You'd have to be of a certain age to make sense of some of the stuff being written about Albert Hoffman after his passing last week. LSD, which he invented - or accidentally stumbled upon, better said - was a big part of youth culture in the 1960s and early 70s. It has hardly been available for the past thirty years, so I suspect most people wonder what all the fuss was about. But those of us who experimented with it are taking the opportunity to dust down some of our wilder memories.

One is Susan Blackmore, a contemporary of mine at Oxford University in the early 1970s (although I had no interest in parapsychology then, and our paths never crossed). Blackmore has always been very open about her use of cannabis, and it didn't surprise me to find her writing a paean to Hoffman in the Guardian at the weekend. Like many regular users, she says, she used to take acid once or twice a year in her mid twenties - 'quite often enough for a drug that last 8 to 12 hours, has extraordinarily mind-bending effects, and can leave you exhausted and full of amazing lessons that you need time to digest.' That was exactly my view of it - it always astonished me that other people could drop acid as casually as they would roll a joint. I remember one poor soul did it two or three times a week, and got seriously raddled as a result.

Blackmore adds that Hoffman had already had mystical experiences long before he took LSD, and was therefore 'well placed to appreciate the deeper significance of its mind-altering effects'. I wonder what she means by 'deeper significance'. It's always interested me that Blackmore combines an interest in Buddhism - she meditates and follows the practice of mindfulness - with an aggressively materialist view of consciousness that owes more to Richard Dawkins than Stanislaf Grof. As I understand it she belongs naturally to the school of thought that sees in the neurological correlate, that is the fact of altered brain chemistry engendering transcendent experiences, the 'final nail in the coffin of religion' - in fact I seem to remember coming across that dread cliché somewhere in her writings recently. Certainly, she's at pains in Dying to Live to account for the near-death experience in reductive terms, and her attempt there to explain away veridical out-of-body perception is so forced that I have to wonder if deep down she really believes in what she is doing.

If you've never tried acid it's perhaps natural to follow the scientific and secular logic. But my impression is that most people who experience the awesome power of psychedelics really are fundamentally changed by it. They have the insight famously expressed by William James after dosing himself with nitrous oxide that there are other realities, other forms of consciousness besides our daily experience which are potentially at least as significant. That has been my experience: it's a long time since I took acid, and I only ever did it a few times. But ever since, it has provided me with perspectives on life, on consciousness and on reported mystical experience which I'm not sure I could have gained in any other way.

It's tempting to wonder how our society might have developed if it had embraced psychedelics instead of running away from them. Would sceptics be so aggressively dismissive of reported psychic experiences? Could a book like The God Delusion ever have been written if the writer had any direct appreciation of mystical states of mind?  Would thinkers and researchers in consciousness be so totally wedded to the computational theory of mind and brain if they had actually experienced altered states?  The alternative that LSD experience naturally promotes is the 'filter' theory - the idea that the brain acts as a barrier to undifferentiated reality, and can be subverted by certain chemical modifications to allow full contact with it - which Aldous Huxley picked up from Henri Bergson and popularised. As far as I'm aware, it's not seriously discussed in scientific circles, for obvious reasons, but if scientists dropped acid now and then it might at least get an airing.

You might think that Blackmore's example stands in contradiction to such ideas. Here is an open-minded, curious and imaginative thinker, someone willing to experiment with altered states of consciousness that in other people typically encourage a non-materialist interpretation, yet who resists that with the dull, dogmatic inflexibility that characterizes far less adventurous spirits. There may be a good reason for this, and perhaps, to be fair, she explains it somewhere that I have yet to come across. Yet it seems paradoxical, and it leads me to wonder, as I often have before, whether with her strident scepticism it is really herself she is trying to convince.

Psychics in the UK are getting hot and bothered about the change of legislation governing what they do. The Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 is being scrapped, and they will in future come under the new Consumer Protection Regulations.  Like any other scam artist they can be prosecuted for knowingly selling someone a duff service, and if convicted face heavy fines or two years in prison.

Will it make any difference? To judge by all the hand wringing some people seem to think so. The Spiritual Workers Association complains that it  is 'turning spiritualism the religion into a consumer product, which it is not,' and that mediums will be more vulnerable to prosecution.

It's a bit hard to tell from the press reports just what the legal implications are. The law wasn't drafted with psychics in mind, so it's unclear how it will affect them. Their worry is that while the old rules obliged prosecutors to prove bad intent, the burden is now on them to prove they did not deliberately intend to mislead. To be on the safe side, mediums in spiritualist churches have taken to prefacing their readings with little disclaimers that this is 'not science, just an experiment'.

On the other hand the College of Psychic Studies, where mediums offer paid services, thinks that tightening standards is a good idea. The Office of Fair Trading itself says that individual psychics or mediums are not in the firing line - the aim is more to deal with foreign mass mailshot fraudsters extracting large sums of money. It says more than 170,000 consumers fall victim to clairvoyant scams every year, losing around £40 million. One psychic scammer sent messages demanding money saying 'you have to trust me ....BECAUSE YOUR FUTURE AND YOUR HAPPINESS DEPEND ON IT'. Another told people that 'there is, in your home, in the very place where you are living, a zone which has been booby trapped by negative waves' and again demanded cash to sort the problem.

If the law can discriminate between the 'bogus' and the 'genuine' then it's got to be a good idea. It's astonishing how brazen the scammers can be, trying to frighten people by claiming that have psychically seen a person is suffering an illness, and claiming to cure it. Then there are the 'psychic hotlines'. When a bunch of press reporters tried out Cilla Black's new pysychic hotline (£1.50 per minute) they said they were given costly advice on a series of non-existent worries, and at great length to keep them on the line.

But how does the law discriminate between good and bad, when science says they are both equally bogus? And will someone make the effort to find out? Sceptics are full of righteous fury at 'cold readers', and it's not impossible that some up-and-coming Randi could try to make a name for him or herself by pushing for a prosecution. It wouldn't be for some obvious fraudster, which would hardly count as a victory, but with a high-profile medium with a reputation to protect, like Colin Fry or Derek Acorah.

A test case would require institutional backing. Any takers? The British Humanist Association is excited at the prospect of 'real changes' to the current situation where psychics are able to make 'completely unsubstantiated claims' and take money for it. Logically, I suppose, that means they hope that anyone who works as a psychic will soon be liable to prosecution. As Richard Wiseman commented for a BBC report: "Anecdotal evidence on their abilities is impressive, but if you put it under more scientific conditions, their claims tend to crumble. [Now] they will need to be able to justify the claims they are making."

This is just Wiseman in rent-a-quote mode - I don't think he has a specific agenda. But of course the threat is implicit. How do mediums justify the claim that they can speak to the dead, if science does not accept that such a thing is remotely possible? If you go to a medium and she says, 'I've got your dead mum here', and you think, 'oh no you haven't', can you call the police and get her arrested? Who judges the quality of the 'evidence' in legal terms, and by what criteria?

The law does occasionally get involved in psychic and spiritualist controversies, and it's not a pretty sight. One of the earliest cases was when Henry Slade, the nineteenth century medium was taken to court by a sceptical sitter. He conducted a stout defence, but was probably done for from the outset, since the judge considered his claimed feats contracted the 'well-known course of nature', and he had to flee abroad to avoid jail (this tragi-comic tale gets an airing in Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics). Another famous court case was the materialising medium Helen Duncan, whose claims were so fantastic she never stood a chance - she actually did do time in prison.

The logical conclusion of a prosecution against a medium is that the claims for psychism and survival of death would themselves be on trial. If there was another Slade or Duncan court case, it would test modern attitudes to these things. Perhaps the defence would call an array of expert witnesses to describe just how much evidence there is, and the prosecution would line up Wiseman, Blackmore, Hyman et al to pick holes in it. We'd then see m'learned friends getting to grips with what is usually considered a philosophical, academic or scientific question. And why not? - this is pretty much what happened with the 2005 Kansas court case over the claims of intelligent design.

I'm intrigued by the idea of this sort of contest, having always thought that evidence for psychism and survival involves matters of logic and is best examined in open debate rather than in purely scientific terms, where all sorts of untested assumptions get in the way. Will it ever happen?  Probably not - a law intended to stop people being obviously ripped off could surely not be used to investigate the profoundest metaphysical mysteries.  But you never know.

Have just finished Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold, by Damien Broderick, an award-winning sci-fi writer. It left me enthused and intrigued (and also, as often happens, a bit bewildered, but I'll come back to that). Parapsychology is not especially blessed with good writers, so it's good to come across someone who, as well as having a good knowledge of aspects of it, has ideas of his own and can put together an entertaining read.

Broderick's curiosity seems to have been stimulated by a psi episode reported by his wife. While gardening one day, she experienced a sudden jolting image of a bloody body, and was convinced something terrible must have happened to her daughter. She found the girl was OK, but an hour later a police officer arrived to tell her a close relative had just been killed in a car accident.  Subsequently Broderick spent quite a bit of time boning up on the experimental research and talking to key figures in the field.

He starts by discussing the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne. But what really gets his attention is the remote viewing work begun by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff working with Ingo Swann at the SRI, which evolved into the CIA-funded Stargate programme. He traces the ins and outs of this at some length, and is clearly impressed by the work of Joe McMoneagle and other stars in the field. He also describes the work of Stephan A Schwartz, a friend and former research director for the Rhine Research Center, who in November 2003 gave a class of remote viewing students the task of identifying the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. Their consensus was that the ousted dictator would be found crouching in a subterranean room or cave reached by a tunnel, beneath an ordinary looking house on the outskirts of a small village near Tikrit, and looking like a homeless person, with dirty rough clothing and long ratty hair - these and other details proved to be spot on.

