Why should the roll of burning cloth or the death by strangulation of Emperor Peter III have reached Swedenborg? We do not know, but an experiment conducted by Usher and Burt19 seems to indicate that events or images may "broadcast" themselves at large, and may be perceived by the appropriate kind of human apparatus. In this case A, who was several hundred miles away from B, had arranged that at 8:30 on a certain evening he was to try to "transmit" telepathically a certain drawing to B. The day before the experiment B (of course without telling A) told a friend, C, that she might take part in it, and try to guess what the drawing was.
The evening of the experiment A dined in a restaurant, playing chess after dinner. Near him three men were talking loudly; they ate roast capon with bread sauce. The room had green hangings. Someone was playing a piano. At 8:25 A remembered he had to transmit the drawing and withdrew to concentrate on it at 8:30. It was a diagram.
But the impression received by the friend C (of whose participation A did not know) was "roast capon, bread sauce, three men, much talk, green hangings, somebody strumming." With it was a crisscross pattern resembling a chessboard. C, however, as is often the case, did not receive this impression at the conscious level, it came via automatic writing.
There are well-attested cases of "spontaneous" clairvoyance (if that is what it is) in the files of research societies, but, as the experimental work previously cited covers such phenomena fairly well, some other questions must be asked in regard to Swedenborg.
Was Swedenborg a "medium"? It seems clear that he was capable of extrasensory perception, but did he go into "trance," do automatic writing, and claim that in these states, or even in his normal state, he was able to transmit messages from the dead to living people?
The answer is that though he did not know the names of those dissociated states he did feel he experienced them and he did claim to have knowledge obtained from the deceased.
It is easy for us now to say: "Why did he not conduct proper
