Dr. Brian Weiss – Pioneer of Reincarnation Therapy
Portrait of Dr. Brian Weiss, the Yale psychiatrist who made past-life regression famous worldwide through "Many Lives, Many Masters". A bridge between science and spirituality.
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Blog – Heaven Connect
The Heaven Connect Blog explores the world of mediumship – from your first mediumship reading and afterlife contact to near-death and consciousness research. We combine long-standing mediumistic practice with what science and research have to say, and also look at where mediums appear in film and pop culture. Knowledge and inspiration for your own journey between the worlds.
John Holland – Portrait of a Spiritual Teacher and Medium
Portrait of John Holland, one of the most renowned mediums in the USA. Author of "Born Knowing", Hay House radio host, and pioneer of mediumship training. He combines British Spiritualism with modern accessibility.
Read article →Jeffrey Tarrant: The Brain in Afterlife Mode – EEG Findings in Mediums
Dr. Jeffrey Tarrant has examined the brainwave patterns of mediums like Angelina Diana and Janet Mayer. His qEEG analyses show significant gamma wave activity and specific activations in brain areas responsible for visual processing and spiritual experiences, while the "ego center" becomes quiet. A fascinating insight into the neurobiological basis of mediumship.
Read article →Helping Parents Heal – Rigorous Testing for Provider Mediums
Helping Parents Heal (HPH) is an international non-profit organization supporting grieving parents. A core aspect of their work is the "Provider" system: mediums are only listed after a rigorous selection process. This includes recommendations from the community, several blind readings for board members, and a commitment to a code of ethics. The goal is to protect parents from charlatanism and provide access to high-quality, evidential mediumship that can foster true healing. As with Mark Ireland, listing is free for mediums to maintain independence.
Read article →Mark Ireland – Medium Certification and Evidence
Mark Ireland, son of the famous medium Richard Ireland, set new standards in medium certification following the loss of his son Brandon. His portal findacertifiedmedium.com and his work with the Forever Family Foundation aim to distinguish high-caliber mediums from charlatans through controlled double-blind procedures. Ireland calls for evidential mediumship that goes beyond vague statements, providing reliable guidance for the bereaved in an often confusing market. His commitment combines personal experience with a demand for scientific rigor to strengthen the integrity of mediumistic contacts.
Read article →The Robertson Healing Study – 130 Documented Cases of Paranormal Healing
When Tricia Robertson (SSPR) heard of Nina Knowland’s healing successes in 2006, she set out four possibilities — self-delusion, fraud, genuine overestimation, or inexplicable betterment — and wrote: "Only through investigation will we know." For five years she and Prof. Archie Roy documented four healers with record sheets, medical contacts, X-rays and video interviews. Results: among Knowland’s first 30 cases, 86% felt heat and 80% quick cessation of pain; in the controlled Glasgow test with Gary Mannion (15 subjects provided by Robertson), 46% immediate betterment, 8 of 15 improved after a month. Final tally: 130 documented conditions, 101 improving after a single session. With Robertson’s own limits — case series rather than RCT, the need problem of research settings — and the freely available final report as the source.
Read article →Paul Meek’s Mediale Highschool – Munich’s School for Spirit Contact
Portrait of the most influential mediumship school in the German-speaking world. In Haar near Munich, Paul Meek has trained mediums for years — starter seminar, multi-year block programme, an intensive week in the Bavarian Forest, and at the end a final examination with certificate and traditional blessing. The curriculum follows British Spiritualism: training the psychic senses, contact through the spirit guide, the separation of psychic level and spirit level as taught at the Arthur Findlay College. Because of his prominence Meek himself no longer gives private sittings and refers to his graduates: more than a hundred trained mediums in seven countries on his public address list, many of them represented in our directory — their CVs show training paths of three to eight years. With Simon Veigel as second teacher and Petra Plößer on the earlier teaching staff.
Read article →Anita Moorjani – the Near-Death Experience That Made the Cancer Disappear
One of the best-documented cases in near-death research. After four years of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Anita Moorjani was admitted in Hong Kong on 2 February 2006 with failing organs — the oncologist gave her 36 hours. In a 30-hour coma she experienced her deceased father and her friend Soni, faced the choice to return, and received the assurance that her body would heal "very quickly". Her NDERF account contains checkable outside perceptions: the later-confirmed doctors’ conversation forty feet away in the corridor, and her brother, whom she saw boarding a plane in India. Within four days the tumours shrank by 70–80 per cent, the biopsies came back clear, and after five weeks she was discharged cancer-free. Jeffrey Long called within hours, Wayne Dyer brought her to Hay House — "Dying to Be Me" (2012) became a New York Times bestseller. Her own reading ("If I had known how to love myself…") is marked as such — the documented core remains.
Read article →James Van Praagh – From the Seminary to the "Ghost Whisperer"
Portrait of one of the most influential American mediums. Raised in a Catholic family in Bayside, Queens, he entered pre-seminary at 14 — until an inner voice whispered: "God is much bigger than these four walls." At 24 the medium Brian Hurst predicted in Los Angeles that he would himself become a medium within two years — Hurst told the scene on his own website throughout his life. In 1997 "Talking to Heaven" made him famous overnight (25 languages, 30 countries, the Watkins list). Unique is his second career as a producer: his own talk show "Beyond", the CBS mini-series "Living with the Dead" with Ted Danson as Van Praagh — and, as executive producer, "Ghost Whisperer" with Jennifer Love Hewitt. Today he teaches at his School of Mystical Arts and the Omega Institute, and appears on the Basler Psi-Verein speaker list.
Read article →Lily Dale – the Village Where the Dead Are Neighbours
Portrait of the world’s largest Spiritualist community on Cassadaga Lake in New York State: meetings on Willard Alden’s farm from 1873, founded in 1879 as the "Cassadaga Lake Free Association" on twenty acres, later named after the lake’s water lilies. Around 300 year-round residents, up to 25,000 visitors per summer season, the highest concentration of mediums in the world. In 1916 Benjamin Bartlett had the Fox sisters’ house moved here from Hydesville (lost to fire in 1955, today a memorial stone). At Inspiration Stump mediums give free public message services daily, and anyone wanting to practise as a medium passes a roughly two-year vetting process — certification lived for generations. Plus Susan B. Anthony on Woman’s Day 1891, Mae West in 1955, the HBO documentary "No One Dies in Lily Dale" and its most famous newer resident: Lisa Williams.
Read article →Lisa Williams – "Life Among the Dead" and a School for Mediums
Portrait of one of the world’s best-known TV mediums. Born in Birmingham in 1973 as the granddaughter of the well-known British psychic Frances Glazebrook; she dates her first memory of the other world to age four, when the spirit of her great-uncle — who had choked to death on peas — warned her against the peas on her plate. TV legend Merv Griffin brought her to Los Angeles: "Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead" (Lifetime, from 2006), "Voices From the Other Side" and "Lisa Williams Live", plus appearances with Oprah and Jimmy Kimmel and, by her own account, more than seven million listeners worldwide. In 2013 she founded her own school (today the Psychic Medium Training Academy, 44 Master Teachers) and openly advocates certification: "We’ve got someone’s life in our hands." After eight and a half years in Los Angeles she moved to the Spiritualist village of Lily Dale; today she gives readings exclusively via Zoom — opening question: "Do you want to know everything?"
Read article →The Basler Psi-Verein – How Basel Became a Capital of Mediumship
Portrait of the institution that hardly any well-known medium in the German-speaking world passes by. In 1967 Matthias Güldenstein – inspired by Hans Bender – founded the "Parapsychological Working Group Basel", with chemistry professor Max Thürkauf on the first board; from 1973 it published the journal "Parapsychika". In 1983 Güldenstein and Alex Schneider launched the Basel Psi Days with the Basel Fair, the largest public congress on the frontier areas of science, with star guests up to Uri Geller – in 2006 they took place for the 24th and last time. Add the separation of society (Basel) and Psi Centre (Riehen, today the Amanar Centre, where Simone Rüegsegger trained), three decades under president Lucius Werthmüller (1958–2021), and today’s programme: around 300 events a year with Gordon Smith, Pascal Voggenhuber, Kai Mügge, Eben Alexander and Rupert Sheldrake.
Read article →Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiritualism – the Legend of the Grieving Father
The creator of Sherlock Holmes became Spiritualism’s best-known advocate — and the usual explanation for it is wrong. The legend has the death of his son Kingsley (28 October 1918) turning the rationalist into a believer. Doyle’s own book The New Revelation (1918) tells it differently: in 1882, after his medical training, a „convinced materialist"; around 1886 he read Judge Edmonds’ reminiscences „with interest, and absolute scepticism"; in 1887 he wrote to the paper Light about a séance — and he dates his final conviction himself to „the last year or two" before 1918, that is, before Kingsley died. Plus the break with Harry Houdini after the séance of 17 June 1922 at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, on the birthday of Houdini’s mother: Lady Doyle’s automatic writing, the cross at the head of the page, Houdini’s objection that his mother spoke no English, and Doyle’s answer that she had learned it in heaven. All from the books of those involved, including the Cottingley fairy photographs as the most embarrassing part.
Read article →Gordon Higginson – "Mr Mediumship" and the Man Who Saved the Arthur Findlay College
Portrait of one of the greatest British mediums of the twentieth century (1918–1993). Son of the medium Fanny Higginson, he sat in his mother’s circle from the age of three and demonstrated in public for the first time on his twelfth birthday – the "boy wonder". Famous for the accuracy of his platform work, giving full names, addresses and telephone numbers and working several links at once, for over sixty years and up to the Royal Albert Hall. In 1970 he took over the heavily indebted Spiritualists’ National Union, saved it and the Arthur Findlay College from bankruptcy, and remained its longest-serving president for 23 years; from 1979 to 1993 he was principal of the College. Add the rare public physical medium (ectoplasm, materialisation, an infra-red photograph from 1974), the trance medium with guides Choo Chow and Paddy, and the healer with "Dr John". He died on 18 January 1993 – by the accounts, he had demonstrated only the day before.
Read article →The Spiritualist Association of Great Britain – in London since 1872
Portrait of the oldest major Spiritualist institution in Britain: on 7 February 1872 around a dozen friends met at 16 David Street in Marylebone, and on 10 July the Marylebone Spiritualist Association came into being. The early years in a carpenter’s workshop and a former police court, Emma Hardinge Britten’s opening address in 1894, permanent rooms at Russell Square from 1930, the air-raid shelter in the basement during the Second World War, the leap to 33 Belgrave Square in 1955 (a 92-year lease for £24,500, opened by Lord Dowding) along with the renaming to Spiritualist Association of Great Britain — and the frankly admitted departure in 2010 after the banking crisis. With the mediums who served it (Estelle Roberts, Ena Twigg, Coral Polge, Doris Collins), Conan Doyle’s chair and what is on offer today: private sittings at £40, open circles, healing, Zoom formats. Plus the strikingly sober notice the Association gives its visitors: that every sitting is an experiment and that a medium does not predict the future.
Read article →Stewart Alexander – A Physical Medium Stops
Portrait of the British physical medium (b. 1946, Kingston upon Hull) who held his final guest circle at the end of 2025. Until he was 21 he knew nothing of Spiritualism; then his brother brought home Arthur Findlay’s “On the Edge of the Etheric”. His home circle began in 1967, but his physical mediumship emerged only in 1982 – after fifteen years. Hence his central conviction: mediums develop in home circles, not on courses. In 1990 he became archives officer and in 1993 president of the Noah’s Ark Society founded by Robin Foy, which gathered over a hundred circles within months – and broke apart over internal quarrels; his article of explanation was never printed and the society collapsed in 2004. What lasts is his archival work: tape recordings of elderly Spiritualists who had sat with the great physical mediums. He never gave private sittings, and declined to take part in “Surviving Death”.
Read article →Surviving Death – the Netflix Series on Life After Death
The six-part Netflix documentary by Ricki Stern (6 January 2021), based on the book by the American journalist Leslie Kean: near-death experiences with Bruce Greyson, two episodes on mental and physical mediumship, signs from the dead, apparitions and finally the children's reincarnation cases from the University of Virginia. Six mediums from our directory appear – among them a blinded reading with Angelina Diana, and Nicole Janssen, who features in the series under her other name Nicole de Haas. With the research behind it (Greyson, Stevenson's legacy, Julie Beischel's controlled studies) and the objections of its critics, set honestly side by side.
Read article →Alexa Kriele – the Angel Interpreter
Portrait of Alexa Kriele (b. 1961 in Überlingen): a trained philosopher and journalist, working full-time as an "angel interpreter" since 1994 – wide-awake interpreting between human and angel instead of trance. Four-volume foundational work "Wie im Himmel so auf Erden", books with Droemer Knaur and Random House, marriage to constitutional law scholar Martin Kriele, TV appearances with Biolek and Kerner – and the rare statement that an angel hour is usually needed only once in a lifetime.
Read article →Jana Haas – Angel Medium from Lake Constance
Portrait of Jana Haas (b. 1979 in Zelinograd, Kazakhstan): Volga German roots, a near-death experience at a river at age six, moved to Germany in 1992, trained as a real estate agent – and since 2005 her own Cosmogetic Institute on Lake Constance. More than 15 books (Ullstein, Knaur, Arkana) including the Spiegel bestseller "Der Blick hinter den Horizont", SWR Nachtcafé 2008, MYSTICA.TV interviews, low-threshold Zoom group formats (angel messages 50, distance healing 30 CHF/€) and her own children's charity in Russia.
Read article →Paradoxical Lucidity: When Dementia Opens for Minutes – the NIA Research Programme
What caregivers have told each other for decades has had, since 2019, a name and a research programme at the centre of the scientific establishment: the National Institute on Aging convened a workshop in 2018, and in 2019 the position paper around George Mashour (Alzheimer’s & Dementia; co-authors including Nahm, Batthyány, Greyson) defined "paradoxical lucidity" – unexpected, meaningful communication despite abilities assumed permanently lost, dementia-specific and not necessarily close to death (distinct from terminal lucidity). The findings: 124 case reports with over 80% complete remission (Batthyány & Greyson 2021), the Griffin typology of 2024, first prospective studies, plus the ethics debate on decisional capacity during episodes (Ney et al. 2021). With the open question of mechanism, the filter thesis as an attributed reading, an honest counter-side (retrospective reports, not a sign of recovery) – and the message to relatives: the person behind the dementia may be more reachable than the clinical picture suggests.
Read article →The Heyday of Mental Mediumship: Alan Gauld’s Last Book on the Golden Era of Trance Mediums
The late work of the doyen of mediumship research (White Crow Books 2022, 340 pages, endorsed by the Kellys, Braude and Cooper): at nearly ninety, Alan Gauld tells the heyday of 1880–1930 as a human story. Six of twelve chapters belong to Leonora Piper – James, Hodgson with his detectives and read mail, Newbold, the "Hodgson control" after 1905 –, then the book recovers the forgotten American line: Hyslop at Columbia, Minnie Soule alias "Mrs Chenoweth", the Doris case with its strikingly accurate mother-communicator, Lydia Allison and John F. Thomas, whose proxy sitting series earned him the first doctorate for mediumship research at Duke in 1933 ("Beyond Normal Cognition", 1937). The connecting thread: the evolution of control from séance to proxy protocol – in a straight line to Windbridge. With the honest counter-side: retrospective rather than new data, praise so far from within the field.
Read article →Mediumship and Survival: Alan Gauld’s Sober Balance of 100 Years of Mediumship Research
The standard work for the SPR centenary of 1982: Alan Gauld (1932–2024), neuropsychologist at Nottingham, SPR president 1989–1992 and holder of the Myers Medal, sifts a century of archival material – the trance mediums Piper and Leonard, the proxy sittings (the stand-in knows nothing about the deceased), his own speciality of "drop-in" communicators (Harry Stockbridge, confirmed in military records; the Icelandic Runki case with the walled-up femur, Haraldsson & Stevenson 1975) – and delivers the most honest treatment of the super-ESP counter-hypothesis: hardly excludable on logic, but the less parsimonious reading in cases combining purposeful agency and knowledge from multiple sources. With the bridge to Windbridge/EREAMS and the late work "The Heyday of Mental Mediumship" (2022).
Read article →Irreducible Mind: the 800-Page Inventory of Phenomena That Do Not Fit into the Brain
The standard work by Kelly, Kelly, Crabtree, Gauld, Grosso & Greyson (Rowman & Littlefield 2007): six specialists – among them Stevenson’s long-time collaborator and the doyen of NDE research – compile, across 800 pages, the phenomena on which the equation "mind = brain" founders: hypnotically induced blisters, the empty engram search, automatisms, NDEs during cardiac arrest and hypothermia, genius, mysticism. Their framework: F. W. H. Myers’ forgotten programme (Human Personality, 1903, enclosed on CD-ROM) and the filter thesis of Myers and James – brain damage distorts the programme, declining brain function can release more rather than less experience. Born in the Sursem project at the Esalen Institute (Michael Murphy, since 1998), opening a trilogy with "Beyond Physicalism" (2015) and "Consciousness Unbound" (2021). With the honest counter-side: Shweder’s praise and Kelly’s Myers Medal (2020) alongside Ash/Gundlach/Sturm and Dieguez’ "soul of the gaps" objection.
Read article →Hello from Heaven!: The Guggenheims’ ADC Project – the Founding Study of ADC Research
How a Wall Street analyst became the father of after-death communication research: Bill Guggenheim (1938–2023), a convinced materialist, saw Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on television in the mid-seventies – in 1980 an inner voice saved his small son from drowning. From 1988 he and Judy Guggenheim collected over 3,300 firsthand accounts in the ADC Project (2,000+ interviews, all 50 US states and 10 Canadian provinces, narrators aged 8 to 92). The book "Hello from Heaven!" (1996, 353 accounts verbatim) coined the term After-Death Communication and the taxonomy of the twelve forms of contact. With the evidential cases (contact before the news of death, protective warnings), the honest counter-side (a collection, not a controlled study – but Rees 1971 and the Psi Report confirm the order of magnitude) and the bridge to today’s Elsaesser project: the pioneers collect, the successors measure.
Read article →Stylometry and Mediumship: Can the Author of an Afterlife Text Be Measured?
Adrian Weibel's methods proposal from the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik (24/1, 2024): apply stylometry – statistical authorship analysis via function words, punctuation and syntax, famous for unmasking J. K. Rowling behind "Robert Galbraith" – to mediumistic writings. The point: the unconscious stylistic fingerprint has so far resisted imitation even by professional writers, and savants drop out too – a match in favour of a deceased author would thus be hard to explain away. Honestly reported: the two computer-aided tests so far went against the mediums (Goto 2018: the 1873 "Dickens sequel" is stylometrically not Dickens; Schöberlein 2017: Lizzie Doten's Poe poems are Doten – "Poe's author signal apparently died with him"). With Doyle's qualitative Wilde analyses of 1927, the curious signature findings of Saad & de Medeiros, Nickell's objection – and Chico Xavier's œuvre as a dream corpus for future tests.
Read article →Psychics and the Police: the Sobering Schouten Study
The most thorough investigation of "criminal telepathy", published in full for the first time after decades (Zeitschrift für Anomalistik 25/2, 2025, 84 pages, freely available; IGPP project 2003): the Dutch parapsychologist Sybo Schouten surveyed police departments in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA (one third with psychic experience, reported usefulness 0–21%), analysed 418 missing-persons cases (psychics involved in ~15%, three cases solved in four years, ~10% useful contributions, ~3% correct solutions) and two Dutch missing-girl cases in detail (contributions "entirely useless"). The surprising finding: the majority of relatives nevertheless judged the involvement positively – psychological support rather than investigative help. With the instructive 1958 vault case (genuine hit, wrong suspect), the Lyons/Truzzi anatomy of anecdotal error, and the honest boundary: what was tested were psychics in an investigative context, not mediumship in controlled settings.
