FINAL CHAPTERS
During his time working at the university in Stoke-on-Trent, my partner Pietro made great efforts to be with me as often as possible, driving for hours late at night to Cambridge or London. When he began work at Christie’s and moved to London he would return to Cambridge at week-ends. During all this long association, whenever we were having terrible rows about my sexual behaviour, the upsets meant that sex together would temporarily cease. Eventually Pietro decided that we should terminate sexual life together, though we still shared a bed. This did not put an end to mutual dependence. We worried about each other’s welfare, shared our troubles and continued to present a united front to others. Pietro introduced me to his colleagues at Christie’s, where they accepted me as his partner and some of them became good friends, while I took an interest in his work. Although fluent colloquially, he had never quite mastered English composition, and I was able to help when he had to write some articles on ceramics. When he found a flat in Kensington near his work, he set about furnishing it and making it comfortable with, of course, some characteristic artistic flourishes. He was given an office in Christie’s premises which he gradually filled with a collection of art books. He was an avid reader and took immense pains to prepare his lectures to students. One of the characteristic that made him popular as a teacher was an acute perceptiveness and an enthusiastic belief in simply looking and noting every detail of a picture or object as the best way to learn its date and origin and appreciate its quality. He enjoyed accompanying students on visits to museums and galleries abroad, especially to his native Italy. I joined him in Florence at the end of one of these visits. Our time together there revived something of the pleasures of earlier years. He had become a practised guide capable of vivid commentary on the surrounding art treasures. I still have an amusing photo of a group of naked young people, Christie’s students during a visit to Berlin, facing a large shrouded building, actually the Reichstag, then under reconstruction by the British architect Norman Foster.
Slowly the situation changed as Pietro’s health deteriorated. For a long time he had been experiencing anginal pain. As the attacks became more frequent and violent, he would wake up in obvious agony with cold sweat and pallor and need swift vasodilator medication. Much as he tried to make light of these attacks, they left him exhausted. Angioplasty gave only temporary improvement. Although no longer able to tolerate wine, his heavy smoking continued. He could no longer tend the garden in Cambridge that had been his pride and joy. He pursued his work with grim determination, appearing cheerful and confident before his students, but at home he was increasingly morose, unwilling to have friends visit, and less inclined to visit Cambridge or to encourage me to stay in the London flat. There he set up his bed on the sitting room sofa, leaving me to sleep in the otherwise unused bedroom. He was forced to take two short periods of sick leave and his boss contacted me to ask if I thought it would be wise for him to take early retirement. That was the last thing he wanted. I suggested he should retire to Cambridge with me, but he was emphatic he wanted to make London his home. He seemed to want to be more and more independent.
In the end he developed stomach pains of unknown cause and was admitted to hospital. He did not appear acutely ill, receiving cheerfully many visits from students and making plans for a swift return to work. I had booked a trip with our San Franciscan friends that included an Alaskan cruise. Pietro was insistent I should go, and with misgivings I did so, taking Tom with me, as usual without telling Pietro. Tom was delighted with the Alaska trip, particularly when he was able to go fishing and produce a fine catch for the hotel to serve up for dinner. I was glad of this, because Tom’s health was already failing and there would be little opportunity for such pleasures in the future. For me, the trip was beset by unremitting anxiety. In my absence our old friend John kept in regular touch with the hospital, visited Pietro and relayed to me reassuring news, later proved unjustified, that he was not in danger. Unexpectedly, the doctors decided to perform a laparotomy. This failed to locate a cause of his symptoms, and following the operation he had a fatal heart attack.
News of the impending laparotomy reached me shortly before the return flight to London was due. Desperately anxious, I negotiated a first exit from the plane on arrival and literally ran from the tube station to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Entering the ward, I saw his bed was empty. A nurse, who must have realised who I was, ushered me into a small office and told me the news. For the first time I experienced the frozen calm a shock can bring. I remember talking in a matter of fact way about practical matters, such as the death certificate, agreeing it was unnecessary to call upon a doctor for further information about cause of death, and afterwards walking back in a daze to the London flat. At the time, and indeed ever since, I have felt guilty about not being around when Pietro was dying, especially since I heard he had been asking for me when he was ill after the laparotomy. He had left his body for medical use, but because of the recent surgery it was not required, so I arranged (through funeral directors occupying the same building as the SPR) a cremation without ceremony, attended only by me and John. When the coffin was delivered there was a moment of silence till I gave the signal and watched it disappear.
As is often the case, the immediate aftermath of bereavement was busy with things to do, people to be notified, probate to be applied for, tax affairs settled, Pietro’s book collection to be cleared from Christie’s office, the London flat to be attended to and Christie’s arrangements for a memorial service negotiated. All this activity was a helpful distraction from a sense of terminal catastrophe. For over forty-five years we had been used to making all important decisions jointly, with Pietro taking in hand most domestic concerns, from cooking guest dinners to decorations and repairs. Now, at age seventy-six, I was faced with the prospect that henceforth every decision, every chore, and every financial issue must be coped with alone. Luckily, at this juncture, John was around to give unstinting moral and practical support.