Broderick make it clear that he believes psi to be genuine, without identifying himself too obviously as a full-on believer.  From time to time he mentions the views of critics like Hyman and Alcock, but then quietly ignores them. He does seem to be shocked by some of the sceptics' behaviour, though.  For instance he describes the conversation in which hardline sceptic Peter Atkins rubbished Rupert Sheldrake's work to his face, and then, under Sheldrake's gentle pressure, conceded that he hadn't read any of it. He also describes at some length the National Geographic TV film in which McMoneagle and Edwin May unequivocally succeeded in passing a remote viewing test on camera, only to hear it dismissed by the programme makers as 'coincidence'.

If there is so much experimental evidence in favour of psi, why don't scientists take it seriously? Broderick thinks a main reason is that there is no theory that could explain it. Accordingly he spends much of the second half of the book discussing what can be said about this, much of it in terms of quantum theory. He praises Evan Harris Walker's attempt to blend psi and quantum physics as a landmark effort, and is similarly respectful of Dean Radin's belief that quantum nonlocality and entanglement are more than metaphors, and provide deep insights into the nature of psi. Personally he is cautious, siding more with May, who as a former nuclear physicist is somewhat dismissive of such approaches. At the same time he feels that the mere fact that psi can plausibly be discussed in these terms counters the sceptics' claim that it is outlawed by the laws of physics.

I was especially interested in Broderick's speculations about the possible evolutionary development of psi, which is something I've often felt is rather neglected. He starts with an idea put forward by lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell, that psi is a primordial or 'first' sense, an intuitive or visceral knowing 'based upon a complex form of quantum correlation that was certainly present in nature long before the species evolved to their current stage, and even before the planetary environment evolved to produce the normal five senses.' Picking up some ideas of James Carpenter and Rupert Sheldrake, he sees the function of psi to

get us ready for what's coming at us, like a social guide muttering discreetly in our ear, tipping us off to the names and status of those we are about to meet, directing us to the correct dinner utensil or appropriate garment for the occasion. It anticipates our needs, provides a sort of anticipatory Google search on current and upcoming experiences, and usually brings the results to us in the form of "inadvertencies", apparently irrelevant events and experiences that nevertheless "implicitly express the action of the orienting activity". Jung would have called them synchronicities. Psychotherapists like to weasel them out as clues to what's going on in the unconscious of a client.

Broderick concludes it is extremely likely that psi is an evolved function of the human species, playing its contributory part in our survival and thriving. He is sceptical of the idea that it necessarily implies the existence of a non-material spooky source of consciousness, citing Ockham's razor. Mystical ideas of a Source, favoured by Jahn and Dunne for instance, he sees as quasi-religious flights of fancy. As for afterlife belief, he favours the notion that this is based on the 'real, confusing experience of half-remembered dreams'.

Unless mediums and parapsychologists can demonstrate unequivocally that such a domain is real and attainable, its adherents will regard afterlife as something to be hoped for in private faith, rather than by watertight public evidence, and that posture is antithetical to the spirit of science, even paranormal science.

Some readers will find this problematic.  Certainly my assumption has always been that that psi essentially contradicts physicalist explanations of consciousness and points instead to Cartesian or 'radical' dualism. It's hard to conceive of telepathic interactions over a large distance in terms of brains that evolved from single cells. At what point in evolutionary history did these lumps of jelly enclosed in skulls acquire the potential ability to be in telepathic contact with other similar lumps a couple of continents away? I don't contest that psi abilities may be subject to evolution, indeed I think we should follow this reasoning as far as it goes. But there's something a bit unsatisfactory about treating psi purely as a materialist phenomenon. 

The impression I get is that Broderick thinks that precisely because psi can be discussed in a scientific framework that materialist assumptions remain untouched. Admirably undogmatic, he allows a faint possibility that paranormal phenomena will 'remake our scientific models and certainties', offering a gateway to some spiritual truth surpassing scientific knowledge. But he clearly doubts it.

For me this is makes the book so fascinating, the way it illustrates a certain approach to the problem of how we relate to psi. Broderick is comfortable talking about it in a scientific milieu. The experimental evidence is persuasive: we should acknowledge that, and expect it to be accommodated within a larger scientific paradigm, perhaps 50 years hence.  But apart from the episode of his wife's he is not at all interested in its daily manifestations  - in, for instance, mediumistic communication, poltergeist episodes, apparitional incidents, and so on, or indeed phenomena such as near-death experiences and children's memories of a previous life - which can hardly be excluded from any serious discussion of its larger relevance, particularly with regard to postmortem survival of consciousness. 

Demanding watertight proof, if afterlife belief is to be anything more than faith, is surely just to establish his own boundaries, just as, in their muddled way, the makers of the National Geographic film revealed theirs when they first devised a stringent test of psi, and, when confronted with a successful fulfilment of it, still refused to believe it. I can't help feeling that it indicates a need for the doubting mind to be so entirely overwhelmed that no further resistance is possible. The fact is, there is an abundance of evidence suggestive of survival which is capable of various interpretations, and this needs to be sifted, examined and subjected to just the kind of nuanced discussion that Broderick gives the experimental research.

Having said all that, Broderick has shown how the debate is going to develop. If parapsychology is to win a wider audience it will be precisely in this way, by open-minded, scientifically literate observers being willing to acknowledge that there is something important going on and taking the trouble to inform themselves about it. Such people will be reluctant to stick their necks out it means having to change their fundamental worldview and start believing in afterlife, ghosts, God and whatever else.  So cultivating this space is perhaps what will ultimately help psi to become more accepted within the scientific and secular community.

I've always thought that the Enfield Poltergeist was one of the best attested. It's often discussed, being relatively recent and the subject of a full length book This House is Haunted by Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse. But here's a very recent case that is its equal in terms of persistent and extreme phenomena. It's described by paranormal investigators Mike Hallowell and Darren Ritson in their new book The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family's Fight Against an Invisible Intruder.

The case occurred over several months in a terraced house in South Shields, a coastal town in north east England.  It started in December 2005 with anomalous movements of furniture and objects, and the following June came to the attention of Hallowell and Ritson, who staged an investigation over a period of several months. The victims were a young couple, Marc and Marianne, and their three-year old son Robert.

Some typical incidents logged by the couple early on include the following:

21.4pm: We ... found two chairs had been stacked on top of one another on top of the table in the bedroom.

12.40pm: Bed, box and drawers were heard moving in [Robert's] bedroom] upstairs.

5.00pm. The chest of drawers [from Robert's room] was pulled out onto the landing on the top of the stairs and the large box full of stuff was moved from one bedroom to another.

5.10pm. While in the bedroom two toys were thrown at Marianne and Marc.

5.20pm: the door leading into the kitchen opened three times on its own..

Often investigators arrive after the disturbances have lost much of their force and don't see much happening. But that's not the case here. The authors were present during many of the disturbances, and photographed and filmed many of them. One particularly convincing incident was a plastic water bottle which one of them saw and photographed balancing diagonally on the table, a quite unnatural position.

Repressed emotion in living individuals is quite often thought to be responsible in cases of this kind, but the investigators soon rejected this. They had a strong sense of an independent entity wanting to stir up trouble.  In fact it soon became obvious that the poltergeist was trying to frighten the couple. Once they found their child's rocking horse hanging by one its reins from the loft hatch in the ceiling. In another particular sinister incident, a large toy bunny was found in a chair placed at the top of the stairs, holding a box cutter blade in one of its paws. The poltergeist also took to writing threatening messages on a doodle-board in the child's bedroom, and in the later stages sent text messages to Marianne's mobile phone, such as 'get you bitch' and 'You're Dead'.

As time wore on the phenomena intensified. Big red weals appeared suddenly on Marc's torso and vanished equally mysteriously, in front of several witnesses. The investigators watched cupboard doors swinging open, light-shades swinging, the quilt on the bed moving. The couple were seriously frightened when the child himself was moved. On the first occasion they found him lying on the floor tightly wrapped in his bed quilt, with a plastic table on top of him. The child himself seemed to be asleep, but his eyes were wide open, as if he was in a trance. Another time the child appeared to have vanished altogether, and was eventually found in a closet, tightly cocooned in a blanket.

In fact no real harm seems to have ever been done, but the couple were terrified, and the authors speculate the poltergeist was trying to create fear in order to generate emotion that it could feed from. They compare the case with the Amherst Incident of 1878 in Nova Scotia, where death threats to the occupants were found scratched on the walls.

What to make of it all? The case fits a classic pattern in many ways, and reads like a very detailed account of what we are long familiar with from other accounts. The investigators quickly eliminated any possibility of Marianne staging a hoax - she was obviously frightened, and in any case was not involved in phenomena they themselves witnessed. They were at first less sure about Marc, largely because he didn't seem to react very much to the incidents, and was the type who might have enjoyed playing pranks. But they were certain he could not have been responsible for incidents they witnessed themselves, and by the end of the investigation had totally abandoned any idea of fraud.

