stood up.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “Whenever we’ve had any kind of ‘read’ on questions like this, we have to call in the Examiner-in-Charge.” In less than a minute a thick-set girl in black sweater and skirt, with thick dark hair and a trace of mustache, stamped into the cubicle. She tested me on the E-meter with the same question.

“Why do I get a little ‘read’ on it still?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I replied, “because I’m shook up by having my auditor yanked away from me like this.”

“We can’t be too careful,” she explained without warmth.

The next time around, I was “clean” with her, too, but I still didn’t get my auditor back. I was sent to Reception to stew for 15 minutes and then go before the Ethics Officer, who turned out to be an effete young man decked out in a blue turtleneck sweater and Ben Franklin glasses. His attack was different but also frightening. He had a printed checklist of 20 “potentially suppressive acts” that my wife might have committed: Was she opening or withholding my mail? Garbling phone messages? Listening in on phone calls? Denigrating my ambitions?

With tin cans in hand, I was able to acquit or excuse her on all counts. The Ethics Officer pronounced my case “not serious— just a minor break in what we call the Affinity-Reality-Communication Triangle.”

The “A-R-C Triangle” is an important bit of Scientological jargon. It means, approximately, that to Communicate successfully with someone you must feel some Affinity for him and you both must be talking about the same thing— Reality. I knew exactly where the break had come but the Ethics Officer, happily, didn’t. With one last “suppressive person” check on the E-meter, he returned me to auditing.

The rest of the session was anticlimactic. Even probing questions didn’t bother me. While waiting for the Ethics Officer, I had worked out a way to beat the E-meter when I needed to.

The needle seemed to record emotional stress and, since I am good with memory tricks and concentration games, I drilled my mind to focus on the Esther Williams-Kathryn Grayson-Jose Iturbi-Jimmy Durante-Lauritz Melchior musical films of my boyhood as soon as a tough question hit in. I was able to drift dreamily past the roughest shoals on a cloud of M-C-M escapism—giving away only as much as I wanted to give.

“That’s it,” said my auditor. “How do you feel?”

“Impressed,” I said, quite honestly.

“Good. Now don’t be alarmed, but I’m going to call in the Examiner one last time. She has to make sure you’re ready to go back to the outside world.”

The frightening girl in black asked just one question: “What gains do you feel you’ve made from this session?”

“I know a bit more about myself,” I said, which was true but a considerable understatement.

The question put to me by the Registrar when the Examiner had gone was blunt enough: Did I plan to go on and make a real start toward CLEAR? By this time I had the distinct impression that pressing deeper into Scientology would be less than a joy-ride. Nevertheless, I said that I thought I would, and the Registrar reminded me that auditing “through Grade IV” was available right at New York headquarters. It would cost $650.

I told him that my plans were to be in London for the summer. “Perfect!” he said without missing a beat. “We can refer you to the London Org and take a commission. Their fees won’t be much different from ours and you’ll only be an hour away from Saint Hill, which is like the center of the universe. You can go right on out there after your Grade IV release.”

In the weeks before leaving for England, I learned a few things about Lafayette Ronald Hubbard and where Scientology had come from. Elron (as his flock speaks of him) was born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska, the son of a U.S. Navy commander, and, at 14, while on a tour of the Far East with his father, “studied . . . with lama priests.” This turned out to be a distinct high point in Elron’s education. He never graduated from college—although he has on occasion claimed a degree. During the ’30s, he traveled in Central America and made a career for himself as a prolific (”15 million published words”) and popular writer of science fiction (Final Blackout), westerns (Buckskin Brigades), and screenplays for a 15- episode serial. In World War II, he served as a U.S. Navy officer. Elron claims today that he and his experiences formed the basis for the postwar novel, play and movie Mister Roberts.

Meanwhile, from his boyhood onward, Hubbard had been formulating a set of at least 200 “self-evident truths. … I saw miracles in India and China done by holy men, but long association with them convinced me that they did not know entirely how they did it. I set out to find out from nuclear philosophy.”

This distillation of applied wisdom first emerged in 1950 as a 435-page book called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Introduced first in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, Dianetics was hailed by Hubbard himself as “a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.” Sloppily but colorfully written, and propelled mainly by word of mouth, Dianetics sold 100,000 copies in the first three months and more than 1.5 million to date. It went right to the top of the bestseller charts. With 500,000 believers at its zenith, Dianetics became —for a time—a household word. It was, in effect, a jiffy mind-straightening scheme for the do-it-yourselfer to practice in his own parlor.

“The basic discovery of Dianetics,” one of my introductory lecturers explained, “was the Engram, a word Hubbard borrowed from biology, where an Engram is the permanent impression left on protoplasm as the result of a stimulus. But to the Scientologist an Engram is a picture image that is imprinted on a cell—like a microgroove on a record—by an experience involving partial unconsciousness and some pain. It’s an area Freud explored but dropped when he went on to other things. Fortunately for us, Elron Hubbard picked it up and went on with it.”

