***THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN POSTPONED TILL SEPTEMBER 27th, SAME TIME, SAME PLACE***

Stacy Horn's newest book, “Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory,” is a fond look at J. B. Rhine and his colleagues and protégés in the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, which, no longer affiliated with Duke University, lives on as the Rhine Research Center Institute for Parapsychology. Rhine and the lab were dedicated to scientific study and quantification of ESP and related phenomena. They got results such that, in the 1930s, the head of Duke’s psychology department declared Rhine’s work to be “the first hard evidence that the elusive proof of life after death might be out there.

From 1930 to 1980, under the leadership of Dr. J. B. Rhine, often considered the Einstein of the paranormal, the scientists at the Duke Parapsychology Lab attempted to test the bizarre, the frightening, and the unexplainable against the rigors of science. Investigating telepathy, clairvoyance, ghosts, poltergeists, and the myriad other strange phenomena that people claim to have experienced, the scientists did find proof that the human mind can exhibit telepathic powers—but their discovery would put them at odds with both the scientific community and the community of believers at large, beginning a multidecade battle among unyielding critics, die-hard believers, and scientists themselves.

Horn says, "When I started writing this book the over-riding idea was: this is going to be fun. The real Ghostbusters! Haunted houses! Poltergeists! And it was a blast. But when I went down to Duke University and started going through the 700-plus boxes that comprise the lab archives I realized, good God, these people were serious. Thousands and thousands of meticulously conducted, recorded and evaluated experiments (millions in the end)." The Duke scientists were queried by the likes of Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, and Helen Keller; the U.S. Army, and blue-chip corporations such as IBM and Zenith seized upon their findings. And thousands and thousands of letters poured in from believers and scientists alike. In UNBELIEVABLE: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, and Other Phenomena of the Unseen World (Ecco; March 2009; $24.95; Hardcover) Horn reveals the strange, lost history of these first attempts to find convincing evidence of the paranormal, bringing to light a half-century’s worth of ghost stories, poltergeists, and paranormal activity.