the Scottish Society for Psychical Research

....investigating the paranormal in Scotland

Striking a happy medium: a Presidential Lecture 

by Prof A. E. Roy

summarised by John Plowman

What I would like to do tonight is to assess the situation and to try to ‘Strike a Happy Medium’ between the utterly sceptical people who state that there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of the paranormal and those who seem to spring up in their thousands who are prepared to believe anything. Did you know that there is a cult in California which gets channeled messages from the doll Barbie?"

Prof. Roy said that most of us would not hear anything new. Serious psychical research goes back to the 19th century, but long before that, King Croesus of Lydia decided to put the oracles to a scientific test. Messengers were sent to a hundred different oracles to ask the question, "What is the king doing now?" Only the Delphic oracle answered correctly, "I smell the sweet savour of lamb and tortoise; brass above and brass beneath." The king had cut up a lamb and a tortoise and boiled them in a brass cauldron with a lid, as the most unlikely thing he could think of.

Sir William Crookes, who became President of the Royal Society, decided it was a scandal and a disgrace that, on the one hand there were thousands of people of impeccable reputation who said they had witnessed people levitate and spoken with their dead relatives, and on the other hand, science was fast succeeding religion as the last word on the deep questions of life. In the 19th century, there was tremendous optimism in science. Science was saying that none of the spiritistic phenomena could happen. The only modes of communication were the five senses. When the brain dies, all personality is destroyed.

When D.D.Home, the medium, levitated in full light to the ceiling, people said, "The law of gravity does not allow people to do that." Investigators studied the mediums D.D.Home and Florence Cook. It was suggested that Home could play an accordion even when he was not touching it. This was tested. An arch-sceptic put forward the theory that the investigators had heard the sound of the accordion from a small mouth organ secreted in a heavy beard. But every photograph of Home shows him clean-shaven!

Prof. Roy distinguished such negative sceptics from the pragmatic sceptic, who is usually someone working in some other branch of science. Many are too busy and dare not do psychical research as it is looked at askance by their department. Pragmatic sceptics are prepare to say, "Yes, what you say is interesting; I would love to have the time to investigate it, but I have no experience and can express no opinion."  It is those people one wants to convince.

Archie Roy spoke of the eminent Victorians who founded the S.P.R. in 1882 and of their work in the first 50 years studying mediums like Mrs. Piper. There are thousands of pages of reports in the Proceedings of the Society; sufficient evidence to convince the sceptical Hodgson that the simplest theory to satisfy the evidence is that communicators have survived death. Professors James and Richet, however, never became convinced and after a century, many would say that little progress has been made.

Archie Roy then described his sittings with the Glasgow medium Albert Best, who gave information from a communicator Professor William Smart: "You are following in my footsteps, aren't you." "The statement, which seems trivial in a way, was particularly appropriate", said Archie, "because he [Smart] became Professor of Astronomy; I became Professor of Astronomy...” The medium gave other correct information about people living near Archie's home years before, which Prof. Roy did not know but was later able to verify.

There are three theories: SUPER ESP; SURVIVAL; and Professor William James's 'COSMIC PSYCHIC RESERVOIR'. The Super ESP theory assumes that the unconscious mind of a powerful medium can fetch any desired piece of information from any living mind or brain, anywhere on the planet and from any physical record, book, etc.

Sixty years of parapsychology in laboratories all over the world has never demonstrated this. Such instant access to data boggles the imagination.

The very simple survival hypothesis is that we die, we shed our bodies, we still find ourselves existing, we still have our memories, our emotions, our concerns for those we have left behind, our skills - in fact we are very, very much what we were before we died. According to some communicators 'what you get is what you want'."

Survival theory also has its difficulties: messages are often trivial and unconvincing but researchers like Lodge, Hodgson and Balfour were forced to come to the conclusion that at least some people seem to survive death.

From 1929 onwards, Professor J. B.. Rhine worked for 30 years at Duke University in U.S.A., obtaining repeatable experimental results. There are at least four repeatable experiments in parapsychology: 

(1)   The SHEEP/GOATS effect. 'Sheep' are people who are relatively open-minded and are ready to at least accept the possibility of something new, and 'goats' are those who dig their heels in. The 'sheep' score significantly higher in card guessing experiments.