Read article →After-Death Communications: What the Deceased Convey – the German Elsaesser Study
The freshly portrayed Zeitschrift für Anomalistik in action: in volume 25 (2025) the leading international ADC research team (Elsaesser, Roe, Cooper, Morrison & Lorimer; University of Northampton / Scientific and Medical Network, funded among others by the Bial Foundation and the SPR) published the analysis of the 235 German-language questionnaires of its project running since 2018 (1,300+ participants in six languages overall). The findings: in spontaneous contacts the deceased are perceived predominantly in a positive emotional state, support for the bereaved stands at the centre ("I am well, you can let go"), and the contacts palpably benefit grief. With the cross-connection to deathbed visions and Kerr's hospice research (the same message from both sides of the threshold), the honest counter-side (grief-coping reading vs. peculiarities of the material) and the normalising message: experiencers are neither alone nor ill.
Read article →Gerhard Mayer: the Field Researcher of Anomalistics
Portrait of the IGPP psychologist who represents fieldwork in the Freiburg ensemble: a doctorate on the reception of occult representations in film, then ethnographies of the neo-shamanic scene ("Schamanismus in Deutschland", 2003) and of contemporary magicians ("Arkane Welten", 2008) – taking seriously without believing along. As an investigator of hauntings he continues the Bender tradition with methodological rigour: the Black Forest hotel reconstruction, photographic anomalies, the sobering material analyses of the famous Bélmez faces, plus the study of the ghost-hunting scene and the methods volume "N gleich 1" on anomalistic single-case studies. As executive director of the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik, editor of the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik (since 2017) and first editor of the handbook "An den Grenzen der Erkenntnis" (with Schetsche, Schmied-Knittel, Vaitl), he is at the same time the field's organiser.
Read article →Christopher Kerr: the Doctor Who Listens to the Dreams of the Dying
Portrait of the Buffalo hospice physician who was the first to study the dreams and visions of the dying prospectively: at twelve, in 1974, Kerr witnessed his father's deathbed (the surgeon spoke of catching the plane to their shared fishing cabin) – he told the story only in 2015, in the TEDx talk that reached millions. The cardiologist with a doctorate in neurobiology got caught by his hospice side job and became chief medical officer of Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo. His longitudinal study (Journal of Palliative Medicine 2014, 59 patients, daily interviews): 88% with at least one dream/vision, almost invariably experienced as completely real, the deceased as the most frequent and most comforting content, increasing frequency toward death, ~one in five distressing; clearly distinguished from delirium. Over 1,400 patient interviews in total, plus the bestseller "Death Is But a Dream" (2020) and a documentary. Interpretively restrained – and precisely for that reason the strongest clinical source of deathbed-vision research.
Read article →The Journal of Anomalistics: Dispute as a Format
Portrait of the German-language journal of anomalistics research: published since 2001 by the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik, since volume 21 (2021) jointly with the IGPP, with Gerhard Mayer heading the editorial office since 2017. What makes it special is its blueprint after Marcello Truzzi's Zetetic Scholar: open peer commentary – main article, invited critical commentaries from different camps and the authors' reply appear in the same issue; the reader gets the dispute itself, not just its outcome. Three issues per year, peer-reviewed, listed in the DOAJ, older volumes freely available in full text. This completes the German-speaking infrastructure triad: institute (IGPP), learned society (GfA), journal – the counterpart to IANDS and the Journal of Near-Death Studies for anomalistics as a whole.
Read article →Michael Schetsche: the Sociologist of Proscribed Knowledge
Portrait of the theorist behind the Freiburg social research on the extraordinary: Michael Schetsche (b. 1956), political science at the FU Berlin, doctorate and habilitation in Bremen, since May 2002 head of the cultural and social science department of the IGPP and adjunct professor at the University of Freiburg. His tools: the sociology of knowledge (how societies separate knowledge from non-knowledge), the symmetrical analysis of conspiracy thinking ("Konspiration"), the Heterodoxie volume with Schmied-Knittel (2018) and the programme of reflexive anomalistics – studying phenomena and society's handling of them at once. With Bauer, editor of "Alltägliche Wunder" (2003, containing the Psi Report Germany) – and co-founder of exosociology ("Die Gesellschaft der Außerirdischen", with Anton, Springer 2019): the sociology of the encounter with the radically other.
Read article →The Psi Report Germany: How Common Is the Extraordinary?
The empirical answer to the "those are just isolated cases" objection: around the turn of the millennium the IGPP surveyed a representative sample of 1,510 Germans about exceptional experiences (Schmied-Knittel & Schetsche, published 2003 in the volume "Alltägliche Wunder", in English 2005 in the European Journal of Parapsychology). Result: around three quarters report at least one exceptional experience, a good half classic paranormal phenomena (precognitive dreams, impressions of telepathy, apparitions of the deceased) – across all strata of society, with no confirmation of the uneducated cliché. The follow-up survey "Alltägliche Wunder 2.0" (December 2024, over 2,050 respondents, now including NDE/OBE questions) confirms: still around three quarters. With an honest boundary (self-reports document experiences, not causes) and the 2001 sister study (4% near-death experiences).
Read article →Ina Schmied-Knittel: the Sociologist of the Extraordinary
Portrait of the IGPP social scientist (since 1998) who represents the third pillar alongside clinic and experiment: surveying the extraordinary in the population. Her two big numbers: with Knoblauch & Schnettler she published Europe's first representative NDE survey in the Journal of Near-Death Studies in 2001 (over 2,000 respondents, 4% near-death experiences, more diverse patterns than the Moody schema, striking East-West differences in interpretation) – and with Schetsche in 2003 the "Psi Report Germany" in the volume Alltägliche Wunder: more than half of Germans report at least one exceptional experience. Plus her doctorate as a discourse analysis of the satanism panic ("ritual abuse"), the Heterodoxie volume (2018), her involvement in the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik – and the Fanny Moser biography "Science und Séance" (2022).
Read article →Fanny Moser: From Jellyfish Researcher to Investigator of Hauntings
Portrait of the woman whose bequest carries the IGPP: Fanny Moser (1872–1953), daughter of the Schaffhausen watch manufacturer Heinrich Moser, enrolled in 1896 as the first female student at the University of Freiburg, took a doctorate in zoology in 1902 and built a serious career as a deep-sea specialist for siphonophores (the Prince of Monaco's collection, South Polar expeditions, several newly described species). After an inexplicable table levitation at a Berlin séance (February 1914) she spent decades examining the field source-critically: first the two-volume "Der Okkultismus – Täuschungen und Tatsachen" (1935), which sorted out the fraud, then the 1950 standard work on hauntings. With the Freud footnote (her mother is regarded as the "Emmy von N." of the Studies on Hysteria) and the bequest, including a 2,000-volume library, to the young IGPP – honoured by a symposium and the biography "Science und Séance" (Schmied-Knittel, 2022).
Read article →The IGPP: 75 Years of Research at the Frontiers of Psychology
Institutional portrait of the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health: founded in 1950 by Hans Bender (the programmatic name: "frontier areas" instead of "parapsychology", "mental hygiene" for counselling those affected), decisively enabled by the bequest of the Swiss zoologist and haunting researcher Fanny Moser (1872–1953) together with her 2,000-volume library. Privately foundation-funded and thus independent – in contrast to Lucadou's often-confused, state-funded counselling office. After the 1996 expansion (Wilhelmstrasse 3a), with around 20 researchers one of the largest institutions of the field worldwide; five thematic fields, the most important specialist library in the German-speaking world (in cooperation with Freiburg University Library), the archive with the estates of Moser and Schrenck-Notzing and Bender's correspondence – and current research such as the terminal lucidity project under Michael Nahm.
Read article →Michael Nahm: the Biologist Who Named Terminal Lucidity
Portrait of one of Germany's most unusual frontier researchers: a diploma thesis on migratory birds, a doctorate on drought stress in beech trees, years of international forestry research – anomalistics alongside as a private researcher, since 2018 full-time at the IGPP in Freiburg (founded in 1950 by Hans Bender). His main work: the rediscovery and naming of terminal lucidity (term 2009, 83-case review 2012, Ehmer study 2014), which arrived in the mainstream in 2019 with the Mashour position paper in Alzheimer's & Dementia – Nahm among the authors; 2023 Outstanding Contribution Award of the Parapsychological Association. The contested chapter is told honestly too: the Felix episode around Kai Mügge, assessed symmetrically (circumstantial evidence vs. denial, no live observation in a controlled sitting, Braude's "indeterminate", Kruse's later positive sensor documentation) – with references to both portraits and the Palladino pattern of "mixed mediumship" as one of several readings.
Read article →Deathbed Visions in Children: the Uncorrupted Witnesses
A companion to the deathbed-visions overview from the children's angle: children do not yet know the cultural scripts of the beyond – and still deliver the same pattern. The anchor case of Daisy Dryden (1854–1864): three days of clear conversations with her deceased brother Allie, documented by her mother, with the famous corrections of expectation ("no river, no curtain"; angels without wings). Plus Kübler-Ross's accident children as a natural control experiment (children named only those actually dead – "not a single child has ever given me a wrong name") and Christopher Kerr's modern hospice children's cases, above all 13-year-old Jessica with her deceased dog Shadow. With an honest counter-side (delirium distinction, thinner data for children) and context alongside terminal lucidity.
Read article →Terminal Lucidity: When the Mind Returns Before Death
People with severe dementia who have not recognised anyone for years suddenly become clear hours or days before death – recognising relatives, speaking coherently, saying goodbye. The biologist Michael Nahm named the age-old phenomenon in 2009; the review with Greyson, Kelly & Haraldsson (2012) collects 83 cases from 250 years (84% died within a week of the episode), and Batthyány's survey of 900 caregivers yields 124 modern cases with around 80% complete remission. Since the 2018 NIA workshop and the Mashour position paper in Alzheimer's & Dementia (2019), mainstream science has studied it as "paradoxical lucidity". With the 1922 Ehmer case (source caveats included) and the core question: if memories and personality return completely, they were never destroyed – only inaccessible. Where were they stored? Linked with the life review, deathbed visions and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →The Greyson NDE Scale: How to Measure a Near-Death Experience
The measuring instrument that turned anecdotes into a research field: in 1983 Bruce Greyson distilled 80 NDE features via a 33-question preliminary form into the 16-item scale with four dimensions (cognitive, affective, paranormal, transcendental) – 0/1/2 points per item, cutoff 7 of 32, deliberately published in the mainstream Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. With the two great trials: Rasch validation (Lange, Greyson & Houran 2004, British Journal of Psychology – unidimensional, interval level, invariant across gender, age and elapsed time) and test-retest over almost two decades (Greyson 2007, Resuscitation, 72 experiencers – no embellishment over twenty years). Plus its use (AWARE with the Greyson Scale; van Lommel still with Ring's WCEI) and honestly named limits: conventional cutoff, Western item pool, distressing NDEs under-represented, the NDE-C scale (Martial et al. 2020) as proposed successor together with Greyson's 2021 reply.
Read article →George Ritchie: the Near-Death Experience That Inspired Raymond Moody
The first case of modern near-death research: on 20 December 1943 the 20-year-old recruit George Ritchie (1923–2007) was pronounced dead at Camp Barkeley (Texas) after double lobar pneumonia – nine minutes without pulse or respiration, attested in a notarised statement by the army physician, brought back by an adrenaline injection into the heart. His account: flying east towards Richmond (the café in Vicksburg he recognised ten months later), his own body identified by the chipped fraternity ring, the being of light, the life review, different realms. NDE researchers Robert and Suzanne Mays later verified the date, the ward location and the almost exactly due-east Vicksburg trajectory. Ritchie became a psychiatrist (Towers Hospital, Universal Youth Corps) – and in 1965 told his story to students at the University of Virginia, among them Raymond Moody, who dedicated Life After Life to him. With Return from Tomorrow (1978, 250,000+ copies) and Stevenson's foreword to My Life After Dying.
Read article →Raymond Moody and "Life After Life" – the Man Who Named the Near-Death Experience
Portrait of the founder of near-death research: as a philosophy student in 1965, Moody heard George Ritchie's account of his own "death" in 1943 (nine minutes, Return from Tomorrow) – the man to whom Life After Life is dedicated. After a philosophy PhD (1969) and medical school (M.D. 1976), Moody analysed around 150 accounts, distilled the recurring elements (tunnel, being of light, life review, deceased relatives, peace) and in 1975 coined the term "near-death experience" – over 13 million copies sold. The foreword was written by the then already world-famous Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying, 1969), who had opened the field to a large audience before Moody named it: "It is research such as Dr. Moody presents that will confirm what we have been taught for two thousand years – that there is life after death." With honest methodological criticism (anecdotal, retrospective – the answer was five decades of follow-up research), the IANDS founding role, and Moody's later, more idiosyncratic paths (psychomanteum, shared death experiences).
Read article →The Journal of Near-Death Studies – the Field's Scholarly Journal
Portrait of the only peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted exclusively to near-death research: launched in 1981 as Anabiosis (founding editor Kenneth Ring), shaped by Bruce Greyson for a quarter of a century from 1982, renamed in 1987 with volume 6, edited by Jan Holden since 2008 (spring 2025: volume 43). With masked review by at least two referees, milestones such as Ring & Cooper 1997 (NDEs in the blind) and the 2007 stress test: three major critical essays by the skeptic Keith Augustine, each with commentaries and rejoinders in the same issue. Honestly assessed (IANDS house journal, 2021 acceptance rate: 71%) – and with the distinctive feature that the complete archive (over 1,000 full texts) is freely readable in the UNT Digital Library after a one-year embargo.
Read article →Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung e.V. – Germany's Point of Contact After a Near-Death Experience
Portrait of the association that keeps appearing in our NDE articles: founded in 2004 by Alois Serwaty (an experiencer himself, chairman until 2016) and the Bochum mathematics professor Günter Ewald (1929–2015), today around 310 members across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, part of the worldwide IANDS family. The association informs the public and offers experiencers contact persons, regional groups and referrals to psychotherapists familiar with the phenomenon – needed because an NDE changes people profoundly. With annual conferences and conference volumes (Freckenhorst 2007 "Near-Death and Transcendence", 2011 "Impulses for Life", 2018 "NDE, Religion and Christian Faith", 2025 Benediktushof symposium "A Challenge to the Materialist Worldview") and a scientifically staffed board: chaired by the psychologist Dr. Joachim Nicolay, with the neurologist Prof. Wilfried Kuhn as deputy.
Read article →Mendeleev and the Periodic Table Dream: Legend and Truth
Did Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) really see the periodic table complete in a dream? The most famous dream discovery is at once the most weakly supported – the ideal conclusion to the cluster around Loewi, Kekulé, Tesla and Ramanujan. The real core: the periodic law of 1869 and above all the courage of the gap – Mendeleev predicted the properties of unknown elements (eka-aluminium, eka-silicon, eka-boron), brilliantly confirmed as gallium, germanium and scandium. The legend, by contrast, is second-hand (from the geologist Inostrantsev), and three points argue against it: not a single source from Mendeleev himself (a critical analysis in the journal Dreaming, 1995); his surviving drafts of 17 Feb 1869 show laborious "chemical solitaire" with cards (Kedrov's archival finding: the table stood before the alleged dream); and from Mendeleev himself there is no first-hand testimony on it (the often-quoted "twenty years" remark is itself only attributed); the real counterweight is his surviving working drafts. Plus the curious detail: around 1902–04 Mendeleev placed the luminiferous ether as a chemical element "Newtonium" in a group zero / period zero above hydrogen (position zero) – removed again with the end of the ether concept (relativity, 1905). Plus the side note that Mendeleev took part in an 1875–76 commission that examined spiritualist mediums and wrote a book of his own on it – though the sources report his personal stance and the commission's origin only second-hand. Conclusion: a catchy flash-of-genius story is no proof – the counterpart to the strong Loewi case (Gordin 2019).
Read article →Otto Loewi and the Dream Experiment: When a Dream Delivered a Nobel Prize
The strongest case in the "creative insight through dreams" cluster: unlike Kekulé's image or Ramanujan's formulae, Otto Loewi's 1921 dream delivered a complete, workable experiment – one that proved chemical neurotransmission and led to the 1936 Nobel Prize (with Henry Dale). The article tells the famous double night from Loewi's own autobiography (first note scrawled in the night, illegible by morning; the next night at 3 a.m. the idea returns and he goes straight to the lab), the elegant two-frog-heart experiment (vagus stimulation → a "Vagusstoff" in the bathing fluid also slows the second heart; later identified as acetylcholine, the first neurotransmitter) and the birth of neuropharmacology. With three honest clarifications that diminish nothing: the dream supplied the experimental design, not the hypothesis (which Loewi had held since around 1903 – a textbook case of incubation); the first attempt was notoriously finicky and succeeded only under favourable conditions; and the embellished account comes from hindsight (1960). Conclusion: the unconscious can supply a whole experiment, but only the waking laboratory decides – dream, then test. Sister article to Kekulé, Tesla and Ramanujan.
Read article →Kekulé and the Benzene Ring Dream: The Snake Biting Its Own Tail
The most famous "dream discovery" in science: August Kekulé (1829–1896) is said to have recognised the ring structure of benzene (C₆H₆) after seeing, in half-sleep by the Ghent fireside, a snake biting its own tail (ouroboros). The article recounts both half-sleep reveries from his 1890 Benzolfest speech (London omnibus → structural theory; Ghent fireside → benzene ring) and his famous line "Let us learn to dream, gentlemen!" – together with the easily overlooked warning not to publish dreams before the waking mind has tested them. With the honest controversy: the anecdote surfaced only in 1890, some 28 years after the event, with no contemporary record; John Wotiz ("The Kekulé Riddle", 1993) considered it a later construct, and Josef Loschmidt had already sketched ring-like benzene structures in 1861 (a priority question). Against this stands the defence by the chemistry historian Alan Rocke (Image and Reality, 2010; Angew. Chem. 2015): Kekulé was a markedly visual, architecturally trained thinker for whom a "daydream" as the birthplace of a structural idea is credible. Conclusion: established are the ring and the visual thinking style, contested is the literal snake vision, and refuted is only the caricature of the ring conjured "out of nothing". Sister article to Tesla and Ramanujan.
Read article →Did Nikola Tesla Have Visions? Flashes of Light, the Mental Workshop and the Budapest Park
Did Nikola Tesla have visions? Yes – by his own, detailed account in the autobiography "My Inventions" (1919). The article cleanly separates three layers: well documented are the involuntary, often blinding flashes of light that accompanied his thoughts from childhood (today best read as photopsia / very vivid involuntary inner imagery), and his actual method of invention – the "mental workshop" in which he built machines entirely in his mind, ran them and tested them for wear, without drawing or prototype. Famous example: in 1882, while reciting Goethe's "Faust" in a Budapest park, the rotating magnetic field came to him in a flash – the principle of the alternating-current induction motor (he drew the diagram in the sand). Stylised are the perfectly formed eureka scenes (the scholarly biographer W. Bernard Carlson 2013 shows Tesla's self-mythologising), and not testable is the later layer of premonitions and "cosmic reception". Conclusion: a real visualisation phenomenon described by Tesla himself, whose true puzzle is the technical accuracy of the inner images. Sister article to Ramanujan; linked with Maxwell, Heisenberg and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →Ramanujan and the Goddess Namagiri – Did His Mathematics Come from Dreams?