Because he had virtually no life beyond his work, in spite of giving me occasional gifts, Pietro had accumulated much unspent salary. He left everything to me and nominated me the recipient of his pension from Christie’s. Even though civil partnerships had not yet been introduced, that firm was not limiting pension benefits to spouses. I was now free to conduct life in general and sex life in particular without his restraining influence. Any sense of impending liberation, however, such as I had, sixty-five years earlier felt at the death of a restrictive, over-anxious mother, was overridden by an overwhelming feeling of loss. Life since has given me experiences and a degree of contentment that was unforeseen, but almost every day I am reminded of the past with Pietro. Looking back, I wonder if we would have been happier had we never met. Work in Cambridge having come to an end, the prospect of maintaining a bachelor home in two places seemed impractical, so I opted to move into the London flat. This meant selling not only the cottage, but disposing of most of the contents, including the things in the storage shed that had accumulated from Pietro’s years of collecting antique oddments, few of which were of significant monetary value. Far more than was appropriate for the space available were squeezed into the London flat, leaving me surrounded by mementoes.
Moving to London proved more problematic than expected. Towards the end Pietro had discouraged visits and I had not realised how far he had neglected the place that he had once cared for with pride. Walls and ceiling were stained brown with cigarette smoke, and a collection of cans of moth killer bore witness to his ineffectual attempts to combat a heavy infestation of carpets and clothes. From the broken down sofa bed to curtains and clothes, everything had become shabby and unkempt, necessary repairs neglected, and untreated damp was creeping up the walls. Drastic renovation proved necessary. Electric wiring was condemned; plumbing was ancient and malfunctioning; illegal asbestos behind fitted cupboards had to be removed and the place subjected to protracted decontamination, all at horrifying expense. Fortunately, with the sale of our Cambridge home and Pietro’s pension, I was feeling well off at the time. In a surprisingly short span of time, being still vigorous and healthy for my age, whilst looking back with nostalgia to the past, both professional and private, I discovered a new lease of life, largely thanks to the internet.
For single gay men not living with a partner and not integrated into a gay circle of friends, retirement and separation from work colleagues can spell social isolation. That did not happen to me for long. One event was an introduction from my San Francisco friends to Paul, a gay American in early but youthful middle-age, intelligent and educated, proud of his exceptionally muscular physique and athletic ability. In addition he was a powerful wrestler and into S & M play. They guessed correctly that I would find him attractive. He had lost his job through some brushes with the law arising from his sexual activities and was temporarily unemployed, but hoping for reinstatement into the nursing profession. Being for the moment fancy free and still in the phase of feeling myself sufficiently affluent to be extravagant, I invited him over to Europe at my expense and we went together on a holiday to Russia, where he had friends prepared to show us around and provide some hospitality.
I had previously spent a few days in St Petersburg on a package tour that arranged everything for one, but travelling as independent tourists was not so easy. Obtaining visas in America and England respectively, and co-ordinating dates, proved a nightmare. On arrival there were repeated visits to officials, long waits and additional charges before a mistake on Paul’s visa was remedied and we were allowed to continue our stay. It seemed to me that Russians were not very welcoming of lone American and British tourists who did not speak Russian. We tried to book tickets at the main train station, but, even with train times and destinations written down in advance, we could make no progress until Uri, one of Paul’s wrestling contacts, who was a hospital consultant living in St Petersburg, came to our aid. We had hoped to visit someone in Estonia, but were told that if we did we would not be allowed back into Russia for our return flight home. Moving around was an interesting experience. We used the cheap local system of hailing unmarked cars cruising around for illegal custom. Although warned that this might be dangerous, I felt Paul’s gorilla-like appearance was sufficient protection. Travelling by train to Moscow in a sleeping compartment for four, shared with two bulky and amused matronly Russian ladies, was a bit embarrassing.
We were heading for a small town a hundred miles or so north of Moscow to stay with a young American lady sociologist, a friend of Paul’s, who was renting a flat there, while engaged on research into Russian consumer habits. Her flat was small and we had to sleep on the living room floor. I got up in the night and in the darkness tripped over a bag Paul had left on the floor. In the morning it was clear I had dislocated a finger. Our hostess insisted on a visit to the local hospital where we were received by a gruff mannered gentleman in a white coat who proceeded to grill her about who I was and what I was doing in Russia. Her charms seemed to pacify him and when he finally turned to look at me I realised he must be the doctor. He touched and stroked the finger while looking at it quizzically before unexpectedly giving it one mighty heave that did the trick. My hostess had said that to offer payment would be tantamount to bribery, but she had brought along a bottle that changed hands discreetly.
