There is a recurring question in the history of mediumship research: why does it remain academically and publicly marginal today – even though the evidence base, as we discuss it in this series from Schwartz through Beischel to Tressoldi's meta-analysis, is actually quite solid? A recurring suggestion is that mediumistic perception might be inconvenient for those in power. Anyone who can be seen through would prefer not to be seen through. The thesis is large – and quickly too large. But there are two documented historical strands showing that mediumistic research has repeatedly come into the focus of state and academic power – with sober, verifiable archival evidence.
1. Helen Duncan and the 1944 Witchcraft Verdict
In November 1941, the Scottish medium Helen Duncan held a séance in Portsmouth. The mother of a missing sailor was present. Duncan told her that her son was dead – and named the ship: HMS Barham. The problem: the sinking of HMS Barham in the Mediterranean was at that time strictly classified. Only the families of the dead had been informed in confidence. The loss was officially announced only at the end of January 1942. The Royal Navy took notice.
Three years later, in January 1944 – just months before the Allied invasion of Normandy – Helen Duncan was arrested at a séance. She was charged under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, a piece of more than 200-year-old anti-witchcraft legislation. According to the case files, the Navy feared she might give away details of the upcoming D-Day plans. Helen Duncan was sentenced to nine months in prison, becoming the last person in Britain ever imprisoned under the 1735 Witchcraft Act.
The reaction of Winston Churchill is striking. In a letter to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison he called the trial "obsolete tomfoolery". Even the wartime Prime Minister was embarrassed by what was being prosecuted in his country in the middle of a world war. In 1951 the 1735 Witchcraft Act was finally repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act. But Helen Duncan's posthumous pardon has still not been granted: petitions to the Scottish Parliament were rejected in 2001, 2008 and 2012.
What this case documents is remarkable in itself: a modern state, in wartime, reactivated a 200-year-old anti-witchcraft law to remove a medium whose mediumistic accuracy was treated as a military security risk. It is hard to imagine stronger evidence for "this state took mediumship seriously enough to fight it."
2. The CIA Stargate Program: 23 Years, then 12 Million Pages
On the other side of the Atlantic – and on the other side of the assessment – a US program ran from 1972 to 1995 that did not try to suppress mediums but to use them for intelligence purposes. Successive code names included Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak and finally Star Gate. Involved were CIA, DIA, Army Intelligence – and the renowned Stanford Research Institute (SRI) under the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff.
The method was remote viewing: selected people were asked to provide information about places, persons or objects that they had no normal way of knowing, given nothing more than geographic coordinates (or even less). Reports of operational successes – via former program director Edwin May and viewer Joe McMoneagle – include locating a downed Soviet bomber in Africa, hostage leads, and observations of Soviet facilities.
In 1995 the program was officially closed. The justification was a Congressionally commissioned report by the American Institutes for Research deeming remote viewing operationally useless. Behind that closure, however, lay a fact that became visible only in 2017: under FOIA pressure the CIA released roughly 12 million pages of files – today fully accessible in the CIA Reading Room.
If the program had really been worthless – why did it receive funding for 23 years, across five US presidencies, in active competition with parallel programs in the Soviet Union and China?
That question is open. It is precisely relevant because the existence of the program is no longer disputable. Whoever today claims that mediumistic or psi perception has been scientifically settled overlooks one thing: the largest intelligence service in the Western world spent more than two decades treating the opposite as plausible. Comparable programs are documented in the Soviet Union (via the Russian Academy of Sciences) and in China.
3. Academic Marginalisation: Andreas Sommer's Reconstruction
The second strand is subtler – and perhaps for that reason more consequential. Cambridge-based historian of science Andreas Sommer reconstructed in his Wellcome Trust-funded dissertation (UCL 2013, awarded by the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology) how mediumship research was expelled from academic psychology in the late 19th and early 20th century – not primarily for scientific reasons, but for ideological ones.
A central episode in Sommer's work: William James, the founder of American academic psychology, considered himself a psychical researcher. He studied the medium Leonora Piper for years and reached cautiously positive conclusions. His student Hugo Münsterberg, by contrast, staged a highly public 1909 "exposure" of the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino. Sommer shows that this exposure was methodologically questionable – it served above all as a distancing ritual, by which the young discipline of psychology cut itself loose from its mediumship-research roots in order to become institutionally respectable.
Sommer's thesis in one line:
"The idea that parapsychology is unscientific or pseudoscientific arose in the 19th century from political, philosophical, and religious concerns rather than scientific work."
In other words: today's academic disregard for mediumship research is less the result of bad data than the result of an institutional path-dependency set in the late 19th and early 20th century.
4. Cardeña 2018: Still There Today
Anyone who thinks all this is long over is wrong. Etzel Cardeña, holder of the Thorsen Chair of Psychology at Lund University (Sweden), published in 2018 in American Psychologist – the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association – a review article with the sober title "The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review".
The conclusion:
"The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines, although there is no consensual understanding of them." – Cardeña, 2018
What was striking was not just the result. What was equally striking was what Cardeña said later in public: of his more than 300 academic publications, this single article was the most difficult to publish in his entire career. We are in 2018 – not 1909 – and the resistance is still there.
What Follows From This?
Both strands are documented. Both stand independently. Together they do not add up to a picture of coordinated conspiracy – that would be over-reading. But they do add up to a picture of recurring institutional discomfort:
- One state treated a medium as a security risk (Helen Duncan, 1944).
- Another state invested significant resources, over 23 years, in the operational use of mediumistic perception (Stargate, 1972–1995).
- An entire academic discipline distanced itself from mediumship research in the late 19th and early 20th century for ideological reasons (Sommer).
- That distancing still operates today – as visible in the fact that a methodologically clean review in the most important journal of the field could only be published against considerable resistance (Cardeña, 2018).
What does not follow: that there is a plan to suppress mediumship research. What does follow: anyone who today hears that "mediumship research has long since been scientifically settled" should at the very least pause. History suggests that this claim originates less in the data than in the institutions that carry it.
The honest question – whether mediumship research is under-funded because it is weak, or appears weak because it is under-funded – is not answered by the Stargate files and the Cardeña experience. But it stands in the room more honestly than a quick "science has long since checked" would suggest.
Sources:
• Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches, Fourth Estate 2001 (the scholarly standard biography of the Helen Duncan case).
• Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell 1997.
• Russell Targ & Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, Delacorte 1977.
• Andreas Sommer, Psychical research and the origins of American psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino, History of the Human Sciences 25/2 (2012). Plus: Forbidden Histories (ongoing research project).
• Etzel Cardeña, The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review, American Psychologist 73/5 (2018).
• CIA Reading Room: Star Gate Collection – ~12 million pages of declassified material, 2017.
• Wikipedia: Helen Duncan.
• Wikipedia: Stargate Project.
The scientific studies whose visibility this article addresses are covered in our articles on Gary Schwartz and VERITAS, Julie Beischel and Windbridge, the Glasgow Study by Roy & Robertson, and Tressoldi's meta-analysis.