Susan Blackmore. In Search of the Light, The Adventures of a Parapsychologist. Prometheus, 1986.
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The Elusive Quarry is not a specially written book, but an anthology of Hyman's articles and book reviews over the past thirty years. These illustrate his basically sceptical approach to parapsychology, and the topics discussed include the Ganzfeld experiments, dowsing, remote viewing, cold reading, the general history of experimental parapsychology, and the nature of pathological science. He concludes that while he still has no idea whether psi phenomena exist or not, he has become even more sceptical since his study of the Ganzfeld experiments. Until then he had defended the experimental rigor of the best parapsychological experiments; now he feels that they are much more flawed than most parapsychologists realise.
It is a great pity that this volume has been so poorly edited, with no index, and no attempt to edit out the large number of repetitions, often of the same anecdotes or even the same phrases. A real book by the author would be most welcome.
Susan Blackmore's book will be of interest to Magonia readers, as it chronicles the author's involvement and gradual disillusionment with parapsychology, in many ways paralleling the intellectual odyssey of European ufology, though one suspects with rather more excitements!
Blackmore can never track down the elusive psi: her experiments always give chance results, and other people's experiments turn out to have flaws in them. This results in her being deemed a 'negative personality' and being banned from a couple of well publicised parapsychological laboratories for asking too many awkward questions - something which will be familiar to ufologists.
There is a nice little spontaneous case. Ufologist Ian Mrzyglod asked her to check on a family who experienced poltergeist effects after a UFO experience. their TV kept changing channels and a clock jumped about on the mantlepiece. She discovered that the TV effects were caused by the dog's collar reacting with the remote control, and the clock's problems were caused by a faulty spring, leading our heroine to be lectured by the clocksmith on how all good Christians should avoid poltergeists and keep their clocks clean! In other hands, how easily this would have become a spectacular UFO/psychic interaction. How many other of our favorite tales have similar prosaic explanations?
There are some nice pen-portraits of psychic researchers. Dr. Dingwall still abusing the SPR and neighbours alike at nearly 100, while the tale of an SPR grand-dame and a certain paraphysical establishment is worthy of being in a sitcom.
- Peter Rogerson. Magonia 37, October1990.
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