Our hostess told us that although modest by American standards, her Russian neighbours, used to severe overcrowding, were aghast at a single girl having a flat all to herself. She showed us a typical local super-market where old-fashioned systems prevailed and shopping took a long time. Purchases from the meat or vegetable sections, for instance, had to be paid for at distant tills and receipts brought back to the separate counters for collection of the goods. We were taken to a dacha in the country, not a grand establishment, but a small cottage with a kitchen garden, where Paul spent time digging while I was introduced to an old lady who spoke English. She had once enjoyed affluence, but changes brought about by revolution had reduced her to penury. She was bitter about present day politicians, and dated her troubles back to the passing of her hero, Lenin.
On returning to St Petersburg Paul arranged an erotic wrestling session in a hotel room with his friend Uri, but the furniture got in the way and Uri was hurt. We did not seek out any gay places, but visited the usual tourist sites, palaces, museums. At the famous church of the Spilt Blood we observed separate entrances for Russians and foreigners, the latter costing several times the former. In the main shopping street of St Petersburg, where ostentatious wealth is on display, Paul asked the price of a tie, finding it about twenty times what he was expecting. The luxury shops and the gloriously restored palaces and beautifully preserved buildings in central St Petersburg were in marked contrast to the sometimes drab, even impoverished appearance, of some suburbs. I came away realising that a stay in a country like Russia, however brief and superficial, makes a more vivid impression than any amount of reading.
These stray memories of a short but eventful holiday may seem of no great consequence, but I include them because I think they illustrate a point. Gay men have some advantage in belonging to a minority that makes for mutual understanding with others similarly placed. Introductions to prospective friends in other countries become easy. When homosexuality had to be hidden, it was difficult for gays to locate each other. Now clubs and the internet have swept away old barriers, including distance, and enable world-wide search for a companion, a sex buddy, a soul mate or a lover surprisingly easy. It was never expected by Paul or me that we would be embarking on a continuing partnership. He returned to America on schedule and although our lives have diverged he still telephones occasionally.
The old are commonly thought to be ‘past it’, and certainly most people would not think of someone in their eighties as attractive sexually. Yet many old people continue to have sexual needs, even if the impulses are less insistent than in their youth. Fortunately, loss of erectile potency, which does not necessarily equate with loss of libido, can often be ameliorated with Viagra. Gay men, accustomed to a lifetime of multiple contacts, are seriously frustrated when sexual encounters become difficult to find. In most gay venues – bars, discos and to lesser extent saunas – old men are out of place. Gay prostitution services remain available, and some of the advertisements specify readiness to cater to all ages. Even before Pietro’s death, I had already made some use of such facilities, usually visiting those offering S & M services. This was in part a special preference, but also because older men seem somehow more readily accepted among S & M enthusiasts. However, as already mentioned, these visits had resulted in a blackmail threat and precipitated resignation from Streetwise Youth. Less expensive than commercial sex are London’s gay clubs for men with specialised sexual interests, such as “S & M Gays” and several spanking clubs, one revealingly named “Boys and Sirs”. I took to visiting these venues, obtaining on-the-spot satisfaction, but acquired no on-going friendships from the encounters there.
Modern internet dating systems now provide previously unheard-of opportunities, not least for isolated or bereaved gay people. Discovering this made a real difference to me in old age. Web sites for gay males, like Gaydar, have thousands of subscribers from all over the world advertising their preferences, social and sexual, and what sort of person they are looking for. The information is usually accompanied by seductive pictures, and for those with web cams and video chat facilities communication is fully interactive. Some sites, such as Caffmos and Silver Daddies, set out to cater for the elderly and their admirers. Doubtless some of the younger subscribers are hoping for a sugar daddy, but it appears that gerontophilia, preferential sexual attraction to the elderly, is commoner than I ever thought possible. I have come to know a few who have had this orientation all their lives. It can be as compulsive as the yearning of paedophiles for children. Its origin has been little researched by sexologists. Some of the advertisers are gay men who have been in a long-term partnership with an older partner who has died and they are looking for a replacement. My own temporary flirtation with the internet, following Pietro’s death, secured a dozen or more encounters, including two men in this situation, now good friends, and a third, also a gerontophile, who is now my civil partner. This must surely be a streak of luck.
The internet is not without its dangers. Being totally inexperienced, I failed to use an address and a pseudonym that would conceal my identity. Living alone in the London flat, I was surprised by a knock on the door one evening to be confronted by a stranger who announced that she was from a tabloid newspaper. She had with her a copy of an e-mail containing my name and sexual preferences. She had already checked my academic attachments and publications. She explained that many of her readers would be shocked to learn of a Cambridge professor’s unusual pursuits, and asked if this was being done for research. I said of course I had done a lot of sex research, but I did not want to discuss it. She said she might need to publish something about it and left me her card to contact her in case I had anything further to say. I was very worried. Although having no relatives to be affected, I feared that scandalous publicity would embarrass former colleagues at the Institute of Criminology. For several weeks I bought and waded through the paper, but nothing relevant appeared. There were rumours around at the time about the behaviour of royalty, which may have fulfilled the paper’s need for salacious gossip.