Engrams beset man right from the beginning. “Birth is a pretty aberrative affair,” Elron wrote in Dianetics. By taking one client back to birth through drug hypnosis, he was able to diagnose that “his asthma had been caused by the doctor’s enthusiasm in yanking him off the table just when he was fighting for his first breath.” Engrams can be incurred prenatally: “Mama sneezes, baby gets knocked unconscious. . . . Papa becomes passionate and baby has the sensation of being put in a running washing machine. Mama gets hysterical, baby gets an Engram. Papa hits Mama, baby gets an Engram. . . .” And, finally, Hubbard’s “Non-Germ Theory of Disease” holds that many of man’s ills are Engramic, including arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, sinusitis, migraine headaches, and even tuberculosis and cancer, as well as the common cold. The human being, the lecturer had explained, actually has two minds: the Analytical, which is like a perfect computer, and the Reactive, which takes care of situations like dodging an approaching taxi. As a result of all stimuli it receives, the Reactive mind is one mass of Engrams, feeding the otherwise perfect Analytical mind incorrect data. The idea is to erase—to CLEAR— these Engrams. In Dianetics, the process took too long. So, in the lecturer’s words, “Elron Hubbard asked himself: Why don’t we use a lie detector to find out what really happens behind all these hangups and inhibitions? He experimented with the idea, refined it—and so today we have the E-meter.”

The evolution from Dianetics to Scientology coincided with some messy upheavals in Hubbard’s personal life. Prominent psychiatrists, including the late Dr. William Menninger, denounced Dianetic Auditing as potentially dangerous. The Manhattan endocrinologist who wrote the laudatory foreword to Dianetics broke with Hubbard, charging that Hubbard was heading toward “absolutism and authoritarianism” while some of his patients were going mad. And Hubbard—after a messy court case that involved the abduction of his own child—shed his second wife (who during divorce procedures termed him “hopelessly insane”) in 1951 and later married Mary Sue Whipp of the Wichita Dianetics Foundation. He took Mary Sue first to Phoenix and then to England, where she bore him the first of four children. They settled in baronial splendor at Saint Hill, the 57-acre estate Elron acquired from the Maharajah of Jaipur.

Hubbard left behind him, in the U.S., Scientology centers in 10 cities. By designating his theory as a religion—a move he himself has termed “an historic breakthrough into the realm of the Human Spirit”—Hubbard freed Scientology from a number of legal strictures. Regulations covering what may be said or done in the name of religion are considerably looser than those covering science or medicine.

“It took Elron Hubbard 15 years to find the first person who could go CLEAR,” the lecturer had said. “In February 1966 at Saint Hill, the first CLEAR was born: a South African medical student named John McMaster. Then all the technology fell into place, and the processing has now been worked out. They’re turning out 15 or 20 CLEARs a week at Saint Hill.

“Now we can help a person free himself from his Engrams and the other things that are keeping him from being an optimum human being. It takes maybe 60 hours of auditing plus a course in Dianetic training. The road to CLEAR is very fast now.”

In the jet 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic, I wrote in my notebook: “Hubbard and disciples clearly believe in what he says.” Then I added: “P.S.—so do all dedicated salesmen.”

The Hubbard Scientology Organization (Org) in London occupied a venerable four-story building on Fitzroy Street, just around the corner from Britain’s tallest skyscraper, the new 40-story Post Office Tower. After checking in and paying my fees (in advance, naturally), I met my auditor. David Dunlop was a taciturn Scotsman in his late 20s who, the Registrar had confided to me, “works very well with Americans.” He wore the same neat gray suit every day throughout my processing. The schedule he proposed to get me up to Grade IV—a kind of intermediate plateau beyond which lay three further levels before CLEAR—was definitely businesslike: we would start at 9 every weekday morning, take an hour out for lunch and go on until 5 p.m.

“Now we can get cracking,” David said when I showed him my bursar’s receipt. “Cracking” was an apt word; in a matter of minutes, we were probing a fragile item of my mental luggage that I thought I’d left behind.

We began with what David called “Straight-Wire Release”— an exercise designed to strengthen my memory and “mend past breaks in the Affinity-Reality-Communication Triangle.” This exercise and the one after it, I was surprised to learn, both rated below the Zero Grade. Then, if I could handle Zero—which David said would bring my reactive mind up to snuff—we could try for Grade I.

I gripped the cans and David monitored his E-meter while he posed the same three problems over and over.

“Recall a communication,” said David.

“Just before I boarded my plane, I phoned my wife from the airport,” I responded, going on to tell him the whole trivial farewell in detail.

“Good. Now recall something real.”

I described the ticky-tacky interior of my transatlantic jet.

“Okay. Recall an emotion.”

My father had died four months earlier. The button pushed by the word “emotion” triggered a description of my surprisingly passive reaction to his death.

“Fine. Now recall a communication.”

I described the letter that had reached me, eight months before, with the fatal diagnosis.

“Okay. Recall something real.”

“Cancer.”

“Now recall an emotion,” said David. He was making notes on a pad mounted to a clipboard.

