While Brazil is famous for its spectacular mediums — Chico Xavier, Zé Arigó — there was a man in the background who embodied the opposite of the exuberant believer: a sober civil engineer who wanted to investigate the phenomena of Spiritism with measurement protocols, case files and scepticism. Hernani Guimarães Andrade (1913–2003) founded the IBPP in 1963 — the first psychical research body in Latin America — making him something like Brazil’s counterpart to the British Society for Psychical Research.
From engineer to researcher
Andrade was born on 31 May 1913 in Araguari (Minas Gerais) and completed his civil engineering degree at the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1941. He worked in government service before devoting himself fully to his real passion. Unlike most Spiritists he came to the subject not through religious awakening but through the question of proof: can the claims of organised Spiritism be tested with the tools of natural science? His engineer’s approach — collect data, interview witnesses separately, rule out alternative explanations — shaped everything that followed.
The IBPP (1963)
In 1963 Andrade founded in São Paulo the Instituto Brasileiro de Pesquisas Psicobiofísicas (Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research, IBPP) — described as the first organisation of its kind in Latin America. Its programme covered:
- Poltergeist cases — Andrade’s specialty
- Reincarnation indicators in children with alleged past-life memories
- Mediumship, near-death and out-of-body experiences
- Instrumental transcommunication — attempts to record "voices" with electronic devices
Although the IBPP always remained a small circle, Andrade amassed a remarkable body of first-hand material over decades: around 32 documented poltergeist cases and about 75 reincarnation cases.
The method: Stevenson, Bender, Roll
Andrade was convinced that the phenomena of Spiritism could and should be appraised scientifically. Unlike his contemporary Waldo Vieira, who invented an entirely self-contained system of terms with projectiology, Andrade consistently followed the leading international parapsychologists of his time:
- Ian Stevenson (University of Virginia) for reincarnation research — Andrade adopted his protocol of recording children’s statements before any possible verification and comparing them with the lives of the deceased.
- Hans Bender (Freiburg), William G. Roll and D. Scott Rogo for poltergeist research — they had coined the concept of "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" (RSPK) and stressed the search for fraud, physical causes and the psychological profile of the "focus person".
This collect-and-compare method resembles in spirit the case collection of Louisa Rhine in the US: instead of a single laboratory experiment, a large corpus of spontaneous cases is systematically recorded and checked for recurring patterns. The methodological weakness is the same — such reports are eyewitness and memory data, not controlled trials.
The Jaboticabal case (1965/66)
Andrade’s best-known poltergeist case unfolded in the small town of Jaboticabal (São Paulo state). At its centre was Maria José Ferreira, a young girl around whom, over months, classic poltergeist phenomena accumulated as the investigators recorded them: stone-throwing (some apparently from nowhere inside the house), flying household objects, spontaneous fires on clothing and furniture and — most disturbing — bite marks and needles embedded in the girl’s skin.
The case is well documented and is regarded by believers as one of the most spectacular in the poltergeist literature; Maria José’s later fate (she is reported to have died by suicide as a young woman) is described in the accounts as a tragic outcome. Caution is warranted here: the phenomena rest on witness testimony and the investigators’ reconstruction, not on controlled observation under fraud-proof conditions. Deception by the focus person — the most obvious alternative explanation in poltergeist cases involving children and adolescents — cannot be ruled out with certainty after the fact. Andrade himself was aware of this and always emphasised the search for normal causes.
A second, often-cited case occurred in 1973 in Guarulhos (greater São Paulo) and followed a similar pattern.
The reincarnation cases
Andrade devoted the largest part of his work to children who reported memories of a former life. Following Stevenson’s model he documented around 75 such cases. His internationally best-known is the case of Jacira and Ronaldo, published in 1980 as an English-language monograph ("A Case Suggestive of Reincarnation: Jacira and Ronaldo") — notable for combining an alleged memory of a suicide with a "change of sex" between lives.
Reincarnation is a core axiom in Kardecist Spiritism — which both motivated Andrade’s research and exposes it to a suspicion of confirmation. Methodologically his cases share the well-known weaknesses of all reincarnation research: retrospective verification, possible unconscious shaping of the child by the family, cultural expectation, and the difficulty of cleanly separating a past-life "memory" from normally acquired knowledge.
Guy Lyon Playfair: the bridge into English
That Andrade’s work was noticed internationally at all is owed above all to the British author and parapsychologist Guy Lyon Playfair (1935–2018), who lived in Brazil for several years and worked at the IBPP. Playfair said he was strongly influenced by Andrade’s serious approach. He turned the Brazilian cases into two influential books:
- The Flying Cow (1975) — on psychical research in Brazil, with chapters on Chico Xavier, the medium Mirabelli and the psychic surgeon Zé Arigó.
- The Indefinite Boundary (1976) — a broader treatment of the mind–matter question.
Playfair later became famous for his investigation of the British Enfield poltergeist — and he had acquired some of his methodological tools in São Paulo with Andrade.
The theory: the "Biological Organizing Model"
Andrade did not stop at collecting. He tried to build a theoretical framework to explain how a "spirit body" (in Spiritism the perispirit) might act on matter. His Modelo Organizador Biológico (MOB, "Biological Organizing Model", developed from 1984) posited a non-physical, information-bearing field that steers the development and form of the biological organism and survives death.
The parallel is striking: Andrade’s MOB resembles in its basic idea the morphic fields that the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake popularised a little later (from 1981) — a form-giving field beyond known physics. Both models share the same appeal and the same problem: elegant as explanation, but empirically hard to test and, above all, to falsify.
What Andrade’s work shows — and what it does not
Andrade’s historical significance lies not in a proof delivered but in an attitude: he took extraordinary claims seriously enough to document them soberly and by international standards, rather than either spreading them credulously or dismissing them wholesale. In doing so he created a Brazilian counterpart to the tradition of British psychical research.
The limits are equally clear. His work consists of field research on spontaneous cases, not controlled, replicable experiments. The data are largely witness testimony; fraud, memory distortion and expectation effects can rarely be ruled out after the fact. That he published in Portuguese also kept his cases largely beyond international scrutiny. Anyone seeking proof of poltergeists or reincarnation will not find it in Andrade — but they will find a carefully kept, fascinating archive that asks the right question: not "Is it true?" but "How would one investigate it seriously?".
Sources
- Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia: Psi Research in Brazil and Guy Lyon Playfair.
- Matlock JG. Hernani Guimarães Andrade (researcher profile, jamesgmatlock.com).
- Andrade HG. A Case Suggestive of Reincarnation: Jacira and Ronaldo. IBPP Monograph, 1980.
- Andrade HG. Parapsicologia Experimental (1967); Reencarnação no Brasil (1988); works on the Modelo Organizador Biológico (from 1984).
- Playfair GL. The Flying Cow (1975); The Indefinite Boundary (1976).
- Context: Mediumship in Brazil; Zé Arigó; Louisa Rhine and the collection of spontaneous cases.