The man I met on the internet, who moved in five years after Pietro’s death and became my civil partner, is over thirty years my junior. He appears active and fit, but has a chronic medical disorder that makes life expectancy uncertain and precludes a normal work career. Strangers might assume he has sacrificed a normal life to the acquisition of a sugar daddy. Some years after our union, when I telephoned to apply for some concession on repairs to the flat, the woman who was asking questions about ages of the occupants jumped to this conclusion and asked if the flat sharer was my toy boy. Living together in a one bedroom apartment within a building containing eight other units might have caused problems. I had acquired with the flat a very religious, Spanish Catholic cleaning lady who was in gossiping relations with neighbours in the building. Luckily, before my partner moved in, her husband decided to retire with her to Spain, so I was enabled to replace her with a male cleaner recruited through an advert in a gay magazine. He admits to living with a male partner, but maintains an attitude of extreme social distance!
Living in London, I needed to register with a local GP. My Cambridge GP had told me there would be no difficulty as the address was in a prestigious area with many doctors. In fact, it is something of a ghetto for the rich, where flats are outrageously expensive, and where the expectation of life is higher than almost anywhere else in the country. Many of the local doctors deal only with private paying patients. I discovered that the nearby National Health Service practices contained hardly any doctor whose name suggested his native tongue was English. Unexpectedly, an acquaintance who had once lived in the area said he had been a patient of a local doctor with a basically private practice who accepted a number of (presumably ‘suitable’) NHS patients. Accordingly, I paid for a private appointment with him, receiving a courteous reception. After inquiring about my background and medical connections he offered a place on his NHS list with the understanding that I could seek a private consultation if I had some particular need. Although disliking the idea of seeking special favours, I accepted his offer and have received prompt and efficient treatment thereafter. At his elegant waiting room, the fellow patients appear in keeping with the surroundings, the wait is never very long, and the reading matter consists of the Telegraph and a selection of magazines featuring gracious living and country houses.
A year or two later, with some misgivings I sought a private consultation with this doctor to explain that I was a homosexual and now had a living-in partner. He congratulated me and said that it was an advantage at my age to be living with someone. After being reassured that my partner was not a social problem or a substance abuser, he said he liked having members of the family included on his list and, despite being warned of my partner’s chronic medical condition, agreed to take him on.
I hope my partner will survive me, so it would be unfair to discuss him. Suffice to record that he has some independent means and that his gerontophilic libido is in fact more than I can easily satisfy. Like Pietro used to do, he proclaims belief in strict monogamy and has been jealous of my occasional visits to S & M venues and my friendship with another gerontophile. It seems ironic that mistakes of the past should be in danger of repetition. Fortunately, with ever-increasing age, sexual impulses are no longer pressing and their absence is missed more for the friendly contacts they yielded than for the orgasms they produced.
Gay bars, clubs, cruising grounds and saunas are mostly geared to younger, but in London there are gay social groups, some of them based around specialised interests, such as music or country walks, where older people are welcomed. Age Concern is an important provider. I had not thought of looking for a gay group until one of my internet friends, who was a frequent visitor to London, asked if I knew of any. I made inquiries and we eventually joined one. The leader was a power freak who invited one of the members to devise a programme of activities. On presenting some proposals he was promptly expelled for interference. Several of us broke away and formed another group, which soon expanded into a collection of middle aged and older men, predominantly educated and middle-class, able to attract interesting speakers to their homes and organise visits to theatres and places of interest. For a time I was elected chairman of this group, but I found socialising with more affluent middle-class gays, sophisticated in theatre, arts and literature, somewhat intimidating. The talks and discussions, however, were interesting, and hearing about the lives of some members I was confronted by a phenomenon that I had hitherto thought uncommon.
I was struck by some men’s ability to switch successfully from heterosexual to homosexual living. I had always felt it was reprehensible for a gay man to marry and keep up a preference of ‘normality’ while actively continuing with, or secretly fantasising about, gay encounters. However, I now met up with some bisexual men who had apparently sustained a heterosexual marriage and fatherhood happily and responsibly, switching easily to a gay life-style when their partner died. Some were maintaining affectionate ties with their families, either by concealing their current way of life or by securing acceptance of the situation from their siblings and adult offspring. This experience is worth mentioning, not because it amounts to a scientific observation, but because it points to the danger of projecting one’s own species of sexuality onto everyone else. Intellectually, I have always had an interest in the biological determinants of sexual orientation, which I still believe to be crucial. My own self-perception, shared with many gay men, is of an exclusive, unalterable and involuntary direction of desire, but this is not a universal pattern. Degrees of bisexuality and even unexpected reversals of orientation can occur. How far personal choice or adventitious circumstances are responsible is an open question. Tolerance of individual differences is needed, not least among gays.