Is it true that the genius mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) received his formulae from his household goddess? It is his own, much-attested account: the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal showed them to him in dreams – and the image of the "hand" is literally accurate, for in his description a hand wrote a series of elliptic integrals on a red screen "formed by flowing blood". Plus his guiding maxim "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God", the well-documented Cambridge episode (the sea-crossing taboo, resolved by his mother's dream) and the contrast with the atheist G. H. Hardy (who rated Ramanujan 100 out of 100 on his genius scale). With an honest separation between the biographically established (Ramanujan's attribution, the Namakkal cult, the notebooks including the later-proven mock theta functions) and the fundamentally non-testable (the supernatural transmission itself). Linked with Maxwell, Planck, Heisenberg and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →Does Meditation Lower Crime? The Maharishi Effect Examined
Are there experiments showing that group meditation lowers a whole region's crime rate? Yes – the most famous is the 1993 Washington, D.C. project: around 4,000 TM practitioners, a claimed drop in violent crime of up to 23.3% (Hagelin et al. 1999). The article shows why the "Maharishi Effect" is not accepted in mainstream science: the "drop" holds only against a self-modelled trend (in absolute terms homicides actually rose), the studies all come from TM-owned institutions, success criteria are adjustable after the fact, there is no independent replication and no physically plausible mechanism (fundamental critique: Fales & Markovsky 1997, Social Forces) – a textbook case of post-hoc statistics and confirmation bias. With the decisive separation from serious research: at the individual level meditation measurably reduces stress, impulsivity and aggression (independent prison meta-analysis Auty, Cope & Liebling 2017, effect sizes ~0.3–0.5) – something entirely different from action at a distance via a "field of consciousness". Linked with the Global Consciousness Project, the PEAR experiments and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →Does Orch-OR Hold Up? The Critique of Penrose, Hameroff and Quantum Microtubules
Penrose and Hameroff's Orch-OR hypothesis derives consciousness from quantum-gravitational processes in the microtubules of neurons – the boldest proposal to think quantum physics and consciousness together. This article (a companion to the Penrose portrait) asks: how well does the theory withstand criticism? Pillar 1, the Gödel argument: Penrose infers from Gödel's incompleteness that human insight is non-algorithmic – a step that logicians and philosophers like Putnam and Feferman reject as non-compelling (the "insight" is conditional; a human cannot know their own consistency either). Pillar 2, the decoherence problem: Tegmark (2000) calculated that microtubule superpositions decay in ~10⁻¹³ s – some ten orders of magnitude too fast; the rebuttal by Hagan, Hameroff & Tuszynski (2002) lifted this to ~10⁻⁴ s, but is itself still below the required ~25 ms. Plus the honest current state – tryptophan superradiance (Babcock et al. 2024) and microtubule anaesthesia findings (Khan/Wiest et al. 2024) – with the decisive three-way split: a quantum effect in microtubules ≠ the Orch-OR mechanism ≠ consciousness. A clean balance sheet rather than "long refuted" or "finally confirmed". The conclusion of the quantum biology series at its most speculative edge.
Read article →Enzymes and Quantum Tunnelling: When Hydrogen Goes Through the Barrier
Enzymes accelerate reactions by factors of millions to trillions. When transferring the lightest building block, hydrogen, many of them use a genuine quantum effect: the particle does not go over the energy barrier but – as a wave – through it; it tunnels. This is detected via kinetic isotope effects (KIE): classically the KIE at room temperature is at most about 7, while tunnelling produces anomalously large values and a striking temperature dependence. The article walks through three key findings – the first clear room-temperature demonstration in yeast alcohol dehydrogenase (Cha, Murray & Klinman 1989, Science), soybean lipoxygenase-1 with its spectacular KIE of about 81 (Knapp et al. 2002, JACS) and the atom-level modelled, "proton-tunnelling-dominated" aromatic amine dehydrogenase (Masgrau et al. 2006, Science). With an honest framing of the real dispute: tunnelling is broad consensus – whether protein dynamics ("promoting vibrations") actively promote it and how much it contributes to catalytic power is contested between Klinman/Scrutton and Warshel (Klinman & Kohen 2013). The third part of the quantum biology series (after the bird compass and photosynthesis) – linked with quantum entanglement, Penrose/Orch-OR and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →Quantum Biology of Photosynthesis: From the "Quantum Walk" to an Honest Correction
When light strikes a leaf, the energy travels as an exciton almost without loss through the light-harvesting complex to the reaction centre. From 2007 photosynthesis was the flagship of quantum biology: Gregory Engel's 2D spectroscopy revealed long-lived "quantum beats" in the FMO complex, read as electronic coherence – the exciton in superposition, sampling every path at once like a "quantum walk"; Collini et al. (2010) found similar signals even at room temperature. But from 2014 the turn came: are these really electronic coherences – or merely molecular vibrations? Duan et al. (2017, PNAS) showed that the purely electronic coherence decays after ~60 fs (title: "Nature does not rely on long-lived electronic quantum coherence…"); Cao et al. (2020, Science Advances, "Quantum biology revisited") summarised the consensus: the long-lived signals are predominantly vibronic. An honest history of science about reading quantum signatures in biology – the counterpart to the avian magnetic compass, where the quantum explanation conversely grew stronger. Linked with quantum entanglement, Penrose/Orch-OR and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →Do Birds Navigate Using Quantum Effects? The Magnetic Compass in the Bird's Eye
A robin finds its way at night and alone from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean each autumn – by a sense we do not have: an inner magnetic compass. The puzzle: the Earth's magnetic field (around 50 microtesla) is really far too weak to overcome the thermal jostling of molecules (the kT problem). The leading explanation is a genuine quantum effect – the radical-pair hypothesis: in the eye protein cryptochrome, light creates spin-entangled electron pairs whose singlet-triplet oscillation depends sensitively on field direction; the field acts through the phase of a spin superposition, not through energy. The article traces the arc from Wiltschko's inclination compass (1972) through Schulten's idea and the model of Ritz, Adem & Schulten (2000) to the decisive radio-frequency test (Ritz et al. 2004; Engels et al. 2014, Nature) and the isolated, magnetically sensitive Cry4 of the robin (Xu et al. 2021, Nature). With an honest separation of evidence and open question (no in-vivo proof yet, several senses in parallel, magnetite) and its place in quantum biology – linked with quantum entanglement, Penrose/Orch-OR, Josephson and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →The Rosenhan Experiment: When a Voice Becomes a Diagnosis
In the famous Rosenhan experiment (1973) eight healthy participants had themselves admitted to twelve US hospitals with a single invented complaint: they heard a voice saying "empty, hollow, thud". That sufficed for a diagnosis of schizophrenia; they were discharged as "in remission", and only the fellow patients saw through the hoax. The article takes this as the cue for the real question: that very basic experience – hearing a voice – lies at the heart of mediumship. What decides "ill or gifted" is not the content but the frame. With Hearing Voices research (Romme/Escher), Tanya Luhrmann's cross-cultural comparison (USA/India/Ghana, "social kindling") and the Durham study by Powell & Moseley of 65 Spiritualist mediums (first contact on average at 21.7 years, 71% before any encounter with Spiritualism, the central role of absorption), which clearly distinguishes mediumistic voice-hearing from psychosis. With an honest framing of Cahalan's critique of the experiment – linked with Moreira-Almeida, the Asch experiment and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →Kim Russo – Portrait of "The Happy Medium"
Who is Kim Russo? A portrait of the American TV medium "The Happy Medium": her own series (The Haunting Of…, Psychic Intervention, Celebrity Ghost Stories), her HarperCollins bestsellers – and above all the point that matters to us: she is a certified medium of the Forever Family Foundation (and on its advisory board) and was a Windbridge Certified Research Medium, having submitted to blinded research testing. With an honest framing of the "highest scores" claim and the documented Tom Green episode.
Read article →Mediumship Certification in the UK: SNU, ISM and SAGB Compared
Britain is the homeland of organised Spiritualism – and has three major bodies that accredit mediums. The article introduces and contextualises them: the Spiritualists' National Union (SNU, founded 1901, motto "Light, Nature, Truth") with its tiered award system (CSNU: two evidential communications to two recipients in 15 minutes plus a prayer; DSNU as the higher tier; plus OSNU, MSNU, LSSNU) and the world-famous Arthur Findlay College at Stansted Hall. The Institute of Spiritualist Mediums (ISM, founded 1956 by Bertha Harris) with its path through workshops, home circles and fledgling assessments to Registered Approved Medium (ISM/RAM) and assessment meetings in March, June and September. And the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain (SAGB, founded 1872 as the Marylebone Spiritualist Association) – one of the oldest institutions of all – with its approved mediums. Plus the key framing: the British "live demonstration before assessors" is a reputable practitioner accreditation, but not a blinded scientific test like the Forever Family Foundation or Windbridge.
Read article →Forever Family Foundation – Certification for Mediums: Process, Requirements, Application
A practical guide for mediums who want to be certified by the Forever Family Foundation (FFF). What the US non-profit is (501(c)(3), founded 2004 by Phran and Bob Ginsberg, over 17,000 members, run entirely by volunteers), why an independent certification is a genuine trust signal toward the bereaved and why you cannot buy your way in. The "Medium Evaluation Certification Process" in detail: a blinded procedure via webcam, several unknown sitters, controlled selection, composite scoring. Plus the requirements (minimum 3 months membership, an established ability, willingness to volunteer), the cost (the test is free), the real bar (only around 27 certified mediums since 2005, a roughly 10–15% pass rate), the application route (mcp@foreverfamilyfoundation.org) – and an honest assessment: a credible quality signal, but not scientific proof. Linked with Windbridge, Arthur Findlay College, "recognising a serious medium" and the certifications section of the inspiration page.
Read article →The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Delok – Tibet's "Returners" from Death
Long before the Western term "near-death experience", Tibet had two answers of its own to dying: a text and a class of witnesses. The text is the Bardo Thödol ("Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State"), a terma of Padmasambhava rediscovered by Karma Lingpa – read aloud to guide the dying through the three bardos (clear light, peaceful/wrathful deities as projections of one's own mind, the pull toward rebirth). The witnesses are the delok ("das-log"): people, often women, who seemingly die, lie "dead" for hours or days, travel through the afterlife realms, stand before Yama and the mirror of karma, and return as messengers. With two famous cases (Lingza Chökyi seeing her corpse as a pig's carcass; Dawa Drolma, sixteen, dead for five days), the striking NDE parallels (Carl Becker), the honest differences (a literary, edifying genre, Bryan Cuevas) and the Western reception from Evans-Wentz (1927) through C. G. Jung to Sogyal Rinpoche. Sister piece to the Nechung Oracle; linked with the life review, the OBE and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →The Nechung State Oracle – Tibet's Institutional Trance Mediumship
Tibet has something without a second example: a state-institutionalised trance medium. In the Nechung Oracle a monk, the Kuten ("physical basis"), offers his body in deep trance and lets the protective deity Dorje Drakden (of the Pehar group) speak through him. The article explains the history (Padmasambhava tames Pehar in the 8th century at Samye monastery, the 5th Dalai Lama makes Nechung near Drepung/Lhasa the State Oracle in the 17th), the tangible trance phenomena (ceremonial regalia over 30 kg, a helmet of around 14 kg today / over 36 kg formerly, the swelling body, bent iron swords, the rigid collapse afterwards), the role in state affairs up to the Dalai Lama's flight in 1959 ("Go! Tonight!" – including the recorded escape route) and the present medium Thubten Ngodup (since 1987). With the honest restraint shared even by the 14th Dalai Lama himself – linked with trance mediumship, Chico Xavier and the brain-consciousness question.
Read article →Peter Fenwick – the Brain Scientist Who Studied Dying
Profile of the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick (1935–2024) – not an esoteric latecomer but an EEG and epilepsy expert at the Maudsley Hospital and the Institute of Psychiatry (King's College London) with over 300 scientific papers. It was precisely this brain expertise that led him not to explain near-death experiences away: he tested oxygen shortage, the temporal lobe, anaesthetics, the dying retina – and found no explanation for lucid experience while the brain has shut down. His NDE survey "The Truth in the Light" (1995, with Elizabeth Fenwick, over 300 accounts) and his most distinctive contribution, the prospective study of end-of-life experiences: deathbed visions, deathbed coincidences, terminal lucidity, light at the deathbed. Plus "The Art of Dying" (2008), his role at IANDS, the Scientific and Medical Network and the Horizon Research Foundation, his mentoring of Sam Parnia (AWARE) and Penny Sartori – and his own death in 2024. Linked with Ring, Greyson, van Lommel, deathbed visions and the receiver model.
Read article →Kenneth Ring – the Man Who Made the Near-Death Experience Measurable
Raymond Moody collected stories; Kenneth Ring, a social psychologist at the University of Connecticut, turned them into a science. His portrait: the study "Life at Death" (1980, 102 experiencers – nearly half with a "core experience") and the field's first measure, the Weighted Core Experience Index. His five-stage model (peace, separation, darkness, seeing the light, entering the light) with its descending, ordered sequence – strongly claimed, read back by Blackmore as a dying brain. The transformation thesis of "Heading Toward Omega" (1984, Teilhard's "Omega Point"), the bold, contested side-path of the Omega Project (1992, NDE & UFO – honestly not glossed over), the blind-NDE study "Mindsight" (1999) with Sharon Cooper. Plus Ring as co-founder/past president of IANDS and founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies – and his road from sober statistician to the receiver model ("Mind at Large"). Linked with Greyson, van Lommel, Sabom, Alexander, the life review and veridical perception.
Read article →IANDS – How Near-Death Research Became a Scholarly Field
Portrait of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, which keeps appearing in our researcher portraits: after Raymond Moody's "Life After Life" (1975), John Audette convened a meeting in Charlottesville in November 1977 – with Moody, Kenneth Ring, Bruce Greyson and Michael Sabom. In 1978 this became the Association for the Scientific Study of Near-Death Phenomena, reorganised in 1981 under Ring (first president) as IANDS at the University of Connecticut. Its most consequential building block: the Journal of Near-Death Studies (launched 1981 as Anabiosis), to this day the field's only peer-reviewed journal – editor chain Ring → Greyson → Jan Holden (since 2008). Plus annual conferences since 1982, over 80 local "Friends of IANDS" groups plus online sharing groups, training material for medical staff, around 1,400 members – and the worldwide family of national sister organisations such as Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung e.V.
Read article →Out-of-Body Experiences: What Is Actually Experienced
The out-of-body experience (OBE) as a phenomenon – described before it is interpreted (the question of proof is in the astral-travel article). What is experienced: the separation, the external vantage point onto one's own body, a wide-awake, "more real than real" clarity, mostly peaceful. Who has it: about 10% of the general population, more in student samples (Celia Green 1968), psychologically healthy (Gabbard & Twemlow, "With the Eyes of the Mind", 1984, 339 cases). When it occurs: in the transition to sleep, in sleep paralysis, in mortal danger, under anaesthesia, in cardiac arrest. Plus the clean distinctions from lucid dreams, sleep paralysis (~7.6% lifetime) and the autoscopic phenomena of neurology (Blanke & Mohr 2005) – and the OBE as the core of the near-death experience.
Read article →Wilder Penfield – The Brain Surgeon Who Began a Materialist and Ended a Dualist
Wilder Penfield (1891–1976) – Princeton, Rhodes Scholar under Sherrington at Oxford, trained under Harvey Cushing. Founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute (1934), inventor of the "Montreal procedure" of awake epilepsy surgery and discoverer of the cortical homunculus (with Rasmussen, "The Cerebral Cortex of Man" 1950; with Jasper "Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy" 1954). Over more than 40 years he stimulated the exposed cortex of some 1,100 awake patients: he could evoke movements, sensations, memories (the "interpretive cortex", flashbacks in under 5%) and emotions – but never the thinking, deciding mind itself. His famous case: on motor-cortex stimulation the patient says "you made me do that, I didn't do it" – the electrode moves the arm but does not generate the will. His last book "The Mystery of the Mind" (1975) documents the turn from materialism to dualism: man more simply explained by two fundamental elements (brain = computer, mind = programmer). The key witness invoked by Egnor and Eccles – first-hand, against his own starting conviction, without overreach. The materialist "not yet" counter-reading is carried along.
Read article →Michael Egnor – The Neurosurgeon Who Argues Against Materialism from the Operating Room
Michael R. Egnor (b. 1954) – Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at Stony Brook University, longtime director of pediatric neurosurgery, by his publisher's account some 7,000 brain operations in 40 years. From a Columbia biochemistry student and materialist to an avowed Aristotelian-Thomistic dualist (not Cartesian: the soul as form, only intellect and will immaterial). His book "The Immortal Mind" (with Denyse O'Leary, Worthy/Hachette, June 2025) builds on clinical cases: the twin sister Katie with a third of the brain mass (essay "Science and the Soul"), Wilder Penfield's 1,100 awake surgeries and his dualist turn in "The Mystery of the Mind" (1975), Roger Sperry's split-brain patients and the seizure argument (seizures trigger movement, perception, memory and feeling, but never abstract thought – no "arithmetic" or "morality seizure"). Stated honestly: Egnor is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute (Intelligent Design), the criticism by Steven Novella ("god of the gaps") and Jerry Coyne is carried along; the first-hand clinical observations and the worldview conclusions are cleanly separated. Linked with Eccles, Faggin, Greyson and the consciousness-brain conjecture.
Read article →Astral Travel and Out-of-Body Experiences: Experience, Tradition and the Experiments
What is astral travel – and can the "journey" be tested? The distinction between out-of-body experience (OBE, the established experience) and the metaphysical interpretation (a travelling "astral body", the open question). The tradition from Theosophy through Muldoon to Robert Monroe and Brazilian projectiology – and above all the concrete experiments: Tart's "Miss Z" (1968, number 25132, four nights) with its criticism (clock reflection, no video, Gardner), Ingo Swann at the ASPR (8/8, the origin of remote viewing), Blue Harary's kitten "Spirit", Blanke's brain stimulation (Nature 2002) and Blackmore's psychological theory. The designated hard test – the AWARE study's shelf targets – effectively never ran (too few prepared rooms, missed/late interviews), so it is a failure of the study and not a null result; the question is kept open by veridical perception, not by tradition.
Read article →The CIA Gateway Process: Consciousness Beyond Space and Time (1983)
Since 2021 a declassified CIA document has gone viral, supposedly "proving" astral travel. What it actually says: in 1983 Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell assessed the Monroe Institute's Hemi-Sync program (Robert Monroe, "Journeys Out of the Body", Focus 10/12/15/21) and explained out-of-body experiences via the holographic universe of Itzhak Bentov, David Bohm and Karl Pribram. Plus the legendary "missing page 25" (a microfilming error, not a cover-up), the link to the Stargate program and Remote Viewer 001 Joseph McMoneagle – and an honest appraisal between binaural beats, the neuroscience of the OBE (temporoparietal junction) and veridical perception as the real test.
Read article →Deathbed Visions: When the Dying See the Dead
Shortly before death many people report seeing already-deceased loved ones who come to "fetch" them – comforting, distinct from delirium, and different from a near-death experience (here the dying person themselves is observed). The strand runs from William Barrett's founding work "Death-Bed Visions" (1926) with the classic case of the dying Doris, who saw her sister Vida – dead three weeks, but kept secret from her – through the large cross-cultural survey by Osis & Haraldsson ("At the Hour of Death", 1977, US + northern India, ~10,000 questionnaires) to Christopher Kerr's prospective hospice studies (50–60% of conscious dying patients). The evidential core is the "Peak in Darien" cases: the dying name someone whose death they could not have known of – like the child in Kübler-Ross's interview who saw her brother Peter, killed minutes earlier, "waiting". Weighed honestly against the counter-side (dying brain, medication, wishful thinking, retrospective) and linked with Kübler-Ross, veridical perception, the receiver model and palliative training.
