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Ted Serios (Psychically Induced Photographs; 'Thoughtographs')

Kryptonite said:
Does anyone know if anyone other than Ted Serios was ever able to produce thoughtographs?
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The label "thoughtography" was sometimes used to describe psychic photography at the beginning of the 20th century. The labeling, if not the exact same technique(s), was associated with:

- Tomokichi Fukurai (psychology professor; Tokyo University) prior to WW1
- French psychic Eva Carrière (1920s)

Since Serios' heyday in the 1960s such thoughtography has been claimed by:

- Masuaki Kiyota (Japanese psychic), who eventually confessed to being a fraud (1980s)
- Uri Geller
 
I liked that dude that claimed to have taken a photo of Jesus with his chronovisor...

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Mythopoeika said:
If Ted was not genuine, he was probably at least a talented performance artist.
As it was all done on Polaroid film, it would be difficult to fake - you'd think.
But he could have had 2 cameras - one for taking the shakycam shots, and the other with vital parts of the mechanism re-engineered.
Placing already-developed pictures back in the cartridge would be easy - and sealing it all back up so it looks like a new film would also be easy.
I can't remember - did anybody try it with a brand new film pack that Ted hadn't supplied?
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Oh yes big time. The Eisenbud book on Serios goes over some of the precautions taken, Serios did not supply any of the equipment apart from the gizmo. There some supposed Japanese versions of thoughtography not involving Polaroid type film, although I haven’t read up on those, yet. Also the Scole experiments claimed to produce some images on sealed canisters of film again not instant film. Ted Serios is the only one I can think of who produced images in the way he did, apart form James Randi producing some images by placing a photographic slide in his version of the gizmo.
 
gordonrutter said:
... There some supposed Japanese versions of thoughtography not involving Polaroid type film, although I haven’t read up on those, yet. ...
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Masuaki Kiyota used a Polaroid camera, and insisted on using both his own camera and film packs that had been in his possession for some time (at least hours) prior to any formal testing.

This 1979 report on the Granada test sessions:

Scott, Christopher; Hutchinson, Michael. (1979). Television Tests of Masuaki Kiyota. Skeptical Inquirer 3: 42-48.

... is accessible as a PDF file at:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1979/04/p44.pdf
 
EnolaGaia said:
Masuaki Kiyota used a Polaroid camera, and insisted on using both his own camera and film packs that had been in his possession for some time (at least hours) prior to any formal testing.

This 1979 report on the Granada test sessions:

Scott, Christopher; Hutchinson, Michael. (1979). Television Tests of Masuaki Kiyota. Skeptical Inquirer 3: 42-48.

... is accessible as a PDF file at:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1979/04/p44.pdf
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For me, that would rumble him immediately as a fake.
 
Kiyota confessed to fakery circa 1984. To the best of my knowledge he's the only reputed thoughtographer since Serios who used a Polaroid camera like Serios did.

I don't know whether Kiyota employed the same tube apparatus Serios used to generate the images or employed some other method.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Masuaki Kiyota used a Polaroid camera, and insisted on using both his own camera and film packs that had been in his possession for some time (at least hours) prior to any formal testing.

This 1979 report on the Granada test sessions:

Scott, Christopher; Hutchinson, Michael. (1979). Television Tests of Masuaki Kiyota. Skeptical Inquirer 3: 42-48.

... is accessible as a PDF file at:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1979/04/p44.pdf
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Cool, thanks for that but there are some Japanese experiments that pre date Serios.
 
gordonrutter said:
Cool, thanks for that but there are some Japanese experiments that pre date Serios.
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The only pre-Serios Japanese experiments I know of were those of Tomokichi Fukurai circa 1910 and for a while thereafter.

Oddly enough, a detailed summary of his work can be found in:

The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring​

Kristen Lacefield, 2016

Partial access available at Google Books:

https://books.google.com/books?id=_qEQNgGCktYC&pg=PA37#v=onepage&q&f=false

See page(s) 34 ff.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The only pre-Serios Japanese experiments I know of were those of Tomokichi Fukurai circa 1910 and for a while thereafter.

Oddly enough, a detailed summary of his work can be found in:

The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring​

Kristen Lacefield, 2016

Partial access available at Google Books:

https://books.google.com/books?id=_qEQNgGCktYC&pg=PA37#v=onepage&q&f=false

See page(s) 34 ff.
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I have Fukurai’s book Clairvoyance and Thoughtography but as stated I have yet to read it.

The reason it is mentioned in the book you cite is one of the people Fukurai worked with was called Sadako, which is the name of the being in the Ring films. How many similarities there are between the two Sadako’s I do not know. Yet.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Masuaki Kiyota used a Polaroid camera, and insisted on using both his own camera and film packs that had been in his possession for some time (at least hours) prior to any formal testing.