In the days of gay liberation, activists were mostly social rebels, deriding nuclear families and capitalist oppression, promoting free love, and delighting to shock in attire and manners. Today the talk is of lasting partnerships, serious commitment and integration into the wider community. In reality, a variety of life-styles – sexual fidelity, open partnerships, closed but serial partnerships, or unfettered sexual freedom – prevail among both heterosexuals and homosexuals. Toleration of individual choice, but always with an eye to avoiding harm to others, would seem the ideal.
In the Fifties, when law enforcement activity brought about numerous scandals in high places and the government was moved to set up the Wolfenden inquiry, the subject of homosexuality, hitherto taboo, suddenly became a topic of debate. This enabled me to publish my book advocating tolerance, but it had to be written under the hypocritical cloak of detached psychological analysis and in language suggesting the author was one of ‘us’ talking about ‘them’. It was beyond my wildest dreams that in old age I should be able to write freely about my own guilty sex life. Luckily, with no close surviving relatives who might be embarrassed, and former work colleagues of the now distant past being probably no more than faintly amused should they read this, I should not be doing anyone harm. Existing friends are all too familiar with my private life.
Unfortunately, hatred of homosexuals and lesbians is far from dead. Gay has become a term of abuse or general disapproval in youthful slang, and gay-related crimes of violence are alarmingly common. The Anglican Church is falling apart in the face of opposition to human rights for gays. Gay tourism has become dangerous in many countries. In places such as Iran, Uganda and Iraq gays are in fear for their lives. To the embarrassment of the British government, too many gay refugees are seeking asylum here, mostly unsuccessfully. In the United States, ostentatious gay parades and gay venues vie with horrendous vilification by the religious right. In Russia, where liberal law reform was not so long ago the order of the day, repression has re-emerged. Global acceptance of homosexual living is nowhere in sight.
In contemporary Britain all is not rosy. The gay image is still unfairly confused with paedophilia. Heterosexual politicians like to parade their partners at public occasions; their few openly gay colleagues are more reserved. In the business world, there is often a similar contrast between gay and heterosexual partners, although some large companies are keen to advertise their non-discriminatory employment and promotion policies. The social life of the majority is geared to couples and families with children. Many gays still prefer to spend their leisure time with friends who are also gay, rather than trying to integrate. The politically correct stance of full acceptance is too often a matter of fragile politeness, apt to break down when a son or daughter displays a minority orientation. Provincial attitudes are different from those in London, where gays still flock to follow a life-style hidden from their family of origin.
All old people dread being taken from home and placed in some institutional refuge for the incapable. Older gays have additional concerns about gay-hating fellow patients or negative discrimination by staff. The United States has private nursing homes and sheltered accommodation run as private enterprises specifically for gays and lesbians. A former consultant to a large American company, who was aiming to set up similar establishments in England, contacted me to obtain an opinion on the likely demand among gays. We had already had some discussions among the group of elderly gay men to which I belong. Setting aside the deterrent factor of private fees, and unwillingness to start thinking about becoming physically dependent or bed-bound, opinion was divided. One man thought the bitchiness and shallowness of a certain type of gay so off-putting he would not like to be closeted among them. Others, recognising that they enjoyed socialising in the protective environment of gay groups, welcomed the idea. I agreed with those who preferred a gay-friendly environment to a gay ghetto, but thought it an advantage to have at least some gay companions.
The afflictions, restrictions and reduced mobility of old age affect people of all sexual orientations. Up till now I have been fortunate, following triple coronary bypass at seventy, I have continued a normal but increasingly sedentary life, with minimal manual exertion. But having arrived at the ‘departure lounge’ stage, one must resign oneself to impending extinction, either mercifully swift or by lingering disintegration. It was not until well into my eighties that pain and restriction of movement in both arthritic hips became so bad that the prospect of life in a wheel-chair loomed. Total hip joint replacements with metal prostheses were offered and carried out in successive operations at age eighty-six. After each six day stay in hospital, being delivered home on crutches and unable even to dress unaided, meant that my partner had to undertake nursing, shopping, and cooking duties. This he did unhesitatingly, and even after I was able to walk again without a stick he went on doing everything for me as if I were still helpless. Although subsequently able to get around without pain, it has become impossible to walk briskly or to cover much distance without becoming breathless. Moreover, failing memory has by now reached embarrassing proportions, being on occasion unable to recall the name of some close friend or the events of a day or so go. Considering my anxious temperament, these signs of deterioration might have been expected to cause panic, but instead the inevitability of it all seems to promote resignation, and attention to my will to ensure my partner can have the flat after my death. Remaining are the common fears of dementia, dependence on 24 hour nursing and loss of life savings to pay for it.
