The SPR has a review by Robert Charman of Steve Taylor "Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World" (2018), in which Taylor proposes a theory of what he calls "panspiritism". Charman is critical of the theory, but urges us to study Taylor's case for ourselves:
https://www.spr.ac.uk/book-review/spirit...eve-taylor
TruthSeeker on Skeptiko has posted a link to an interesting MuckRock article on a declassified CIA document from 1977:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/de...nuum.4286/
The document, entitled "Parapsychological Weapon", deals with Soviet parapsychology, KGB shenanigans, scientists investigating Uri Geller being affliicted by poltergeists, Teilhard de Chardin and theoretical physics. It ends by speculating that the telekinetic influence of ten individuals might be capable of causing a whole city to "sink back into a sea of energy or be displaced in time and space."
It was so peculiar that I wondered for a moment whether it might be a clever hoax (though where would anyone get hold of a typewriter in this day and age?). But here's the original document on the CIA website:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/...0042-9.pdf
It is a curious document, although given that it is categorised as an "informal note" I don't know how much we can make of it.
At any rate it seems the part about a journalist being arrested in Moscow in 1977, for receiving a scientific paper on parapsychology, is quite true. The journalist was Robert Toth, of the Los Angeles Times.
Here's a report from the Washington Post in 1977 referring to the incident, and also including some background information about Soviet parapsychology:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/p...8a491499e/
The incident is covered in more detail in this essay by Martin Ebon, entitled "Amplified Mind-Power Research in the Former Soviet Union":
https://sm4csi.home.xs4all.nl/nwo/MindCo...e_USSR.htm
For those who are interested, there's much, much more about Soviet parapsychology here, though I have no idea how reliable the information is:
https://sites.google.com/site/crabtreesc...s-and-more
Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's an interesting article from the New Yorker about John Barker and the British Premonitions Bureau. The Bureau was set up in 1967 after the Aberfan disaster, which appeared to have been foreshadowed by a number of precognitive dreams. The following year Barker died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, having been warned by a regular contributor to the Bureau that his life was in danger. Earlier the same year he had published a book entitled "Scared to Death", about the possibility of fear having fatal consequences:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/...the-future
Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, Craig Weiler has started a Parapsychology page on the Quora website, and has been posting contributions pretty frequently in the first week:
https://www.quora.com/q/rwtbmbxgygnumhcf
The most useful thing about listening to Jeffrey Mishlove's interview with James Alcock was that Alcock referred to a monumental survey of the state of parapsychology by John Palmer, published in 1986 as a Research Note for the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, under the title "An Evaluative Report on the Current Status of Parapsychology". It runs to 246 pages, and is available here:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a169486.pdf
(2019-03-02, 07:16 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]The most useful thing about listening to Jeffrey Mishlove's interview with James Alcock was that Alcock referred to a monumental survey of the state of parapsychology by John Palmer, published in 1986 as a Research Note for the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, under the title "An Evaluative Report on the Current Status of Parapsychology". It runs to 246 pages, and is available here:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a169486.pdf
This looks like a really useful reference work for the experiments done in the 1970s and 1980s. It outlines not only the experimental protocols and results, but also the criticisms by sceptics and Palmer's own conclusions about the quality of the work, which seem quite balanced. Palmer also deals with the practical philosophical issues behind the design of experiments and the interpretations of the results, and also discusses Stanford's theoretical concept of "psi-mediated instrumental response."
Here is the contents list:
1: Introduction
2: The Maimonides Dream Experiments
3: Remote Viewing
4: The Ganzfeld Debate
5: Random-Event-Generator Research
6: The Delmore Experiments
7: Correlational Studies
8: Psi-Mediated Instrumental Response
9: Metal Bending
10: Summary and Conclusions
For anyone who is interested in the subject matter but finds the idea of 246 pages off-putting, there is a 27-page chapter of "Summary and conclusions" at the end.
Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - Stephen Braude has made available at academia.edu seven editorials he wrote for the Journal of Scientific Exploration (free registration is required):
https://umbc.academia.edu/StephenBraude/Papers
The subjects are: Scientific Intolerance, Scientific Expertise, Replication in Parapsychology, Super Psi, Eyewitness Testimony in Parapsychology, Foolish Scientific Invective, and the Preservation of Important Documents.
In total there are 59 papers by Braude available on that site, and 6 books.