Lie through a lens: the madness of Ted Serios
If they weren’t such horrific grifters, psychics would be phenomenally cool.
In fact, that willingness to believe in something bigger and more spectacular than our lives is what makes the central con at the heart of all psychics so convincing. I think all of us, at some level, want to believe that someone can transcend our human limits. It’s what makes us worship musicians, sports stars, all kinds of performers. However, what else is a psychic but someone who can convince us that we’re literally in the presence of someone touched by the divine?
The problem is that 95% of the time, we’re in the presence of someone who is extraordinary… at conning us out of our money. Who uses their charisma, uniqueness, nerve and trickery to exploit our unconscious need for our lives to make sense and make stacks of cash out of it. The other 5% of the time, you’re dealing with someone clinically insane. But then, you could probably tell that the moment someone sticks a camera lens to their forehead, snaps a pic and says that they just photographed their own thoughts.
I’m not making that last part up, by the way. This was the grift of one Ted Serios, a bellhop from Chicago who shot to prominence in the early 1960s when he managed to fool a fairly high-profile journalist into believing that he could photograph his own thoughts. This turned into an extensive profile written about him in Fate Magazine, and a late-in-life career hawking his grift to anyone who would listen began.
How did anyone believe Ted Serios?
Looking back, Serios’ claims are truly comical. According to him, he had something he called “a gizmo” (his words) that he would press to a camera lens. Then he would take said camera and press its lens to his forehead. He would take a photo, and when it developed, it would show what he was thinking about. Most of the time. The vast, vast majority of the photos Ted Serios took were, y’know, just a black square. The same thing everyone else gets when they take a photograph of their own forehead. Fate, however, printed a set of these photographs.
Ones that had “unexplained” images within them. Images like Serios’ face or a staircase or… well, it’s difficult to say. Most of them just looked like blurry images of nothing. Fate‘s editor bought into Serios’ claims so entirely that he begged famed psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud to study his so-called abilities. Though sceptical, Eisenbud brought Ted Serios in for a number of tests between 1964 and 1967. Ones that more or less confirmed what we all thought. Ted Serios was a fraud.
The “gizmo” actually contained a microscopic frame of an image that the camera would pick up when pressed against the lens. After all, Serios was rarely able to generate a photo of an image he was told to think of on the spot. He needed a few days for it to percolate. These tests also revealed the truly worrying state of Serios’ mental health. They talk of a man who could barely control his emotional expression. He exhibited sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies, who would respond to the slightest thing going wrong by bashing his own head against the floor.
However, if you think that this was a product of its time? That we wouldn’t fall for something so transparently fake these days? Take a look at some of the AI slop that thousands of people fall for every day. Given the choice, I’d take Serios’ grift over all of them any day.