Up till now euthanasia has been an issue of interesting but detached intellectual debate, but in reality one cannot know how one will react when the time comes. I have to admit that ingrained dread of death might prevent anticipatory suicide and likely block voluntary euthanasia. At this time of writing, my longest standing friend John – the one-time flat mate who stayed friendly with Pietro until he died and helped me cope afterwards – is dying of multiple cancers. Watching his helplessness and suffering, despite receiving well-meaning care, I wish sufficient morphine could be given to terminate his unnecessary agony. These are unspoken thoughts, but perhaps not untypical at my age.
In the prevailing atmosphere of scientific scepticism, suspicion of fraud hangs over any experimenter who reports positive ESP or PK results. The leading British exponent of ESP guessing tests in the Forties and Fifties, the mathematician S.G.Soal, using specially gifted subjects, reported more positive results than any other British researcher. He was always somewhat suspect, even among some fellow parapsychologists. As mentioned before, I witnessed a session with his first successful subject, Basil Shackleton. Shortly after Soal’s death, a statistician, Betty Markwick, produced strong evidence that he had cheated in his Shackleton tests. This was the culmination of years of publicised suspicion. There had been a belated admission that a witness at one Shackleton session had seen Soal altering a figure on a record sheet. When asked a long time later to let colleagues see his record sheets, he announced he had long since accidentally left all of them on a train.
Handwritten copies, made at the conclusion of each session, were still available. Markwick’s discovery, using these copies, made use of the fact that, within the supposedly random series of numbers representing the five different targets in the Shackleton tests, some short sequences of target digits were repeated. This should not have happened if the numbers had been drawn systematically from tables of logarithms in the exact manner Soal described. This was not a critical flaw, since it could not account for the successful guessing. However, among these repeated sequences there was an occasional discrepancy when a particular digit was not the same. These discrepancies generally coincided with correct guesses, a strong indication that at some stage digits had been changed to register fake hits. Unfortunately, the necessary forgeries could not be confirmed by inspection since the original ‘lost’ sheets had been altered before the copies were made. Soal’s work with Shackleton had been much praised for the precautions taken against fraud, the research had featured in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, and was frequently cited as sound evidence for ESP. After Markwick’s exposure his name virtually disappeared from parapsychological literature.
Soal had been a diligent investigator of mediums for many years and was the author of a long report in SPR Proceedings on some remarkable results through the spiritualist medium Gladys Cooper. When his personal records of these sittings turned up in a second-hand book shop, I conceived the idea of reviewing all his many contributions to see if the Shackleton debacle might have been an isolated lapse. It was not. His second most important experimental research, carried out with the assistance of a former mathematics student, Fred Bateman, was a continuation of Shackleton type tests with another subject, Gloria Stewart. This yielded, over several years, a still larger mass of impressive data, an account of which he published in a book Modern Experiments in Telepathy (London, 1959). He was eventually persuaded to deposit the score sheets from these experiments in the SPR archives at Cambridge University Library. I asked Betty Markwick to help examine these records. It soon became clear that a large proportion were not the originals. The falsifications on one particular score sheet were revealed on a microfiche of the records that Soal had included in the archive. By mistake a photo had been taken of both the original and the fraudulent copy. The differences were clearly visible. On many of what appeared to be original sheets, there were some crudely forged signatures and many very visible alterations of target digits. These, which must have been made after the experimental sessions, had the effect of rectifying a statistical deficiency of doubles (repetitions) in the target digits. The embarrassing deficiency had probably come to notice when examining the score sheets for secondary effects over and above correct guesses. Worse was to come when Betty Markwick noticed, also on apparently original sheets, some more subtle alterations of target digits that coincided with successful guesses. I checked a sample of sheets on which Markwick had detected alterations and found that I could pick these out independently. The changes, were sufficient to account for the above chance guessing on the sheets where they occurred. They must have been made during the recording procedure at the experimental sessions. The inescapable conclusion was that most likely all of Stewart’s allegedly successful guessing was spurious.
In Soal’s later experiments with the Jones boys, Welsh cousins he encountered during stays at his favourite holiday home, one of them acted as telepathic agent and the other as the guesser. At open air sessions, some of which I attended, with the boys screened from each other and separated by 80 ft. or more, they continued to produce scores at times so high that some parapsychologists felt they were too good to be true. One imaginative sceptical theory was that the agent was using a concealed super-sonic whistle. The psychologist Chrisopher Scott went so far as to mount a demonstration of the feasibility of the method. All along, Soal had been resistive to many proposals to impose completely convincing conditions, such as separation in different houses. He may have been guilty of suspecting the boys were cheating, but he was not faking the effects himself because, on a number of occasions, similar results were obtained when he was absent. The boys’ abilities dwindled with the passage of time, and they produced no significant scores when the BBC conducted an acoustically recorded session that would have revealed supersonic signalling. When I interviewed them individually some forty years later they still maintained their performances had been genuine. That tantalising possibility could perhaps have been confirmed had a different investigator than Soal been in charge! Although my study of Soal’s career had begun with a view to finding support for him, the outcome can only reinforce my reputation for undue scepticism.