Read article →Near-Death Experiences in Medicine: A Blind Spot in Training
In 2017 the neurologist Wilfried Kuhn observed that near-death experiences are "definitely not" taught at medical faculties – and that still holds. Yet it is not a metaphysical problem but a clinical one: 10–20% of resuscitated patients and about 15% of long-ventilated ICU survivors report NDEs; 50–60% of conscious hospice patients have end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs), mostly comforting and clearly distinct from delirium. Dismissing or pathologising them demonstrably causes distress and destroys trust; comforting visions get sedated away as delirium; the distressing cases (~5%) are misread as psychosis. The key move: you need not regard NDEs as paranormal to demand that doctors handle them competently – and the bar is low: they would only need to recognise such cases, not shut them down, and refer them (triage competence, IANDS, chaplaincy). Why this is the least controversial, most feasible reform in the field. With the Greyson/Pehlivanova survey (2024) and links to Kuhn, the receiver model and the sociology of science.
Read article →The Blind Who "See": Ring, Cooper and the Riddle of Mindsight
Perhaps the most puzzling strand of near-death research: people blind from birth, who have never processed an image, report after a near-death experience that they "saw". Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper gathered the cases in "Mindsight" (1999) – among them Vicki Umipeg, whose optic nerve was destroyed in the incubator ("No light, no shadows, no nothing, ever"), who saw her body, her wedding ring and the doctors "from above", and Brad Barrows, who at age eight, in cardiac arrest, saw his blind roommate go for help (later confirmed). 31 blind subjects, 14 of them blind from birth, about 80% reporting visual impressions. Crucially, Ring expressly calls it "mindsight" – a multisensory awareness, not ordinary vision. Weighed honestly against the strong counter-side (Keith Augustine: retrospective, anecdotal, unreplicated) – why that is exactly what makes the debate so compelling and where the real proof is still missing. With links to Sabom, van Lommel, Holden and the receiver model.
Read article →Eben Alexander: The Most Famous and Most Contested Near-Death Experience
No modern near-death case is better known – and none has been attacked more fiercely. The neurosurgeon Eben Alexander (who taught for a time at Harvard Medical School) falls into a seven-day coma in 2008 from rare gram-negative E. coli meningitis and lives through an overwhelming journey: the murky "earthworm" realm, the blossoming Gateway valley, the woman on the butterfly wing with her message ("You are loved … you have nothing to fear") and the "Core" with its "Om". His "Proof of Heaven" (2012) becomes a worldwide bestseller – carried by a strong argument: his neocortex was shut down, so the experience cannot be a product of the brain. But Luke Dittrich's Esquire investigation (2013) disputes the central premise (the coma was medically induced, per ER physician Laura Potter), and Sam Harris calls the argument "alarmingly unscientific" (no fMRI/PET/EEG functional data); Oliver Sacks points to the cortex coming back online. An honest weighing in both directions – why the case cannot bear the "proof" claim and where the real evidential weight lies (Sabom, van Lommel, Holden, veridical perception).
Read article →Michael Sabom: The Cardiologist Who Made Veridical Perception Measurable
Unlike most NDE pioneers, Michael Sabom was a sceptic: the cardiologist (Emory University) set out to refute Raymond Moody's "Life After Life" and launched a five-year study of more than a hundred resuscitated patients – which changed his mind. His methodological stroke of genius in "Recollections of Death" (1982) was the control group: cardiac patients without an NDE were asked to describe a resuscitation – every account contained major errors, while the NDErs who had watched their own resuscitation "from above" described it accurately (26 of 32 autoscopic cases on target, the remaining six highly precise against confidential records). This counts as the first hard evidence of veridical perception – the blueprint for Holden, van Lommel and Greyson. "Light and Death" (1998) brought the Atlanta Study (160 patients, 47 NDEs) and the Pam Reynolds case – along with a conservative Christian turn and the famous feud with Kenneth Ring ("Religious Wars in the NDE Movement", 2000). Why the NDE field, too, has its camps and dogmas – symmetry in both directions.
Read article →Veridical Perception: When the Dying See What They Cannot See
Most elements of a near-death experience are inner experiences and cannot be checked from outside – but one can: veridical perception, where people accurately perceive, during a documented cardiac arrest, things they could not have perceived. Six concrete cases, honest about strengths and weaknesses: Pam Reynolds and the bone saw (Sabom, "standstill" surgery), Maria's tennis shoe on the ledge (Seattle 1977 – striking, but only one witness; sceptical re-examination Ebbern & Mulligan 1996), the man with the dentures (van Lommel, Lancet 2001 – documented at the time by nursing staff), AWARE's "Mr A" (Parnia 2014 – one verified case, but the hidden images produced no hit), Al Sullivan and the "flapping" surgeon, and people born blind who "see" (Ring & Cooper, Mindsight). From the single case to the number: Janice Holden's tally of over a hundred cases (about 92% accurate). With the honest counter-side (Keith Augustine; the negative prospective test) and the question of where consciousness "resides" when the brain has failed.
Read article →The Asch Experiment: What It Really Showed – and Why the Textbook Misremembers It
"Three out of four call white black when the group does – humans are sheep." That is how Solomon Asch's line experiment (1951) appears in the textbook – inverting what Asch himself emphasised. The setup (unambiguous line task, control error below 1%, 12 of 18 critical trials with a unanimously wrong majority), the famous figure (37% conforming judgements, three in four at least once) – but also the forgotten one: on about two thirds of the trials people stayed independent, a quarter never went along. A textbook survey (Friend, Rafferty & Bramel 1990) shows the independence was quietly dropped; Asch was struck by the resistance. With the decisive variations – a single ally cuts conformity by about three quarters (and it need not be the correct answer: unanimity matters more than group size) –, the normative vs. informational distinction (most knew the group was wrong and admitted it privately), the context dependence (Bond & Smith; Perrin & Spencer) and the real, encouraging lesson. Linked to Milgram, Stanford, Arendt and Bonhoeffer – and to the broader herd-behaviour overview.
Read article →The Stanford Prison Experiment: The Most Famous Study That Never Was
"Put good people into a bad role, and they turn bad" – the lesson from Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment (Stanford, 1971) is in every textbook. 24 students screened as healthy were split by coin toss into "guards" and "prisoners"; after six of the planned fourteen days it was called off, because the guards seemed cruel and the prisoners broken. From this came Zimbardo's "Lucifer Effect" and the line to Abu Ghraib. But the finding does not survive scrutiny: Thibault Le Texier's archival work (Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment, American Psychologist 2019) shows the guards were explicitly coached toward brutality; the famous breakdown of "prisoner" Douglas Korpi was, by his own account, faked (Ben Blum, The Lifespan of a Lie, 2018); the most brutal guard consciously played a role; and methodologically there was neither a control group nor a real hypothesis test. The counter-test – Reicher & Haslam's BBC Prison Study (2006) – found the opposite: no automatic role conformity, what matters is shared identity. With Zimbardo's rebuttal, the link to Milgram, Arendt and Bonhoeffer, and the meta-lesson of why even a comfortable, canonical finding can be a myth.
Read article →The Milgram Experiment: What Was Really Measured – and What the Myth Made of It
"65% go all the way to 450 volts – humans obey blindly." Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment (Yale, from 1961, inspired by the Eichmann trial) appears like this in every textbook – half true, half myth. The setup (teacher, learner, experimenter, generator up to 450 V, the four "prods"), the famous baseline (26 of 40) – and above all the roughly two dozen variations in which obedience collapses: victim in the same room 40%, touch proximity 30%, run-down office instead of Yale 47.5%, experimenter only on the phone ~21%, two rebelling peers 10%. Obedience is thus not a constant but situational. Plus Gina Perry's archival critique (improvised prods, sceptical subjects – those who believed in real harm obeyed less; poor debriefing), Haslam & Reicher's "engaged followership" (the only genuine order, the fourth prod, worked worst – not submission but identification with the "good cause of science") and the ethics turn (Baumrind 1964, Burger 2009 with ~70%). Why this supports exactly the thesis of Arendt and Bonhoeffer – and why even canonical "truths" deserve scrutiny.
Read article →On Stupidity: Why Bonhoeffer Considered the Followers More Dangerous Than the Perpetrators
The real problem is not the few truly evil people at the top – those one could deal with – but the many followers who follow them uncritically and thereby make them powerful in the first place. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this down in 1942 within the resistance, in the section "On Stupidity" from "After Ten Years" (later in "Letters and Papers from Prison"); in 1945 he was executed at Flossenbürg. His thesis: "Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice" – for "against stupidity we are defenceless". The decisive point: by "stupidity" he means no lack of intelligence but a moral-social defect produced by power – "the power of the one needs the stupidity of the others". The follower becomes a "will-less instrument", "capable of any evil" and "at the same time unable" to recognise it as evil. With the independent parallel to Hannah Arendt's thoughtlessness, Bonhoeffer's resolution (not an act of instruction but of inner liberation to a "responsible life before God") as a bridge to the site's conscience theme – and a warning about the many Bonhoeffer misquotes. All quotes verbatim from the original, in the public domain since 2016.
Read article →The Life Review: What Near-Death Research Knows About the Panoramic Re-Living
The "life flashing before your eyes in seconds" sounds like a movie cliché but is one of the best-documented elements of the near-death experience – with a research lineage more than 130 years old. From 1892 Albert Heim surveyed fallen mountaineers (his own Säntis fall in 1871) and assembled the first systematic collection of near-death experiences. Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti translated Heim and measured the phenomenon empirically ("panoramic memory", 205 accounts, 60 with a life review). In Bruce Greyson's NDE Scale the review belongs to the cognitive cluster. Kenneth Ring worked out the uncomfortable core: the perspective reversal in which one feels one's own deed from the other's side ("I was the very people that I hurt"). With an honest reductive counter-side – depersonalization, temporal lobe, the 2022 incidentally recorded "dying brain" gamma finding (single case) – and the question these models leave open: they explain the trigger, not where the other's perspective and the never-consciously-encoded contents come from. The life review as a hint toward non-local storage (van Lommel) – and the bridge to Hannah Arendt's conscience as a dialogue with oneself.
Read article →Obedience and Evil: How Hannah Arendt Explains Thoughtlessness
How does evil arise on a large scale? Not through monsters, but through many ordinary people who hand over their judgement and responsibility to authority, orders and the spirit of the age, without thinking for themselves. Hannah Arendt's real thesis is not "bureaucracy makes you evil" – the popular caricature of Eichmann the "banal bureaucrat" has anyway been outdated since Bettina Stangneth's "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" (2011) – but: where thinking stops, the moral brake falls away. With the "ordinary men" (Christopher Browning's Reserve Police Battalion 101, which explicitly left refusal open; Harald Welzer's three perpetrator mechanisms), an honest reading of Milgram (Gina Perry's data critique, Haslam/Reicher's "engaged followership" instead of blind obedience) and Arendt's core from "The Life of the Mind": thoughtlessness as the quiet suspension of the "two-in-one", the dialogue with oneself. The few who did not join in refused not out of loyalty to principle, but because they were unwilling to "live with a murderer" – themselves. The bridge to this site: conscience as an inner authority – up to the life review of near-death research, in which one feels one's own deed from the perspective of those affected.
Read article →The Lasting Transformation After Near-Death Experiences – What Remains for Decades
The debate about near-death experiences fixates on the seconds during cardiac arrest and overlooks the most remarkable part: the radical, lifelong change afterwards – loss of the fear of death, less materialism, more compassion, a new sense of meaning, deepened spirituality. The article shows why these after-effects carry empirical weight. Pim van Lommel's prospective Lancet study (2001, 344 patients) compared experiencers after two and eight years with a control group who had survived the same cardiac arrest without an NDE: only the NDE group transformed deeply, specifically and, over the years, increasingly. Greyson (2022) demonstrated the stability over roughly twenty years (Life-Changes Inventory, 63 experiencers) and a dose effect: the more intense the experience, the greater the change. With an honest framing of the one partial analogue – the psychedelic mystical experience (MacLean, Johnson & Griffiths 2011), where not the substance but the NDE-like mystical quality predicted the lasting effect – and the limit: the transformation makes "just a hallucination" implausible but does not prove an afterlife; that is decided by veridical perception.
Read article →Ian Stevenson (1918–2007) – the Psychiatrist Who Turned "Cases of the Reincarnation Type" into Science
The missing pillar of our series on consciousness and survival: memories at the beginning of a life rather than at its end. In 1957 Stevenson gave up his psychiatry chair in Virginia to document – funded by Xerox inventor Chester Carlson, whose bequest founded the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) in 1967 – around 2,500 cases of small children who appear to carry memories of a previous life. With his conservative field method (both families interviewed separately, written records predating verification), the focus of his late work "Reincarnation and Biology" (1997) on birthmarks said to match autopsy findings, the modern James Leininger case (Jim Tucker) – and consistently symmetric scepticism: Champe Ransom (Stevenson's own assistant), the interpreter and time-gap problems, Paul Edwards, Leonard Angel and Michael Sudduth's sharp re-analysis of the Leininger case. Why the birthmark cases are the harder evidence and what the material means for the question of where memory is stored.
Read article →From Mesmerism to Hypnosis – How "Quackery" Became Science
What counts as serious science and what as superstition is not a fixed fact but a movable line – the history of hypnosis shows it exemplarily. A Paris commission under Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier dismissed Franz Anton Mesmer's "animal magnetism" in 1784 as mere imagination (in one of the first blinded trials in history – methodologically a triumph, and they were right about the "fluid"). Yet in the same year Puységur discovered the trance (artificial somnambulism), and with it a real phenomenon thrown out together with the fluid: the power of suggestion. James Braid coined the term "hypnosis" in 1843 and discarded the fluid; in 1882 Charcot legitimised hypnosis again before the same Académie des sciences; the Nancy school (Bernheim, Liébeault) established suggestion. Yet hypnosis itself stayed marginal for almost the entire 20th century – in psychology it was at times dismissed as mere role-play (Sarbin, Barber, Spanos); only brain scans (Rainville 1997, PET: hypnotic suggestion measurably alters pain-processing regions) demonstrated objective neural effects. Honestly framed: trance and suggestion became science, the somnambules' clairvoyance did not. The lesson is not "the sceptics are always wrong" but that the line between science and superstition is drawn by institutions and shifts over time.
Read article →The Cross-Correspondences (1901–1932) – the SPR's Most Ingenious Survival Experiment
The high point of serious mental mediumship research – the exact counterpart to the fraud-prone theatre of physical mediumship. After the deaths of the SPR founders Frederic Myers (1901), Edmund Gurney (1888) and Henry Sidgwick (1900) – all classical scholars – fragmentary classical allusions appeared over three decades in the automatic scripts of several mediums on different continents, meaningless on their own and forming a common theme only when combined. Allegedly an experiment designed by the deceased themselves to rule out telepathy among the living. With the automatists (Mrs Verrall, Mrs Holland alias Kipling's sister Alice Fleming, Mrs Willett alias Winifred Coombe-Tennant, Leonora Piper), the analysts (Alice Johnson, Piddington, Eleanor Sidgwick), the famous cases (Hope, Star and Browning; the Ear of Dionysius) and the honest criticism (chance, loose interpretation, observer closeness, "super-psi").
Read article →Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886) – the Most Famous Physical Medium
The most famous physical medium in history. The Scottish spiritualist (pronounced "Hume") appeared in the salons of the European aristocracy, mostly in good light and without a fixed fee: levitations of objects and of himself (the famous Ashley House episode of 1868 before Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay and Captain Wynne), an accordion playing without contact, elongation, the handling of glowing coals. William Crookes took him into the laboratory in 1871 (the accordion in a cage, the spring-balance test) and posited a "psychic force". With the sceptics (Browning's "Mr Sludge", Podmore), the Lyon lawsuit and an honest assessment – the hardest case in the whole field.
Read article →Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929) – the Doctor Who Photographed Ectoplasm
The German key figure of physical mediumship – the counterpart to Crookes (England) and Richet (France). The Munich physician, psychiatrist and baron came from hypnosis and suggestion research (an early forensic psychologist) and brought the camera into the field: his main work "Phenomena of Materialisation" (1914) documented ectoplasm photographically. He read it not spiritistically but as "ideoplasty" (shaped by the unconscious). With the famous study subject Eva C. (Marthe Béraud) – and the still-contested criticism of it (the "Le Miroir" cut-outs, smuggled pins, de Heredia's replication), which Schrenck-Notzing met with controls and his ideoplasty reading; an unambiguous proof is lacking either way. Harder to explain are the brothers Willi (from 1919) and Rudi Schneider (from 1925) under strict controls (tied up, marked with luminous pins, held, and finally a planned electrical control system) – as well as the later controversies around Rudi (Osty's infrared, Harry Price's photograph).
Read article →The Scole Experiment (1993–1998) – the Last Great Investigation of Physical Mediumship
From 1993 to 1998 the "Scole Group" around Robin and Sandra Foy and the trance mediums Alan and Diana Bennett produced a whole repertoire of physical phenomena in the cellar of a Norfolk farmhouse: floating lights, images on sealed films, apports, direct voices, a dissolving crystal. Three reputable Society for Psychical Research researchers – Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison and David Fontana – monitored a long series of sittings from 1995 to 1997; visitors included Rupert Sheldrake, Robert Morris and Alan Gauld. The 452-page Scole Report (1999) found no direct indication of fraud but was not enough to prove the survival of consciousness after death. With honest criticism: total darkness, no control of the mediums, the group's own equipment, rejected tightening, Cornell's LED reproduction and the design flaw of the film containers.
Read article →What Is Physical Mediumship? Phenomena, History, Criticism
The explainer overview of the rarest and most contested form of mediumship. Unlike mental mediumship (inner messages), physical mediumship claims an objectively perceptible effect in the room: raps, table movement and levitation, direct voices, apports, light phenomena and – as the most spectacular phenomenon – materialisation and ectoplasm (a term coined by Charles Richet). With a historical arc (Fox sisters 1848, D. D. Home/Crookes, Palladino/Richet, Schrenck-Notzing and the Schneider brothers, Helen Duncan, the Scole experiment 1993–1998, today Kruse and Kai Mügge), how a séance works (energy, trance, cabinet, red light; English binding vs. German hold-control; Kruse's microphone triangulation of the voices) and an honest reckoning with the fraud problem and the "quantum physics proves everything" trap.
Read article →Joseph McMoneagle – "Remote Viewer 001" and the Typhoon Submarine
The longest-serving and most highly decorated remote viewer of the US programme: Joseph McMoneagle (b. 1946), US Army chief warrant officer, "Remote Viewer 001" in the Stargate programme and recipient of the Legion of Merit for his intelligence contributions. His most famous 1979 session described, in a hall at the Severodvinsk naval base, a novel double-hulled submarine that would be floated out through a canal still to be dug – months later satellite images confirmed the Typhoon class, the largest submarine ever built. With his 1970 near-death experience, the Dozier case, Skylab and an honest assessment (non-blind conditions, embellishment, operational value != proof of psi). Completes the trio with Ingo Swann and Pat Price.
Read article →Pat Price – The Policeman Who "Saw" for the CIA (Remote Viewing at SRI)
While Ingo Swann shaped the method of remote viewing, former Burbank police commissioner Pat Price (1918–1975) delivered the most spectacular operational hits at the Stanford Research Institute. From coordinates alone he described the NSA station Sugar Grove (1973) – the test that convinced the CIA – and the secret Soviet site URDF-3 near Semipalatinsk (1974, the CIA's first operational task): a huge gantry crane and welded steel spheres, documented in the declassified CIA analysis. With his mysterious 1975 death and an honest assessment (noise alongside signal, the Marks/Kammann cue critique, operational use ≠ proof).
