"Les chercheurs ont testé de manière répétée la capacité des médiums à fournir des informations utiles lors d’enquêtes criminelles, et les résultats sont accablants. Une étude britannique publiée en 1996, par exemple, a confronté des médiums à des étudiants en licence de psychologie. Les chercheurs ont donné à chaque participant un objet lié à un crime résolu —comme une écharpe ou une chaussure—, et les sujets devaient dire ce qui leur passait par la tête. On leur a aussi donné une liste de phrases sur les crimes, dont seulement certaines étaient vraies. Les médiums n’étaient pas meilleurs que les étudiants dans leurs prédictions, et aucun groupe n’a eu de meilleur résultat que le hasard. Ces résultats ont été répliqués dans des dizaines d’études."
— Affaire de Cleveland: pourquoi la police consulte-t-elle des voyants? | Slate
"Another astronomer looked at the results of Swann’s psychic space travel, and came to a very different conclusion: Carl Sagan. Philip J. Klass sent Sagan a copy of this National Enquirer article - Sagan’s reply is above. He calls the results “dreadful - sort of vague remembrances of sixth-grade general science.” In the “little book” to which he refers, Sagan writes of “two courageous American mystics” who made an “astral projection” trip to Jupiter. “If their reports had been submitted in my elementary astronomy course, they would have received grades of “D” …. they were filled with the most obvious misunderstandings both about Jupiter and about Pioneer 10."
— Bad UFOs: Skepticism, UFOs, and The Universe - by Robert Sheaffer: Ingo Swann (1933-2013) - Psychic Astronaut
"We replicated the procedure of Experiment 8 from Bem (2010), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate the result. The paper includes a description of our procedure and analysis as well as a brief discussion for some reasons why we obtained a different result than in the original paper."
— SSRN-A Replication of the Procedures from Bem (2010, Study 8) and a Failure to Replicate the Same Results by Jeff Galak, Leif Nelson
"The fact that extrasensory perception is an increasingly familiar concept among people who pay no attention to crystal-gazers and swamis is largely due to the rigorously controlled, long-continued experiments at Duke University of Psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934). Lately Dr. Rhine has felt the need of a word of wider scope to designate not only telepathy and clairvoyance but any other “unusual capacities of mind that do not fit into the recognized order of things.” He chose the word parapsychology, an importation from the German."
— Science: Parapsychology - TIME
"
Patience appeared on the scene just when spiritualism, enjoying its last great American revival, collided with the age of science, and a brigade of investigators, including magician Harry Houdini, prowled the nation to expose bogus mediums. Since most mediums were women—the spiritualist movement accorded women social status they rarely attained elsewhere—this crusade turned into an epic battle of the sexes: supposed hard-nosed men of science against swooning female seers.
The Patience Worth case remains one of the most tantalizing literary mysteries of the last century, a window onto a vanished era when magic seemed to exist because so many people believed in it. In the decades since Pearl Curran’s death, in 1937, no one has explained how she produced Patience’s writing. Combing through the voluminous archives, however, a modern sensibility starts to see clues and patterns that may not have been apparent at a time when science was just starting to explore the far reaches of the human mind.
"
— Patience Worth: Author From the Great Beyond | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine
"In the case of a normal rap, the sound (which often only lasts a few milliseconds) starts loudly and decays over a period of time. The loudest part of the sound is right at the beginning. In the case of a poltergeist rap, the loudest part is near the beginning of the sound - but not at the very beginning. The rapping sound starts relatively quietly and works up to a maximum before it then starts to decay. This effect has been seen in all ten of the poltergeist cases studied."
— Scientific evidence of poltergeist knocking? | Society for Psychical Research
"The two-year-old cephalopod has a record of predicting past German results in this manner, his owners say. Paul has so far correctly predicted all of Germany’s results in South Africa. His keepers say he correctly predicted nearly 70% of Germany’s results during the 2008 European Championship."
— BBC News - ‘Psychic’ octopus predicts Germany victory over England
"
Dear Dr. Rhine,
I have heard so much about your experiments in telepathy that I rejoiced to get an authoritative account, and especially to know that a University Professor of Psychology was taking up the subject. And now I find that you were aware of my own work in the same direction, although it was carried on in a back-stairs manner and had no University status At the same time I was personally convinced of the reality of what you have rechristened E.S.P.
I desire no more evidence; only now the subject is on the way to becoming respectable, treated in a handsome volume, published by Henry Holt, & vouched for by several Professor as a branch of Psychology.
Yours faithfully,
Oliver Lodge
"
— Unbelievable » Blog Archive » Oliver Lodge
