The most common objection to everything this site writes about is not "that has been refuted" but: "That only concerns a few odd people." For a good twenty years there has been an empirical answer to this objection – the "Psi Report Germany", the representative population survey on exceptional experiences by the IGPP. Its result, in short: the extraordinary is statistically normal.
The survey
Around the turn of the millennium the IGPP had a representative sample of 1,510 Germans surveyed about their experiences with the "supernatural" – covering, among other things, impressions of telepathy, precognitive dreams, apparitions of the deceased and UFO sightings, along with attitudes and ways of coping with such experiences. The study was conducted and analysed by the sociologist Ina Schmied-Knittel and the sociologist Michael Schetsche; it was published in 2003 as the "Psi-Report Deutschland" in the volume "Alltägliche Wunder" ("Everyday Miracles", edited by Eberhard Bauer and Schetsche) and in English in 2005 in the European Journal of Parapsychology. Important for context: this is no head-count in an esoteric forum, but classical empirical social research by the rules of the survey craft.
The result: everyday miracles
The book's title was meant as a thesis, and the data backed it: around three quarters of respondents reported at least one exceptional experience of their own; for a good half of the population these involved classic paranormal phenomena – above all precognitive dreams, plus impressions of telepathy and apparitions of the deceased. What commonly passes for an exotic fringe phenomenon is, accordingly, everyday reality across the population: it is the neighbours, the colleagues, one's own family – right across society.
Just as remarkable is what the survey did not find: no confirmation of the cliché that such experiences are a phenomenon of the uneducated or the psychologically conspicuous. The experiencers are a cross-section of society, and the vast majority live with their experiences unremarkably – they rarely talk about them, because our culture has no place for them. It is precisely this speechlessness that creates the need for contact points such as the IGPP's free counselling service, the counselling office of Walter von Lucadou or, in the NDE field, IANDS and the Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung.
The sister study: 4 percent near-death experiences
The Psi Report has a thematically narrower sister: as early as 2001, Schmied-Knittel (then still publishing as Ina Schmied) with Hubert Knoblauch and Bernt Schnettler had published Europe's first representative near-death experience survey – more than 2,000 respondents, four percent with a near-death experience, published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Together the two studies form the German numerical scaffolding: millions of people with near-death experiences, a population majority with exceptional experiences of some kind.
Everyday Miracles 2.0: the finding holds
A generation later the IGPP measured again: for the follow-up survey "Alltägliche Wunder 2.0", more than 2,050 adults were surveyed online in December 2024 (quota-representative by gender, age and federal state), with 50 questions – among them the repeat questions from back then and new topics such as near-death experiences, out-of-body perceptions, astrology, spiritual healing and meditation. The first core result: around three quarters of the population report an unusual experience of their own today as well, with persistently high openness towards such phenomena. The finding of 2003 was thus no zeitgeist artefact of the millennium years – it is stable.
What the numbers prove – and what they do not
Honesty requires the boundary: a survey measures experiences and interpretations, not their causes. That half of Germans report a precognitive dream or an apparition does not prove that precognition or contact with the deceased are real – for that, the case and experimental research treated in the other articles on this site is needed. What the numbers do settle, however, is the opening argument: an experience shared by three quarters of the population cannot be dismissed as the quirk of a fringe group – nor can it be wholesale pathologised without declaring the majority of society patients. The exceptional experience is a normal part of human life; what needs explaining is not its existence but its content.
Context
The Psi Report Germany is the statistical foundation under many articles on this site: it turns "a few odd people" into "half the country" – with methods against which no methodological objection bites, because nothing paranormal is claimed here; things are merely counted properly. Perhaps that is the real point of the Freiburg sociology: before arguing about what these experiences are, one should take note of how many people have them. There are too many for any comfortable explaining-away.
Sources: Ina Schmied-Knittel & Michael Schetsche, "Psi-Report Deutschland. Eine repräsentative Bevölkerungsumfrage zu außergewöhnlichen Erfahrungen", in: Eberhard Bauer & Michael Schetsche (eds.), Alltägliche Wunder. Erfahrungen mit dem Übersinnlichen – wissenschaftliche Befunde (Ergon, Würzburg 2003); eidem, "Everyday Miracles: Results of a Representative Survey in Germany", European Journal of Parapsychology 20 (2005); the IGPP project pages "Verbreitung und Rezeption des Paranormalen" and "Alltägliche Wunder 2.0", igpp.de (follow-up survey December 2024, over 2,050 respondents); Knoblauch, Schmied & Schnettler, "Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience", Journal of Near-Death Studies 20 (2001), full text.
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