Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s lecture tours in the United States have created
wide discussion and considerable difference of opinion, some persons
contending that he is really in communication with the spirit world,
while others declare that he is the victim of tricksters. In order to
conduct an impartial investigation, J. Malcolm Bird, associate editor
of The Scientific American, attended several of Sir Arthur’s seances,
and afterward declared that he had observed psychic phenomena that
could hardly be explained by any known natural cause. He could discover
no physical connection between the medium or the spectators and the
phenomena, and he saw mysterious self-luminous lights, attributed by Sir
Arthur to ectoplasm, and heard strange noises that defied his efforts to
establish a natural cause.
“My best judgment would be that both in direction and subject matter much
of the ‘communicated’ material of the seance would be quite beyond the
normal ability of the medium,” he said. “The seance entered a phase which
seems to me to prove, without question, that telepathy or some other
force with intelligence behind it was at work.
“The trumpet began to talk, loudly and distinctly and coherently, in a
voice that had not yet been heard.... It was not ordinary ventriloquism,
because the ventriloquist cannot work in the dark. He doesn’t deceive
your ears, but rather your eyes, by directing your attention to the point
whence he wishes you to infer that the sound came. The voice really came
from the center of the circle.”