New Books and Media

From the publisher's website: From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years.

Further information at the publisher's website: University of Chicago Press.

From the publisher's website:

An der Universität Princeton war er als Forschungskoordinator des Labors für technische Anomalien für alles zuständig, was sich die Wissenschaft nicht erklären konnte. Danach widmete sich Roger D. Nelson dem Global Consciousness Project, bei dem über 100 Wissenschaftler weltweit den Fragen nachgehen, ob alle Menschen über ein gemeinsames Bewusstsein miteinander verbunden sind, und wenn ja, was das bedeutet. Die Antworten, die er durch seine Forschung inzwischen liefern kann, verändern das Bild des Menschen. Es besteht kein Zweifel: Wir sind alle miteinander verbunden.

Der Autor:

Roger D. Nelson forschte und lehrte an der Universität Princeton und war von 1980 bis 2002 Forschungskoordinator des Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR). 1997 gründete er das Global Consciousness Project.Schwerpunkte seiner Arbeit sind die Erforschung des gemeinsamen Bewusstseins und die Rolle des Geistes in der physischen Welt.

Review by Gerhard Mayer

From the publisher's website: Kean explores the most compelling case studies of young children reporting verifiable details from past lives, contemporary mediums who seem to defy the boundaries of the brain and of the physical world, apparitions providing information about their lives on earth, and people who die and then come back to report journeys into another dimension. Based on facts and scientific studies, Surviving Death includes fascinating chapters by medical doctors, psychiatrists, and PhDs from four countries. As a seasoned journalist whose work transcends belief systems and ideology, Kean enriches the narrative by including her own unexpected, confounding experiences encountered while she probed the question concerning all of us: Do we survive death?

Review by Nemo C. Mörck

From the publisher's website:

Is consciousness actually the Life Force, the animating principle which underlies and unifies mind, body, and spirit in all living things, and which philosopher Henri Bergson termed the élan vital? This book offers a compendium of empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives from a broad range of scholarly disciplines, which suggest that there is an unbroken, non-local, collective aspect of consciousness that links distant individuals and events—a kind of resonant connectedness that defies separation in space and time.

From the publisher's website: In this detailed book, Dr Peter McCue reflects on the enormous range of paranormal phenomena to have been reported along Britain’s roads, and examines the theory that certain areas seem to be hotspots for such occurrences, such as the A75 and B721 roads in southern Scotland, and the Blue Bell Hill area in Kent. He delves into the sightings of apparitional vehicles; encounters with ‘colliding apparitions’; ‘phantom hitch-hikers’; out-of-place big cats; phantom black dogs; UFOs; ‘missing time’ (strange memory gaps); vehicle interferences (such as mysterious breakdowns); and incidents in which drivers and passengers seem to have been translocated in space or time. This thorough book debates the evidence and theories in a critical but open-minded way, and is a welcome addition to the genre.

Review by Chris Jensen Romer

From the publisher's website: Reality Denied confronts conventional wisdom with events that, although quite real, seem to challenge the revered “laws of science,” proving them to be wrong or incomplete. The thorny issues of life after death, mind over matter, UFOs, remote viewing, telepathic communications with animals, and more are all addressed from Col. John Alexander’s firsthand perspective. Here physical and spiritual domains collide, providing glimpses of worlds beyond everyday reality.

About the Author:

JOHN B. ALEXANDER, Ph.D., is a retired senior Army officer with decades of experience with a wide range of phenomena. Traveling to all eight continents, he has encountered events that defy common explanation. He has met with shamans in the Amazon, the Himalayas, the Andes, East and West Africa, and Northern Mongolia. In Tonga, he dived in open ocean with humpback whales, and was involved with telepathic experiments with wild dolphins in the Bahamas. A psychic adventurer, he practiced psychokinetic metal bending, fire walking, and caused a white crow to fly for the National Academy of Sciences. A founding board member of IRVA, he is a past-president of IANDS, and former SSE councilor. Straddling two worlds, he is also retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and served on studies with the National Research Council, the Army Science Board, the Council on Foreign Relations, NATO, and was a senior fellow of a DoD university. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross headed his doctoral committee.