(2)   The DECLINE effect. If you ask a person to guess 100 packs of Zener cards, their scores decline as they get bored until, nearing the end of the task, their scores improve again. Prof. Roy showed how the graph of scores differed from chance results.

(3)   The HELMUT SCHMIDT effect. An arrangement of nine lights lit up randomly, driven by the radioactive decay of Strontium-90. People were asked to guess which lamp would light up next. A follow-up experiment with nine lights in a circle showed that people could force the lamps to light in a clockwise sequence, an example of psycho-kinesis or P.K.

(4)   The GANZFELD experiment, developed by the late Charles Honorton, has been improved by the Koestler Unit in Edinburgh. People in a daydream existence, their senses diminished by diffuse light and sound, attempt to describe pictures which are being viewed in another room. Results of 36% compare with 25% expected by chance. Over many studies, this represents a chance of one in ten million.

Professor Roy continued, "That type of experiment and the spontaneous cases studied in the first 50 or 60 years of the Society for Psychical Research's existence, I think, to anyone of open mind, shows that information can get from one person's mind to another person's mind, without the five senses." He referred to the Census of Hallucinations in 1894. There were hundreds of well-attested cases of people seeing apparitions. " It is embarrassing to list the reasons given by modern sceptics for not believing in these cases...Only one case has been falsified." Sceptics say, "They are all old cases," but they have stood up to 100 years of scepticism and the same types of cases are still happening. Prof. Roy described the case of the pilot who saw an apparition at Glasgow Airport, which he investigated 3 years ago.

"Why if the evidence is so strong, do people not accept these things?" Dr. Allan Gauld, speaking in 1991, gave reasons for the decline of parapsychology as partly political; universities, being short of funds, orient their courses towards business and industry. "I am not knocking parapsychology by any means, but I think there is a danger of neglecting what is happening outside the parapsychological laboratory.”

Astronomy has parallels with psychical research. Things happen which are not predictable. Some phenomena last seconds, some hours, some years ... as do psychic phenomena. There was a time when parapsychologists said we should stop trying to observe spontaneous phenomena; mediums, haunted houses etc. are not scientific, they said. 'Parapsychology' rather than 'psychical research' was productive because it has created repeatable experiments. It was counterproductive because journals became filled with results of not particularly significant experiments. The S.P.R. lost members, not by death, but by boredom!

There is a change that is taking place, which is significant... an attempt to get back to days when people studied mediums in scientific circumstances. What we have now are statistical tests and new apparatus. Prof. Roy mentioned the organisation of P.R.I.S.M. and the work of Prof. Ian Stevenson who studied 3000 cases of children who remembered previous lives. There is a core of phenomena: immediately a child can speak reasonably fluently, the child babbles on about another life, another mummy and daddy, about the details of the life and the circumstances of the death. In many cases, the previous person can be identified from the information given by the child. Often the previous life was cut short and the present child carries a birthmark or deformity of the same nature as on the previous body.

Apparitions are still going on. Alan Gauld has studied 'drop-in communicators', strangers who come through at sittings with a medium to the annoyance of the sitters. Investigating cases that had happened 20 or 30 years before, he found that these people, the drop-ins, had given so much information that Gauld could identify them and they were total strangers to the sitters. Professors Stevenson and Haraldsson have also found drop-in communicators of a very convincing nature. Who are they?

A man, who died in 1878, appeared sixty years after his death. The sitters were not interested in him. He turned out to be a 'damned nuisance'. He wanted all sorts of things done for him. In particular, he wanted his leg back.

Eventually he gave information to a new sitter, which led to the discovery of a thighbone, built into the house of the sitter, who knew nothing about it. The corpse of the communicator, missing a leg, had been washed ashore and the bone had been found subsequently.

Archie Roy concludes, "To me, after 40 years of study, the theory that we are electrochemical, physical mechanisms, with a brain, which in action persuades us that we have a mind, that everything about us is stored in the brain, and that when the brain dies it is wiped away - everything that belongs to a human being. I have to accept that that theory is embarrassingly inadequate. And yet... although all this evidence exists, and much of it is in the archives of the S.P.R., hardly anyone has heard of it!"

As Lord Louis Mountbatten said to the 14th Army in Burma, "Men you may think that the people at home have forgotten you; well, you are wrong. They have never even heard of you!"