“The letter came just as we were pulling out of a trailer camp in Kentucky. We’d been on vacation. I remember thinking that, if we’d only left a few minutes earlier, I wouldn’t have gotten the letter and he wouldn’t have cancer. Which is silly, of course.”

“Good. Now recall a communication.”

“A book called The American Way of Death.”

“Okay. Recall something real.”

“My awareness, even before the diagnosis, that my father’s end was near. I’d bought the book three years earlier, but hadn’t read it. And yet I took it along and read it on that particular vacation. I must have been preparing. . .”

Now I was in deep. I had to work at propelling my train of thought toward “safer” problems. Over several dozen go-rounds, I went from my relations with my father in his lifetime … to the sterility of living one’s life to achieve objectives set by others … to three drafts of my first adult venture into playwriting.

Recall a communication: “A trusted adviser’s opinion that it needs at least two more drafts before I can show it to David Merrick. But there’s another play I want to start writing. Yet, if I don’t stick to what I’m doing, one thing at a time, I’ll just be creating a trunkful of uncompleted plays.”

Recall something real: “Well the next play has been coming so clear in my mind for the past three months that it’s much more real than the play I’ve written three times.” At this point, I was so wrought-up that David had to remind me to keep both hands on the tin cans.

Recall an emotion: “Anticipation!” I was shouting and I could feel a glow begin to envelope me. “Do you know, David, that anticipating something can be much more exciting and rewarding than the smooth, logical process of everything going as it should go?”

David’s answer was: “Very good. You can put down the cans now.” He told me, as I already suspected, that I had just achieved Straight-Wire Release.

“You mean,” I said knowledgeably, “my needle is still.”

“Oh, no. When the needle is still, it just means you’re clean on a particular question that I’m asking. But when the needle is floating freely and easily, instead of jumping, it means that you’ve achieved release on the whole subject.”

On my next sub-Zero level, “Secondary Release,” the repetitive questions were Recall a loss and Recall a misemotion. Almost instantly, I was enmeshed once again in the loss of my father and the alarming lack of grief I seemed to feel. I found myself brooding into the E-meter about why my own father’s death didn’t seem to affect me as much as those of President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. I started out with some glib pop sociology about our mobile age with its rapid dissolution of family bonds and how people we see on the screen are more real to us than our own kin. But the answer lay closer to home and deeper within. I wound up describing, with appalling accuracy that still makes me squirm, the gradual filminess that aging casts over a man.

My father was 79 when he drew his last breath. But it struck me with hammer force that I had actually been watching him die from at least the age of 65 onward.

As soon as I said this, David informed me that I had now been released from “moments of loss and misemotion.”

I felt good then—very good— in my new self-knowledge. Later would come the weight of guilt.

“Communications Release” (Grade Zero) was a variation of the word-association games I used to like to play at parties. The two alternating queries were “What are you willing to tell me about? What are you willing to tell me about it?” I caromed from sex to words to drama to movies to expatriation to deadlines to friendship to danger and almost a hundred other subjects before I finally found myself explaining and justifying a complicated future plan that wouldn’t be of interest to anyone outside my immediate family—except perhaps someone probing me for vulnerability. The psychiatrist I consulted months afterward told me that “free association and repetition are two quick ways to induce regression in a patient. He starts to lose normal ego control.”

After each Release I had to go through an elaborate bureaucratic minuet. The first step was always Tech Services, where whoever was on duty would interview me and, whenever I seemed unresponsive, peer at me with great concern and ask if I was all right.

If a day’s auditing ended in mid-grade, David wouldn’t let me go out on the street without first focusing my attention on each of five or six objects (the doorknob, for example) in the otherwise barren auditing room. It felt like being awakened from a dream.

Grade I was concerned with “problems.” David would ask me, “What is the problem?” and, when I’d named it, “What solutions have you?” We started out with money and wound up—not long after the E-meter had revealed some bypassed charge on the problem of comeuppance—by uncovering the notion of suicide which, I discovered, lurked in the back of my mind as an ultimate solution to the insoluble. The more I talked about it, the more I knew I could never do it. Presto! Problems Release!

I came away relieved, but I wondered then what kind of hornet’s nest a less sensitive auditor might stir up in the mind of a person with different hangups. I suspected that, however well-intentioned they might be, Scientology’s auditors were simply people who had studied Scientology, were devoted to the subject and had themselves attained one or more levels toward CLEAR. Beyond that, I doubted they had special qualifications to be fooling around in a comparative stranger’s psyche.

Grade II involved Overts (”harmful or contrasurvival acts”) and Withholds (”undisclosed contrasurvival acts”) and was called the “Relief Release.” David would repeat the same two questions, “What have you done?” and “What haven’t you said?” I spilled out incident after incident until I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that what I’d done was to “make life—every aspect of it, even every trivial conversation—a constant battle, a kind of Indian handwrestle to get the better of someone. It’s all hit-or-flop, success-or-failure, make-or-break with me. . . . David, I think I may have achieved a Release here!”

“You have,” said David.