From the back cover: 2nd Edition July 2018 - In 2012, my girlfriend and I took up residence in a suburban home right outside Seattle, Washington. What we saw and experienced within weeks of moving in, end up sending shock waves through the paranormal community. BREATH IN / BREATH OUT, because this tale is like no other. The Bothell Hell House has finally arrived. This book explains what happened to me and my girlfriend while living there from 2012 to 2016. But that's not all. I’m not only going to share our horrible experience. I’m going to provide some evidence. Video reenactments of what scared me the most. Aftermath pictures of what attacked us combined with the audio and video evidence are what set this book apart from other haunted tales. What I and my girlfriend lived through and equally important what others before us lived through has come full circle. Yes, this house was featured on Travel Channels Ghost Adventures episode titled “Demons in Seattle.” The episode where Zak Bagans and crew left empty-handed. Why did they leave empty-handed? How does one investigate a malevolent haunting? Those questions and more are finally getting answered. Prepare yourself for an interactive journey. Recently updated.

Review by Chris Jensen Romer.

These guidance notes are intended to be helpful for those who seek to investigate Ghosts, Apparitions, Hauntings, Poltergeists and related phenomena. These are generally referred to as being spontaneous phenomena as they normally occur without warning, as such they cannot be predicted or prompted. Since the earliest times, countless witnesses have attested to experiencing apparitions or other ghostly phenomena and thousands of buildings and places have gained a reputation for being haunted. To ignore or dismiss these accounts would be foolish, to acknowledge them as proof without question or study would be equally so.

Available through the SPR Book Store.

Ghosts have fascinated and haunted us for millennia. They appear in our campfire tales, films, books, and television shows as well as in our dreams and nightmares. Despite widespread belief in spirits and the popularity of television ghost hunting shows, scientific evidence for them remains elusive. Investigating Ghosts is the first book to examine the history and techniques of ghost hunting from folkloric, scientific, and sociocultural perspectives.

No mere armchair scholar, author Benjamin Radford's book is based on nearly twenty years of first-hand, science-based investigations and research. Investigating Ghosts will entertain and educate skeptics and true believers alike, separating fact from fiction about this timeless mystery.

Topics include: 1) Guidelines for scientifically investigating ghost reports; 2) Analyzing photographic, audio, and video evidence; 3) Ghost hunting equipment: What works, what doesn't, and why; 4) In-depth case studies of solved ghost investigations; 5) Understanding the psychology of ghost experiences.

J.B. Priestley is considered by many to be an old-fashioned playwright whose work is locked in a pre-war world of provincialism and whose ideas are way past their sell-by date. In Time and the Rose Garden, internationally recognised author Anthony Peake re-assesses the plays and novels of this fascinating writer. In doing so, Peake argues that Priestley should be recognised as one of the most prescient of all middle century playwrights and that his ideas on time, consciousness and mortality can be found in hugely popular blockbusters such as The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Deja Vu, Sliding Doors, Butterfly Effect and many others.

Review by Robert A. Charman

From the publisher's website: "This book tells the incredible story of the cross-correspondence automatic writings, described by one leading scholar of the field, Alan Gauld, 'as undoubtedly the most extensive, the most complex and the most puzzling of all ostensible attempts by deceased persons to manifest purpose, and in so doing to fulfil their overriding purpose of proving their survival'. It is an intensely personal and passionate story on so many levels: May Lyttelton trying to convince her lover Arthur Balfour of her continued existence; Frederic Myers with indomitable persistence trying to produce evidence to prove survival generally; Edmund Gurney and Francis Balfour striving from beyond the grave to influence the birth of children who would work for world peace; Gerald Balfour and his lover Winifred Coombe-Tennant believing that their child, Henry, would be the Messianic leader of this group of children."

Further information about the book can be found on Imprint Academic's website:

http://books.imprint.co.uk/book/?gcoi=71157100349240

Trevor Hamilton has produced an entry on the cross-correspondences in the SPR's online Psi Encyclopedia:

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/cross-correspondences

Review by Donald J. West

From Dr. Pallikari’s website: The present volume contains 23 articles based on the memoirs of Dr. Angelos Tanagras, edited, annotated and translated from the original Greek into English by Fotini Pallikari. They describe the life, work and personality of Tanagras: his childhood, when he was serving as adoctor in the Greek Royal Navy, and later when he established and ran the Greek Society of Psychical Research.

These selected stories aim to offer a valuable source of information on the cultural heritage not only of Greece, but also of those countries Tanagras visited or just interacted with during the time from the late 19th and up to the middle 20th century. The material presented here should be of interest to historians, psychologists, parapsychologists and humanities scholars.

Further information can be found on Dr. Pallikari's website: 

http://users.uoa.gr/~fpallik/tanagras.htm

and on her Linkedin page:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/angelos-tanagras-my-memoirs-collection-short-stories-pallikari-viras/?published=t

Review by Tom Ruffles