I'm certain this book will soon become a classic of its kind, a very full and detailed description of eye-witness testimony, that will be compared with the Enfield case (Playfair provides a short foreword) and the Columbus, Ohio case described by William Roll in Unleashed.  I'm not sure how much it will resonate with people who are not already convinced that such things do happen. I  would personally like to have seen more independent corroboration of the kind that one often gets in other cases - from reporters, police officers, social workers etc. It's true there are 15 or so statements from other eyewitnesses, but most of these are from paranormal investigators who the authors invited to the house, and only witnessed one set of phenomena. The quantity and quality of eyewitness testimony can count for as much as of the phenomena itself.

On the other hand it might not have been in the couple's best interests to involve other people. And it's good to see such a rich episode being written up so fully and so readably. As a recent in-depth description of a puzzling phenomenon the book has few rivals, and will be an important addition to the literature.

I've always thought that if the existence of psi becomes generally recognised, the sceptics would indirectly have a lot to do with it. As the scientific case for it gradually builds, the angry agit-prop of old guard types like Martin Gardner and James Randi seems ever more irrelevant. Generalisations that parapsychology is a pseudo-science, there is no evidence, Hume's argument against miracles, etc, still have some force. But critics like Ray Hyman, Susan Blackmore and Richard Wiseman are also having to come up with specific objections to psi experiments, and  in a few cases doing experiments themselves.

So the time is ripe for giving these counter-arguments some close scrutiny. In fact I'm surprised it is not done more often, as many of them are so obviously specious. Of course researchers such as Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake have focused on this to some extent - Radin has a useful chapter on it in The Conscious Universe - but it's far from being their main focus. I think this has been a weakness for parapsychology as a whole, that the sceptics have managed to get away with too much for too long.

Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of ESP is arguably the first major attempt to place the sceptics' arguments in their proper context.  It's an important book, and should be on everyone's reading list who is serious about understanding the issues.

A brief look at some nineteenth century work with mediums sets the scene, with the examples of investigations of Henry Slade leading into more modern controversies. A description of CSICOP follows, and the disagreements over its early activities.  Carter goes on to discuss J B Rhine's work at Duke, PK experimentation, the Ganzfeld debate, and Sheldrake's research of a telepathic dog. Many notorious episodes are here, for instance the attempt by sceptical members of a National Research Council committee to stop a fellow member presenting evidence supporting the ganzfeld claims, and the failed attempt to get parapsychologists chucked out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Also other dishonest shenanigans, like Randi pretending he had debunked doggy telepathy, when by his later admission he had nothing of the sort.

The book is chock full of quotes both from the sceptics and sympathetic scientists, which brings us closer to the debate, and often leaves one gasping with disbelief (the statement that there is nothing to argue about as there is 'no evidence of anything paranormal', here voiced by psychologist Nicolas Humphrey, is a particular head-scratcher).

I was expecting rather more space to be given to analysis of individual experiments: there is only a brief mention of the Stargate remote viewing programme, ditto on Sheldrake's highly suggestive work on the sense of being stared at and other of his research, the PK work by Jahn and Dunne at Yale, and so on. But I think Carter is right not to try to be comprehensive, and to leave plenty of space for dealing with the more general aspects of the critics' arguments.

For me this is actually where Carter is best, demolishing the scientific and philosophical objections to psi. As he points out, sceptics such as Blackmore like to say that it is incompatible with 'our scientific worldview', but this begs the question, which scientific worldview, the old one based on Newtonian mechanics and behaviourist psychology, or the emerging one based on quantum mechanics and cognitive psychology. Quantum non-locality and the view that consciousness, not measurement, is implicated in the collapse of the state vector both support the existence of psi and might even lead to predictions of it.  The conclusion, Carter argues, is that the term 'paranormal' is an anachronism and should be dropped, as psi does not operate outside nature.

I was particularly interested in his nuanced discussion of Benjamin Libet's finding that brain activity precedes a conscious decision, which is routinely presented by sceptics, in their dull way, as 'another nail in the coffin for dualism' (Blackmore, Dying to Live, p. 237), and which of course is open to contrary interpretations, as Libet himself pointed out. Wilder Penfield's experimental findings on the neurological basis of memory is also used by sceptics in an anti-dualist sense which Penfield himself did not endorse.

No book is perfect, and I did have a slight quibble with the way it was structured - it seemed to jump around a lot between historical periods, types of experiments, supporters and critics, and so on. Having said this, I know from my own experience of trying to write about parapsychology how  challenging it is to organise so much material. Nor does it detract from the book's value.  Carter explains that he originally tackled the subject in its entirety, but the result was so massive it had to be broken down into three parts: the next instalment will be on survival evidence and the sceptical objections. 

I suspect that in taking the debate directly to the sceptics Carter is first onto what may soon be a well-populated field. The enthusiasm for psi research in the 1960s and 70s led to a backlash over the next two decades with the founding of CSICOP, but there are signs that the sceptics may be running out of steam - the imminent suspension of Randi's prize being just one example. We may soon start to see the pendulum shifting the other way, and this time it is the nay-sayers who will be on the defensive.

I've always been one for trying to learn new skills, wholeheartedly believing the fiction sold by self-help gurus: "You can do anything you set your mind to ... Realize your dreams" ... etc.  Alas, I've learned by experience that actually I can't. I can think and write, and that's about it. Whenever I try to pick up a skill - playing the piano, speaking German, running a business, playing chess, juggling - I may achieve a certain shaky competence before finally grasping, what family and friends beg me to realise, that I'm crap at it, and should give up (actually that was mainly the piano).

One of the things I've tried to learn is meditation, and again, it's not something I got very far with. But in this case it's not because meditating is inherently difficult - I guess just about anyone can do it - but because I was never committed enough to take it the point where there would be tangible results. In fact over the years I forgot why I was doing it, or that it could lead to tangible results at all.

Recently I was clearing out an old bookshelf and I came across a little book called simply Concentration, by Mouni Sadhu (1959). I remember reading it twenty years ago, and that memory stayed with me ever since, together with a slightly guilty feeling of an aspiration never fully realised. I pulled it out recently and re-read it right through. Twice. It's a gem, and it left me feeling inspired.

The book is essentially a graded series of exercises aimed at gaining complete total mastery of the mind. They are meditation techniques, some of which I have seen elsewhere: for instance breathing 'colours' or focusing on the tip of the second hand of a watch, or clock, or the head of a pin. Each exercise is expected to take weeks or months, so this is something that would not expect to take less than, I guess, three years or more.

What I recognised, having remembered from reading the book the first time, was the slightly fierce tone. Sadhu leaves you in no doubt that he wants you to work. He's full of stern exhortations not to waste time pursuing 'egoistic and material aims', and instructions such as 'The beginner is strongly advised Not to Read in Advance any of chapters beyond which he is working' (I disregarded that one, sorry).

This is quite unfashionable now. TM, the system I'm most familiar with, insists that thoughts should not be blocked but simply observed and then allowed to depart. In Sadhu's approach the will is more strongly engaged: we are exhorted to show the mind who's boss. It's the teaching ethic of an earlier age, one that I'm old enough to have experienced and which I confess to being rather nostalgic for. Much of what I learned as a young child was from teachers who insisted I pay attention. 

There's also something rather appealing about the idea that full self-realization can be largely achieved through a handful of rather mundane seeming exercises, pursued with dedication and will. It's not of course the only thing: one has to pursue a spiritual path, but Sadhu rather takes that for granted.  I also like the plain speaking and the refreshing lack of Sanskrit terms and jargon. Sadhu was actually a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi, but points out that achieving the power of concentration is as much a part of western religious training as the eastern ones.

At the summit, he says:

You already know of many things which before were for you, as Himalayan peaks would be for an untrained climber from the plains. You can concentrate your attention on anything, under any conditions, without being disturbed, as formerly, by the onslaught of uncontrolled thoughts and emotions. You are really not interested in anything which lies beyond the magic circle of your attention and visualization created by your own will and no longer by something outside yourself.

This doesn't mean 'mental dullness', he insists.

Quite the contrary! The wise man possesses intelligence comparable to that of average people; but he only uses it when needed, and not as an untrained layman does, who thinks ceaselessly all his life and despite possible fame and fortunes, still amounts to nothing at his death. For a spiritually advanced man, thinking becomes something like the trivial functions of the average person such as eating or walking, etc. No reasonable man would fill his life solely with these functions and forget everything else.

A trained person, he goes on, can exclude all thoughts, ideas, words and images from the mind, and can choose or abandon emotions at will. If the exercises work, he says, a question will arise in the mind. (If it does not, the mind has not been properly stilled - go back and repeat the exercises for a few more months/years.) Addressing the question will lead to the summit of Samadhi, resurrection into a new state of consciousness, a precursor to full enlightenment.

I wondered, what sort of person it would be who could reach this peak of awareness, of mental and moral strength. What are the effects? Did Sadhu himself achieve Samadhi? Or was he just talking about it in an aspirational sense?

Perhaps the answer lies in the book itself. Despite, or perhaps because of it's apparently awkward and direct style, it has a curiously seductive power. There is an attractive, passionate urgency in it, utterly missing from modern manuals. I think he must indeed have reached his goal, but rather than rhapsodising about it, he provides a glimpse of its power through his writing. He left me feeling that it is something that even I could reach out for, if I was able to summon the necessary will, and that it would be really something worth having.

