Jubal Tests Smith’s Paranormal Abilities

Jubal Harshaw’s tests of Valentine Michael Smith’s paranormal abilities turn an abstract claim into a sequence of witnessed experiments, each exposing a different part of the power and the difficulty of describing it. A carton disappears, an ash tray hangs and moves through the room, desk objects rise and fall, and a gun vanishes from Jubal’s hand. Yet the tests do not make Smith a confident demonstrator: he struggles to explain the act, worries that he has failed, and follows instructions with a literalness that forces Jubal to reconsider how he speaks to him.

The carton and the limits of explanation

Jubal begins with a large carton that had contained twelve fifths of brandy and asks Smith whether he can make it disappear. The question follows Smith’s unfinished attempt to explain that he reaches toward something that seems wrong and must not be there. Smith recognizes the carton as a wrong thing, and Jill then abruptly throws it at Jubal’s head. Jubal ducks by instinct; when he looks again, the carton is gone.

Jill comforts the trembling Smith, who appears unhappy rather than triumphant. Her reassurance that the object vanished does not settle what happened. Anne, watching carefully, reports that the process lasted a measurable fraction of a second: the carton seemed to shrink rapidly into the distance, yet remained visible in the room until the instant it disappeared. Jubal asks where it went, but Smith cannot find the words to answer. When Jubal asks him to bring it back, Smith again cannot explain or perform the request. The demonstration establishes a striking capacity while leaving its mechanism and destination unresolved.

A command changes the result

Jubal next gives Smith an ash tray, drawing attention to its weight and sharp corners, then tosses it high toward the ceiling. He expects Smith to stop it before it strikes him. Instead, the ash tray halts five inches below the ceiling and hangs there, unsupported. Anne and Jill confirm what they see; Jubal, staring upward, asks why it did not disappear as the carton had.

Smith explains that Jubal had told him to stop the ash tray, not to make it disappear. The difference is decisive: Smith’s action follows the instruction as given. Jubal recognizes that Smith takes language literally and that the two outcomes were not interchangeable commands. When Jubal tells him to move the ash tray, it descends slowly, travels sideways above the desk, pauses, and settles almost noiselessly in an empty place. Jubal inspects it; it remains an ordinary, dirty, over-decorated object. What has changed is not the ash tray but the witnesses’ understanding of what can happen to it.

Levitation, effort, and failure

The next test makes the instruction explicit. At Jill’s prompting, Jubal asks Smith to lift the ash tray a foot above the desk without touching it. Smith does so, then anxiously asks Jubal to measure its height in case he has done it wrongly. He holds the ash tray steady and, at Jubal’s request, adds a pencil. Other small desk objects join the hovering layer as Anne watches and Duke enters carrying a step ladder.

Smith is uncertain how much longer he can continue. He says he can think of one more, then tries to lift a paperweight across the desk. That effort coincides with the collapse of the display: all the dozen-odd floating objects fall at once. Smith apologizes and seems close to tears, although no tears form. Jubal insists that he should feel proud rather than ashamed, comparing the feat to something far harder than tying shoestrings and calling it beautiful. The scene makes the ability’s limits visible alongside its force: Smith can sustain several objects in the air, but the evidence does not show him mastering a larger or continuing display, and he reads the sudden failure as a personal mistake.

The gun and the filmed record

Jubal later turns the test toward immediate danger. He opens a lower desk drawer and shows Smith his elderly police special, telling him to wait until he gives the signal. He moves the women away, takes out the gun, and aims it at Smith. On the command, Jubal’s hand is suddenly empty. There is no shock, jolt, or twisting motion; the gun is simply gone. Jubal praises Smith for removing it before he could aim, and Smith says he is happy.

The camera records allow Jubal and Duke to inspect the earlier demonstrations instead of relying only on surprise and memory. In ordinary playback, the carton disappears in midair. At ten-to-one slow motion, it can be seen shrinking smaller and smaller until it is no longer there. The ash tray’s hover is outside the camera’s angle, but its descent and landing are recorded. The pistol appears small in the stereo image, yet the recording supports the same interpretation as the carton: it shrinks away without traveling elsewhere, even while Jubal grips it tightly. The film does not explain where the objects go, but it gives Jubal corroboration and changes his position from astonishment toward conviction.

Significance of the tests

Across the experiments, the crucial difference is between what Smith can do and what he can explain. His language falters at the moment of disappearance, and he treats both Jubal’s directions and his own apparent errors with earnest precision. Jubal, meanwhile, learns that a request to stop an object is not a request to remove it, and that an observer’s expectations can distort the interpretation of evidence. The ash tray’s controlled descent and the slowed film’s visible shrinking complicate the initial impression of a simple vanishing act.

The tests also move from a thrown carton to a deliberate demonstration of levitation and then to a weapon aimed at Smith, raising the stakes from observation to protection. Jubal’s methods are improvised, but the camera supplies a second kind of witness: the scene can be replayed, slowed, and checked against what the people in the room report. The result is not a complete theory of Smith’s abilities. It is a careful record of distinct effects, their dependence on precisely understood instructions, and the gap between an extraordinary action and the words available to describe it.