Familiar Jugglery

Abstract

“Familiar Jugglery” discusses Seybert Commission Secretary George Fullerton’s investigation of a “psychical experiment” performed by German astrophysicist J.C.F. Zollner in 1878. Fullerton’s preoccupation with Zollner’s methodology is significant because it preempts twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship on how a scientist’s personal biases can affect the perceived outcome of an experiment. Such scholarship is significant both to psi and to mainstream science because it disrupts prevailing assumptions of objectivity with respect to the scientific method.