As for Sadhu himself, what kind of person was he? I pictured some grizzled Gurdjieff-type figure, but as you can see from the photo he looks like an average guy. He was a Pole, born Mieczyslaw Sudowski, and an electrical mechanic by trade. He fought for the Germans in World War One, lost his wife when the Nazis bombed Warsaw during the 1939 invasion, fought the Germans, was captured and spent time in POW camps in Germany and then Russia before going to live in Brazil, where presumably he started writing. A tough life, and one that must have fuelled a determination to rise above the traumas and tragedies of existence.

I don't know whether I will put Sadhu's exercises into effect or whether I will go back to my TM training. But for sure, meditation is something I'm not going to let slip again, and I thank him for that.

Click on this link for a sample of his writing.

Had been planning to write today, but news of Rupert Sheldrake's 'mishap' has made it hard to concentrate. The general feeling seems to be that he's had a lucky escape, and that it could have been much worse, but it's still bad enough. I hear from a friend of his that the knife narrowly missed a main artery, that his leg swelled right up and an operation was needed to remove a large blood-clot - doctors say it may be a year before he can walk properly again.

I do feel a sense of relief that he is going to be OK, though. There aren't many good researchers in parapsychology, and we can't afford to lose one with his flair, imagination and courage. I wish him a speedy recovery.

I've yet to get a hold of Michio Kaku's new book The Physics of the Impossible, and most likely it'll be a while before I get round to it. But I'm intrigued by the publicity it's been getting, and its possible implications for parapsychology.

Kaku is a theoretical physicist at City University in New York, and a big player in the field of string theory. He's also a pretty effective science popularizer. He has got big attention with this book, only published in the UK today, by arguing that a lot of wacky ideas we associate with science fiction may not be completely impossible after all. 

Kaku puts forward three categories of 'impossibilities'. In reverse order, what he calls 'Type 3' include technologies that absolutely violate the known laws of physics, such as perpetual motion machines and precognition. These would require a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics. Type 2 are technologies currently at the edge of our understanding, but that might be possible one day, such as time travel.

Under Type 1, Kaku groups a number of things that are impossible today, but which do not violate the known laws of physics and so might one day become possible.  These include: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy and psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes.

This is a pretty eclectic mix of ideas, theories and technologies. As to his reasoning, I'm a bit in the dark, as I haven't read the book. I understand that Kaku argues teleportation in terms of quantum entanglement - it's being done on the level of particles, so the principle is already there. Alien contact becomes more probable as astronomers scan planets in other solar systems, so that too is feasible. Robots already exist. He talks of invisibility on the basis of new materials that eliminate reflections and shadows. 

What gets my attention is the presence in the list of telepathy and psychokinesis. As I say, it'll be a while before I find out what his thinking is (comments welcome, in the meantime), but I'm guessing his approach is technology-based and that he proposes they will become possible when we figure out how to do them (in terms of parallel universes?)

Parapsychologists would have a couple of things to say about that: a) telepathy and psychokinesis are here now, and b) they don't involve technology. They would add that precognition, which Kaku thinks is really impossible, is closely associated with these things. But what interests me is how sceptics will respond. Normally they can't stand it when a high-profile scientists comes out in favour of telepathy, and they try to drown him out with a cacophony of jeering. I guess that won't happen here, though, because Kaku's idea of telepathy is precisely that it doesn't contradict known laws of physics, which is their main stated reason for objecting to it.

This is an interesting development. One outcome could be that Kaku's ideas could turn out to be too simplistic, and will be shot down by parapsychologists, pointing out that they don't relate to the considerable existing data. That would be a pity, although ironically since parapsychologists are so little regarded in the scientific community perhaps no one would notice. For even if the theory is not wholly convincing, it can only be a good thing if serious scientists bring psychism in the scientific arena. If the concept of telepathy can be raised without sceptics popping a fuse in public, perhaps the scientific world will start to calm down and talk about it rationally.

All the God-talk at Easter has got me thinking about Biblical miracles. In the Guardian's Face to faith column yesterday, Michael Horan makes the case for the resurrection story being just that, a story, and not something to believe in literally. I say he makes the case, but it's more a sort of ruminating about something he takes for granted. In fact he is bemused that many people still believe that the resurrection and ascension were literally physical, historical events.

Here's how he explains it:

At this distance in time, and with only the New Testament as a source, we cannot know what actually happened after Jesus' crucifixion. Disillusion, confused and frightened, the disciples seem to have returned north to Galilee to resume their fishing. As they reminisced, possibly over many months, recalling their extraordinary experiences with Jesus, links began to form between their mental images of him and then-current messianic expectations. Possibly a part of that imagining was the idea, wholly feasible in their minds, that God had raised Jesus into his presence.

Probably when I was a very young child I took the Biblical miracles literally. But I don't think I was more than ten or eleven when I started to realise they might not be factual.  The pictures of Jesus travelling vertically upwards, like a slow-mo human rocket, seemed silly, and ever since then I was content to take all that as metaphor, without really worrying my head about it. 

But since I got interested in parapsychology I've had to rather modify that view. True, it's not hard to think of claims such as turning water into wine and walking on water as post-hoc imaginings - I'm not familiar with any credible claims of that kind in séance literature, for instance. But the Resurrection is a bit different. Whatever you think about claims of materialising mediums, it can't be denied that a great many people over the past one hundred and fifty years have believed themselves to be briefly reunited with a dead family member, apparently in fully flesh and blood form, that they could touch and embrace. As I mentioned when discussing Helen Duncan (Feb 29) the claims are sometimes very detailed and categorical, and curiously hard to account for. A lot of people have also been convinced by apparitions, although these seem less physical and so perhaps only indirectly relevant.

Without going so far as to make a detailed case for the Resurrection as a common-or-garden parapsychological event, I wonder whether this, and perhaps some of the other Biblical miracles, are actually the imaginative myth-making that is widely assumed - by many Christians as well as atheists. What interests me is the way the modern mind refashions something it can't accept - a 'category mistake', as Horan says. This speculative reframing - 'as they reminisced, possibly over many months...' - is typical of how sceptics explain away apparitional experiences, for instance, as a combination of faulty memory and imagination, which on close examination doesn't really work (I'll come back to that another time). 

Of course the first Christians lived so long ago we can speculate all we like - they aren't here to contradict us. The fact that they belonged to a pre-scientific age means we can consider them prey to all kinds of imaginings. But it's not quite as easy when people living today, or at least quite recently, make claims every bit as extraordinary as anything in the Bible.

This makes me stop and think. I've always understood that it was precisely those miraculous occurrences that launched Christianity in the first place - that people took Jesus's teachings seriously because his doings made him seem literally superhuman, validating his claim to be an emissary of God. It's startling to think that two thousand years later, paranormal claims that the world tends to regard as unexplained 'miracles' again challenge us to rethink our beliefs about our situation.

Sceptics rightly complain that the miraculous benefits touted by so many suppliers of health foods have little or no scientific backing. Well I recently came across something that will really annoy them. An American chocolate manufacturer claims that chocolate imprinted with good thoughts can actually make you feel better. And it has the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study to prove it.

Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate bases its claim on the traditional idea that food tastes finer and is more health-giving if it has been made with love and good intentions, or ceremonially blessed. (I don't remember hearing this, and it didn't sound likely, but what do I know.) The firm's founder Jim Walsh says dishes prepared by great chefs seem to work better than identical recipes created by less gifted folk. He believes there is such a thing as the 'Mother's chicken soup syndrome' - lovingly prepared foods by one who cares has curative properties.

The company says it was the first to grow cacao beans in the US, and spent years spreading the word about the 'true properties of chocolate, its amazing health qualities, the transcendent attributes of tastes, texture and most importantly its soul.' Then it gets a bit strange. An American scientist emerged from the Amazonian jungle one day carrying a message for Walsh from the cacao shamans of the upper Amazon. The shamans had communed with their devas, who said to tell Walsh:

The cacao tree is here on earth to heal the etheric heart of man and this mission is as important as plankton fixing oxygen from the sea. Continue your work; it is critical to cacao fulfilling its purpose.

Unsurprisingly, Walsh didn't really get this. But a bit later one of the company's main investors, who had suffered a serious heart attack, found that nibbling a cacao bean from the company's plantation brought a miraculous recovery from chest pain. This got Walsh's attention, and by degrees he arrived at the idea of a curative energy field that surrounds chocolate. He mentioned it to parapsychologist Dean Radin, who realised the claim could be tested.

The subsequent study by Radin, Hayssen and Walsh was published last October in Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Their approach was to create four groups of people, with care taken to ensure a broadly similar demographic profile. Three of the groups were given chocolate that had been blessed by Tibetan monks and a Mongolian shaman, each using a different technique. The fourth group was given ordinary chocolate as a control. By the end of the week all three groups eating the treated chocolate reported improved mood, with less fatigue and greater vigour, while the control group reported little change. The overall significance was not great, at the p = .04 level, but jumped to p = .0001 for those who habitually ate little chocolate, well beyond chance levels even given the small size of the sample.

Before this experiment I might have dismissed the whole idea as a bit airy-fairy. But a result as robust as this has made me think again.

Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics came in the post today, and I'm looking forward to reading it. I'll review it in a while, but today I just want to mention something that struck me while I was dipping into Rupert Sheldrake's introduction. It's that extraordinary episode that occurred eighteen months ago, when Sheldrake and others were invited to present papers at a science festival and were furiously denounced in the press by leading scientists like Peter Atkins, who said there was no reason to suppose telepathy was anything more than a "charlatan's fantasy".