Grade III, or “Freedom Release,” required me to recall a past break with someone in the Affinity-Reality-Communication Triangle. In retrospect, it determined my future as a Scientologist. Straining to keep my traumas legitimate, I suddenly jarred open a Pandora’s box within me.

Somehow, I was reliving an argument from early in my marriage. I had been blathering about how well I was doing and how great I was, and my wife had made a face. I shot back then almost jokingly: “Don’t you love me any more?”

“I love you,” she had replied, choosing her words carefully, “but I’m not sure that I like you at this very moment.” Her words had for a brief time devastated me.

David wanted to know when this had happened.

I thought for a moment and said: “In 1958. We were living in Louisville and had just come back from a winter trip to New Orleans, so I’d say early 1958. And it was Sunday morning—I remember that distinctly.”

“Good. Let’s get a fix on the date. Was it January? February?”

“March, I’d think.”

“It was March,” said David, consulting the E-meter. “Now the date? First to 10th? Eleventh to 20th? I’ve got a read on 11th to 20th.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier,” I said, “to consult a 1958 calendar? There are only four or five Sundays in March.”

“There’s no need for that. And keep your hands on the E-meter,” David said sharply. “The E-meter will find out for us. Was it the 11th to 15th? Sixteenth? Seventeenth? Eighteenth? Nineteenth? Twentieth? That’s funny, I get reads on the 15th, the 17th and the 18th.”

“I think I know,” I said. “When you said ‘15th’ the Ides of March went through my head. And the 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, which anybody who grew up in New York remembers. But I don’t know about the 18th.”

“Then it’s probably the 18th,” said David.

We rechecked March 15th to 20th on the E-meter. This time the only “read” was on the 18th.

“Before we go on,” I said, “can’t we get a calendar and check whether March 18, 1958 was a Sunday?”

“No,” said David. “This is the session. And don’t let go of the cans!”

With that, he rummaged in a drawer until he found a 23-part checklist which took me over my 1958 domestic spat. I was too disturbed by the fresh memory of the incident and David’s harshness even to answer Yes or No to most of the items. But David reported that the omniscient E-meter had shown the “greatest read” on “Was a past refusal of reality restimulated?”

“Of course it was,” I said fiercely. “The Reality being rejected was me!”

This was the Release, but by now my hands were clenched around the E-meter cans and David had to remind me to let go.

“Are you all right,” he asked, “or have we overrun your Freedom Release?”

Ability Release,” my farewell to auditing in London, seemed tame by comparison—even though it began with the memory of stepping on a dancing partner’s toes and ended still more violently with me crawling beneath live machine-gun fire at Fort Dix. In both instances, I was made aware that my clumsiness, or “wrong computations,” had hurt or endangered others—particularly a sergeant who had crawled out to hurry me along the infiltration course.

In fact, even while the London Registrar was packeting my bulging folder for my transfer to Saint Hill —the only place in the world where one could take the final levels to CLEAR—I realized that, during the whole process, I had been made to feel achingly ashamed of myself—for my remote flirtation with suicide; for the battle I’d made out of life; for walking into a swing at the age of 4; and, above all, for standing by, feeling no pain and offering no help, during the first dozen years I watched my father age and die.

Here, there was guilt within guilt: I worried that the next time I saw my mother, I might give her an inkling of this terrible truth I’d unearthed. A tug of war was going on in my mind. One pull seemed to say: “Listen! Everybody gets old. He spent eight months dying, not 14 years. There wasn’t a thing you could do that you didn’t do. And you didn’t grieve because it was a merciful end and you had eight months’ warning.” The other, slightly stronger, pull seemed to be saying: “Only Scientology can save you—can relieve your guilt!” My journalistic involvement had led me this far— on an inbound voyage of self discovery that was starting to tear me apart.

Something else was happening to me while I killed time in London until my appointment at Saint Hill: I, who averaged three or four minor headaches a year, was having three or four blinding headaches a day. They recurred whenever I tried to ponder the Sunday, March 18, 1958 quarrel with my wife. It was as if there were something basic either in the incident itself or in the uncovering of it that my Reactive Mind didn’t want my Analytical Mind to find out. Struggling in vain to apply the standard journalistic questions—Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? —to the revelations of Sunday, March 18, 1958, I simply could not get beyond when? Invariably, a headache would intercept and abort my span of attention.

You can amass all the evidence in the world to convince a man that a drug or a practice or a doctrine or a cigarette is bad for him, but when he’s halfway hooked by it he has to find out for himself. This was my case as I rode the British Railways from London 30 miles to East Crinstead and took a cab to Saint Hill Manor. I craved release from Scientology and the blinding headaches my new self-knowledge had brought me. And yet I needed to know more about the significance of the events of Sunday, March 18, 1958. I suspected that both could be found only at Saint Hill.

My cab turned off the main road onto a country lane that climbed through rolling hillsides speckled with scooters and kiddie cars, sandboxes and swings, and a dozen children feeding a donkey. It was all sunny, open and innocent—until an army of trees loomed up to flank and darken the road. As we neared the sprawling, gloomy-looking manor house, the road ended and my driver said: “This is as far as I can take you. Reception’s in the first shed.” The mansion was marked: “OFF LIMITS.”

