The Criticism, and the Fraud He Announced Himself

The attack on the Duke results began almost at once and came in three forms: that the cards could be read from the back or from imperfections in printing, that scores were recorded by people who knew the target, and that the statistics rested on runs selected after the fact. Attempted replications elsewhere went badly for Rhine, most publicly a large series at Princeton in which more than twenty-five thousand trials produced nothing above chance. Rhine's response was procedural rather than rhetorical: opaque screens between subject and experimenter, mechanical shuffling, duplicate independent scoring, and greater physical distance. He founded the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937 partly so that negative results and methodological criticism would have somewhere to appear inside the field rather than only outside it. The episode that most divides opinion about him came late.

In 1974 Walter J. Levy, whom Rhine had installed as director of his institute and treated as his successor, was caught by his own junior colleagues tampering with recording equipment to inflate results. Rhine investigated, dismissed him, and published the exposure in his own journal. Critics read the affair as showing how easily the field's results could be manufactured and how long it took to notice; Rhine's defenders read his handling of it as the behaviour of someone who wanted an answer rather than a verdict. Both readings survive, and the atlas records the dispute rather than settling it.