It's the sheer heat of sceptics' responses that gets my attention. I've often wondered about it, and just recently I got a sense of why people react so fiercely to what they can't explain. It was while spending Easter with my father, now pushing 92. While I was there my sister called, asking me to look for a business letter that she had left there on her last visit. I put off looking for it as long as possible, and then took the plunge.

The problem is, my Dad doesn't do filing. Never has. Thirty or so piles of paper are distributed around the house, on the kitchen and dining room tables, around his armchair in the living room, in his bedroom, on the table in the hall, on chairs, on the floor, behind desks... So if you want to find a piece of paper all you know is: it's in one of those piles.

The first pile I tried contained, more or less in this order, two recent bank statements, a letter concerning a hospital appointment next month, a speech given by Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s, a very old bar of Swiss chocolate, a restaurant menu, an invitation to a wedding in 1973, a letter warning that the car insurance is about to expire, a Christmas card from people who died ten years ago, two sheets of blank paper, junk mail for kitchens, a clipping from a 1960s fashion magazine, a maintenance manual for an old food processor, and last month's phone bill.

Note the distribution of recent and possibly relevant material - bank statements, bills, hospital appointments, etc - evenly spread through the detritus of the past. Even more fascinating: every single pile of paper is exactly similar. There is the same anarchic spread of current business mail with personal correspondence, clippings, photos, etc. If you want to gather all the phone bills or bank statements together - as we sometimes do - you will have to hunt through all the piles to collect them.

Now, you may say, that happens with elderly people - get over it. But it's not that at all. Not only is Dad quite normal in every other respect, he is mobile, mentally sharp, and has an active social life. It's not because he's lazy or forgetful, he likes it this way. My sister and I once spent an afternoon filing the statements and bills, and on our next visit he had turned everything back to the way it was before.   

Of course it's my problem, not his. But it really is a struggle. It provokes me - there's something creatively mad about it. When I was searching for this letter I found myself simultaneously clutching my head and groaning. I'm sure a psychologist could come up with some neat explanation of why he does it, but I'm not convinced it would really satisfy me.

That night I lay awake anxiously trying to fathom it, and completely failing.  Then I recalled Kant's odd image of one man milking a billy goat and the other holding a sieve underneath to catch the milk - it comes in the Critique of Pure Reason to illustrate the idea of complete nonsense.

I also remembered where I first came across it, mentioned in With the Eyes of the Mind, a book about out-of-body experiences by two psychiatrists, Gabbard and Twemlow. It's their response to reports of accident victims and hospital patients having consciousness of events around their bodies when by every normal indicator they are unconscious. Up until this point the authors had done a competent job of researching the OBE, but this aspect of it completely stumped them. They then struggled rather inefectually to explain it away, for instance by accusing hospital doctors of being bamboozled by deviant patients or of doctoring their own data.

I realised then that I entered that strange state of mind that militant sceptics occupy when they contemplate paranormal claims. They are reacting to something which is impossible, inexplicable, and makes no sense. It really is a deeply uncomfortable feeling. So when they reject ESP or out-of-body awareness it's not just an ideological act, a commitment to scientific orthodoxy, but a cry of anguish. Of course I know this perfectly well on an intellectual level, but it was salutory to be reminded of just what it feels like.

Whenever a child goes missing you can be sure that someone will claim to have psychic information about his or whereabouts. So no surprise that this happened in the case of Shannon Matthews.

There isn't much information, but from the various press reports I've read the scenario was something like this. Shannon, aged nine, disappeared on February 19. On March 6 the Daily Mirror reported that a clairvoyant had told her mother she was still alive and that she had been taken 'by somebody who you know'. On the following Sunday March 9 the Mirror's sister paper The People identified the psychic as Joe Power, and said Shannon had been abducted by car, about which he gave some details. 

Shannon was found alive on March 14. She had been taken by the uncle of Shannon's stepfather Craig, a man named Michael Donovan, but also known as Paul Drake, his original name. She was found hidden under a divan bed in his flat in Batley, a mile from her home.

Two days later on the 16th the People revealed that Power had provided three extra items of information, that the abductor was possibly named Michael or Paul, that Shannon had sat on his knee at a family funeral, and that she was currently in Batley. The People confirmed that these details had been provided before Shannon's discovery and passed to the police.

That may be so, but it seems that the information was never acted on. Shannon was found after a woman reported hearing a child's footsteps in the apartment above her, where, to her knowledge, no child was living.

Still, Power is confident that he had the right information in time, and is miffed that the police did not use it. He says:

The main thing is that in Britain it's about time the police recognised real, gifted psychics who can save the police millions of pounds. It should be in the law. They do it in America.

Well perhaps. But there are issues here. It's true that Power came up with some accurate facts before the case was resolved, essential if the claim of psychic knowledge is to carry credibility. But they were not terribly detailed: 'alive not dead', and 'someone you know', each have a 50% chance of being true. It's highly probable that the abductor used a car, so no surprise there either. If you consider that Power was probably only one of several psychics who volunteered information, which police say usually happens in such cases, there is even less reason to get excited - you'd expect that only the one who gets anything right is going to be talking to the press, while the rest are keeping quiet.

It was only after the event that we hear, as Power says, that he had identified the name Paul, someone connected with Craig and the area she was in: "I heard a voice saying she'd been taken to Batley, through one of my guides, crystal clear." But if so, why were these details not published in the original report? Now we only have his word for it, and the word of the reporters. 

Psychics often claim that they help police with their investigations, and imply that they make a useful contribution. Power himself is keen to promote that: his website states that he is 'renowned for his accuracy and his work with the police'. But where is the police testimony for that? The impression one gets from the police themselves is quite different. A couple of years ago 27 UK police forces (out of a total of around 40) responded to a survey about the use of psychics carried out by a sceptics group. The responses were pretty dismissive. For instance Kent police said:

It would be almost inconceivable to have paid a person purporting to have psychic powers for their assistance. In my personal experience as a police officer with 30 years service, in the aftermath of a major crime many people offer information, as witnesses, psychics or experts. All information is evaluated and considered. Personally, I have never found a person claiming to have psychic abilities to have been of benefit to an investigation.

Of course no public organisation would risk associating itself with the paranormal, and it's quite likely that some individual coppers may think some psychic leads worth following up, particularly where an investigation has ground to a halt. It may be, as Power says, that this happens more in the US than Britain. I recall an American TV documentary a few years back in which detectives were full of praise for psychics who had led them to the bodies of missing individuals. There's also a comment on Amazon in the review section of Joe Nickell's Psychic Sleuths complaining that Nickell didn't do his homework when debunking a case in which a psychic named Phil Jordan was involved.

I know because I am the child's mother, and I was never contacted. And I also know for certain that scores of volunteer firemen and policemen were searching for my son unsuccessfully, in the wrong area for hours. The next morning, Phil Jordan arrived, asked me for a personal article of Tommy's, and with Tommy's little sneaker, as well as hand drawn map of the area (an area which Phil Jordan had never seen before), Phil walked directly to my son... Would Tom be alive today if it were not for Phil Jordan's God given ability? Probably not... Because of Phil Jordan, I held my son in my arms again. There is no way that I can ever thank Phil Jordan enough.

But this happy outcome seem to be exceptional. More common are cases where psychics insist they are helping police, but aren't getting results. For instance there's the Florida case of Trenton Duckett, a two year old who disappeared 18 months ago. A psychic named Maggie Giono says she has been talking to Trenton's spirit and that he is trying to lead her to him, also a missing woman named Jennifer Kesse. But police have followed up in both cases quite thoroughly and found nothing. 

So it's hardly fair to blame the police for being cautious about working with psychics. Self-promotional bragging only puts them off and adds to public cynicism about psychism.  It doesn't mean that psychics have nothing to offer; on the contrary, the remarkable results gained by remote viewers associated with the Star Gate program suggest that it's a skill that could be exploited. But as things stand there is no real incentive for the police to pay much attention. What's needed is some breakthrough to give the process credibility and make police open to the possibility that they might get results this way.

It might be an individual success, as the Shannon case could have been if Power had posted all of his data before it was resolved. But in the longer term it might require a more concerted, collective approach. An office might be set up that collates psychics' claims about ongoing investigations and looks to see whether any positive matches occur with actual facts. If, over a period of time, certain individuals start to create a track record, showing genuine insight, the police would be far more likely to make use of them.

Sorry to hear about the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, although 90 is a good age. His were just about the first science fiction stories I read as a teenager, which is something you don't forget, and some of his futuristic speculations actually made sense.

What I always liked about Clarke was his attitude towards scientific dogmatism, viz:

New ideas pass through three periods:
1) It can't be done.
2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing.
3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

and

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

(Not sure about 'elderly' there... )

Clarke was sceptical about UFOs, insisting that pretty much every unexplained sighting could be accounted for eventually. But he had quite a different take on poltergeists, arguing that there is 'impressive evidence that small objects an be thrown around, or even materialised, with no apparent physical cause.'

Usually there is a disturbed adolescent in the background, and although adolescents are quite capable of raising hell by non paranormal means, this persistent pattern over so many cultures and such a long period of time suggests that something strange is going on. If so it is a complete mystery, and labels such as 'psychokinesis' are only fig leaves to conceal our ignorance.

