Ted Serios

Theodore Judd Serios (November 27, 1918 - December 30, 2006) was an American self-declared psychic who claimed to possess the ability to project mental images onto Polaroid Instant Film, producing what he referred to as "thoughtographs" by this method. These abilities, first reported on by Jule Eisenbud, were apparently lost by the late 1960s.[A]

Skeptical observers &mdash; including Christopher Reynolds and David Eisendrath in Popular Photography (Oct. 1967) &mdash; reported that a small tube used to allegedly focus Serios's mental projections involved a micro-lens that focused on small bits of cut slides, producing the images shown on the developed Polaroids.[R] Eisenbud, however, remained convinced that the abilities of Serios were genuine and continued to defend the "thoughtographs" as legitimate in spite of the obstensible debunking, going so far as to offer a monetary reward to any magician who could demonstrate the ability to reproduce the effect under the same observational conditions, though this was seemingly never taken up.[A]

Resources

 * Jule Eisenbud collection on Ted Serios and thoughtographic photography, Collection 23, Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD), https://library.umbc.edu/speccoll/findingaids/coll023.php &mdash; "Contains Dr. Jule Eisenbud's collection of documents from his lifetime of research on a variety of subjects, with the bulk of material relating to his work on Ted Serios, thoughtography, thoughtographic photography, and his book 'The World of Ted Serios.' Includes an impressive number of correspondence, legal and medical documents, financial documents, experimental data, Eisenbud's clippings, Non-Eisenbud clippings, multimedia, and photographs."