Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,28

in headline-making news conferences that he had spoken to his dead son through various mediums. “There is enough scientific evidence to give plausible affirmation that the human personality survives the grave. It is the most plausible explanation of the phenomena that occurred,” Bishop Pike is quoted.

Over in Britain, Rosemary Brown was getting messages from dead composers, including such kingpins as Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, and Debussy. Her symphonies, attributed to her ESP capabilities, have even been recorded. When I first heard about the amazing Miss Brown, I was inclined to dismiss the matter unless some private, as yet unpublished, information about the personal lives of the dead composers was also brought out by the medium. Apparently, this is what happened in the course of time and continued investigations. I have never met Miss Brown, but one of the investigators sent to Britain to look into the case was a man whom I knew well, Stewart Robb, who had the advantage of being both a parapsychologist and a music expert. It is his opinion that the Rosemary Brown phenomenon is indeed genuine, but Miss Brown is by no means the only musical medium. According to the National Enquirer, British medium Leslie Flint, together with two friends, Sydney Woods and Mrs. Betty Greene, claimed to have captured on tape the voices of more than two hundred famous personalities, including Frédéric Chopin and Oscar Wilde.

A RIFT EMERGES

Gradually, however, the cleavage between an occult, or mystical, emotionally tinged form of inquiry into psychic phenomena, and the purely scientific, clinically oriented way becomes more apparent. That is not to say that both methods will not eventually merge into one single quest for truth.

Only by using all avenues of approach to a problem can we truly accomplish its solution. However, it seems to me that at a time when so many people are becoming acquainted with the occult and parapsychology in general, that it is very necessary that one make a clear distinction between a tea-room reader and a professor of parapsychology, between a person who has studied psychical phenomena for twenty-five years and has all the necessary academic credits and a Johnny-come-lately who has crept out of the woodwork of opportunism to start his own “research” center or society.

Those who sincerely seek information in this field should question the credentials of those who give answers; well-known names are always preferable to names one has never heard before. Researchers with academic credentials or affiliations are more likely to be trusted than those who offer merely paper doctorates fresh from the printing press. Lastly, psychic readers purporting to be great prophets must be examined at face value—on the basis of their accomplishments in each individual case, not upon their self-proclaimed reputation. With all that in mind and with due caution, it is still heartwarming to find so many sincere and serious people dedicating themselves more and more to the field parapsychology and making scientific inquiry into what seems to me one of the most fascinating areas of human endeavor. Ever since the late Sir Oliver Lodge proclaimed, “Psychic research is the most important field in the world today, by far the most important,” I have felt quite the same way.

PSYCHIC PHOTOGRAPHY

At Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, a dedicated group of researchers with no funds to speak of has been trying to delve into the mystery of psychic photography. Following in the footsteps of Dr. Jules Eisenbud of the University of Colorado, and my own work Psychic Photography—Threshold of a New Science?, this group, under the aegis of the Department of Physics at the university, is attempting to “produce psychic photographs with some regularity under many kinds of situations.” The group feels that since Ted Serios discovered his ability in this field by accident, others might have similar abilities. “Only when we have found a good subject can the real work of investigating the nature of psychic photography begin,” they explain. The fact that people associated with a department of physics at a major American university even speak of investigating psychic photography scientifically is so much of a novelty, considering the slurs heaped upon this subject for so many years by the majority of establishment scientists, that one can only hope that a new age of unbiased science is indeed dawning upon us.

MIND CONTROL & THE ALPHA STATE

Stanley Korn of Maryland has a degree in physics and has done graduate work in mathematics, statistics, and psychology; he works in the Navy as an operations research analyst. Through newspaper advertisements