That rubbed militant sceptics up the wrong way - always a good thing. 'I should not be surprised if the average person does not understand scientific method, but I really expected something better from Arthur C Clarke,' grouches Victor Stengler (Physics and Psychics, p. 71), who quotes him saying that 'many poltergeist cases cannot be easily explained away'. Of course Stengler goes to do just that, wheeling out James Randi's debunking of Tina Resch and referring vaguely to 'many other cases' of trickery being suspected or exposed. I think Clarke realised that cases like Miami and Rosenheim, which of course Stengler doesn't mention, raise questions that the debunkers' speculations barely touch.

In short, someone one could relate to. It's comforting to remember, at moments when one starts to doubt it, that there are figures who scientists and atheists respect as one of them, who are passionate and knowledgeable about science, and whose critical faculties are not in doubt, yet who are open to the most inexplicable and ridiculous of human experiences being true. Perhaps that's what makes a great science fiction writer.

Here's a familiar story. Two young girls are in bed one night when they hear a curious tapping noise coming from somewhere in the room. This happens on several consecutive nights. It seems to emanate from the wall, and they think at first it must be coming from the house next door. But then, weirdly, they realize that the noise is responding to them, even when they are whispering so quietly that no one outside the room could possibly hear. They find they can communicate with it, by asking questions and getting it to knock once for yes, two for no, and three for don't know. For more complex queries it will rap out the letter of the alphabet (five knocks for E, 13 for M, etc). The whole family soon gets involved, and gather nightly to ask the unseen entity about itself and get it to answer questions about themselves, which it often does correctly.  The house is soon filled with neighbours, local clergy, police, mediums and investigators, all coming to wonder at the phenomenon and try to figure out what's causing it.

The strange story of the Fox sisters is usually the first thing that you read about in any general book about spiritualism and the paranormal. You may go on to hear that that having established they could communicate through raps the spirits later came through  at séances, launching the cult of spiritualism that quickly swept the developed world. If it's a debunking book the mystery will then be revealed: towards the end of their lives the girls admitted it was a prank played on their parents, first by bumping apples tied to string on the floor, and then by manipulating their toes and joints to create the rapping noises. This segues naturally into reflections about the gullibility of the superstitious masses, and their reprehensible failure to accept it was all a trick.

Either way, the impression most of these books leave you with is that the Fox incident was a one-off. But of course this tale of raps and codes and spooky communications is widely reported. It's not exactly common, but it's so distinctive, and often reported in such detail, as to create the appearance of a phenomenon in its own right. When Tony Cornell and Alan Gauld tabulated 500 documented poltergeist-type cases back in the late 1970s they found that around half involved exactly this kind of rapping noises, often described as knocks, thumps, thuds, bangings and suchlike, for which no cause can be found. They say 16% involve communication, of which presumably the majority involve this method. [Poltergeists, pp. 224-40]

The case I mentioned earlier is actually not the Fox sisters, but concerns the Andrews family in Andover, Hampshire, in 1974. It was investigated by Barrie G. Colvin, who says he was prevented by the family from publishing more than an outline at the time. Ten years later they were still unwilling to have it publicised but now that more than 30 years have elapsed, and the family has moved from the area, there is no longer an issue about this, and he has written it up in the latest SPR Journal, using pseudonyms.

Colvin seems to have been quite through, paying a total of nine visits over a ten-week period. As well as interviewing the family about the origins of the case he had plenty of opportunity to hear the raps himself and establish that they were not the result of trickery or other visible cause.  The focus seems to have been Theresa, the younger of the two girls aged 12. Colvin also established to his own satisfaction that the source had intelligence of a sort, calling itself Eric Waters, although it does not seem to have provided any coherent information beyond that. At one point a medium claimed the noises were being made by a young boy whose body was buried under the floorboards; nothing more is mentioned about this, and subsequent investigations failed to turn up anyone of that name who had lived in the area. 

Colvin did attempt a small experiment, persuading 'Eric' to transfer the noises from the wall of the room to the headboard of Theresa's bed. As follows:

[Mrs Andrews] then said: "Eric, please try to knock on the headboard." This was followed by a very soft tap which was heard by us all. I was at that moment standing very close indeed to the headboard, with my ear about 15 cm from it. As Mrs Andrews repeated the request, I put my hand on the headboard to see whether I could feel any sensation. Eric rapped progressively louder on the headboard and I could clearly feel the vibration.

It's interesting how often vibrations in the bed headboard feature in poltergeist literature. This is just one example, from the 1960 case in Sauchi in Scotland:

On entering at the front door he heard loud knockings in progress. Going upstairs he found Virginia awake, but not greatly excited, in the double bed... The loud knocking noise continued and appeared to emanate from the bed-head. Mr. Lund moved Virginia down in to the bed so that she could not strike or push the bed-head with her head, and he also verified that her feet were well tucked in under the bed-clothes, and held in by them. The knocking continued. During the knocking Mr. Lund held the bed-head. He felt it vibrating in unison with the noises. [A.R.G. Owen (1964) Can We Explain The Poltergeist?, pp. 148-9.]

The responsiveness is less common, but is still widely reported. Perhaps the best known case of the kind is reported by William Barrett, investigating a case in a farmhouse in Derrygonnelly in 1877:

To avoid any error or delusion on my part, I put my hands in the side pockets of my overcoat and asked it to knock the number of fingers I had open. It correctly did so. Then with a different number of fingers open each time, the experiment was repeated four times in succession, and four times I obtained absolutely the correct number of raps ['Poltergeists Old and New', SPR Proceedings 25, 1911, pp. 377-412]

The Andrews family seem to have been rather ambivalent about the case, enjoying the novelty of communicating with an unseen entity, but becoming frightened when the taps and raps turned into loud bangings, especially when they went on for hours and deprived them of sleep. By Colvin's last visit it seemed to have faded out, however. While the family treated Eric has a deceased spirit, Colvin's view is that no discarnate entity was involved, and that the case fits the pattern of repressed emotion in the living, although there was no outward sign of this, the family being apparently happy and stable. 

Of course none of this would convince a sceptic: it's hard to share an investigator's conviction of the paranormality of an event without copious reassurances, diagrams, descriptions, signed statements by witnesses with impeccable rationalist credentials, and so on, and probably not even then. But my understanding is that sceptics actually never get that close to the phenomenon, in real life or even in books.  If you look at the debunking literature you will quickly find that there are two main sources: James Randi's article on the Columbus, Ohio case of 1984 and a clutch of cases mentioned by another debunking magician Milbourne Christopher in his book Seers, Psychics and ESP (1970). Neither of the magicians witnessed anything (the families concerned would not let them into the house) and in any case they do not really involve this rapping phenomenon.

I'd be interested to know if debunkers like Joe Nickell who rely on these two sources to such an extent have any sensible ideas about this, beyond insisting that the teenagers are playing tricks, and that everyone else is too dim-witted to notice. Considering how insistent they are that the Fox sisters case was a hoax, and the mileage they get from it, it's a contribution they should be encouraged to make.

Parapsychology in the UK is in excellent health. So says Deborah Delanoy, president of the Society for Psychical Research, in the new edition of its Paranormal Review.

Is it really true? My perception has been that parapsychology as a discipline is somewhat moribund, both in Britain and the US. There's still experimental stuff going on, but there is little of the excitement generated by the ganzfeld debates of the 1980s, for instance, when there was a sense in some quarters that parapsychology might be on the brink of acceptance by the scientific community. Not much is heard from Edinburgh's Koestler Institute, especially since the death of its head Bob Morris four years ago. Rupert Sheldrake is very active and has been getting interesting results, as well as a fair amount of media coverage, for instance with his experiments on psi in animals and the sense of being stared at. But one doesn't get the sense of parapsychology as a discipline striding ahead.

However Delanoy is looking at the long-term. She points out that thanks to the Koestler Institute, parapsychology is being taught at more UK universities than ever before, both to undergraduates and graduates doing research.  Morris supervised more than 30 PhD students, many of whom are training their own students at other universities, who in turn are becoming academics and training other PhD students. There are now 45 PhDs, Delanoy says, and no fewer than eleven UK universities where one can either take classes or pursue a research degree in parapsychology - they include Northampton, Liverpool Hope, Goldsmiths (London) and Coventry. This is having a snowball effect, she says. As more people get involved in psi research it will start to seem normal, and teachers and students in other disciplines will not be fazed by it. 

Delanoy compares the situation favourably with the US, which led the way from the 1930s but has since become increasingly focused upon privately funded research, which is less secure than universities. (I don't know how much documented linkage there is, but it's hard to think that CSICOP has not had a lot to do with that.) Delanoy's point is that a solid university base is a much more effective means of furthering the subject, a means to train the next generation of researchers and make them financially secure. That in turn enables longer-term projects to be carried out, and influences the general public's perception of the field.

I completely agree that all this is a major step forward. But I have some concerns.

A lot depends on parapsychology maintaining strict professionalism and not setting itself up as a target. That means pursuing sceptic-proof methodologies and avoiding the kind of scandals that can undo much good work.  It's worth remembering Ray Hyman's advice to fellow-sceptics in the context of the Stargate remote viewing. The results may be impressive, and he can't see anything wrong with them yet. But wait awhile and they will be discredited for one reason or another, as has always happened in the past.  It would only take one researcher, however lowly, to be exposed massaging his or her results, or as having been tricked by subjects planted by a magician, perhaps as a scam financed by a newspaper, for this brave new wave of parapsychologists to be discredited for the next ten years. And it's safe to assume there will be plenty of efforts in that direction.

