What should we do if we caught science in a bold, black lie? Science tells us that mental telepathy does not occur. Suppose we directly experienced other people's thoughts nearly every day, as some few persons claim to do. They are insane, of course, and should simply be ignored if they are otherwise harmless.

Let me start again. Suppose that you, my Web site reader, had been trained in physics and had worked in World War II at M.I.T. as the leader of a group of physicists designing radar equipment. Suppose that in recognition of your wartime service you had been honored by being made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, consequently, that you had come to believe that you were rather firmly in touch with reality.

Suppose that you had never experienced telepathy yourself, but that one day in 1943 you had read in Time magazine that someone at Duke University claimed to have done experiments showing that he could control the fall of dice (slightly) merely by wishing. Disbelieving, of course, suppose you had visited Harvard University's library and discovered that there was a large literature on this sort of thing, going back 60 years and involving revered English physicists -- Lord Rayleigh, for example. Putting it all together, suppose you had concluded that what is now called extrasensory perception (ESP) was, and is, occurring. What would you do?

I answered that question to myself by deciding to drop my other postwar plans and to give this matter my whole attention until I understood what was going on. And this I did.

The mystery is this. Why hasn't the question of ESP's occurrence been openly discussed and then settled by more experiments, to the satisfaction of all concerned, as is customary in science? This question has plagued me over the years and now, nearly 60 years after my first visit to Harvard Library, I think I have the answer.