Ted Serios’s claim that mental activity could produce photographic images became the subject of a substantial and disputed research programme. The Denver experiments offer something more useful than a simple declaration of belief or disbelief: published descriptions of apparatus and procedures, photographs to interpret, and disagreements about what would count as an adequate test.
Approximate area: the map represents Denver city using the rounded representative coordinates in the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 Places Gazetteer. It does not locate a laboratory room, a former television studio or a private home. The two sessions discussed below are explicitly placed in Denver by their published report. The museum camera pictured here is equipment context from elsewhere, not an object used to establish the case location.
An interested reporter’s mixed experience
Paul Welch’s “A Man Who Thinks Pictures,” in LIFE, 22 September 1967, gives a revealing first-person account. Welch recalled meeting Serios four years earlier in Chicago, initially in a hypnotist’s office. He and another reporter brought their own Polaroid camera and film. He described obtaining a blurred but recognisable picture of a Greek statue while the camera was directed towards Serios, and later an aerial city image following Welch’s request.
Welch became interested enough to follow the case and regard Serios as a friend. Yet he also reported a conspicuous failure: a test arranged with a research group associated with an unnamed photographic institution produced no result, not even fogged film. Welch ended uncertain about the photographs. The failed visit must remain in the account alongside the impressions that persuaded him to keep looking. His observations were neither a uniformly successful series nor the same sessions later reported from the Denver studios.
The two Denver television sessions
Jule Eisenbud and associates’ 1970 report describes tests on 10 February 1967 at the University of Denver’s Mass Communications Center and on 25 February at KOA Television in Denver. Polaroid cameras were used alongside television recording. Serios generally held a short tube, called a gismo, near the lens; other participants operated cameras on many trials.
A crucial qualification concerns the second session’s camera described as lensless: the report specifies removal of the compound assembly behind the shutter while retaining a front lens. Its final video sequence also came after the hidden target had been disclosed. The authors acknowledged that some images moved with the tube and showed static relationships between pictured objects. They nevertheless argued against an optical gimmick, citing observations, optical trials and other experiments.
These details constrain the conclusion. The final video cannot independently establish knowledge of a still-hidden target. Other occasions’ controls cannot simply be transferred to these sessions.
What the optical explanation proposes
In “‘Thoughtographs’ and Stanhope Lenses”, optical writer Stephen R. Wilk explains an ordinary route to a superficially extraordinary photograph. A transparency positioned at the focal plane of a small lens can provide an image to a camera. An assembly small enough to fit inside a tube can make a nearby picture appear as if it were a distant scene. Illumination, focus, alignment and movement affect what the resulting photograph looks like.
Wilk connects this explanation with Charles Reynolds and David B. Eisendrath’s 1967 photographic criticism and with Stanhope souvenir viewers. He considers deliberate illusion likely. This is a proposed mechanism supported by optical reasoning, rather than the recovery of a device from a specified Denver exposure. The distinction is essential: showing how a class of images could be produced ordinarily challenges a claim of impossibility, but identifying the cause of each historical image requires its own evidence.
The challenge and the disagreement about its meaning
Curtis Fuller’s “Dr. Jule Eisenbud vs. the Amazing Randi,” in FATE, August 1974, reproduces portions of Eisenbud’s correspondence and presents his side of the dispute. Eisenbud proposed that magicians reproduce results under specified conditions corresponding to reported tests. The proposed arrangements differed between tests and included camera control, supplied clothing or separation from the apparatus. An alcohol condition was subsequently waived.
Fuller’s account strongly favours Eisenbud. It quotes his letters directly while summarising some of Randi’s replies, so it should not be confused with an unedited archival file giving every participant equal space. Nor are proposed conditions automatically evidence that a particular completed trial succeeded under them. The correspondence establishes a dispute about replication and the adequacy of criticism; it does not itself perform the missing experiment.
This is one reason a challenge can remain rhetorically powerful without resolving a scientific question. To assess it, a reader needs a precise agreed task, the actual procedures followed, a definition of success established beforehand and the complete outcome. A refusal to take part supplies none of those observations.
The argument was still alive in 1980
A further exchange appears in the Summer 1980 Skeptical Inquirer. Within a discussion mainly concerning a different subject, Susie Cottrell, Eisenbud again raised the Serios challenge and offered access to the same facilities and personnel. James Randi responded that the central question concerned the claimant’s performance, rather than whether a magician could reproduce it. He also disputed the interpretation of the stringent conditions invoked by Eisenbud.
These are the protagonists’ published positions, with all their continuing antagonism. Neither statement can substitute for the trial records it contests. The Cottrell material also needs to stay separate: a claim about deception or failure in another person’s test is not an observation of Serios. Equally, an argument that a critic misunderstood one experiment does not validate every other experiment undertaken by the original investigator.
What a photograph can and cannot settle
A photograph is a record to explain, rather than an explanation of itself. Recognition of a building, vehicle or face answers a different question from how the image entered the photographic system. The presence of a recognisable object alone cannot tell a reader whether the exposure involved an ordinary optical path, an unnoticed intervention or an unknown process.
There is also a difference between interpreting an image after seeing it and testing an agreed target. A fair target test needs a stated way to score both matches and failures. Otherwise the available resemblance can expand: a broad category may be accepted when a particular object was originally sought. Recording the rejected possibilities matters as much as displaying the most suggestive picture. This is a methodological requirement, not a retrospective diagnosis of Serios.
For a stronger comparison, the optical alternative should be tested under the documented apparatus and viewing conditions, with its limits reported. Conversely, a paranormal interpretation needs reliable exclusion of ordinary routes in the successful trials themselves. Neither side gains that exclusion merely from the confidence, qualifications or persistence of its advocates.
An archive, rather than a final verdict
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s collection and exhibition preserve photographs, ephemera and experimental material associated with Eisenbud’s work. Its exhibition prospectus also lists videos, a camera and gismos. That survival gives future researchers a material source trail. Curatorial presentation records the collection’s significance; it does not independently establish a psychic cause.
The evidence reviewed here supports a history of contested experiments and competing explanations. It leaves a clear boundary around this article: the complete raw videotapes, every original photograph and the whole experimental archive have not been re-examined. The underlying claim should therefore remain attributed, while the practical differences between sessions, apparatus and proposed replications remain visible.
Sources and related reading
Eisenbud and associates, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 64(3), July 1970, pp. 261–276; complete text and selected figure pages examined. Welch, LIFE, 22 September 1967, pp. 112 and 114; complete article examined.
Fuller, FATE, August 1974, pp. 65–74; complete article examined. Eisenbud/Randi exchange, Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1980, pp. 73–75; relevant exchange examined. Wilk, Optics & Photonics News, October 2017, pp. 22–24; complete article examined. The original 1967 Popular Photography articles were not directly examined for this case.
For another western US case involving disputed photographic evidence, see McMinnville’s 1950 photographs. Explore the Spiritual & Psychic collection for other claims and investigations. Sources checked 5 November 2026.