My release from Scientology came that morning and that afternoon in a series of revelatory incidents.

The Registrar had my papers all ready for me to sign. But my contract for Grades V through VII called upon me to pay not the $390 New York and London had given me to understand—but $3,150! “Plus living expenses,” added the Cashier, whom the Registrar had summoned in the expectation of having my signature witnessed. “The information you say you were given in London and New York is wrong. These are our rates, payable in advance. We can’t have credit, can we?” And he handed me a rate card.

It was outrageous. I told him that I’d have to go back to London and maybe to New York to swing it. “Meanwhile, so my trip out here won’t be a total waste, may I wander about?” Armed with the horse-headed pin I had been given for reaching Grade IV and a map showing what was on and off limits, I explored Saint Hill for the rest of that balmy day. The grounds were aswarm with butterflies, grasshoppers and people. At small folding tables behind the manor house and around the wishing well, perhaps 60 people were auditing some 60 others, E-meters between them. Scores more could be seen auditing inside various bungalows.

Toward noon, I bought a sandwich and a soda from vending machines and picnicked on the grass with what seemed like hundreds of my fellow Scientologists. A fat lady who’d packed her own hero sandwich wore a badge reading: “I AM IN POWER PROCESSES [Grade V]. PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME QUESTIONS, AUDIT ME, OR DISCUSS MY CASE WITH ME.” And, shortly after 12, a bright-eyed young girl came out of an auditing shack and plunked herself down amidst benign smiles.

“Hi, Fran!” several picnickers greeted her.

“I just went CLEAR,” she said softly.

All the boys and girls within earshot fell over her, cheered her, pummeled her and kissed her. Others came running over to do the same. A circle formed. There was a flurry of eager questioning, which Fran answered calmly and self-confidently in a slight Bronx accent. Then the conversation died down. Fran’s friends smiled at her. She smiled back. Somebody new would pass by. Fran would murmur, “I went CLEAR!” The passersby would maul her, congratulate her, and either move on or join the circle. The smiles would come on again.

Finally, after a long, uneventful silence, Fran turned to one of the boys in the circle. With a desperate pounce, she grabbed his lapels and implored him: “So what’s new?”

The emptiness of her going CLEAR touched me. I felt like answering her question with another: “So who wants it?”

Right after lunch, a little girl’s resemblance to my 3-year-old daughter caught my eye. She was 5, or perhaps 6, and she wore a red dress and white stockings— her Sunday best. She was very, very tense. So was her mother—a young woman in slacks who sounded like an Australian.

“Now when you go before the Examiner,” the mother was saying, “I want you to do just what we did at home this morning. When he asks if you feel you’ve been Released, you say ‘yes’ just like we did at home.”

The child gave a nod, which seemed to jolt her whole rigid little frame. As she and her mother entered an auditing shack, a rate chart I’d seen—”Junior Dianetics: $10; Children’s Cram Course: $5.60″—was shockingly fleshed out for me. In less than two minutes they came out. Now the mother’s stride was brisk and proud. Her daughter was skipping. She had pleased her mother and now she could go play—until tomorrow, at least.

Depressed, I retreated to the inevitable Scientology bookstore, where a skinny, beady-eyed clerk remarked upon the beautiful weather: “There hasn’t been a spell like this since around the time John McMaster went CLEAR. It’s been this way since Sunday. . . .”

Her words triggered another of my blinding headaches and, in the moment I wondered why, the battle between my Reactive Mind and my Analytical Mind was at last joined.

“Look!” I said, almost lunging at the poor clerk. “Do you have any kind of almanac or perpetual calendar here?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”

“Can you call me a cab?” I said.

“The switchboard can. If you’ll give me fourpence, I’ll see that they place the call.”

The only calendar in the bookstore was for 1967—when March 18 fell on a Saturday. In the 15 minutes while I waited for the cab, one of my minds tried to calculate backward to March 18,1958 —a trick I can ordinarily perform in two or three minutes—while the other seemed to be crying: “Stop!” By the time I’d paid the driver and dashed into the W. H. Smith & Sons bookstore of East Grinstead, I had not for the life of me been able to get back past 1960.

Smith’s had an almanac. It took me less than a minute to find what had been gnawing at me about March 18, 1958. It was not guilt or my wife’s love for me. It was simply that in 1958, March 18 had fallen on a Tuesday, not a Sunday.

It seems pathetic to me still, and terribly precarious, that my failure to perform so simple a journalistic chore—under other circumstances I would have automatically looked up the date— could have kept me half tied to Scientology, the deep-probing auditing sessions and the damned E-meter. It is still difficult for me to admit to myself how deeply those months affected me. A psychiatrist I consulted later in an effort to find out what had happened to me said: “You haven’t been brainwashed or you wouldn’t be here talking to me. But they did a remarkable job of indoctrinating you and I hope you’ll get your equilibrium back.”

