ABC News piece on the Rhine Center

[Ninshub]

Rhine Research Center studies ESP, phenomena seen in 'Stranger Things'

[Ninshub]

Here's another recent mainstream-ish article about visiting the Rhine:

Bending the spoon, and other secrets of ESP
Can psychics and rationalists get along? I went to a parapsychology center to find out.
By Glenn McDonald

ExperienceMag
July 27, 2019

The evening ends with a brief presentation on spoon bending, the notorious psychic scam popularized by Uri Geller and other show business professionals. As a pop-culture punch line, spoon bending is too well known to be considered a legitimate paranormal phenomenon. It would seem to present a dilemma for the Rhine team — who takes this stuff seriously?

Half the audience, evidently. Kruth’s presentation is a delightful study in nudge-nudge, wink-wink ambiguity. He never says spoon bending is real. But he never says it’s fake, either. In fact, he brings out a Duke physics professor, who provides some notional misdirection about atoms and magnetic fields and energy transfer matrices. A plastic bucket full of metal spoons is passed around. Sitting in groups around a half-dozen library tables, we’re instructed to hold our spoons by the narrowest part, rub gently, concentrate severely, and see what happens. The physics professor leads us in a communal shout: “Bend! Bend! Bend!”

Sure enough, within a few moments, a cascade of bent spoons are clinking down onto the tables. Because we’re all concentrating on our spoons, as specifically instructed, no one actually witnesses others’ spoons spontaneously bending. Still, several of the participants look startled, even a little freaked out. How did that happen?

[Laird]

The first one was reasonably balanced, and the embedded tutorial video on Zener cards was excellent; the second was (sometimes not-so) subtly biased. That said, it's good to at least see coverage of this stuff.

The first one was reasonably balanced, and the embedded tutorial video on Zener cards was excellent; the second was (sometimes not-so) subtly biased. That said, it's good to at least see coverage of this stuff.

Yes - I thought the second one was pretty bad, considering the author was aware that the occasion was essentially "fun and games" based on the early days of parapsychology.