In fact I think the Koestler people understood all this very well. I'm not aware of them suffering any serious controversy: an attempt to do a 'Project Alpha' was nipped in the bud before it could do any harm, which was reassuring. But if the Koestler activity is multiplied across the country by a factor of ten or more, then so is the chance of a mishap or of standards slipping. I'd be curious to know whether these new parapsychology units have any system in place to review each other's experimental activity and generally keep an eye on each other, to minimise the chance of negative publicity and scandal.

The real test will come when research teams have something worthwhile to report. We may not have long to wait, to judge by talk of significant remote viewing results in the University of Northampton (see my Jan 28 post). By definition, success in this field automatically leads to media interest. That is followed by barracking from high-profile scientists and sceptics, as sure as night follows day. The greater the success, the bigger the threat is perceived to be, and the more vicious the campaigning to stop it will become. It has taken more than two decades for the psi-seeding of academe in the UK to take place, but a sceptical campaign to discourage universities from 'harbouring pseudo-science' could quickly reverse that. Scientists see creationism as the main threat right now, but that's only because the movement to teach intelligent design in schools has had a much higher profile. Parapsychology could soon be in the firing line.

If this sounds a bit gloomy it's because, as a long-time student of parapsychology, I know how easy it is for sceptics to manipulate public perceptions. My point is that something rather more is demanded of parapsychologists than in any other discipline one can think of. They don't just need to be passionate about their subject; to be taken seriously, and to face down the opposition, they need also to be diplomats, publicists and public relations experts, writers, controversialists, street-fighters even. Many scientists have at some time or other to fight for funding and get involved in politicking, but this is political activity on a quite different level.

I'm not at all saying that British parapsychologists can't succeed in getting their subject accepted and achieving that all-important breakthrough. But I think that the process that Delanoy quite rightly welcomes is just a first step.

Thinking a bit more about people who believe there is no evidence of psi or survival, and nothing to argue about. If someone said to me, 'OK, so I'm an ignorant disbeliever, educate me', what would I say? I suppose the first thing would be to direct him/her to some useful books. But which ones?

Kevin (comments, That Glass Screen, March 7), suggests Kelly et al's Irreducible Mind, an in-depth argument for a revised view of consciousness that embraces the empirical research.  It's a magnificent book and would certainly be on my list, although it might be a bit weighty for someone with limited time to spare. Perhaps also, as he says, Jenny Wade's Changes of Mind and Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics, which I hope to review shortly. Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds, Rupert Sheldrake's The Sense of Being Stared At and Stephen Braude's The Limits of Influence  would all be indispensable, to name only a few.

If we are talking about survival, I might recommend Richard Almeder's Death and Personal Survival. That sets out the logic in a rigorous way, and has the virtue of being quite succinct. David Lorimer's excellent Survival? might also be good, as it pulls together a lot of the historical background about afterlife belief together with theories of consciousness and paranormal evidence.

So there's plenty of good stuff out there. Perhaps reading one or more of these books might at least encourage people to hesitate before making sweeping declarations about the lack of evidence.   

But I'm not convinced that on their own they would do much more than this. When I recall my own journey there wasn't any one book that did it for me. I read voraciously and indiscriminately, and it just got me into the most fantastic muddle.  I remember getting Brian Inglis's Natural and Supernatural from the library and, since it was sitting right next to it, Ruth Brandon's The Spiritualists, one a factual chronicle of nineteenth century psychical research, and the other a determined and highly speculative debunking. They wrote about the same mediums, investigations and controversies, but from entirely opposite viewpoints, which left me wondering what the hell was going on.

Eventually I realised that I would have to figure things out for myself by getting to grips with the primary sources. That's when it started to get interesting. Having just lost my job, and with no immediate prospect of getting another, I had the luxury of loads of time, and spent weeks and months in libraries. I ploughed through the anecdotal material and analysis of spontaneous phenomena in the various journals, also books like Phantasms of the Living and Myers' Human Personality, the work with Piper and Leonard, the cross correspondences, 'Patience Worth', investigations of poltergeists, the experimental work from Richet to Rhine, Jahn and Dunne, Honorton and others.  Then I read much of the literature on near-death experiences Ring, Sabom, Morse, Greyson, etc) and the equally extraordinary work on possession and children's memories of a previous life by Ian Stevenson and others.

I also thought a lot about the claims and tested the logic. Here I found the sceptics hugely useful: Kurtz's Transcendental Temptation and Skeptic's Handbook, Randi's Flim-Flam!, Hyman's The Elusive Quarry and many others. At first what they said seemed to make a lot of sense - it took quite a while to realise how limited their knowledge and understanding is. I think that's when light started to dawn.

My point is that you don't arrive at conviction on something as significant as this by reading one or two books. Perhaps some people do, but then I wonder how firm and lasting it is. Better to immerse yourself in the claims and experiences, weigh them up against your own experience, read the analyses of both investigators and sceptics, and see who you think is doing the best job. It's then that the gradual conviction comes over you that there's a huge area of human experience that has just been filtered out of your awareness, not through any fault of your own, just as an effect of being alive in the world at this particular time.

I suspect too that on some level it would have to jibe with personal experience, and surely even sceptics have at least once been confronted with an incident that forced them to ask questions, in their own lives or the lives of someone close to them.

So no short cuts. This isn't just information in libraries, it changes lives. It can't be a purely intellectual process. You'd have to bring a certain commitment to the subject, otherwise it would just be dabbling. You would actually have to respond, and who knows where that might lead. You might find yourself starting to sympathise with people you once despised, and find yourself despised in turn by people whose good opinion you once took for granted. Your friends would change. And I don't think there's a book that prepares you for that.

To North London on Saturday for a pleasant pub lunch with Veronica Keen, widow of the late Montague Keen. I met Monty a few times when we were involved in a SPR project together some years back, although didn't know him well. He was the senior of the three authors of the SPR's Scole Report (Proceedings 58, 1999) and an effective debunker of sceptics. I especially appreciated his robust response to James Randi's comments on a Channel 4 TV show five years ago - incidentally Veronica is pictured, to rebut Randi's rudeness about her looks.

Many people remember Monty's dramatic passing, at the end of a public debate about telepathy between Rupert Sheldrake and evolutionary scientist Lewis Wolpert. Since then, Veronica says, he has continued to be a very active presence in her life, writing through her hand and communicating at séances. I heard the tape of an address he made to be played back later at his memorial service. The voice sounded very clear and forthright, and I assumed it was the medium speaking in trance, but she said, no, it was direct voice: the medium's mouth had been securely taped as well has having his arms bound to the chair. From what I remember of Monty it sounded like him, and Veronica has no doubt - the slightly pedantic circumlocution of his speech was absolutely typical of him, she says.

She adds that he has also materialised, although she has not seen it herself. At one séance he 'shadowed' her body, superimposing an image of himself over her, and conversed with the sitters; she was in trance and was not aware of it.

Veronica is not at all fazed by any of this, and takes it for granted that he should keep in touch. But there is more: he is apparently very keen for her to start a new foundation to carry out spiritual, medical and environmental research.  He is very determined about this, according to Veronica, and to help make it happen has joined forces with John Mack, the Harvard expert on alien abduction. (Mack was a friend of the couple, and had come to work with Veronica on communications from Monty some months later when he himself died, killed in a traffic accident near her house.)  She says he is pouring out information, and although she finds it exhilarating it is clearly taking over her life.

I have never been to a séance, and almost all of what I know about the paranormal is from reading books and journals. I'm not a researcher, and seldom have close contact with it. So although I can readily empathise with Veronica, I find what she tells me curiously hard to accommodate. It might all be happening on another planet. How much harder it must be to accept for people who know nothing about the subject at all. I suspect many will prefer to think that it's all in the mind of a grieving widow. Physical mediumship is by its nature extremely controversial.

Then again, the apparent ease with which Monty seems able to communicate would be consistent with two things. One is his close involvement with mediumship and commitment to the truth of post-mortem survival during his life. If appearances are to be believed, Frederic Myers and other leading lights of the early SPR laboured for years to provide evidence through the cross-correspondences.

Apparently it also helps if there is a strong emotional bond between the deceased and the surviving spouse. There's a good example of this in a memoir by David Kennedy, a Scottish priest who describes frequent contacts by his wife following her early death from heart-disease - he recounts incidents where at her urging mediums would ring him up out of the blue, for instance to wake him up when he had dozed off before a church service he was supposed to give.  The couple had become convinced about survival by reading parapsychology journals, and there was also a strong romantic attachment between them. Both conditions are present here: besides being a knowledgeable and passionate advocate of survival, Monty had a powerful bond with Veronica, in what was still quite a new relationship.

Veronica posts Monty's weekly letter on her website. She says that in the future he is keen to materialise in a way that provides scientific validation. This will require a good deal of luck and skill, if it is not simply to end in yet more fruitless controversy. Just as challenging will be getting the foundation going, and sticking to its highly ambitious agenda, although she is confident, having made progress and getting good professional help.  I wish her the best of luck.

Earlier this week (What's Weird, March 3), I wrote about the extraordinary anomaly - as it seems to me - of living in a world where indications of psychism as a feature of consciousness are abundant, yet utterly invisible to a large section of society. As I said, it's like a parallel universe where I'm separated from other people, many of whom I value and respect as friends or as writers and thinkers, by a conceptual glass screen.