This 1979 report on the Granada test sessions:

Scott, Christopher; Hutchinson, Michael. (1979). Television Tests of Masuaki Kiyota. Skeptical Inquirer 3: 42-48.

... is accessible as a PDF file at:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1979/04/p44.pdf
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ANYONE who makes any kind of claim and then 'insists' on any kind of parameters being put in place would be suspect in my book.
 
It was always obvious that Serios and others of his ilk were frauds.

I'm amazed anyone was fooled.
His whole act was showmanship and sleight of hand.

All he needed were a top hat and a magic wand to tap on it and he'd be David Nixon.
 
Picking up on the (old) conversation about Serios himself, and whether anyone could recreate his pictures, I saw Randi do so directly into a television camera in (approximately) the 1970s. He had palmed a small "peepshow" type viewer, a tiny thing that looked like a telescope with a little photographic transparency in it. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, imagine one of those handheld viewers for 35mm slides, with a lens you hold up to your eye, only much smaller.) Toy versions of these were common at the time, only an inch or two long, and cheap enough to distribute in gumball-style machines for 25 cents or less. Serios could certainly hide a dozen or so of them on himself to conform to most "requests", if not too specific.

As for the "misspellings" and the like, Serios' photos were never very clear, and blurring and shakiness can certainly explain most of it. Of course, there was nothing preventing him from altering the originals before loading them into a viewer.
 
I have always vaguely thought that Serios was faking it. Even if he had real ability, it was impossible to isolate and verify from all the contextual factors: lack of robust external controls; apparent strong desire on part of others (Eisenbud) to believe in Serios’s ability; apparent strong desire on part of others (Randi) to disbelieve in Serios’s ability; dislike of Randi’s rude and over-the-top declaration that Serios had faked it (and therefore, faked it all), etc.

All the usual psychodrama of emotion, belief, and varying degrees of cognition which is found in Forteana.
 
Randi was someone I admired as a good magician and magic authority from the time I was a child, but I became more and more irritated by his true-believer "skepticism" as the years went on. Towards the end it seemed he was resorting to trickery himself to disprove any evidence of anything that didn't fit in with his view of the way the Universe worked.

I suppose I should amend my last post to say that just because Randi could reproduce what Serios did to some extent doesn't mean he proved that Serios did it the same way; but it did add to the evidence that leads me to conclude that Serios was faking it all. I generally am not convinced by "he faked it sometimes, but sometimes it was real" arguments.
 
ChasFink said:
a small "peepshow" type viewer, a tiny thing that looked like a telescope with a little photographic transparency in it
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There was one of those in my car for some time. Shaped like a tiny camera, loaded with various views of healthy unclothed young men.

Never found out where it came from but it caught out plenty of nosy passengers. :chuckle:
 
gordonrutter said:
I was planning on doing a talk at UnCon one year about this subject with this very title…
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Anecdote: John McEnroe used to host a quiz show called the Chair where the contestants were only allowed to answer questions if their heart rate was below a certain level.

One woman knew an answer but couldn't say it as her heart rate was too high.

In an effort to calm her down, McEnroe asked her her children's names. "Spring, Summer and Autumn," said the contestant.

Guess what John McEnroe said in reply...?
 
Kryptonite said:
Does anyone know if anyone other than Ted Serios was ever able to produce thoughtographs?

Had a quick look online but couldn't find anything, but I'd assume, if Serios was not a hoaxer, that others would have attempted thoughtography, or that if he had faked his pics, that someone would have been able to produce similar fakes, but I can't find any evidence of either.

Its always been strange that Serios wouldn't allow anyone to examine his gizmo, which (if no trickery were found) would have proved him genuine, but his early photos are genuinely perplexing: there is one where he thoughtographed a building called the Old Gold Store, but the image showed the sign as " the Wld Gold Store". Investigation later showed that the building had formerly been a branch of Wells Fargo, with the W of Wells in exactly the same place that the O of Old would later be.
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escargot said:
There was one of those in my car for some time. Shaped like a tiny camera, loaded with various views of healthy unclothed young men.

Never found out where it came from but it caught out plenty of nosy passengers. :chuckle:
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Oh, THAT'S where it...I mean, what a strange device! I wonder what the purpose could possibly be!
 
gordonrutter said:
Died in about 2006. Had a long history of alcoholism and erratic behaviour.
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Serios' fame and active promotion of his alleged talent waned dramatically after the exposés of the late 1960s. He didn't get much publicity after that, except for the routine mentions in paranormal / parapsychology books. As far as I know he more or less quit performing the thoughtography stuff for the subsequent 30-some years until his death.
 
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