I am sure that among the millions of words Elron has written, there are some to convince me that the Engram I unlocked in that one auditing session did happen on a Tuesday—in another life—or that March 18 did fall on a Sunday when I was in the womb. But, thankfully, it no longer matters.

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Fingerprinting All Safeguards Each Citizen

Fingerprints of citizens are being made by state and federal agencies at the rate of tens of thousands per month, as a result of the Department of Justice plea that every law-abiding person in the United States volunteer for the work. A complete file would contain 125,000,000 sets of fingerprints. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the federal bureau of investigation, points out that fingerprint records help authorities in making speedy identification of persons rendered unconscious in accidents, persons suffering from loss of memory and persons who die with no identifying papers or marks in their clothing. Many maternity hospitals are using this means of avoiding mistakes in identifying babies. If all employes were fingerprinted, Mr. Hoover says, it would be almost impossible for criminals to gain positions of trust. When the United States civil service began to route all applicants’ fingerprints through the Department of Justice, it was found that one of every thirteen applicants had a criminal record. No means of identification is more reliable than fingerprints. The courts recognize such records. There is not one chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,-000,000,000,000,000,000 (pronounced “one undecillion”) that one person’s fingerprints will be exactly like those of anyone else. For that reason, fingerprints are more satisfactory than a signature for documents, important papers, valuable records and certificates. Signatures can be forged, but not a fingerprint. To speed up the search for a particular set of fingerprints, a system of classifying them by certain whorls, lines and other marks has been evolved. In a recent test, the exact record of an unidentified person’s fingerprints was located within three minutes in a file containing more than 1,500,000 records. The New York city police department has been collecting citizens’ fingerprints for several years. Between 15,000 and 20,000 persons volunteer each month. Other cities are taking up the work. The Department of Justice in Washington is the clearing house for most fingerprints. The master criminal file contains 5,000,000 records. The civilian file will be separate. Instead of a stigma, the record will be a form of personal protection.

Bath in Ocean of Soapsuds Is Latest Reducing Method

SLEEPING in the clouds has nothing on the “bubble bath,” the latest novelty in the way of health gadgets. This device consists of a waterproof electric motor and pump, which connects with a series of long perforated metal tubes placed in the bottom of the bathtub. Air emitted from these tubes causes the water in the tub to bubble and splash like a miniature surf.

By the addition of a teaspoonful of non-alkali soap a heavy foam will form as demonstrated in the accompanying photo. The device has received the approval of eminent medical authorities both as an invigorating bath and as an effective reducing process.

Dog Rides Comfortably in Sack on Running Board
When you take your dog along for a ride, but prefer not having it inside the car, it can ride safely and comfortably in this sack, which is carried on the running board. The bottom of the sack is clamped to the running board and the top is fastened to the lower part of an open window with hooks, covered with small rubber tubing to prevent marring the car.

Latest Clock Has a “Voice” to Announce Time

Sleepyheads may be awakened in the near future by a clock which announces in clear tones, “Seven o’clock,” or whatever the hour may be. Such a clock has been developed by a communications laboratory. It has an odd caricature face and a “voice” circuit which will put the exact hour into words. It is synchronized with a nationwide time service. The clock may be used as a train announcer, with a microphone connected into the speech circuit for making announcements other than telling the time.

Pocket Fire Escape Wound on Reel Is Safeguard in Tall Buildings

To demonstrate the efficiency of a “vest-pocket” fire escape which he has devised, the inventor fastened one end of it to a seventeenth – story window railing of a New York hotel and lowered himself safely to the ground by clinging to the stout wire cable which unwound from a reel holder. A loop and snap buckle were attached to the end so that it could be quickly adjusted, and a spring in the reel took up part of the weight in descending.

The Electric Blanket Is Tested By “Maggie”

THE delightful creature in the bed is “Maggie,” the engineer’s solution to General Electric’s search for a substitute for a human being to conduct continuous tests on the automatic electric blanket developed by G.E. to keep its users warm whatever the temperature. Stuffed with straw, “Maggie’s” underwear contains insulated copper wires which give off heat approximating the human body’s normal temperature.

Hoodlike Gas Mask Protects Babies

Three years of research have solved the grim problem of fitting babies with gas masks, according to the British designer of the model illustrated in use below. Rubberized gasproof fabric completely incloses an infant from the waist up in a capacious hood with a large cellulose acetate window. A hand bellows operated by the parent supplies pure filtered air for the baby to breathe.

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You Don’t Have To be Good To Have Fun!

IF YOUR job or hobby is deep-sea diving or jet-plane piloting, either you’re good or you’re dead. Watchmaking and diamond cutting call for considerable skill, too. But there are dozens of pursuits less exacting that offer something much needed these days: the thrill of accomplishment.

I have an idea that a lot of people hesitate over hobbies because (a) they think they aren’t skilled enough, or (b) it’s too much work.

For those who “can’t drive a nail,” I recommend a careful reading of Jerome Parker’s lively piece on page 194, “I’m Proud of My All-Thumbs Craftwork.” Not because Mr. Parker threatens Mr. Chippendale, but because he is himself an amateur with a hammer. And because he is able to pass along in print some of the sheer pleasure of making something out of nothing.