Soal’s motivation for cheating is a mystery. He was secretive and a loner, yet intellectually gifted, devoting the best part of a lifetime and enormous effort to his questionable investigations. In the matter of the Stewart data, he was immensely diligent in producing convincing copies of a large part of the records while leaving some of the originals with tell-tale signs of forgery. His behaviour was extremely damaging to the reputation of parapsychologists, but it was surely exceptional. His activities are hardly comparable with the collaborative researches of present day parapsychologists working in university departments.
Since the days when I was engaged in card-guessing and dice-throwing, methods of ESP and PK testing have become greatly refined. Computers have taken over and the spectacle of cards being shuffled behind a screen now seems excessively primitive. Software is available that generates (virtual) random sequences of numbers that serve as ESP targets concealed within the computer. The subject under test presses buttons to make his guesses while the machine registers automatically correct and failed matches and delivers a print-out of the results. Human counting errors and the risk of inadequate screening are eliminated. To counteract boredom from forced choice guessing of the same symbols or numbers over and over again the ESP task can be embedded in a computer game, which is actually one of pure chance, so that regular wins become a measure of ESP. One can participate in rigorous professional experiments by locating ESP tests on the web.
Despite the ease with which self-testing can be quickly and reliably carried out at home with computers, no outstandingly gifted ‘psi’ subject has come forward. Star subjects, capable of producing substantial and persistent effects over long periods, have virtually disappeared from the contemporary experimental scene. Parapsychologists working in universities prefer to use as subjects ordinary people, typically students, rather than claimants to dramatic psychic powers, the assumption being that ‘psi’ abilities are present to a weak degree in many people. Whether this is justified is open to dispute.
The advent of electronic random event generators rendered testing PK by dice throwing similarly outmoded. Utilising random emissions of electrons from weak radioactive materials, REGs can feed into a computer a rapid sequence of truly random target numbers. The experimenter selects a particular target and asks the person being tested to ‘will’ the production of a statistical excess of that target. Targets can be delivered at speed and a great deal of data produced in a relatively short time, so even tiny effects yield statistically significant deviations. The energy supposedly involved in causing such distortions would seem to be tiny in comparison to what would be needed to alter the movements of dice.
Notwithstanding impressive advances in experimental techniques and many ingenious schemes meant to encourage ‘psi’, no clear picture of the processes involved in ESP or PK has emerged. The very existence of ‘psi’ effects is disbelieved by most scientists. The size of the effects reported from the best run experiments today is usually much smaller than was the case in earlier years. Devices that might be expected to facilitate success, such as selecting highly motivated, confident, well-rewarded subjects, having numerous subjects aiming at the same target, or counting deviations from chance in either negative or positive direction have on occasion appeared to give results, but there is no protocol that guarantees a strictly repeatable demonstration, a basic requirement in the physical sciences.
There is a puzzling lack of consistency in what have been claimed to be features of ‘psi’. The secondary patterns of scoring, supposedly a confirmatory characteristic – such as alternating positive and negative scoring, displacement (i.e. focusing in symbols adjacent to the target), and decline in scoring from the beginning of a run with recovery towards the end – seem no longer to be reported. Extroversion was once thought to be typical of successful subjects, but nowadays ‘schizotypy’, a quality more akin to introversion, is more often cited. All too often, experimenters have introduced conditions thought to increase positive scoring, only to find negative scoring instead or to conclude that outcomes depend on the vagaries of individual subjects.
Some years ago, at a conference at Trinity College, Cambridge, there was a discussion of Spotiswood’s observation that ESP scoring tended to peak at particular phases of sidereal time. This was a correlation that could be checked in data from past and future experiments, wherever the timing of guessing is fully recorded. Sir Andrew Huxley remarked that in view of this we should be in a position to know in a few years’ time whether ESP is a reality. Due to the uncertainty of outcome in the rather few attempts at verification of the correlation with sidereal time that have been published, that dream has not been fulfilled. It remains to be seen whether a similar fate awaits attempts to substantiate reports of correlations between ‘psi’ effects and variations in ambient geomagnetism.
Even the most gifted subjects of the past had no awareness of how they achieved success, and could not say whether an individual guess was correct until the target was revealed. Experimenters have sought to obtain clearer results in telepathy experiments by circumventing the guessing requirement and testing for unconscious physiological responses. Typically, a distant agent, preferably someone emotionally close to the subject, is given at random intervals a succession of sharp stimuli, such as a pin prick or a sudden noise. The subject under test is wired up to a lie detector type instrument, registering changes in skin resistance and other measures indicative of an emotional reaction. If detectable responses occur synchronously with the times of stimulation of the agent, this is evidence of some paranormal transmission. More recently, a similar procedure seeks to make use of the fact that a physiological response is detectable before a person becomes conscious of a stimulus – the presentiment effect. Experimenters have tried to establish that the anticipatory response can occur a moment before the stimulus begins, which would imply real precognition. At the time of writing, this research is in its early stages and the outcome remains uncertain.
