New Books and Media

A Host of Phenomena that Boggle the Mind

The Entity Letters describes a years-long sociological investigation of a sitter group that witnessed table movements, table levitations, poltergeist phenomena, earthquake effects, and other startling physical events. The group was known as the Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT), founded in 1961 by John G. Neihardt, the famous poet and author of the best-selling book Black Elk Speaks. SORRAT hoped to replicate Spiritualist phenomena to increase scientific understanding of psychokinesis (mind over matter). After meeting weekly for a few months, the group heard rapping sounds, seemingly from Black Elk and other spirits. The phenomena grew to include ostensibly spirit-written messages found within a sealed container called a mini-lab specially designed to preclude the possibility of fraud. Eventually, the “spirits” began communicating by mail with dozens of S0RRAT members, describing life after death, the nature of time, and spiritual development. The Entity Letters explores the idea that these kinds of experiences shaped ancient religions.

About the Author:

James McClenon, Ph. D., a sociology professor and licensed clinical social worker, has written three books: Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology (University of Pennsylvania Press), Wondrous Events: Foundations of Religious Belief (University of Pennsylvania Press) and Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion (Northern Illinois University Press).

Further information about the book (including table of contents) can be found at Anomalist Books

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:

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.

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.

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.