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David Scott Rogo - Leaving the Body: A Complete Guide to Astral Projection

For one series of tests, he and a colleague hypnotized a female psychic. An observer was placed in another part of the house.

The experimenters "sent" their subject's double into the distant room and instructed it to either touch, hit, or pull at the observer. These trials were invariably successful. The observer, who had no idea what the subject's double would be requested to do, often felt blows, touches, or pulls by invisible hands. The phantom double was even visible to some of the people whom Durville used as witnesses. They usually described it as a whitish apparitional figure and saw an odd cordlike extension protruding from its head or stomach leading back to the subject's physical body.

Durville's most intriguing discovery was that many people, who did not otherwise consider themselves psychic, could often perceive even the invisible presence of the double. He conducted several tests during which the observer sat in one room and tried to "guess" when colleagues were sending their subject's phantom to him or her.

"When the phantom approached the spectators," wrote Durville in a 1908 summary of his work, "nine out of ten of them become aware of its presence by a feeling of coolness which comes over them and which disappears soon after it has gone away again. Some perceive distinctly a sort of breath, which somewhat resembles that felt when standing near an electrostatic machine in operation. When the phantom has stood for six or eight minutes near persons placed at one end of my study, it seems to them that that part of the room has become sensibly colder. There are a few persons who do not perceive this sensation of coolness, but who receive other impressions. Thus, on the approach of the phantom, especially when it has stood before him for 40 or 50 seconds, [one subject] feels a moisture in his hands, and especially at the ends of his fingers. If the phantom remains longer, this moisture spreads to the upper part of his body. Others feel a slight trembling, a sort of shivering, which is curious without being disagreeable."

The French experimenter later succeeded in having the fluidic double carry out physical - that is, telekinetic-displays. The liberated double could produce raps by knocking its "hand" on a table, close a half open door, and so on.