Some things need no blueprints, no fancy tools, no great skill. The personal production of even the most primitive gimmick has a thrill as a by-product. Let me tell you about MY operation …

Now, I can run a hammer, saw, paintbrush, and wrench, but I’m no Harry Walton. One stormy Sunday afternoon lately, I found myself with a restless six-year-old son who wanted a new belt like the beautiful hand-carved example of leathern art I had just picked up as a bargain. Rummaging around in my catch-all drawer, I found a half-inch leather strip, and an awl. Except for a little emergency sewing, and making a couple of crude holsters and sheaths years ago, I had never done any leather work.

But, probably by absorption from the pages of Popular Science, I knew you could wet leather, push it around with a blunt instrument, and thus impress a design. So, with my awl, a knife, a dull nail, and a kitchen spoon, I set to work—ably bothered by the boy.

Here’s a picture of the result an hour later. It’s a “school belt” complete with alphabet impressed by said nail. The “carving” was done with the handle of the spoon. I made mistakes: getting the leather too wet was the worst. It should be dampened from the flesh side until the polished side darkens, I now know. In my ignorant enthusiasm I soaked it good. It isn’t going to put Sam Myers, down in Texas, out of the harness and holster business. But my son’s schoolmates are pestering their pops.

And I guess it has put me in the leather-working business. I never knew it was so much fun and so easy to turn pennies of leather into dollars of value compared to “boughten” stuff. So now I’m shopping for leatherworking tools.

In fact, if the fun isn’t enough to start you doing something with your hands, the high prices these days are a good reason for making what you can yourself. You will find many things around the house, especially the little luxuries, that cost too much to buy. You can make them, even with the high cost of materials, for half the price and less. All you need is ten thumbs and the urge. And Popular Science will supply the urge.

Legs Of Ducks Transplanted On Chickens Before Hatched

Legs of turkeys and ducks growing on young chickens, legs of chickens and guinea fowl on young turkeys—a grand general mix-up transplantation of drumsticks and second joints all around the poultry yard has been achieved by Dr. Herbert L. Eastlick, young University of Missouri zoologist.

These legs are all extras, too, added by tissue-grafting while the birds were still embryos in the shell, only two or three days along in their incubation. A very delicate and patient technique had to be used, chipping away enough of the eggshell to expose the embryos, clipping off the limb-beginnings of one and transposing it to another, and sealing over the hole in the shell with an artificial covering.

Some of the embryos died before hatching, just as eggs in any incubator may fail. But even these showed that the transplanted legs had “taken” and were developing. In some, the transplants were fastened not to the outside of the body wall but within the body cavity.

Still living, according to Dr. Eastlick’s report in the current issue of the British science journal, Nature, are three chicks with extra guinea-fowl legs, and one chick with an added duck leg. The duck leg lacks one toe, but is otherwise in good condition, including the web on its foot. It seems to have a nerve supply from the body, although it cannot be bent.

Where the transplant was of a colored leg onto a white chick, color spread to the area surrounding the graft if a little of the embryonic tissue that eventually forms nerves was included, but if none of this nerve-making material was present the only color developed was on the transplanted leg itself.

DOCTOR DISPUTES LINK BETWEEN SMOKING, CANCER

The case against tobacco is derived mostly from statistical associations and some experimental work with animals, says Dr. Harry S. N. Greene, chairman of the department of pathology, Yale University Medical School. There is yet no sound proof that cigarette smoking is a cause of human lung cancer.

In a book, Science Looks at Smoking, by Eric Northrup, published by Coward-McCann, Inc., New York, Dr. Greene says this about his own smoking pleasures:

“The evidence (both statistical and experimental) does not appear sufficiently significant to me to warrant forsaking the pleasure of smoking. As a matter of fact, if the investigations had been pointed toward some material I thoroughly dislike, such as parsnips, I still would not feel that evidence of the type presented constituted a reasonable excuse for eliminating the things from my diet. I will still continue to smoke, and if the tobacco companies cease manufacture, I will revert to sweet fern and grape leaves.”

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Priest Develops Practical Psychogalvanometer

A PSYCHOGALVANOMETER invented by Father Walter G. Summers, head of the department of psychology at Fordham University in New York City, is said to be a practically infallible lie detecting device.

The apparatus consists of two boxes. One, resembling a radio set, contains a system of balanced electric circuits. The other, a milliammeter, produces a chart tracing of the emotional reactions of the person being tested. The combined apparatus amplifies the electrical charge inherent in the human body to such an extent that variations, caused by the emotions, cause a change in the tracing.

BULLET-PROOF VEST RESISTS FIRE OF THREE PISTOLS

To demonstrate the effectiveness of a bullet-proof vest he invented, a New York man donned the garment, posed as the target and allowed three policemen to shoot at him at close range. Repeated fire of thirty-eight and forty-five caliber bullets failed to penetrate the vest. The missiles were flattened against the sides of the protector and fell harmless to the ground. Following this demonstration, young women put on the vests and also served as targets.

