Conclusion
The entire concept of The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle is ingenious and amusing. I find the thought of a seemingly rational and well educated person being taken in for years by such banal things as moving tables to be dumbfounding. This, not because the mysterious movement of a table is poor evidence of ghostly visitation, but because I can think of so many more important things to ask a disembodied spirit than how ectoplasm lifts a table.
I do hold out the possibility that Crawford was correct. After all, there are still “physical mediums” today who claim to produce ectoplasm for the spirits to use in séance manifestations. However, if you adhere to Occam's Razor, it is very hard to accept such a possibility in a situation where as many as seven people may be colluding to fool a researcher, where those seven people determine the experimental environment and can refuse any of the suggested apparatus of the researcher, and where the flash photographs taken of the purported ectoplasmic structures show what appears to be cheesecloth.
Regardless of the true facts in this whole case, my biggest disappointment has to be with Crawford's imagination as expressed in his drawings of the structures he believed responsible for the movements. I mean, really? How could these structures, even if they were real, have any chance of lifting a table? Where is the force applied to effect leverage?
I'm thinking
he took
the abridged version of the physics classes.
Those designs
would not get a passing grade at UAF.