Read article →Why Some Knowledge Stays Hidden – Power Logic, Not Conspiracy
Veridical perception, remote viewing, consciousness beyond the brain – why do such fields stay at the margins even when the evidence is more interesting than the mainstream admits? This article argues an uncomfortable but defensible thesis: you need no central conspiracy. Four mechanisms suffice – paradigm protection (Kuhn), pseudo-skepticism (Truzzi), career and funding incentives, cultural hegemony – topped by the cool power logic of information asymmetry (cui bono). With the documented Helen Duncan case (HMS Barham, Witchcraft Act 1944, Churchill's "obsolete tomfoolery") and the decisive point that global uniformity is precisely NOT evidence of a central command but follows from a shared system.
Read article →Janice Holden and the Tally of Veridical Perceptions – 92 % Accurate
A single spectacular near-death case can always be explained away – a systematic tally across more than a hundred cases cannot. In 2009, in the field's standard handbook, Janice Miner Holden (University of North Texas, editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, IANDS president) was the first to review every documented case of veridical out-of-body perception: 107 cases, and by the most stringent criterion conceivable (one wrong detail fails the whole case) only 8 % were inaccurate – 92 % completely correct. Why this aggregate evidence weighs more methodologically than the famous dentures case or Pam Reynolds.
Read article →Are Near-Death Experiences Just Hallucinations? What Memory Research Shows
The most common objection to near-death experiences is that they are merely a hallucination. That objection can be tested in memory – because hallucinations, dreams and deliria leave a faded, fragmentary trace, whereas near-death experiences do not. Thonnard et al. (2013, Coma Science Group Liège) used the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire to show that NDE memories carry more sensory detail, self-reference and clarity than memories of real, of imagined and of coma events – a kind of hyper-reality, "not to be considered as imagined events". Palmieri et al. (2014, Padua) found the EEG signature of genuine episodic perception (theta) but stressed "not necessarily" any correspondence with the external world, reading NDEs as "really perceived hallucinations". Moore & Greyson (2017, University of Virginia) reproduced the finding ("more real than real"); Greyson (2007) further showed the accounts are not embellished over two decades. With an honest framing of the two interpretive camps (physiological vs. survival-oriented) and the limit: memory clears away the hallucination shortcut but does not prove correspondence with the external world – that is decided by veridical perception.
Read article →When Skeptics Deceive: Pseudo-Skepticism and the Case of Uri Geller
Scepticism is a virtue of science – examining before judging. But there is a variety that judges first and ridicules instead of examining. Marcello Truzzi, co-founder of the influential sceptics' organisation CSICOP, coined the term "pseudo-sceptic" for it and left in protest: the group practised advocacy rather than open-ended examination and misused the line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" as immunisation. At the centre is the asymmetry of the burden of proof: the claim of a phenomenon is examined strictly, but the debunking is usually believed unexamined – even though an "exposure video" can be wrong, selective or staged. The case study is Uri Geller: SRI experiments by Targ and Puthoff published in Nature (1974), a trigger of the state remote-viewing programmes (Stargate), versus the famous 1973 Carson show that was planned as a takedown but made him more famous instead. A fair assessment: not "proven genuine" but contested – pushed out, not refuted. The demand: the same standards for both sides.
Read article →Prof. Dr. Eckhard Kruse: A Computer Scientist Researches Physical Mediumship
A robotics computer scientist in a darkened séance room – that is the hallmark of Prof. Dr. Eckhard Kruse. He studied computer science with applied physics, earned his doctorate in robotics and image processing and has been Professor of Applied Computer Science at DHBW since 2008. His subject is physical mediumship: immediately observable phenomena such as moving objects, raps, flashes of light, "spirit hands", materialisations and ectoplasm – in the tradition of Crookes and Richet, but also the field with the largest history of fraud. His real contribution is method: infrared/night-vision cameras and motion sensors attached to the medium bring engineering-grade, continuous control into the dark room to rule out conventional explanations. Collaborations include Kai Mügge (monitored sessions in Hanau) and Gary Mannion, as adviser to the Basel Psi Association, together with the psychologist Dr. Heike Bauder; book "Der Geist in der Materie". A fair assessment: not accepted by science, the dark room remains a weak point – what is valuable is the stance of separating phenomenon from interpretation.
Read article →Ricardo Leppe and Brain-Friendly Learning: Mnemonics, the Loci Method and "Wissen schafft Freiheit"
"Every child wants to learn. Humans are curious by nature." That sentence sums up what the Austrian memory trainer Ricardo Leppe stands for. From the magician's craft (for which a good memory is mandatory) he transferred well-known memory techniques to school material: the loci method (memory palace), mnemonics (translating the abstract into vivid images) and Vedic mathematics (calculation shortcuts against the fear of arithmetic) – always playful and visual rather than a frontal lecture. In 2020 he founded the association "Wissen schafft Freiheit" in Gloggnitz, with by now over 100 free learning videos for self-determined learning "without cost, without pressure, without a fixed sequence". The common denominator is exactly what learning psychology describes as effective: linking, imaging, tying to emotion. Following on from Vera F. Birkenbihl and the Prussian school model – with a fair assessment: powerful tools for retention that complement, not replace, deep understanding.
Read article →Vera F. Birkenbihl and the Critique of Schooling: What Goes Back to Prussia
"Children come into the world as learning machines – and unlearn the joy of learning of all places at school." That is how Vera F. Birkenbihl (1946–2011) summed up her critique. Her guiding concept was "brain-friendly" learning, her core thesis: school works systematically against the brain. Nine criticisms – brain-hostile frontal teaching, "bulimic learning" instead of understanding, no links to prior knowledge, no sense of meaning, fear and grade pressure as a block, grades as a poor measure, lockstep instead of individuality, rote cramming (countered by her language method, ABC lists, KaWa/KaGa) and artificial subject separation. The decisive twist: many of these symptoms have a structural cause in the Prussian school model – age-graded classes, the 45-minute period and the bell, frontal teaching, a standardised curriculum, grades as selection, discipline before curiosity; a system optimised for standardisation and compliance, not for understanding. With links to herd behaviour and the "majority versus experts" question – and a fair assessment (learning types are considered outdated).
Read article →Propaganda and the Manipulation of the Masses: What the Research Actually Shows
Can an entire population be steered on purpose? The question is the subject of an almost century-old field of research – and the findings cut both ways. The classics: Walter Lippmann's "pictures in our heads" (Public Opinion, 1922), Edward Bernays' "Propaganda" (1928, the "torches of freedom" campaign), Harold Lasswell's content analysis, the "seven propaganda devices" of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937, e.g. name-calling and bandwagon). The empirical turn: Hovland's Yale studies (source credibility, sleeper effect), Cantril's War-of-the-Worlds study, Adorno's "Authoritarian Personality". The critical line: Ellul (propaganda as a climate) and Chomsky/Herman ("Manufacturing Consent"). Today: computational propaganda (bots, microtargeting, Cambridge Analytica), soft power, nudging and "cognitive warfare" (Jonas Tögel), and inoculation theory ("prebunking"). The honest assessment: the mechanisms are established but the strength of the effect is overstated – instead of a "hypodermic needle" the limited-effects model holds. Why this matters symmetrically, in both directions.
Read article →Herd Behaviour in Humans: What Asch, Sherif and Neuroscience Actually Show
"Humans are herd animals" – is it true, and how good is the evidence? That people orient strongly toward the group is one of the best-established findings in social psychology: Solomon Asch's line experiment (1951), in which about 37% of judgements followed the obviously wrong group consensus and roughly three in four people conformed at least once; Muzafer Sherif's autokinetic effect (1935), where a lasting group norm forms in ambiguous situations; Cialdini's social proof, Milgram's street experiment, herding in financial markets (Shiller, information cascades) and the neural finding that deviating produces an "error signal" (Klucharev 2009). But "instinct" is the wrong word: behind it stand two explainable mechanisms – informational and normative influence – and the effect is highly context-dependent. Where the facts are clear, conformity drops, and a single ally breaks the pressure. Why this matters for the dismissal of uncomfortable findings (near-death, mediumship) – in both directions.
Read article →Are Mediums Mentally Ill? Moreira-Almeida and the Study of 115 Spiritists
"Whoever believes they speak with the dead is ill" – the psychiatrist Alexander Moreira-Almeida (UFJF, NUPES research centre) did not merely assert this convenient equation but measured it. In the study "Dissociative and Psychotic Experiences in Brazilian Spiritist Mediums" (with Lotufo Neto and the near-death researcher Bruce Greyson, 2006) the team surveyed 115 Spiritist mediums: high educational level, low prevalence of mental disorders, socially well adjusted – and crucially, the number of their dissociative/psychotic-like experiences did not correlate with markers of disorder. A companion study (J Nerv Ment Dis 2008) shows that, despite surface similarities, mediumship must not be confused with dissociative identity disorder (DID) – mediums are better adjusted, use no antipsychotics, and have fewer histories of abuse. The diagnostic core (DSM/ICD): an unusual experience alone, without distress, is not an illness – a finding that reaches into the ICD-11 debate.
Read article →Alexander Moreira-Almeida and NUPES: Spirituality as a Subject of Serious Psychiatry
Behind the Brazilian studies on mediums and psychography the same name usually appears: Alexander Moreira-Almeida (b. 1974), professor of psychiatry at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), trained at USP and a postdoctoral fellow in religion and health at Duke University. He founded NUPES (Núcleo de Pesquisas em Espiritualidade e Saúde) at UFJF, one of the world’s most visible centres for "spirituality and health" (190+ papers, 8,500+ citations). Four research lines: are mediums mentally ill? (study of 115 mediums; mediumship vs. dissociative identity disorder, 2008); spirituality and mental health (lower rates of depression, suicidality, substance use); mediumship in the brain (co-author of the 2012 SPECT study); and the mind-brain problem (book "Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship"). As WPA section chair (2014–2020) he coordinated the WPA Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry. An honest assessment: methodologically careful, no proof of survival of consciousness; controlled mediumship tests (2020) were negative — his real achievement is the creation of an academic framework.
Read article →Nosso Lar and Astral City: Brazil’s Afterlife Between Book Classic and Box-Office Hit
No work has shaped Brazilian Spiritism’s vision of the afterlife as much as "Nosso Lar" ("Our Home"). Psychographed by Chico Xavier in 1944 and attributed to the spirit of a deceased physician named André Luiz, it describes a life after death that is neither heaven nor hell: André Luiz dies, awakens in the bleak umbral and is admitted to the spirit colony Nosso Lar — a city "hovering" above Rio with hospitals, schools, work teams and hierarchy, conceived as a transit station before the next reincarnation. A striking motif: the deceased are influenced by the thoughts and grief of their living relatives. In 2010 the story was filmed as "Astral City" (director Wagner de Assis, music by Philip Glass, Renato Prieto as André Luiz) and became one of Brazil’s biggest box-office hits with around 4 million viewers. Content, cosmology, the André Luiz series and an honest assessment between cultural significance and an open question of truth.
Read article →Waldo Vieira and Projectiology: From Chico Xavier’s Collaborator to a "Science" of the Out-of-Body Experience
One of the most unusual careers in Brazilian Spiritism: the physician Waldo Vieira (1932–2015) psychographed 18 books alongside Chico Xavier from 1955 to 1966 (including "Evolução em Dois Mundos", attributed to the spirit André Luiz) — then broke with Spiritism in 1966 to found the out-of-body experience as a religion-free "science": projectiology and conscientiology. He created his own system of terms (holosoma, thosene, cosmoethics, penta, the "principle of disbelief"), wrote around 41 books and built an institutional apparatus (IIPC 1988 in Rio; CEAEC in Foz do Iguaçu / "Cognópolis"). The article frames the break with Chico Xavier, presents the doctrine, and honestly explains why established science views it as pseudoscience (self-created terminology, no independent validation, lack of falsifiability) — while noting the movement’s rejection of cult accusations.
Read article →Hernani Andrade and the IBPP: Brazil’s Scientific Psychical Research
While Brazil is famous for spectacular mediums (Chico Xavier, Zé Arigó), the civil engineer Hernani Guimarães Andrade (1913–2003) embodied the opposite: the sober researcher who wanted to test the phenomena of Spiritism with measurement protocols and scepticism. In 1963 he founded the IBPP (Instituto Brasileiro de Pesquisas Psicobiofísicas) in São Paulo — Latin America’s first psychical research body, a Brazilian counterpart to the British SPR. Using the methods of Ian Stevenson (reincarnation) and Hans Bender and William Roll (poltergeist/RSPK) he documented around 75 reincarnation and 32 poltergeist cases — including the famous Jaboticabal case (Maria José Ferreira, 1965/66). The British author Guy Lyon Playfair carried the cases into English in "The Flying Cow" (1975). Andrade’s "Biological Organizing Model" (from 1984) anticipated Sheldrake’s morphic fields. An honest assessment: fascinating field research on spontaneous cases, not controlled laboratory proof.
Read article →Can Hands Heal Measurably? The Sham-Controlled RCT on Spiritist Passe Therapy (Cavalcante 2016)
How do you test a healing practice that works with "healing fluids" using clinical-medicine tools? The group around Ricardo de Souza Cavalcante (UNESP, 2016) subjected the Spiritist passe (laying on of hands) to a randomised, sham-controlled design (real vs. sham passe, 50 participants, 8 weekly sessions, anxiety measured via STAI). Result: anxiety fell in both groups (p<0.0001) but more in the real-passe group (p=0.02); at the end only 17% vs. 63% still met the anxiety criterion. The article explains what an RCT is and why the sham control subtracts the placebo effect, presents the methodologically even stronger double-blind preterm-newborn RCT (2018, cortisol/respiratory rate) and further passe studies (cardiac patients, preoperative anxiety) — and locates it between non-specific factors and specific effect. A serious signal, not a proof of efficacy.
Read article →Brazil’s Spiritist Psychiatry: Half a Century of Integrative Treatment
Brazil runs a network of around 50 psychiatric hospitals that, for over half a century, have combined conventional psychiatry (ICD/DSM diagnostics, psychotropic medication) with optional spiritist therapies — disobsession (spirit release), the passe (laying on of hands, "fluidotherapy"), intercessory prayer and fraternal dialogue. The authoritative review by Lucchetti, Moreira-Almeida and colleagues (Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 2012) studied six leading hospitals: the model is explicitly integrative and non-indoctrinating (no one has to become a Spiritist), and the voluntary nature increases acceptance — while the authors openly name the evidence gap (no standardised protocols, few controlled studies). The historical root is Bezerra de Menezes’s 1897 concept of obsession; the oldest house is the Sanatório Espírita de Uberaba (from 1933). Plus the sham-controlled RCT on passe therapy for anxiety (Cavalcante 2016) and an honest assessment between non-specific factors and specific effect.
Read article →Four Hundred Books, Forty Handwritings: Graphoscopy and Stylometry in Chico Xavier
Chico Xavier psychographed over 450 books under dozens of "spirit authors" — and the Brazilian forensic document examiner Carlos Augusto Perandréa demonstrated in his 1991 graphoscopy study that the signatures of deceased authors in the psychographies matched the handwriting they had documented in life, not Chico's own. Stylometric consistency across seven decades (Emmanuel, André Luiz, Humberto de Campos), the question of medical knowledge in the André Luiz series despite a primary-school education, and the forensic application of these methods in two famous Brazilian court cases (Humberto de Campos 1944; Goiânia acquittal 1979). An independent line of evidence on whether the texts can be explained by Chico's ordinary abilities — three explanations (literary talent, dissociation, external source) remain open.
Read article →When the Frontal Lobe Falls Silent: The SPECT Study on Psychography (Peres, Moreira-Almeida & Newberg 2012)
In 2012, Julio Peres, Alexander Moreira-Almeida and US neuroscientist Andrew Newberg studied ten Brazilian psychography mediums using SPECT imaging (PLoS ONE 2012). The striking finding: experienced mediums showed reduced frontal lobe activity — the region for planned, intentional writing — during trance, even though the texts they produced were linguistically more complex than their normal writing. In less experienced mediums the pattern was reversed. The result fits dissociation studies on jazz improvisation and deep meditation, and remains the most methodologically rigorous neuroimaging investigation of psychography to date.
Read article →The Mansão do Caminho: A City of Care in Salvador
When people asked Divaldo Franco for proof of his teaching, he pointed not to his books but to a piece of land in Salvador da Bahia. The Mansão do Caminho ("Mansion of the Way"), founded on 15 August 1952 by Divaldo Franco and Nilson de Souza Pereira as the social work of the Centro Espírita Caminho da Redenção (first in Calçada, then Pau da Lima), is the most concrete charitable work of Brazilian Spiritism. Instead of a mass orphanage, small family houses with foster mothers (casas-lares); today a complex of around 78,000 m² serving more than 5,000 people daily, free of charge – with schools (crèche "A Manjedoura" to the Colégio Nilson de Souza Pereira), a health centre and a maternity ward. Funded by the donated royalties of Divaldo's 250+ books. With the spiritist motto "Fora da caridade não há salvação" – and the core idea: a verifiable legacy, whatever one makes of mediumship.
Read article →Bezerra de Menezes: The Doctor of the Poor and Apostle of Brazilian Spiritism
Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes (1831–1900) is a special case: not a spectacular medium but a respected physician and politician. As the "doctor of the poor" he treated the poor for free; for the Liberal Party he sat on the Rio city council and in the imperial parliament and was regarded as incorruptible. His public conversion in 1886 lent Spiritism – fought by Church and criminal law – social credibility. As president of the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (1895–1900) he united a movement torn between "scientists" and the religious. In "Madness under a New Prism" he interpreted part of mental illness as obsession (the basis of disobsession) – with an honest assessment of the tension with modern psychiatry. And the remarkable part: after his death the organizer himself became one of the most-invoked spirit guides – psychographed by Chico Xavier and Divaldo Franco, with healing evenings named after him to this day.
Read article →The Brazilian Spiritist Federation: The Backbone of Organized Spiritism
Behind Chico Xavier, Divaldo Franco and all of Brazilian mediumship stands not a medium but an institution: the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (FEB), founded in Rio on 1 January 1884 (the ground prepared by the journal Reformador from 1883). It turned Allan Kardec's French doctrine into an organized mass movement. Bezerra de Menezes (1831–1900) united the divided early movement and – against Kardec's own reserve – brought the religious-charitable side to the fore. The 1949 Golden Pact created a unified national structure; the FEB publishing house (which also issues Chico Xavier's books, whose rights he donated) funds the social work, since all spiritual services must be free. Plus the systematic study programme (ESDE), regulated mediumistic practice (passe, disobsession), the 1984 move to Brasília, and the international spiritist council CEI (1992).
Read article →Allan Kardec: The Educator Who Forged Spiritism into a Doctrine
Behind Chico Xavier and the whole of Brazilian Spiritism stands a Frenchman who was never a medium himself: Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), a sober Parisian educator and pupil of Pestalozzi. At first he mocked table-turning – "I will believe it when shown a table has a brain" – then examined it with a comparative method: the same questions through many circles unknown to one another, keeping only the answers that agreed. Under the pen name Allan Kardec (supposedly a Druidic past life) he codified the doctrine in five books (The Spirits Book 1857 to The Genesis 1868), founded the Revue Spirite in 1858 and made reincarnation its core axiom. Plus the Barcelona book-burning (1861), his falsifiability motto, the dolmen grave at Père Lachaise – and why the doctrine became a mass movement not in France but in Brazil. With an honest assessment of the limits of his "method".
