In Search of Psi

At the tender age of 13, I embarked on a serious mission to tap the psychic waveband. While other kids were playing team sports or ogling girls, I was fabricating divining rods and a Hieronymus Machine.

My guide into the queasy world of quasi-science was John W. Campbell, Jr., the irascible editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. He sounded like one part engineer, one part wide-eyed visionary, and two parts drill sergeant. His enemy was unthinking orthodoxy. His precept was that you could crack any problem with the scientific method, so long as you didn’t pay too much attention to “experts” warning you that what you wanted to do couldn’t be done.

In 1956, Campbell published an informal position paper, asking his readers if they were ready for a serious exploration of “psi,” by which he meant the entire subject of psychic phenomena. If psi existed, it should yield to a mix of logical deduction and Yankee ingenuity, just like anything else. So how about it? He wrote as if he were addressing a platoon of fresh-faced recruits. Were we man enough (surely, none of his readers was female) to tackle some really life-changing, head-bending ideas, no matter where they might lead us?

In his June 1956 issue, Campbell reported that his readers shared his zeal. They were gung-ho, ready to lock-and-load and follow him over the top into combat with prejudiced naysayers who dismissed psychic research as frivolous or wacky. So be it! He started publishing a series of revelatory articles that I read with utter fascination.

DIVINING RODS

I especially liked a feature about “divining rods” because they were so simple. All you needed were two pieces of rod and two lengths of tube. You bent each piece of rod at a right angle and hung it in a length of tube. You held the tubes, one in each hand, so that the rods pointed away from your body, like a pair of handguns. If you rotated your wrists slightly,

Author’s note: Since the inventor’s patent was filed under the name “Hieronymus,” I have used this spelling, even though Campbell, who was in contact with the inventor, spelled his name as “Hieronymous.”

the rods would swing from side to side.

Supposedly they would detect cables, conduits, water pipes, sewer pipes, aquifers, or anything else that ran in a straight line underground. You held the divining rods and started walking. As you approached the linear underground object, the divining rods started to turn. When you were directly above the object, the rods aligned themselves with it.

The rods were said to be standard equipment among hard-hat maintenance workers across Heartland America. The magazine published a picture of the Distribution Supervisor from a water company in Flint, Mich., holding a pair of the rods — or at least, so the caption claimed.

Campbell theorized that the human brain might have unknown powers to sense underground objects. The brain simply needed a means to express itself, perhaps via unconscious muscular movements of the type that old-fashioned water diviners had applied with a yew twig. The rods probably worked the same way.

I chopped a wire coat hanger into two pieces, hung each of them in a spool of thread that I filched from my mother’s sewing kit, and stretched a piece of string across my bedroom floor. I closed my eyes and stepped forward. One pace, two, three. I opened my eyes, and sure enough, I was standing directly on the string, and the rods had turned (or, I had turned the rods) to align themselves with it.

I was thrilled, but of course I realized this was not a fair test, since I had known where the string was located, and I had known the result that I was hop-

56 Make: Volume 09