Rumble Seat on Handle Bar for Cyclist’s Baby

When one proud father in Switzerland wants to take the baby for an airing, he fits a special rumble seat on the handle bar of his bicycle and away they go. The seat is equipped with a top to protect baby from sun or shower, but the top can be folded when desired.

Machinery to Eliminate Humans
THE last word in the elimination of the human factor in the manufacture of machinery is represented in the erection of the new A. C. Smith research engineering plant in Milwaukee which will house the laboratories of a staff of highly trained research engineers whose efforts will be directed along the lines of creating a 100% automatic frame plant, that is, a machine-perfect factory.

Seeing Ghosts NOW EXPLAINED BY SIMPLE EXPERIMENTS

GHOSTLY, sheeted figures, seen as one runs past a dark cemetery, are not merely figments of the imagination. They are actually seen as real ghosts looming out of the night.

This is the conclusion arrived at by psychologists who now claim that people really see with their own eyes the apparitions that form the bases of “true” ghost stories.

According to these psychologists you can, at will, see synthetic specters, in the following manner:

To see a white skull, covered with a green hood, trace the outlines of the skull, which is seen on this page, on writing paper with a pen and jet black ink. Fill in the black parts carefully and then with wax crayon or water-color, make the hood red.

To see the ghost, hold the drawing in the light of a white electric bulb and stare steadily at the skull’s nose for fifteen or twenty seconds. Then, quickly looking away, stare fixedly at a white, dimly lighted wall.

In two or three seconds, you will see a pale green hood appear, to be followed by a white skull. After three or four seconds, the vision will fade away.

The green color on the ghost’s hood is due to the fact that prolonged staring at the red hood tired the retina so it became temporarily less sensitive to red. As a result, when you look at the wall, the retina responds only to the red’s complementary color—green. Similarly, the black skull rests the retina and makes it more sensitive to the reflected light from the wall, which accordingly shows you the black pattern in the white, ghostly outlines of a specter.

Now trace off and color the outline of the two pictures seen in the first columns. After being looked at steadily for a few moments, the ghosts of the pictures will appear on the wall as a yellow chicken, white egg, green ground, and blue sky. The other figure will show a green tree, red barn, and the rainbow in its correct order of colors.

Psychologists have proved that these after images can, occasionally, be retained by the retina for a surprisingly long time. For example, let us suppose that one who was frightened by the graveyard spook had recently seen a human figure silhouetted in black against a lighted doorway. Experiments show that it would be possible for him to carry this after image in his eyes and to see the same figure as a white ghost against the dark trees.

One experimenter saw the after image of an object on the wall of his room on awakening from a whole night’s uninterrupted sleep. This makes it easy to explain how people wake up and see ghosts moving about their rooms, leaning on the foot of their beds, or peering in at the windows. Each ghost is the after image of some person who may have been seen against a strong light several hours before. Another interesting experiment explains the type of ghost seen when one carries a candle about in a dark house.

Hold a lighted candle two or three inches before your nose and move it slowly from side to side. In a short time you will see the network of finely branching blood vessels on your eye’s retina, outlined against a dull, red background. Also you will see near the center a light spot. This is the fovea, or point of most distinct vision. How easy it would be for an apprehensive person carrying a candle or small lamp, to perform this experiment unconsciously and to mistake the fovea for a dimly seen head with some of the blood vessels forming the folds of a cloak. Doubtless this is the secret of the ghosts seen in old “haunted” houses.

Elkhorn Artist
THE world’s largest elk herd located in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, supports an odd and lucrative business for Walt Floerke, a retired Chicago CPA. He gathers the massive antlers which are shed annually and turns them into interesting curios such as those shown here and sells them to tourists.

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Reducing Suits
Horses, as well as overweight humans, can trim off pounds by sunning in a plastic “silhouette” suit. Jockeys say it helps them reduce as much as five pounds in an hour.

Radioactive Safety-Control System
Radioactive crystals and Geiger tubes make a punch press at a United Air Lines maintenance base accident proof. Operators of the press wear wristbands containing the “hot” crystals. Three Geiger tubes enclose the punching area. If hands stray into danger, the tubes pick up radiation from the wristbands and instantly halt the machine —even in midstroke. The machine will not run unless the operator wears the bands.

“Thinking” Brain Removed

LIKE a fairy tale of medicine is the description of an operation which removed nearly the entire “thinking” portion of a woman’s brain, changing her entire personality. For the first year after the operation the woman was almost childishly gay and happy. Later came more mature changes, which improved her power of concentration, memory, and endurance. The right prefrontal lobe and most of the left lobe of the brain were removed by Dr. Glen Spurling of Louisville University’s School of Medicine.

Glass Case Protects Baby from Poison Gas
Masked nurses clad in gasproof rubber garments are testing out the latest invention of war-fearing Europe. It is a portable glass case in which babies can be thrust at the alarm of a gas attack and carried to a zone of safety.

Related posts

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