Read article →Zé Arigó and Dr. Fritz: The Surgeon with the Rusty Knife
Zé Arigó (José Pedro de Freitas, 1921–1971) is the most controversial case of Brazilian Spiritism: a barely educated miner from Congonhas who, in trance, operated on people – with a pocket or kitchen knife, without anaesthesia or disinfection – and wrote complicated prescriptions, both attributed to the spirit of a German physician, Dr. Adolf Fritz. In 1963 the US parapsychologist Andrija Puharich filmed him and had excised tissue analysed (genuine diseased tissue, not the animal blood of Filipino trick healers), yet it was not a controlled trial. Plus the two convictions for quackery (a pardon by President Kubitschek), the fatal 1971 car crash – and a deliberately balanced assessment: the believers' over-claims ("2 million patients, never an infection") are unverifiable, while the real puzzle is the prescriptions. A historical account, not medical advice.
Read article →Divaldo Franco and the Mansão do Caminho: When Mediumship Became Social Action
Divaldo Pereira Franco (1927–2025) was, after Chico Xavier, the most important figure of Brazilian Spiritism – not the reclusive writer but the world-travelling orator and man of action. In 1952, with Nilson de Souza Pereira, he founded the Mansão do Caminho in Salvador: not an anonymous mass orphanage but small family houses with foster mothers, today a city of care with schools, a clinic and a maternity ward serving around 6,000 people daily. Funded by the notarially donated royalties of more than 250 psychographed books (over 8 million copies sold). The spirit author of most works is Joanna de Ângelis, whose psychological series links Kardec strikingly closely to the depth psychology of C. G. Jung. Plus the xenoglossy reports and the question of where the information comes from – and the core idea: a mediumship whose fruits are verifiable, whatever one makes of its source.
Read article →Chico Xavier and Psychography: When a Letter from Beyond Held Up in Court
Francisco Cândido Xavier (1910–2002) is the face of Brazilian Spiritism: a desperately poor man with barely four years of schooling who produced more than 450 books by psychography (automatic writing) over seven decades – in the styles of dead poets – and kept not a cent for himself. His very first poetry collection, Parnaso de Além-Túmulo (1932), matched the individual metres of deceased poets so precisely that critics could barely argue against it. Plus the Humberto de Campos copyright trial (1944), in which a court declared itself incompetent because it could not establish a spirit's authorship; and the Maurício Garcez Henrique case (Goiânia): a psychographed letter exonerating the accused friend José Divino Nunes was admitted as evidence by judge Orimar de Bastos in 1979 – acquittal. With the sceptics' objections (hot reading, cryptomnesia) and the question of where the verifiable information comes from.
Read article →Mediumship in Brazil: The World Capital of Spiritism
Brazil is the world capital of Spiritism: this is where Kardecist mediumship became a mass movement. Chico Xavier (1910–2002) produced over 400 books by psychography and donated all proceeds; Divaldo Franco built a large social institution out of mediumship; the "spirit surgeon" Zé Arigó allegedly operated in trance. Carried by the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (1884) and a network of spiritist hospitals where mediumistic experiences are not reflexively pathologized. The scientific anchor comes from psychiatrist Alexander Moreira-Almeida (UFJF/NUPES) – 115 mentally healthy mediums – and the SPECT study by Peres, Newberg & Moreira-Almeida (PLoS ONE 2012): reduced frontal-lobe activity during more complex automatic writing.
Read article →Spiritism or Spiritualism? Why They Are Not the Same Thing
Interchangeable in everyday speech, yet historically two distinct – and in the 19th century even rival – movements. Anglo-American Spiritualism (Fox sisters, Hydesville 1848) is an empirical-religious movement of spirit communication through mediums and classically rejected reincarnation. Allan Kardec's Spiritism (Le Livre des Esprits, 1857) makes reincarnation its core axiom and sees itself as an experiential science. Kardec coined the word "spiritisme" himself to set it apart from "spiritualisme" – which in philosophy already means the counter-position to materialism (Bergson). Plus the fraternal war over rebirth, Brazilian Kardecism today (Chico Xavier) and why the distinction helps when reading the other articles.
Read article →Melchior Joller and the Stans Poltergeist (1862) – the Record of an Enlightened Eyewitness
Melchior Joller (1818–1865), a liberal lawyer and Swiss national councillor, was an avowed rationalist – and in 1862 recorded, in his own family home in Stans, one of the best-documented poltergeist cases in history. Triple knocking and a white figure (son Oskar, 5 June), answering knocks from the walls, rooms devastated within seconds, an apple that flew straight back in after being thrown out of the window, stones between playing children. A government commission searched only for fraud by the family and found nothing; the empty house stayed silent, and the furniture danced again when the family returned. His 1863 book cost him his reputation, his friends and his home – he died impoverished in Rome. The case in the light of modern RSPK research (Bender, Huesmann & Schriever, Lucadou): bound to persons, not to the place, and a hostile rationalist witness.
Read article →Wanted: The Poltergeist – the Freiburg Meta-Study by Huesmann and Schriever (1989)
Gisela Huesmann and Friederike Schriever at the IGPP under Hans Bender analysed 253 poltergeist cases from 1947–1986 quantitatively. The statistical fingerprint: 91% acoustic phenomena, 70% object movements, 29% electrical disturbances, apparitions under 10%. Focal persons in puberty (girls averaging 11, boys 13 years). Anomalous trajectories, the occlusion effect, the bell-curve time structure and the psychosomatic family profile. Poltergeist as unconscious psychokinetic discharge, not haunting.
Read article →Louisa Rhine – 14,000 Spontaneous Psi Cases and the Patterns Behind Them
Louisa E. Rhine (1891–1983) classified over 14,000 spontaneous psi reports at the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory into four categories: realistic dreams, symbolic dreams, intuitions and hallucinations. The taxonomy that remains the standard for field research to this day. Ten cases from her collection — the chandelier above the cradle, the mother at the garden pond, the brother's face in the mirror, the withered roses and others — told and analysed in the style of the popular Lucadou case page. With the pattern behind the cases: emotional bond as trigger, crisis situation as context, protective impulse as dominant function.
Read article →Federico Faggin – the Inventor of the Microprocessor and the Irreducibility of Consciousness
Federico Faggin (b. 1941 in Vicenza) designed the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, in 1971, invented MOS silicon-gate technology, founded Zilog (Z80) and Synaptics (touchpad). National Medal of Technology 2010, Kyoto Prize 1997. After decades at the forefront of the semiconductor industry, he turned to consciousness research and in 2011 founded the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation. His book Irriducibile (Mondadori 2022, English Irreducible 2024) argues: consciousness is fundamental, not derivable from matter – and no machine will ever possess it. Qualia are not computable. With the connection to Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and the pattern series from Planck through Schrödinger, Eccles and Penrose. The man who built the hardware says: consciousness is not software.
Read article →Quantum Entanglement – Einstein's Spooky Action at a Distance, Bell's Theorem and the 2022 Nobel Prize
Two entangled particles respond to each other simultaneously, no matter how far apart — not at the speed of light, but instantaneously. Einstein called this spooky action at a distance in 1935 and considered it proof that quantum mechanics was incomplete (EPR paper with Podolsky and Rosen). John Bell proved mathematically in 1964 that Einstein was wrong: no hidden variables. Alain Aspect confirmed this experimentally in Paris in 1982. In 2015 three independent teams (Delft, Vienna, Boulder) closed all remaining loopholes. In 2022 the Nobel Prize went to Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger. The non-locality of quantum mechanics is an experimentally established fact. What it ontologically means, nobody knows.
Read article →The Harvard Rats, the Melbourne Control Group and Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance
William McDougall's rat experiment at Harvard University (1920–1938, 49 generations): rats learned ten times faster across generations. F.A.E. Crew's Edinburgh replication was inconclusive. The decisive Melbourne study by W.E. Agar et al. (20 years, 50 generations, Journal of Experimental Biology) confirmed the finding — and delivered the surprise: the never-trained control group improved equally. This refutes Lamarck, fits no known biological model, and has been unexplained since 1954. Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis (A New Science of Life, 1981, Nature review: "a book for burning") offers an interpretation. With connections to PEAR and the Global Consciousness Project.
Read article →Louisa Rhine, the Rhine Research Center and 95 Years of Psi Research (1930–present)
Louisa E. Rhine classified over 14,000 spontaneous psi reports and created the first systematic taxonomy of anomalous experiences: realistic dreams, unrealistic dreams, intuitions, hallucinations. Her husband J. B. Rhine's Duke laboratory became the FRNM in 1962 and the Rhine Research Center in 1995 – one of the oldest continuously operating psi research institutions in the world, now in its 95th year.
Read article →Global Consciousness Project – the Worldwide Random Generator Network (1998–present)
Roger D. Nelson, senior researcher at the PEAR lab, founded the Global Consciousness Project in 1998: a worldwide network of up to 70 quantum random number generators that registers systematic deviations from chance during major events such as September 11, 2001. 500+ formal events, cumulative statistics at p ≈ 10⁻¹², the FieldREG backstory, methodological criticism (event selection, time-window flexibility), and the transition to GCP-2.0 with pre-registration.
Read article →Hydesville, 31 March 1848 – the Fox sisters and the birth of modern Spiritualism
A source-critical reconstruction of the Hydesville rappings and the career of the Fox sisters Margaretta ("Maggie", 14), Catherine ("Kate", 11) and Leah (35). With Mrs. Fox's affidavit of 11 April 1848, the "Mr. Splitfoot" question-and-answer game, the three Corinthian Hall investigations in Rochester 1849, the sceptical Buffalo report of 1851 (Flint/Lee/Coventry), William Crookes's 1874 examination of Kate Fox in London, Maggie's confession at the New York Academy of Music on 21 October 1888 (with the internal inconsistencies — false age claims — suppressed in popular reception), the 1889 retraction and the 1904 cellar bone discovery at Hydesville. Today's standard literature: Barbara Weisberg 2004, Ann Braude 1989, McLuhan/Wehrstein in the SPR's Psi Encyclopedia. With the historical impact from Hydesville via Allan Kardec, the 1882 founding of the SPR and William James through to today's academic mediumship research (Beischel/Windbridge, Schwartz/Veritas, Tressoldi meta-analysis, Lazar/EREAMS).
Read article →Voltaire at Sanssouci – how a tone became the world's school standard
Voltaire's mockingly distanced way of dealing with the mystical became the global academic standard not through a law, but through a habitus. The diffusion runs through Sanssouci 1750–1753 (Voltaire's three years as Frederick's house guest), Frederick II, the Prussian General-Land-Schul-Reglement of 1763 (drafted by the pietist theologian Johann Julius Hecker, not Voltairean in wording but in elite ethos), Wilhelm von Humboldt's university reform of 1810, Horace Mann's Seventh Annual Report of 1843 (Prussian schools as "first of all nations") and the Japanese Gakusei of 1872. Kant absorbed the same zeitgeist but treated Swedenborg methodically rather than reflexively (Knobloch letter 1763, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 1766) – a path that was lost in academic practice. With the decisive turn 1906–1910 (Curie, Kelvin, James, Münsterberg's Palladino exposure) when the Voltairean tone shifted from elite habitus to institutional filter.
Read article →Frederick the Great, His Sister and Swedenborg – a Family Micro-Chapter of the Enlightenment
A little-noted family configuration of European intellectual history around 1760: Frederick II of Prussia (architect of the modern school system with the General-Land-Schul-Reglement of 12 August 1763), his elder sister Louisa Ulrika (Queen of Sweden, who received Swedenborg in 1758 and 1761 and turned pale at the message from the deceased brother August William), Emanuel Swedenborg himself and Immanuel Kant (working in parallel in Königsberg from 1762 on the epistemological question). With source-critical separation: Frederick followed Voltaire philosophically, not Kant; the reglement created the form of school in 1763, the substantive anti-mediumistic filtering only followed with the academic materialist turn from 1906. Steiner's Waldorf school from 1919 as a counter-model to both.
Read article →Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) – Anthroposophy, Clairvoyance, and the Demarcation from Mediumship
Portrait of one of the most influential figures in European intellectual history of the early 20th century. Three biographical phases: Goethe scholar in Weimar (1890–1897), theosophist in Berlin (1902–1912), anthroposophist in Dornach (1912–1925). Own claim of clairvoyant Akashic-Chronicle research with over 6,000 documented lectures. Sharp methodological demarcation from classical trance mediumship (atavism argument, responsibility argument, activity model) – which is, in practice, softer than in theory, because today's mediums describe their working state exactly as Steiner claimed for himself. The institutional impacts (over 1,200 Waldorf schools worldwide, Demeter biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, the Camphill movement, the Christian Community). With the critical academic source picture: Helmut Zander 2007 (standard work), Christoph Lindenberg 1997, Geoffrey Ahern 2009 and Peter Staudenmaier 2014 on the problematic passages.
Read article →Why the Defence Against Near-Death Experiences Is So Forceful – a Psychological Explanation
A social-psychological explanation for the unusually forceful defence against NDE and mediumship research. Layer 1: motivated cognition (Festinger 1957, Kunda 1990, Kahan in the 2010s) – humans infer not from evidence but from self- and identity-protection. Layer 2: Terror Management Theory (Solomon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski since 1986, over 400 studies, main work "The Worm at the Core" 2015) – being reminded of one's own mortality strengthens the defence of one's worldview. Plus Thomas Nagel's open admission in "The Last Word" 1997 ("I don't want there to be a God"), Bruce Greyson's observation on the "more emotional than scientific" NDE defence, and the specific moral dimension of the life-review finding with its perspective reversal. Argues cautiously: not ad hominem against individual sceptics, but structurally about the unusual forcefulness – with the methodological self-requirement on all participants to reflect on their own relationship to mortality.
Read article →Immanuel Kant and Swedenborg – the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 1766
One of the most unusual books in the history of philosophy: Kant's anonymously published "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics" (Königsberg 1766) deals exclusively with Emanuel Swedenborg and the question of what human reason can do with reports of contact with the spiritual world. Three years earlier, Kant had publicly stated in his letter to Charlotte von Knobloch (10 August 1763) that he personally had the Stockholm fire incident investigated by an English merchant sent to Sweden – with full confirmation of every detail. Today's Kant scholarship (Stengel 2011, Kuehn 2001, Johnson 2002) no longer reads the "Dreams" as a wholesale dismissal of Swedenborg but as a methodological turning point: out of the Swedenborg case arises in Kant the question of the limits of theoretical reason, which is systematically answered fifteen years later in the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781). The only case in the history of philosophy in which a leading philosopher investigated a mediumistic file with his own field inquiry and his own book.
Read article →Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) – Natural Scientist, Mystic and Proto-Medium
Portrait of the Swedish mining counsellor, anatomist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. The first half of his life as Royal Swedish mining counsellor with recognised scientific publishing activity (Opera Philosophica et Mineralia 1734, Regnum Animale 1744/45). The visionary turning point at Easter 1744 in London. The systematic theological work in over 30 Latin folios (Arcana Coelestia 1749–1756, De Caelo et Inferno 1758). The three externally documented incidents: the Stockholm fire of 19 July 1759 (Gothenburg, 400 km away, all detail statements exactly confirmed), Queen Louisa Ulrika 1761 and the message from the deceased brother, Madame de Marteville 1761 and the lost receipt. The main source for the Stockholm fire reporting is Immanuel Kant's letter to Charlotte von Knobloch of 10 August 1763, with Kant's own field investigation through an English merchant. Influence on Allan Kardec, Emerson, William Blake, William James, the SPR. With Friedemann Stengel's 2011 standard work as today's reference.
Read article →Ingo Swann (1933–2013) – the Artist Who Turned Remote Viewing into a Method
Portrait of Ingo Swann (Telluride 1933 – New York 2013), the most important single figure in the remote-viewing programme. Biographical anchors (twelve years in the UN Secretariat, Manhattan Bowery, parallel art career with over a thousand works). The CCNY magnetometer experiment of June 1972 with Gertrude Schmeidler and Arthur Hebard, which brought him to SRI. The outbounder/beacon experiments. The Jupiter viewing of 27 April 1973 with the spontaneous ring description, six years before the 1979 Voyager 1 confirmation. The development of Coordinate Remote Viewing between 1974 and 1979 in six stages, with substantial CIA funding. The training of the Stargate viewers at Fort Meade 1979–1986 (Joe McMoneagle, Lyn Buchanan, Paul Smith, Ed Dames, David Morehouse). Plus the dividing line between the methodologically documented work and the speculative late work (Penetration 1998).
Read article →Delphi Associates and the 1982 Silver Futures – Nine of Nine Through Associative Remote Viewing
Reconstruction of the Delphi Associates silver-futures experiment from late 1982 to early 1983. Russell Targ left SRI and founded Delphi Associates in California with the psychologist Keith Harary and the Texas funder Paul Temple. The associative-remote-viewing (ARV) protocol step by step: selection of two target objects, viewing of a future perceptual event, judge comparison, COMEX trade, market resolution, feedback loop closed only via the matching object. Nine consecutive correct trades, about USD 120,000 profit, chance probability 1 in 512. Subsequent failure of the second phase on scaling – psi-missing under pressure, greed and the presence of sceptics. Methodological double lesson: ARV works, but not arbitrarily scalable. With follow-ups at PEAR and in the Applied Precognition Project. Main sources: Targ & Harary, The Mind Race (1984); Schnabel, Remote Viewers (1997); Targ, The Reality of ESP (2012); Third Eye Spies (2017).
Read article →The SRI Geller Experiments 1972/73 – What Was Tested and What Came Out
Session-by-session reconstruction of the three main experimental series with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute between November 1972 and August 1973. Thirteen picture-reproduction sessions in the doubly shielded Faraday room, with ten evaluable hits (chance probability below one in a million), assessed by five independent judges in forced-choice ranking. Die-in-a-steel-box series: eight of ten correct, two passes, chance probability around one in a million. Magnetometer sessions with documented signal deflections, filmed. ESP-card series with markedly weaker results, honestly documented. With Nature 1974 (251, 602–607), the follow-up correspondence in Nature 252, Proceedings of the IEEE 1976 (64(3), 329–354), Mind-Reach 1977. Full critique–reply balance with Randi, Gardner and Hyman. Plus the 2017 declassified CIA files and the original films in the Third Eye Spies documentary.
Read article →Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ – the Two Laser Physicists Behind the SRI Remote Viewing Programme
Joint portrait of the two laser physicists who at the Stanford Research Institute between 1972 and 1985 built the remote-viewing programme. With the biographical anchors – Puthoff's textbook on quantum electronics and NSA background, Targ's contribution to the first tunable pulsed laser at GTE Sylvania and his childhood visual impairment. The two key publications Nature 1974 (251, 602–607) and Proceedings of the IEEE 1976 (64(3), 329–354). Coordinate Remote Viewing as a methodological invention. Targ's Delphi Associates silver-futures episode of 1982 (nine of nine correct predictions, ~USD 120,000). Puthoff's arc from SRI via EarthTech and IAS-A to the 2017 NYT AAWSAP disclosure. Elisabeth Targ's distant-healing study in the Western Journal of Medicine 1998 and her death in 2002 of a glioblastoma – in the middle of a glioblastoma-healing study. Both still alive and publicly active in 2026.
Read article →Uri Geller – SRI, Nature 1974 and the CIA Trail to Stargate
Portrait of Uri Geller (born 1946 in Tel Aviv): the Stanford Research Institute experiments by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ between 1972 and 1973, the Nature publication of 18 October 1974 (Nature 251, 602–607), the direct trigger of the CIA Stargate programme, the 1970s TV rise on BBC, German ZDF and the Tonight Show, the Tonight Show incident on 1 August 1973 prepared by James Randi, the academic reversal of the King's College mathematical physicist John G. Taylor between Superminds 1975 and Science and the Supernatural 1980, and Randi's sceptical position. Assessment without binary "real or trick", with the three independently documented facts of the Nature publication, the Stargate trigger and the 1970s TV space.
