1966 Ted Serios a bellhop from Chicago claimed to be able to project thoughts onto Polaroid film. Interestingly, some of his best results were when he was drunk. This seemed to open a psychic pathway for him, some believed. By holding a Polaroid camera and focusing on the lens very intently, he was able to produce dreamlike pictures of his thoughts on the film; he referred to these images as "thoughtographs. Sometimes, the photos were all white, other times all black, and occasionally when Ted was drunk, an image would show.
The noted mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis was apparently paid to watch Ted Serios perform during which Persi claimed that he caught Serios sneaking a small marble with a photograph on it into the little tube attached to the front of the camera he used. "It was," Persi said, "a trick." When looking at the photos--it seems rather feasible when you see the rounded look of them and the fuzzy edges (below).
A psychiatrist named Jule Eisenbud. Eisenbud (1908-99) was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Medical School and a charter member of the Parapsychological Association; he wrote numerous articles on psychiatry and psychoanalysis based on his experiments with telepathy. However, his best-known (and only commercially successful) book was The World of Ted Serios: "Thoughtographic" Studies of an Extraordinary Mind (1967).
I recently purchased this book. You might ask, "why get a book about a hoaxer?" Well, how better to have a very open mind when investigating paranormal claims if you have a body of work to observe in which someone did perform a hoax? You need to know about the explainables (debunking) as you do about the unexplainables in this field. I am and always will be a skeptic first. What intrigues me about this case the most is that a drunken everyday unknown from Chicago was able to impress so many intellects in the field. This also makes me wonder if perhaps people who have a psychophysiology that is conducive to attracting spirit activity might actually affect Polaroid film. It would be interesting to see if such a burst is possible and if a person can affect film. I have no reason to think they can put their images in their head on film, but they might be able to create a strange overexposure. It might be interesting to even work on an experiment involving undeveloped film in a room where activity is known to occur and see if, like audio recording devices, an image can be laid down without using the camera.