This is something that has preoccupied me a good deal over the past few years. Those of us who are literate in parapsychological matters, who are familiar with the work and thought of people like William James, Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, JB Rhine, Ian Stevenson and many many others, can find it hard to understand why our peers - friends, family, co-workers - often don't see our interest in the same way. The evidence that these researchers gathered, the analyses they made and the conclusions that they arrived at seem to us to be deserving, if not of actual acceptance then at least of consideration. But this body of work is not only largely unknown in intellectual circles, it's something many people don't even want to hear about. More than once I have been gently harangued by well-meaning friends who upbraid me for even showing an interest in it, as if I was somehow letting myself down.

I've recently been reading a book by Julian Baggini, a British philosopher who writes about his subject in accessible books and articles. This 2004 volume is titled What's It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. In chapter 3 (of 11) he disposes of life after death in just over four pages. He points out that consciousness appears to be dependent on the brain and that the idea of living on after death is difficult to make sense of, important arguments both. So far so reasonable. But he also says:

Belief in life after death can only be based on faith, since the evidence and good reasons required for a rational argument that it exists are lacking. The only evidence we have for life after death is the testimony of those who claim to have seen or communicated with the dead. This would certainly not stand up in a court of law and nor should it stand up in the court of reason. It is true, though not surprising, that a small number of these claims are hard to falsify. Among the many thousands of alleged communications with the other world there are bound to be a small number of uncanny coincidences and lucky guesses. However, if there were genuine communication between the living and the dead we would expect a great many more accurate and otherwise inexplicable communications. The fact that they are so rare suggests they are not genuine, but frauds, guesses, and coincidences.

Baggini is no foaming God-basher: au contraire, he's eminently reasonable and wears his atheism lightly.  I think - and I'm just guessing - that he talks like this here because it's the conventional wisdom in secular circles. He has no personal background of psychic experiences, his university philosophy department would almost by definition have been wholly secular, and he has never come across anything that would give him pause. In other words he's just very poorly informed. He has a vague idea about mediums, but gives no hint that he knows about the work with Piper and Leonard or the cross correspondences, let alone the vast data relating to crisis apparitions, near-death experiences and children's memories of a previous life, to name only a few of the 'reasons required for a rational argument'. If he wants to insist that these things are not sufficient reason for believing in post-mortem survival, then fine, he can apply his philosophical bag of tricks, as others have done. But an analysis this superficial will not do it.

There's a lot going on here, but I'd just like to mention the two things that are uppermost in my mind. One is that Baggini and many people like him, who might conceivably modify their views if they had an opportunity, have very little access to the data. True, they might find books by Braude, Ducasse, Broad, Almeder and others in the philosophy library, but they would still want to check the primary sources, and these are harder to get hold of. With the Internet that's starting to change, and hopefully more people will start to see what the evidence really consists of, if ways can be found to point them in the right direction.

At the same time, I think that for many people this is not really about the evidence, it's about what they feel comfortable with. This is stating the obvious, of course, but it's something we tend to forget when we upbraid sceptics for their complacency and intellectual cowardice, as we often do. The rest of Baggini's book offers a thoughtful series of ideas and arguments about how humans can find the meaning of life themselves, without having it thrust on them. For some people there is moral value in ignoring parapsychology, and it's something we should take into account when we try to draw their attention to it.

A pet dog has been credited with anticipating the earthquake that hit parts of the UK last week (it reached 5.2 on the Richter scale and was the biggest for 25 years). Wendy Brooks from Mablethorpe, a town at the epicentre in Lincolnshire, says one of her five pet Boxers started acting strangely several hours before the quake struck, pacing up and down, panting and looking nervous. 'She kept getting up and glancing behind her as if something was there and then she'd look up at the ceiling and cower down in fear.' After the quake the dog went back to normal.

Brooks assumes the dog is psychic, as I think the reporter does. Does that follow, though? I grew up with the idea that animals predict earthquakes, that even some hours before a quake hits cattle start getting twitchy, dogs bark and cower under tables, and so on. But I never thought of it in terms of psychism - I just assumed that since animals' senses are so much stronger than ours in many ways they could feel tiny earth tremors before humans.  Other ideas apparently are that they can they can sense electrical changes in the air or gas released from the Earth.

But if one of the five dogs displayed the abnormal behaviour it might suggest that we are dealing with some exceptional quality, and not something that is generally shared by all animals. Just like psychism in humans. And in animals too, for that matter: unlike Rupert Sheldrake's telepathic dog, my Staffordshire terrier never knows when I'm coming home until I'm within ten feet of him.

That doesn't mean it is psychism. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a link between earthquakes and abnormal animal behaviour: the anecdotal evidence is persistent. You can find any number of stories about elephants and other animals fleeing to the hills before the Asian tsunami - one bunch of villagers owe their lives to the fact that they were chasing after the stampeding buffalo, who took them to higher ground. (We might surmise, in view of what I've just mentioned, that only some of the animals sense the coming catastrophe, and communicate their fear to the others).

So I never realised the phenomenon was controversial. But apparently in some scientific circles that's the case. Here's statement on the subject from The US Geological Survey:

Changes in animal behaviour can not be used to predict earthquakes. Even though there have been documented cases of unusual animal behaviour prior to earthquakes, a reproducible connection between a specific behavior and and the occurrence of an earthquake has not been made. Animals change their behavior for many reasons and given that an earthquake can shake millions of people, it is likely that a few of their pets will, by chance, be acting strangely before an earthquake.

Where have I heard this idea before? Oh yes, to explain the idea that people experience telepathic connections with other people or have precognitive dreams. I can think of at least one reason why a reproducible connection has not been made, the same as with reports of poltergeists or apparitions: you can't predict when the activity is going to happen. Yet the rational mind can always find ways to suppress what it can't definitively prove, and set aside widely reported experience as so much gossip and folklore.

Steven Spielberg is said to be planning a social network for fans of the paranormal. TechCrunch, a site which reviews new Internet companies, has been told this by 'multiple sources'. The network will be for users who've had, or who are interested in sharing, paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences. It may carry video clips of ghost and UFO investigations.

I don't know how reliable the report is, but it makes sense. As has been widely noted, a sci-fi-cum-paranormal element runs strongly through Spielberg's work: Close Encounters (1977), ET (1982) Poltergeist (1982), The Haunting (1999), the TV series Taken (2002), and The War of the Worlds (2005). Spielberg is also said to have had paranormal experiences himself.

But a film director wouldn't have to have a particular interest recognize that the paranormal is a smart subject to tackle, and easy to turn into big bucks. It taps into people's interest in the exotic and sensational, also the fascination with the occult, of which the conspiracy theory is a modern, secular manifestation - UFO cover-ups, Biblical codes, things that are not what they seem, etc, etc. 

Yet in real life the paranormal is not really as Spielberg depicts it. It just isn't as scary as people think. Poltergeist is effective entertainment, but that very extreme sort of entity-attack isn't typical of what witnesses report.

Nor are encounters with ghosts particularly scary. I'm thinking of the late nineteenth century case reported by the Society for Psychical Research, of a house in Cheltenham where a ghost appeared so often that she was treated as a sort of unofficial guest, seen by (I think) as many as eighteen different people (Proceedings 8, 1892, pp. 311-32). She didn't hurt anybody and people didn't run screaming in hysterics when they saw her. In fact they got used to her hanging around and then disappearing into thin air. As for all the stories described in the SPR's Phantasms of the Living, once you've read one you've pretty much read them all - person appears unexpectedly, person vanishes mysteriously, person turns out to have been dying in some distant location at the time.

What worries me about this project, if the reports are true, is that it will be a sort of oo-er fest, with people out-doing each other with bizarro stories. It's unlikely that the anecdotes will be corroborated in any meaningful way. The network will just end up creating a target for sceptics, who can quote from it to back up their argument about human credulity. It will be a centre for the sort of low-level babble which the Internet already seethes with, and just further entrench the paranormal as an artefact of the human imagination.

Perhaps I'm doing him an injustice and Spielberg plans to do this in an orderly and serious way. To judge by his work in recording reminiscences of Holocaust survivors, a project which came out of his work on Schindler's List, he might want to do something serious. In that case, I hope he's getting good advice from leading parapsychologists about how to make a social network effective, for instance by establishing rules about the minimum criteria for an anecdote to be accepted. 

Even so, aren't there better ways to make a contribution?  Parapsychology is a pitifully underfunded discipline, with a very tenuous presence in academia. A Hollywood mogul could use some of his wealth to create a new university institute, as the writer Arthur Koestler did at Edinburgh, enabling new research and graduate study. The Spielberg Institute has a good ring to it, and would be a fitting epitaph to a career largely built on the public appetite for all things paranormal.

That would be the obvious route, but for a film-maker of his genius there is another application: to make films that explore the paranormal not as scriptwriters imagine it but as it is experienced in real life. Just to take one example - and not necessarily the best -  I've often thought that the nineteenth century investigations of mediums by scientists offer fantastic opportunities in this regard. The combination of special effects and human sensitivity that Spielberg can uniquely create could really bring them to life: the extraordinary story of William Crookes and Florence Cook, for instance, or the equally astonishing events at the Villa Carmen in Algiers, where Charles Richet first encountered Marthe Beraud (later known as Eva C.) An entity like Florence Cook's 'Katie King', as she is described by Crookes, is already a sort of ET figure, a visitor from another world, exciting a gamut of emotions from wonder and friendship, to fear, ridicule and consternation.

To be sure, these subjects are hugely controversial and in lesser hands the result would probably be risible. But I can just about see Spielberg pulling them off.