Read article →Kai Mügge – Physical Medium and Leader of the Felix Experimental Group
Portrait of one of the few actively working physical mediums in the German-speaking world: since the early 2000s Kai Mügge has led the Felix Experimental Group (FEG) in Hanau. Séances with raps, light phenomena, ectoplasm, apports and direct voice – in the tradition of Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Florence Cook and Rudi Schneider. With Stephen E. Braude's investigations in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, an honest treatment of the 2014 Hanau incident, and context within the SPR tradition and the 1906 pattern.
Read article →The Frozen Worldview – Brain, Institution, Language Model
How a worldview arises, when it counts as firm, and why it is so hard to correct afterwards: Layer 1 is the neurobiology – myelination of the prefrontal cortex between 25 and 30, cognitive dissonance, the backfire effect, Planck's dying-out sentence. Layer 2 is institutional path dependency – the 1906 pattern, Prussian compulsory schooling, the concrete material-selection effect in schools and engineering education (Newton instead of Higgs field), the ordering effect in Wikipedia. Layer 3 is the large language model – it learns the statistical average of this corpus and reproduces the classical default even when, on direct request, it can give correct Yukawa-Higgs-QCD answers. Why the pre-1906 materialist worldview is still the default in the general education of 2026, even though physics itself has been teaching something radically different since the 1960s.
Read article →Paul Dirac – Nobel Physics, the 1927 Solvay Statement and the Canonical Counter-Figure
Paul Dirac (1902–1984), Nobel Prize Physics 1933, Lucasian Professor at Cambridge on Newton's chair, is the canonical counter-figure of the 1906 pattern series. Solvay 1927 in Brussels: Dirac publicly formulates an atheist position ("the very idea of God is a product of human imagination"), Pauli replies with the famous bon mot "Our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is: There is no God, and Dirac is His prophet" (recorded in Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond, Piper 1969). The later mathematical-beauty line in Scientific American May 1963 is aesthetic Platonism, not a religious turn. Dirac's work fits seamlessly into the rationalist-materialist standard canon and passes through unfiltered – which sharpens the pattern thesis rather than weakening it, by showing that it operates selectively, not across the board.
Read article →Max Planck – Founder of Quantum Physics and Consciousness as the Foundation
Max Planck (1858–1947), Nobel Prize Physics 1918 for the 1900 quantum hypothesis, is present in the schoolbook through the constant h and Planck's radiation law. Not in the schoolbook: his Observer interview of 25 January 1931 with J.W.N. Sullivan – "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness" –, his Baltic lecture "Religion und Naturwissenschaft" 1937 (printed by Barth in Leipzig in several editions), his long-standing role as church elder of the Berlin-Grunewald congregation, and the personal tragedies (four children, a wife, son Erwin executed 1945 for Stauffenberg-circle involvement) as the background to his religious position. Plus a source-critical note on the problematic 1944 Florence "Nature of Matter" quotation (the Max Planck Archive itself flags the provenance as unsecured). Linked to the 1906 pattern and to the Prussian curriculum filtering.
Read article →Prussian Compulsory Schooling – Discipline, Literacy, and the Path Dependency of a Curriculum
Frederick William I in 1717, Frederick II in 1763 with the General-Land-Schul-Reglement: the birth of the modern Volksschule. Official aims reading, writing, Christianity – structural functions administration, military, discipline, leading away from "superstition". Via Horace Mann in 1843 to the United States, via Meiji-Japan in 1872 to East Asia. Four ideological overlays (Wilhelm II 1889/1892, Weimar 1920/1925, Nazi era from 1933, West-German federalism and East-German centralism 1949–1990, then the PISA shift) have never touched the form (class group, lesson clock, grading scale). The 1906-pattern connection comes in two halves: among the pre-1906 canonical figures Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin as truncated biographies (court astrology, alchemy, Boyle Lectures, Sandemanian eldership, theology, faith); among the post-1906 voices Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Eccles, Penrose, William James as biographies absent altogether. Institutional path dependency, not conspiracy. With Melton, Neugebauer, Foucault, Bourdieu, Gatto, Hentig as sources.
Read article →Christof Niederwieser – Portrait of an Austrian Astrologer and Prognostication Scholar
Dr. Christof Niederwieser (b. 1976 in Tyrol) combines economics studies in Innsbruck and Berlin, a humanities doctorate on "Prognostication in Magic and Modernity", fifteen years of corporate practice (most recently Head of Brand & Business Development at a German luxury company) and, since 2014, a full-time practice as an astrologer and futures-strategy consultant. Visiting Fellow at the IKGF at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg 2018/2019. Own methods: Group Horoscope, Astro-Kondratieff cycle, AstroMANAGEMENT. Four books, a far-reaching YouTube channel, his own software CHRONLEX. With a historical bridge to Kepler as court astrologer.
Read article →Martin Zoller – Portrait of an Internationally Active Swiss Medium and Remote Viewer
Martin Zoller (b. 1971 in Paris, grew up in Basel, Swiss citizen, for years active in Bolivia) is one of the internationally best-known German-language mediums. Became known through the 1999 Bolivia case (locating a crashed aeroplane in the jungle). Seven books (including "Hellsichtig" and "Handbuch der Intuition" with Giger Verlag), four meditation CDs, an award-winning documentary on shamanism. Works in German, English, French and Spanish. Advises private individuals, companies, lawyers and politicians worldwide. With cross-reference to the Bolivia case in our own detail article.
Read article →Birgit Fischer – Portrait of an Austrian Medium and Bestselling Author
Birgit Fischer from Styria is one of the most far-reaching German-language voices in mediumship, healing and spirituality: several-time SPIEGEL bestselling author, operator of the Powersoul platform (powersoul.at) with her own online academy, in-demand speaker at the large channelling congresses. Books at Allegria/Ullstein and Schirner among others. Topics: personal readings, energetic healing, mediumistic training, starseeds. With a brief cross-reference to her special topic Remote Viewing for the Find Me Group, which we treat in detail in a separate article.
Read article →Kim-Anne Jannes – Portrait of a Well-Known German-Language Medium
Kim-Anne Jannes (b. 1971 in Solingen, lives in Switzerland) is one of the best-known German-language mediums – with TV appearances on Fliege, Pro7 Galileo Mystery, RTL "Ein Gespür für Mord" and "Das Medium", and on the ARD show maischberger. Author of the book "Das Jenseits und die geistige Welt" (Droemer Knaur), director of the Flügelwerkstatt seminar centre in the Zurich area. A plainly told portrait – with a separate paragraph on the recurring observation of technical disturbances in her presence, parallel to the Pauli effect from the history of physics.
Read article →The 1906 Pattern – How Academic Science Lost the Mind
A synthesis of twelve portrait blogs: until about 1906 top scientists (Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, William James) could be both top academics AND researchers of metaphysical and mediumistic phenomena. Within a narrow window 1906–1910 Pierre Curie (April 1906), Lord Kelvin (December 1907) and William James (August 1910) die; Hugo Münsterberg stages the 1909 Palladino exposure as a distancing ritual of American psychology from its own psychical-research root. After 1906 the same combination becomes institutionally impossible – not through new data but through three documented mechanisms of marginalisation plus a fourth, harder variant (direct institutional action). The pattern continues to operate: Cardeña 2018, the Lucadou funding cut 2019, the Penrose Nobel 2020. With Andreas Sommer's 2013 UCL dissertation as methodological anchor. An institutional path-dependency, not a conspiracy – but also not "the data have shown it".
Read article →William James (1842–1910) – Founder of American Psychology and 25 Years of Leonora Piper
William James (1842–1910), Harvard professor and founder of American academic psychology ("Principles of Psychology" 1890), was at the same time twice SPR president (1894/95), co-founder of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885 and for over 25 years investigator of the Boston medium Leonora Piper – his famous "white crow". Died on 26 August 1910, months after Münsterberg's 1909 Palladino exposure, in which his own former student staged the institutional separation of psychology from its psychical-research root. The bridge case of the pattern series: model figure before 1906, institutionally displaced after 1906. With "Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902), "The Energies of Men" (1907) and the testament "The Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher" (October 1909).
Read article →Roger Penrose – The Nobel Laureate and the Orch-OR Theory of Consciousness
Sir Roger Penrose (b. 1931) – Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 for the singularity theorems, Rouse Ball Professor at Oxford, one of the major mathematical physicists of the second half of the 20th century. With "The Emperor's New Mind" (1989) and "Shadows of the Mind" (1994), the only living physics Nobel laureate with an independently worked-out quantum theory of consciousness. Since 1996 Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) jointly with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff: consciousness as a non-algorithmic process in the microtubules of neuronal cells, gravitationally induced quantum collapse as the elementary moment of conscious experience. Penrose is a secular Platonist, not a theist – thus the proof that the pattern series is defined not by religion but by insistence on non-material reality.
Read article →Werner Heisenberg – The Central Order and the Metaphysical Programme Behind Quantum Mechanics
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), Nobel Prize in Physics 1932, discoverer of the uncertainty principle and matrix mechanics (Helgoland 1925). Director of the MPI for Physics until 1970. His autobiographical main work "Physics and Beyond" (1969), the Gifford Lectures 1955/56 ("Physics and Philosophy") and the posthumously published manuscript "Ordnung der Wirklichkeit" (written 1942, published 1989) develop the concept of a "central order" as source of physical law and ethical truth. Heisenberg's Platonic reading of elementary particles (mathematical forms instead of material building blocks) and the Bacon bonmot "the first sip makes atheistic, at the bottom of the cup God awaits". The third marginalisation variant of the pattern series: not omitted but downplayed in reach.
Read article →John Eccles – The Nobel Neurophysiologist and His Dualism of Self and Brain
Sir John Eccles (1903–1997) – Australian-British neurophysiologist, student of Sherrington, Nobel Prize Medicine 1963 for the ionic mechanisms of synaptic excitation and inhibition (EPSP/IPSP). Lifelong avowed substance dualist and member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. With Karl Popper "The Self and Its Brain" (Springer 1977, 600 pages), Gifford Lectures 1977/78, "How the Self Controls Its Brain" (Springer 1994). In 1992 with the theoretical physicist Friedrich Beck a quantum-mechanical mind-brain interaction model in PNAS ("psychon" theory, PNAS 89:11357–11361) – the most concrete neuroscientific variant of the post-1906 Pauli/Bohm programme. Four years before Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR.
Read article →David Bohm – Quantum Physics, the McCarthy Exile, and the Krishnamurti Dialogue
David Bohm (1917–1992) – Berkeley PhD under Oppenheimer, Assistant Professor at Princeton, Einstein's preferred discussion partner on quantum foundations. Lost his US position in 1951 after refusing to testify before HUAC, moved via Brazil (passport confiscated) and Israel to London. Pioneer of the hidden-variables interpretation (de Broglie-Bohm theory 1952), co-discoverer of the Aharonov-Bohm effect (1959), founder of the implicate-order ontology ("Wholeness and the Implicate Order" 1980) and for over three decades intense dialogue partner of Jiddu Krishnamurti. John Bell built his famous 1964 theorem explicitly on Bohm. The most densely marginalised biography in the entire pattern series – political (McCarthy), professional (hidden variables until c. 2000) and philosophical (Krishnamurti separation).
Read article →Erwin Schrödinger – The Vedantic Doctrine of Consciousness Behind Wave Mechanics
Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) – Nobel Prize in Physics 1933, founder of wave mechanics (Schrödinger equation 1926), creator of "Schrödinger's cat" (1935), at the same time a lifelong student of the Upanishads and of Advaita Vedanta. He wrote the first part of "My View of the World" in autumn 1925 – a year before wave mechanics. "What is Life?" (1944) founded molecular biology AND ended with a Vedantic epilogue on the one consciousness. "Mind and Matter" (1958): the plurality of consciousnesses is a construction of the subject-object split. With Walter Moore's Cambridge biography, the tat-tvam-asi argument, and the historical point: the worldview preceded the physics, not the other way round.
Read article →Lord Kelvin – Thermodynamics Patriarch and Believing Bridge into the 20th Century
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin of Largs (1824–1907) – founder of the absolute temperature scale, co-formulator of the Second Law, architect of the transatlantic telegraph cables, 53 years Glasgow Professor, Royal Society President 1890–95, buried beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. Lifelong active in the Free Church of Scotland, in 1903 at 79 he gave a widely reported UCL lecture against scientific materialism, was Vice-President of the Christian apologetic Victoria Institute. His death in December 1907 falls with Pierre Curie's death in 1906 and Münsterberg's Palladino exposure in 1909 into the window in which the openly theistic British physics establishment ends. With the Earth-age argument, Rutherford's polite correction in 1904 and the UCL quote on the "Directive Power".
Read article →Robert Boyle – Father of Chemistry, Alchemist, and Founder of the Boyle Lectures
Robert Boyle (1627–1691) – co-founder of the Royal Society, author of Boyle's Law (1662) and "The Sceptical Chymist" (1661), at the same time an active alchemist in Newton's correspondence network and author of "The Christian Virtuoso" (1690). In his will he founded the Boyle Lectures – a Christian apologetic series running annually since 1692, reaching its 334th year in 2026. Lawrence Principe's Princeton study (1998) reconstructed the alchemical side (pursuit of the philosophers' stone, repeal of the anti-alchemy law in 1689, correspondence with Newton); Michael Hunter's Yale biography (2009) the theological programme. Both systematically removed from the school-chemistry image.
Read article →Michael Faraday – Sandemanian Preacher and Inventor of Field Theory
Michael Faraday (1791–1867) – bookbinder's apprentice with no university education, discoverer of electromagnetic induction (1831), founder of the field concept, three times elder of the strictly Bible-believing Sandemanian community in London. His search for the unity of the natural forces (electricity ↔ magnetism ↔ light ↔ gravity) was theologically motivated: if the Creator is one, the creation must be unified. Geoffrey Cantor's authoritative biography (1991) shows that this theological root of modern field physics is consistently omitted from the physics textbook. With sermon manuscripts, the 1844 exclusion, and the Faraday → Maxwell line.
Read article →James Clerk Maxwell – The Forgotten Theological Maxwell and Electrodynamics
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) – first Cavendish Professor, father of electrodynamics and of the kinetic theory of gases – was a confessing, practicing Presbyterian. His 1875 Encyclopaedia Britannica article "Atom" argues the cosmic identity of atomic spectra as evidence of design. His 1873 Eranus address publicly opposed mechanistic determinism with an early chaos argument. Religious poetry, a deathbed prayer, the "Demon" paper of 1867/71 – an entire theological-philosophical substrate now almost completely retouched out of today's physics textbook. With Campbell/Garnett 1882, Niven 1890 and Harman 1990–2002 as primary source base.
Read article →Isaac Newton – Alchemist, Theologian, and "the Last of the Magicians"
Newton (1642–1727) left around one million words on alchemy and several million on anti-Trinitarian theology – more than on physics. Cambridge and the Royal Society kept these writings as "not fit to be printed" for 200 years after his death. Only the 1936 Sotheby's auction (with buyers John Maynard Keynes and Abraham Yahuda) and Keynes' 1946 lecture "Newton, the Man" brought the other Newton back into view: "He was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians." With today's editions at the Newton Project (Oxford) and Chymistry of Isaac Newton (Indiana).
Read article →Walter von Lucadou – Haunting Stories and Precognitive Dreams from the Freiburg Counselling Practice
Six cases from the lectures and books of Walter von Lucadou, head of the Parapsychological Counselling Service in Freiburg and successor of Hans Bender: the bowling alley after hours, the operating-room monitors, the grandfather clock on the night of the death, the dream of the burning cradle, the foreseen car accident with the red sports car, and the famous Aberfan cluster of 1966 (Eryl Mai Jones).
Read article →Hans Bender (1907–1991) – Founder of the Freiburg Institute for Border Areas of Psychology
Hans Bender (1907–1991) – psychologist in Freiburg, founded in 1950 the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene (IGPP) and from 1954 held the only regular German university chair for "Border Areas of Psychology" ever. Correspondent of C. G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli and J. B. Rhine, practical partner of Gerard Croiset, leader of the 1967/68 Rosenheim poltergeist investigation with the MPI plasma physicists Karger and Zicha. For four decades the public face of serious German-language parapsychology; the IGPP exists to this day.
Read article →Charles Richet (1850–1935) – The Nobel Physiologist Who Coined "Ectoplasm" and "Métapsychique"
Charles Robert Richet (1850–1935): Sorbonne Professor of Physiology, Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology 1913 for the discovery of anaphylaxis, SPR President 1905, director of the Paris Institut Général Psychologique. Coined the terms "métapsychique", "ectoplasm", "telekinesis" and "cryptesthesia". His 800-page Traité de Métapsychique (1922) remains, a hundred years later, the most systematic survey of the pre-Rhine phase of psi research. With the Palladino investigations, the Eva C. episode (critically framed) and the 1919 founding of the IMI in Paris.
Read article →Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) – The Nobel Laureate Who Made Consciousness a Quantum Question
Eugene Paul Wigner – Hungarian-American theorist, Nobel Prize in Physics 1963 for symmetry principles in nuclear theory, co-architect of the Manhattan Project (the Hanford reactor with Szilard), 33-year Princeton professor, brother-in-law of Paul Dirac – in 1961 in "Remarks on the Mind-Body Question" made consciousness an unavoidable component of quantum mechanics foundations. His "Wigner's Friend" thought experiment is still discussed today and was sharpened anew in 2018 in the Frauchiger-Renner theorem from ETH Zurich.
Read article →Hans-Peter Dürr (1929–2014) – "There is no matter!" The Heisenberg Successor and His Consciousness Legacy
Hans-Peter Dürr – PhD under Edward Teller at Berkeley, closest collaborator of Werner Heisenberg at the Munich MPI for Physics, its executive director 1972–1997, Right Livelihood laureate 1987 for his peace work against the Strategic Defense Initiative – became, in the last two decades of his life, the formative German-language voice of a quantum physics that takes consciousness seriously. With his central thesis "There is no matter!" and his late books (Herder, Crotona), Dürr is in the German-speaking world the most important bridge between Heisenberg's original physics and today's consciousness discussion.
Read article →Brian Josephson (b. 1940) – The Living Nobel Laureate Who Defends Psi Research
Brian David Josephson – Nobel Prize in Physics 1973 at age 33 for the Josephson effect (quantum tunneling between superconductors, basis for SQUID magnetometers and superconducting qubits), Trinity College Cambridge, Cavendish Laboratory – has been publicly active in consciousness research, transcendental meditation and parapsychological research since the 1970s. Director of the "Mind-Matter Unification Project" at the Cavendish. Massive mainstream criticism (Royal Mail 2001, David Deutsch's "utter rubbish") – never retracted. The only living Nobel laureate in physics publicly defending psi research.
Read article →Sir J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) – Discoverer of the Electron as SPR Member
Sir Joseph John Thomson – Cavendish Professor at Cambridge (successor to Rayleigh, predecessor of Rutherford), discoverer of the electron in 1897, Nobel Prize Physics 1906, RS President 1915–20, Master of Trinity College 1918–40 – was an SPR member for decades, personally present at the 1895 Cambridge sittings with Eusapia Palladino, and devoted a chapter to the subject in his 1936 autobiography "Recollections and Reflections". Comparison with Lodge and Rayleigh: the same differentiation – telepathy taken seriously, physical mediumship sceptical.
