Before Julie Beischel established the highest level of blinding in mediumship research with the Windbridge Institute, there was another address where the topic found an academic home: the laboratory of Prof. Gary E. Schwartz at the University of Arizona. Schwartz, a Harvard-trained psychologist and former Yale professor, founded the VERITAS Research Program there in the early 2000s – named after the Latin word for "truth" and Harvard's motto. VERITAS was one of the first university-anchored programs in the English-speaking world to systematically test the survival-of-consciousness hypothesis. It laid the groundwork on which Julie Beischel's stricter methodology would later grow.
Who Is Gary Schwartz?
Gary Schwartz, born in 1944 in Mineola, New York, earned his PhD in psychology from Harvard University in 1971. Five years as an assistant professor at Harvard followed, before he moved in 1976 to Yale University as Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry. In 1988 he joined the University of Arizona, where he still teaches today – with appointments in Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Surgery. He also directs the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health (LACH), the institutional home of VERITAS.
This biography matters in the context of mediumship research: with Harvard and Yale credentials, Schwartz brought academic reputation into a field that had until then largely lived in private foundations and parapsychological societies in the United States.
VERITAS: Truth as a Program
The VERITAS Research Program focused on a single, precise question: Can highly skilled mediums, under controlled conditions, deliver specific and accurate information about deceased persons, where that information was not available through normal means? Schwartz worked closely with the psychologist Linda G. S. Russek, with whom he had previously developed the theoretical framework of a "Living Energy Universe" – an attempt to make consciousness and information scientifically tractable as non-local phenomena.
The Studies: From "Silent Sitter" to Multi-Blind Designs
VERITAS worked its way methodologically from simpler to more complex setups. The main experimental designs:
- Single-blind, screen design: medium and sitter sat separated by a screen. In the first minutes there was complete silence (silent sitter) – the medium could only "read" with no verbal feedback. Only in the second phase could the sitter answer with yes/no.
- Double-blind by phone: medium and sitter fully separated in space; the medium did not know the sitter and could not hear them. Evaluation was based on the written reading transcripts.
- Triple-blind transcript ratings: reading transcripts were rated by blinded judges who did not know which reading was meant for which sitter. This is the design that Julie Beischel later extended into her quintuple-blind protocol.
The Mediums: Famous Names Under Laboratory Conditions
Several prominent US mediums took part in VERITAS – Schwartz deliberately wanted to test people whose public profile committed them to authenticity beyond the study itself:
- John Edward (host of the TV show Crossing Over)
- Allison DuBois (inspiration for the NBC series Medium)
- Suzane Northrop, George Anderson, Anne Gehman, Laurie Campbell, George Dalzell and others
The Central Result
The most important peer-reviewed publication appeared in 2001 in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research:
Schwartz, Russek, Nelson & Barentsen (2001): "Accuracy and replicability of anomalous after-death communication across highly skilled mediums", JSPR 65/1, pp. 1–25.
Five mediums were tested with a sitter who had lost six close people in the preceding ten years. Hit rates were clearly above chance. Schwartz's conclusion, soberly stated: "There is a class of highly skilled mediums who are doing something extraordinary."
Books for a Wider Audience
Alongside the scientific publications, Schwartz brought his research to a broader readership in several books:
- The Living Energy Universe (Hampton Roads, 1999, with Linda Russek)
- The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death (Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster, 2002, foreword by Deepak Chopra)
- The Truth About Medium (Hampton Roads, 2005)
- The G.O.D. Experiments (Atria, 2006)
- The Energy Healing Experiments (Atria, 2007)
- The Sacred Promise (Atria, 2011)
Criticism – and How It Was Handled
VERITAS was controversial from the start. Skeptics such as psychologist Ray Hyman (University of Oregon) and Richard Wiseman criticised aspects of the early studies: non-standardised rating measures, possible sensory leakage in the screen-based setups, and statistical degrees of freedom in the analysis. Some of this debate played out in the Skeptical Inquirer (2003).
Schwartz responded publicly to most of the objections; some criticisms – particularly those concerning the strict separation of experimenters and raters – were taken very seriously by subsequent research. This is exactly where Julie Beischel picked up: her quintuple-blind protocol at the Windbridge Institute can be read as a methodologically rigorous answer to the criticism of VERITAS.
From VERITAS to SOPHIA – and to Windbridge
In June 2006, Schwartz expanded the research with the SOPHIA Research Program (from Greek sophía, "wisdom"), which investigates not only communication with the deceased but also with higher spiritual levels – guides, angels, "divine" sources. VERITAS itself was wound down as an independent program in 2008, but the scientific line continued seamlessly: Julie Beischel, who had worked under Schwartz as a William James Post-Doctoral Fellow, founded the Windbridge Institute in the same year and developed there the stricter methodology that today serves as the benchmark.
Putting It in Context
In relation to Beischel, Gary Schwartz is what the Glasgow Study of Roy & Robertson is to both: the trail-blazing pioneer with institutional reputation. His VERITAS work is methodologically less strict than Beischel's quintuple-blind designs, but it accomplished three things that should not be underestimated:
- It established mediumship research as a legitimate university research field in the US.
- It worked with prominent mediums and thereby created public visibility.
- With its triple-blind transcript procedure, it provided the methodological skeleton from which Beischel built her full quintuple-blind protocol.
Anyone who wants to understand contemporary mediumship research has to know VERITAS – not despite, but precisely because of the debates it triggered. It is exactly those debates that have made the discipline sharper.
Sources:
• G. E. R. Schwartz, L. G. S. Russek, L. A. Nelson & C. Barentsen, Accuracy and replicability of anomalous after-death communication across highly skilled mediums, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 65/1 (2001), pp. 1–25.
• G. E. Schwartz, The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death, Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster, 2002.
• G. E. Schwartz, The Truth About Medium, Hampton Roads, 2005.
• Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health: VERITAS Research Program.
• Psi Encyclopedia (SPR): Gary Schwartz.
For more on scientific mediumship research, see our articles on Julie Beischel and the Windbridge Institute, the Glasgow Study of Roy & Robertson, Oliver Lazar's EREAMS study, Jeffrey Long's NDERF research, and Patrizio Tressoldi's meta-analysis that evaluates these studies together.