Gardner misstated the facts, which were long available. I wrote critically about the lab deception myself in 2022:
In the early 1970s, J.B. Rhine’s then-independent lab (faced with declining institutional support his center had migrated off [Duke University’s] campus) was itself rocked by a fraud scandal. A charismatic and driven medical student handpicked by Rhine as his institutional successor was caught faking results. Rhine was resolute and transparent in rooting out and exposing the fraud and laying groundwork for improvements.
But Rhine cannot wholly be spared blame. He handpicked his own Judas. “He had barely been there three years,” wrote authorized biographer Denis Brian, “when, in 1973, Rhine appointed this man in his early twenties director of the institute.” [5]
It is possible that Rhine, a former Marine with square-jawed good looks and poised manners, saw in this “bright young dynamo” a formidable newcomer who could take parapsychology to its next stage of public acceptance. From my perspective, it would have been wiser for Rhine to place his stock in the less-Olympian looking but more integral and erudite Charles Honorton (1946–1992) with whom Rhine never seemed to personally connect. Although Honorton’s career was cut short by ill-health, the scientist proved the field’s natural intellectual heir, but without the garland of institutional inheritance. [6]