Read article →Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919) – The Argon Discoverer as SPR President
John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh – Cavendish Professor at Cambridge (successor to Maxwell, predecessor of J. J. Thomson), Nobel Prize Physics 1904 for the discovery of argon, originator of Rayleigh scattering ("why the sky is blue"), Master of Trinity College 1908–19, RS President 1905–08 – was also President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1919 and in January 1919 gave a late, methodologically mature presidential address on decades of careful psi research. With the Cambridge Palladino sittings of 1895, the Balfour connection, and the "third position".
Read article →Sir Oliver Lodge and "Raymond" (1916) – The Radio Pioneer Who Sought His Dead Son
Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) – pioneer of wireless telegraphy on a par with Marconi, inventor of the Lodge coherer and the spark plug, Principal of the University of Birmingham, President of the British Association 1913 – was active for decades in the Society for Psychical Research, twice its president, and investigator of Leonora Piper. After the death of his son Raymond on the Western Front in 1915 he published "Raymond, or Life and Death" (1916). For Lodge, radio waves and telepathy were two aspects of the same medium – the aether.
Read article →Sir William Crookes and the "Psychic Force" – A Royal Society President in the Séance Laboratory
Sir William Crookes (1832–1919) – discoverer of thallium, inventor of the Crookes tube and the radiometer, President of the Royal Society 1913–1915 – investigated the most famous mediums of his time in his private London laboratory between 1869 and 1875: Daniel Dunglas Home (levitations, accordion in a cage, weight variations) and Florence Cook (materialisations, "Katie King"). In 1871 he published the "Psychic Force" hypothesis – a still-unknown physical force. He never retracted his findings.
Read article →Pierre and Marie Curie and the Medium Eusapia Palladino – The Paris Sittings of 1905/06
Two years after their joint Nobel Prize in Physics (1903), Pierre and Marie Curie attended from June 1905 a series of sittings in Paris with the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino at the Institut Général Psychologique. In a famous letter to Louis Georges Gouy of 24 July 1905, Pierre wrote of "a whole new domain of facts and physical states of space". A few weeks before his accidental death on 19 April 1906 he was planning a systematic publication. Marie continued until 1907/08, then withdrew.
Read article →Albert Einstein and the Mental Radio Foreword – How a Nobel Laureate Took Telepathy Seriously
Albert Einstein wrote the foreword to the 1930 German edition of Upton Sinclair's book "Mental Radio" – a documentation of telepathy experiments between Sinclair and his wife Mary Craig Sinclair. With the actual Einstein quote (rather than the often-invented one), his general stance as a "fourth position" alongside Jung, Pauli and Rhine, and a critical reading of the famous but weakly sourced episodes with Wolf Messing (Vienna 1927) and Gene Dennis (1932).
Read article →Johannes Kepler – Court Astrologer and Founder of Modern Astronomy
Kepler (1571–1630) is the textbook figure of the three laws of planetary motion. In the historical original he is also court astrologer in Prague and to Wallenstein, author of some 800 horoscopes, theorist of a geometrically grounded astrology ("Tertius interveniens" 1610), defender of his mother Katharina in the Leonberg witch trial (1615–1621) – and the historical key witness in Wolfgang Pauli's 1952 essay on archetypes in natural science.
Read article →PEAR – The Princeton Lab for Consciousness and Randomness (1979–2007)
Robert G. Jahn, Dean of the Princeton School of Engineering, founded the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR) with Brenda Dunne in 1979. 28 years of operation, around 2.5 million individual trials with quantum random number generators, the "Random Mechanical Cascade" with 9,000 balls, the Remote Perception program, the combined statistics at Z ≈ 7 and the public closure in 2007 – plus the Bösch-Steinkamp-Boller meta-analysis in the Psychological Bulletin.
Read article →J. B. Rhine and Duke Parapsychology – How Telepathy Entered the Laboratory
Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980) turned parapsychology into an experimental discipline. At Duke University in Durham he built the world centre of psi research from 1930 onwards: the Zener cards, the 1933/34 Pearce-Pratt experiment with over 1,800 individual guesses, the 1934 bestseller "Extra-Sensory Perception", the Journal of Parapsychology from 1937, dice telekinesis, the Rhine Research Center to this day. Plus: Louisa Rhine and 14,000 spontaneous cases.
Read article →Wolfgang Pauli and the Paranormal – From the Pauli Effect to Synchronicity
Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958), a founder of quantum mechanics, collaborated with C. G. Jung for more than two and a half decades. From the legendary Pauli effect through some 1,500 documented dreams (including the famous "World Clock" vision) to the joint 1952 book "Naturerklärung und Psyche" with the concept of synchronicity and the unus-mundus thesis – a Nobel Prize in physics at the border of the paranormal.
Read article →C. G. Jung and Mediumship – from Helly Preiswerk to Depth Psychology
C. G. Jung's entire psychiatric career began with séance protocols of his 15-year-old cousin Helene "Helly" Preiswerk. The sittings between 1894 and 1899 became his 1902 Basel dissertation "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" – and later the theory of complexes, the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Plus: the Red Book (Liber Novus), the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos and synchronicity.
Read article →Dolly Röschli – Swiss Medium from the Emmental
Portrait of Swiss medium Dolly Röschli (b. 1975 in Wyssachen/Emmental): trained at Arthur Findlay College, full-time in her own practice in the Zurich Oberland since 2003, bestselling book "Hallo, Jenseits" (Wörterseh Verlag 2018) and unusually present in Swiss mainstream media (SRF Sternstunde Religion, Glanz & Gloria, Tele Züri).
Read article →Mediumship in Switzerland: Europe's Longest Living Tradition
Why Switzerland is the European centre for mediumship: two roots rarely told together – the Alpine folk tradition ("Wenden", "Le Secret", state-recognised cultural heritage since 2012) and urban Spiritualism since 1850 (C. G. Jung, Basel, Zurich). Plus the legal reason: the absence of a Heilpraktiker-style restrictive law. With links to Sam Hess, Pascal Voggenhuber, Christina von Dreien, Anouk Claes/Bösch and Martin Zoller.
Read article →Christina von Dreien (b. 2001): Portrait of a Young Swiss Spiritual Teacher
Portrait of the young Swiss bestselling author Christina von Dreien (b. 2001 in the Toggenburg). Her own team, sold-out lectures, a YouTube audience in the hundreds of thousands. Five-volume "Christina" series at Govinda Verlag (volume 5, "Der Ungehorsam der Liebe", she wrote herself), plus the standalone "Christinas Herzbotschaften". Core message: Freedom, Truth, Love – and "Consciousness creates peace".
Read article →Sam Hess (1951–2025): The Swiss Forester Who Lived Between the Worlds
Portrait of Swiss medium Sam Hess: 35 years a forester, clairvoyant from childhood, raised in the old Alpine tradition of seers and healers. Books at AT Verlag, documentary films ("Fenster zum Jenseits", "Die weisse Arche") and his central message: "There is no death".
Read article →Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain? A Conjecture, Not a Proof
The claim "the brain produces consciousness" is presented as established fact – but it is an unproven conjecture. A methodological walk-through: what a correlation logically permits, the frog joke, the receiver model, the hard problem (Chalmers) and why the underlying materialism no longer holds even in fundamental physics.
Read article →Dr. Penny Sartori: The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences
Insights from an ICU nurse based on her five-year clinical study at Morriston Hospital. Learn about the famous "Lollipop Case" of veridical perception and how near-death experiences permanently transform the lives of those affected.
Read article →Worldwide Psi Programs: Soviet Union, China, UK and More
Stargate was not the only one. A comparative overview of state psi programs in the Soviet Union (Bekhterev, Vasiliev, Naumov, KGB psychotronics), China (EHF, Tsinghua, Yan Xin), the United Kingdom (MoD study 2001/2002), as well as Czechoslovakia, France and Israel – with documentary record, focus areas and sources.
Read article →Stargate: The CIA's Secret Remote Viewing Program (1972–1995)
23 years, five US presidencies, around USD 20 million budget – and in 2017 declassified with 12 million pages of files. The story of the Stargate program: SCANATE, SRI, Ingo Swann, Joe McMoneagle (Legion of Merit), General Dozier, Skylab, Typhoon class – plus the 1995 AIR report by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman.
Read article →Pascal Voggenhuber – Portrait of a Modern Medium
Who is Pascal Voggenhuber? A portrait of the Swiss bestselling author, his training at Arthur Findlay College, his time with the police, and his philosophy of evidence-based mediumship.
Read article →Mediumship and Power: Helen Duncan, CIA Stargate, and Academic Marginalisation
Why mediumship research stays marginal despite a solid evidence base – two documented historical strands: Helen Duncan's 1944 Witchcraft Act conviction and the CIA's 23-year Stargate program, declassified in 2017 with 12 million pages of files. Plus the academic marginalisation reconstructed by Andreas Sommer and felt again by Etzel Cardeña in 2018 with his American Psychologist review.
Read article →Christina von Dreien: Does Our Consciousness Arise in the Brain?
Christina von Dreien, a well-known medium from Switzerland, outlines the receiver model of consciousness in a short audio piece: the brain is not the producer, but the translator. Her view from a mediumistic perspective – and how it connects to the empirical work of Schwartz, Beischel, Long and Tressoldi.
Read article →Patrizio Tressoldi: The Big Meta-Analysis of Mediumship Research (p < 10⁻⁹)
How Dr. Patrizio Tressoldi (University of Padova) demonstrated in a 2020 meta-analysis covering 18 mediumship experiments over two decades a combined effect at p < 10⁻⁹ – plus his own studies (28 mediums, 100 readings, p = 0.000048) and his notable positioning towards the survival hypothesis.
Read article →Gary Schwartz & VERITAS: Mediumship Research at the University of Arizona
How Prof. Gary Schwartz (Harvard PhD, formerly Yale) built the VERITAS research program at the University of Arizona, tested prominent US mediums such as John Edward and Allison DuBois – and with his triple-blind transcript procedure provided the methodological skeleton from which Beischel's later quintuple-blind work would grow.
Read article →Beischel & Windbridge: Mediumship Research with Five-Layer Blinding
How Dr. Julie Beischel has studied mediums since 2007 at the Windbridge Institute (Tucson, Arizona) under the highest level of blinding seen in experimental research: a quintuple-blind phone protocol, certified research mediums, and significance values down to p = 0.0001 – the methodologically strictest complement to the Glasgow Study.
Read article →The Glasgow Study: Archie Roy and Tricia Robertson Put Mediums to the Scientific Test
How Prof. Archie Roy (astronomy, Glasgow) and Tricia Robertson developed a double- and triple-blind protocol between 1996 and 2004 – and refuted the skeptic hypothesis that "mediumistic statements apply to anyone" with a chance probability of around one in a million.
Read article →Dr. Jeffrey Long: Evidence of the Afterlife – The 9 Lines of Evidence
In his bestseller "Evidence of the Afterlife", Dr. Jeffrey Long presented nine scientific lines of evidence for an afterlife, based on more than 1,600 analyzed near-death experiences. We summarize his key findings.
Read article →British Spiritualism: A Living Tradition of Mediumship
Why Great Britain is the motherland of modern Spiritualism, how Spiritualist Churches are maintained, and what makes the Arthur Findlay College so unique.
Read article →Kim-Anne Jannes: The Uwe Barschel Case
How medium Kim-Anne Jannes, in collaboration with the Barschel family, sought new insights into the mysterious death of the politician.
Read article →Paul Meek: RTL Mysteries and the "Big Bang" of his Career
How the show RTL Mysteries with Jörg Draeger became the "Big Bang" for Paul Meek's career and why he gave up his opera career for mediumship.
Read article →Arthur Findlay College: The World's Premier College for Mediumship
Arthur Findlay College at Stansted Hall is considered the world's leading centre for mediumship. Learn about its history, training, and its striking resemblance to Hogwarts.
Read article →Martin Zoller: Using Remote Viewing to Find a Plane Wreck in Bolivia
How Martin Zoller located a plane that crashed in the Bolivian jungle in 1999 using Remote Viewing, which official search parties had been unable to find for days – making it possible to rescue several survivors.
Read article →The House of the Spirits – A Spiritual Analysis
Isabel Allende's novel between mediumship and history: Clara's magia blanca, the house as a resonant space, magical realism instead of karma – and the torture cell where Clara appears to Alba and binds her to write.
Read article →Ghost Whisperer: Mediumship and Earthbound Spirits
Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda Gordon: We analyse the series' concept of "earthbound souls", compare fiction with the reality of mediumistic work, and show why the show helped de-stigmatize communication with the afterlife.
Read article →Ghost (1990) – What the Movie Reveals About Mediumship
The movie Ghost is more than Hollywood kitsch. We analyse the portrayal of afterlife communication, the role of medium Oda Mae Brown, and the accuracy of its depiction of mediumistic phenomena.
Read article →The medium Birgit Fischer and the CIA – Remote Viewing and the Find Me Group
What is remote viewing? From the CIA Stargate program (1972–1995) and the Stanford Research Institute via Joe McMoneagle and Ingo Swann to Birgit Fischer's account on the {ungeskriptet} by Ben podcast (from 1:21:20): method, history, the Find Me Group's multi-viewer protocol – and what distinguishes remote viewing from classical mediumship.
Read article →Mavis Pittilla – the Most Influential Mediumship Teacher of Recent British Tradition
Portrait of English medium and teacher Mavis Pittilla (1933–2023): more than 60 years of practice, decades of teaching at Arthur Findlay College, mentor to Gordon Smith, Tony Stockwell, Janet Nohavec and many others. With teaching philosophy (vocation not stage, relationship to the spirit world, responsibility toward the bereaved) and placement in mediumship research.
Read article →Gordon Smith – the "Psychic Barber" of Glasgow and the Glasgow Studies
Profile of Scottish medium Gordon Smith: from a barber in Glasgow to a tutor at Arthur Findlay College, with the years-long statistical studies by Prof. Archie Roy and Tricia Robertson at the University of Glasgow (Journal of the SPR, 2001/2004). With method description, Smith's style (names, addresses, highly specific details), comparison to Lazar/Beischel/Schwartz and a critical perspective.
Read article →The EREAMS Study – Design and Results on Mediumistic Messages (Lazar 2021)
The EREAMS study by Oliver Lazar in detail: 243 participants from six countries, two mediums, a waiting phase as methodological filter, highly specific evidence as the gold standard – over 90 % authenticity and 96 % comforting impact. With comparison to Schwartz, Beischel and Tressoldi and an honest discussion of strengths and limitations.
Read article →Pim van Lommel and the 2001 Lancet Study – The Breakthrough of NDE Research
The 2001 Lancet study in detail: 344 patients at ten Dutch hospitals, prospective multicentre design, 18 % NDE incidence, the "dentures case", long-term follow-up over 8 years, and the decisive finding that personality change occurs only in the NDE group – not in the control group with the same cardiac arrest.
Read article →Bruce Greyson – "Father of Near-Death Research" and His Greyson NDE Scale
Portrait of US psychiatrist Bruce Greyson (University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies): 45 years of NDE research, the Greyson NDE Scale (1983) as the worldwide standard, 27 years as editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, IANDS co-founder and author of "After" (2021). With his central findings on long-term after-effects and veridical perception.
Read article →Pam Reynolds – Probably the Best-Documented Near-Death Experience Case in Medical History
Reconstruction of the 1991 standstill operation at the Barrow Neurological Institute: body temperature 10 °C, stopped heart, blood drained from the head, flat EEG, absent brainstem potentials. Reynolds reported perceptions during this phase that Spetzler and the surgical team confirmed. With critical discussion of Woerlee's anaesthesia-awareness counter-hypothesis.
Read article →A Medium in a Psychiatric Clinic – Jakob Bösch and Anouk Claes (Baselland)
On the 4th floor of the Basel Land Psychiatric Clinic, the door sign "Head physician Dr. Jakob Bösch" sat next to one reading "Healer" – this is where medium Anouk Claes worked. A documented case of integrative psychiatry in the German-speaking world, with sources from DLF, SRF/3sat and Wikipedia, and the UK comparison: since 1985 the NHS has paid for energetic healing on a doctor's prescription.
Read article →Matter and the Higgs Field – Why Quarks Have Zero Rest Mass
Harald Lesch and Josef M. Gaßner explain why elementary particles in the Standard Model must be massless, why the equations would otherwise yield probabilities above 100 %, and how the Higgs field produces what we measure as mass. Plus: 99 % of the proton's mass is QCD binding energy – not "stuff".
Read article →Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar and the EREAMS Study – Mediumship Readings Scientifically Investigated
Summary of the interview with Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar (FOM Düsseldorf) on his EREAMS study: 243 participants, two mediums, highly specific evidence – over 90 % authenticity and 96 % comforting impact. Plus: the personal starting point and two independent confirmations by mediums.
Read article →Majority vs. Experts: Galileo, Semmelweis, Wegener, Einstein – and the AI bias
Five historical cases in which the majority stood against the experts and lost – and why today's AI systems reproduce the same bias, because they weight by frequency rather than expertise. Applied to the NDE debate.
Read article →Godehard Brüntrup: Philosophical Perspectives on Near-Death Experiences
Summary of the lecture by Prof. Dr. Dr. Godehard Brüntrup SJ (Munich School of Philosophy): five philosophical strategies for dealing with NDEs, the puzzle of perception during flat-line EEG, patterns hard to explain in evolutionary terms, and the NDE as a mystical experience.
Read article →Prof. Wilfried Kuhn on Near-Death Experiences – A Neurologist's Perspective
Summary of the Thanatos TV interview with neurologist Prof. Wilfried Kuhn (department head Schweinfurt, Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung e.V.): why the hallucination label falls short, why endorphins fail as an explanation, flat-line EEG and the puzzling gamma peak shortly before death.
Read article →Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on Near-Death Experiences (1981) – Not a Matter of Belief, but a Matter of Knowledge
Summary of the 1981 television interview with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: the moment of death as a liberating experience, blind patients describing colours, and the children study – "in ten years no child has ever given me a wrong name".
Read article →Prof. Walter van Laack on Near-Death Experiences – Key Points
A summary of the interview with Aachen-based physician and scientist Prof. Walter van Laack: why oxygen-deprivation, drug and hallucination explanations fall short, documented flat-line EEG cases, and what clearly distinguishes NDEs from dreams.
Read article →The Little Match Girl
Hans Christian Andersen's Christmas tale (1845) in full – with a short note on the soul-leaving-the-body motif at the end: the grandmother receives the child in the light.
Read article →Mediums in Police Work
How police authorities cooperate with mediums – illustrated by Pascal Voggenhuber (Switzerland), Gerard Croiset (Netherlands) and the Etta Smith / Melanie Uribe case (USA). Plus: why Germany officially does not work with mediums – and how it still happens in practice.
Read article →What does a Mediumship Reading cost?
Typical price ranges for mediumship readings by country – DACH (€80–250), USA ($80–300) and UK (£40–150) –, the factors that drive the price, and red flags around bait offers and price-gouging.
Read article →How do I recognise a reputable Medium?
A concrete checklist of quality signs, typical red flags of fraudulent providers and questions to ask before booking a mediumship session.
Read article →Can you learn Clairvoyance?
Training paths from development circles to Arthur Findlay College, foundational exercises for the four clair-senses, and realistic timelines on the path to your own mediumistic practice.
Read article →What is a Trance Medium?
Introduction to trance mediumship: the difference from mental mediums and channeling, light and deep trance, the typical flow of a trance session and how to recognise a reputable trance medium.
Read article →How a Mediumship Reading works
How a mediumship reading typically unfolds: preparation, the typical phases (building the connection, identification, messages), duration, costs and what to look for when choosing a medium.
Read article →→ Also interesting: knowledge collection with external articles & videos