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unseen by anyone. The first case would be general ESP, and the latter would be clairvoyance. Although both types of experiments often gave statistical significance, the results showed that better scores were achieved when the sender looked at the card, giving evidence for the helpfulness of the mind-to-mind connection. Experiments of this type, along with the distant hypnosis experiments of L.L. Vasiliev (described in Chapter 9) are among the best laboratory data we have for purely telepathic connections between people.
One particularly gifted subject was Hubert Pearce, who was a divinity student at Duke when he offered himself as a potential subject to Rhine. He scored a 32 percent hit rate (8 out of 25), when only 20 percent was expected. This might not seem so exciting, but when he showed that he could continue this hit rate for hundreds of trials, the results were highly statistically significant. Pearce told Rhine that he believed he had inherited his psychic ability from his mother, who had a similar talent.
In a famous and much scrutinized experiment, Pearce was sequestered on the top floor of the Social Sciences building at Duke, and the experimenter, Gaither Pratt, was in the college library 100 meters away. 4 At the rate of one trial per minute, Pratt would remove the top card, facedown, from a shuffled deck, and without looking at it, place it, facedown, on his record book. This was a clairvoyance experiment, since no person knew what the card was at the time of the trial. If someone had known the card's identity, then there would have been a possibility of a mind-to-mind telepathic connection as well as a direct connection to the card. In the experimental cubicle, Pearce would record each of his guesses, trial by trial, until he had completed 25 calls. He would then have a five-minute rest, and write down his impressions of the next 25 cards.
Over a six-month period, Pearce carried out 74 runs of this type. He scored correctly on 558 trials, where only 370 would be expected by chance. The probability of these extra 188 hits occurring by chance is less than one in 1020, or one in a hundred billion billion. Pearce did not receive any feedback on his trials, and he obviously didn't need it. He probably had some internal method of cleaning his mental slate from the residue of each previous trial.

 
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