November 26, 1936
Dear. Prof. Rhine:
Since I began reading magazine and newspaper accounts of your
experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance, I have wondered whether
anyone ever tipped you off to an 8-year-old boy named Jackie Merkle,
and whether you have ever put him through a conclusive test.
The boy baffled me and others who have tried to divine how he works.
Of course, none of us testers was very well versed in the phenomena
which seemed to be involved, but we gave him what seemed to us
foolproof tests. I will relate them briefly and you can judge for
yourself.
We tried the simple test of putting him in an adjoining room,
writing words and sentences (or geometrical figures) on a piece of
paper and asking him what had been written. He answered these easily.
Next, without any writing, one of us would think of a name, or a word,
or a combination of words and ask him to tell what it was we were
thinking of. This took him a little longer but he got the answers. We
worked this both in the same room with him, and by having the tester go
to another room, fully out of sight of the boy. In this test, some of
the testers would think of long medical words. The boy would stumble
over pronouncing them, but he never missed.
Next, we sat him at one end of a long room. At the other end was a
shelf of books. One of us would pick a book at random, open it at
random and ask the boy to tell what was on the printed page.
He was
very slow and stumbling about this but accurate in his reading to a
syllable. The bookshelf was unfamiliar to him and unfamiliar to us.
None of us knew where any book would fall open.
During much of this
test, the boy was looking at a funny paper. He has a passion for comic
strips and sometimes it is difficult to get him away from them long
enough to perform.
Next, one of us, whose background he couldn’t have known, asked
Jackie questions about his (the questioner’s) history. The boy told him
how and where his mother died (in Dublin, of cancer), what her name
was, where the tester’s father had been born, what his name was, and a
number of other things of the same nature. A woman in the groups said:
“I am thinking of the name of a dog I once owned. What is it?” The boy
instantly gave it and it was some complicated name like Sir Ronald of
Twyffort Fields.
Jackie is the son of a pair of acrobats. His mother was killed in a
fall and his father, now a retired acrobat, lives off the child’s
vaudeville performances, scooting along the thin ice of child labor
laws as best he may.
Jackie doesn’t perform much around New York
because of strict enforcement but spends most of his time ranging
around the country, mostly in the gaslight circuit, astounding the
natives, as he astounded us here. One of his father’s favorite
publicity stunts is to take Jackie into a local newspaper office where
the boy stops reporters, stenographers, printers, et al, and tells them
very intimate things about themselves, such as how many children they
have and their names, their past occupations and their current
ambitions.
His talent is frankly being commercialized and I think he
give a lot of phoney answers just to please the theatre customers. Many
ask: “Who stole my diamond ring?” and he usually answers: “A domestic.”
In this sort of thing, I believe he is a plain fake, but I simply
cannot doubt his telepathic abilities.
If you are interested in this boy, I will be able to get in touch
with him. May I request that if you decide to test him the New Yorker
get whatever story there may be in it?
Jack Alexander