A somewhat similar idea was tested years ago by Professor Susan Blackmore, long before she became a prominent sceptic. Slight stimuli, of which we are unaware, may be subliminally perceived and affect our reactions, a phenomenon that advertisers have tried to exploit. For example, if subjects are required to make blind guesses at symbols so faint, so small, or so briefly exposed, that they cannot see them, they do in fact guess better than at a chance level. By gradually reducing the stimulus Blackmore wanted to see if some of this effect might be due to ESP, but as soon as the target symbols became absolutely invisible the effect disappeared.
It was in the context of spontaneous examples of apparent telepathy in everyday life that experimental testing was developed, but the small statistical deviations obtained in most experiments are of a lesser order of magnitude. One problem may be the difficulty of reproducing in psychological laboratories the circumstances in which they normally occur. Consider, for instance, the rather common experience of sensing the identity of an unexpected telephone caller. This does not happen with every call, and when it does there is often some unanticipated but significant reason for the call. The circumstances in which the telephone effect occurs spontaneously differ from the usual testing situation, in which one of four friends is randomly selected and asked to call the subject, who is required to decide before picking up the receiver which of the four is ringing. Dr Rupert Sheldrake is at present actively engaged on automated tests of the phenomenon through the internet, with very promising results, but whether this will prove repeatable by others remains to be seen.
The Ganzield technique of telepathy testing has achieved a degree of replication. While in a reflective, dreamy state of mild sensory deprivation – induced with opaque eye shields and white noise played though headphones – subjects are asked to describe distantly displayed target pictures or video clips Objective statistical evaluation is achieved by having independent judges match the subject’s response to four targets from the same source pool, only one of which is the target that was actually used. The matches are ranked in order of closeness of resemblance. Results have been variable, but meta-analyses, combining results from a complete series of all the most carefully conducted tests, suggests that the occasional failures to obtain significant scores are over-ridden by a generally positive effect.
In a somewhat similar method, called remote viewing, an agent is directed to visit a pre-selected site while the subject, closeted at a distance, tries to describe the place. The method was widely used in a government backed scheme in the USA during the Cold War, when it was hoped it might aid espionage. Funding eventually ceased and the value of the research done remains controversial.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of the difficulty of pinning down in laboratory experimentation the elusive ESP and PK effects is the story of the PEAR team of well-trained researchers, working over a quarter century at the engineering department of Princeton University, conducting PK tests with random number generators and remote viewing ESP experiments. By their retirement in 2007 they had published numerous papers reporting small, but statistically highly significant results from rigorously conducted tests using volunteer subjects with no prior claim to psychic abilities. However, in subsequent collaborative PK tests at two other laboratories, using the same protocols, neither reproduced their straightforward, persuasively significant, positive effects. However, puzzling and unexpected ‘secondary’ statistical effects emerged, which they did not consider explicable by chance.
The Pear group’s remote viewing experiments were conducted as precognitive tests, with the target locations not selected until after the subjects’ impressions were recorded. Over a period of years, subjects produced a variety of effects, but predominantly positive deviations in the direction expected, with a cumulative positive score reaching astronomical odds against a chance effect. Then they introduced what was intended to be a more sensitive method of judging resemblances, after which the ‘psi’ effect virtually disappeared. A simple, repeatable formula for success was never achieved. They concluded that whereas genuine effects of incontestable importance had been recorded, outcomes were sensitive to often uncontrollable psychological influences, such as mood, expectation, attitude and fatigue of both the subjects and experimenters involved.
This conclusion coincides with my own views, namely that sufficient positive results have been obtained in innumerable well-conducted tests by so many different experimenters at widely separate academic centres, that belief in ‘psi’ effects is justified, but that adequate explanation of how these occur or how to control them eludes us. That said, some fairly well supported generalisations have emerged that add to the impression of a genuine effect. A substantial independence of psi effects from separation of subject and target by either distance or time is an initially incredible finding that has been repeatedly claimed. The appearance of ‘psi’ is encouraged by selecting subjects who are imaginative and open-minded, perhaps having had experiences they consider paranormal, putting them into a relaxed, dreamy state, and using targets that are interesting or emotional. Such experiments give strong support to the existence of a real effect. Even so, it must be admitted that progress sufficient to make parapsychology an accepted branch of science is a long way off. At a personal level, I have had the task over many years of studying scores of experimental projects that have received grants from either the SPR or the Perrott Warrick Fund. None has produced anything like a break-through. Nevertheless, the persistent indications that sometimes there are correlations between human mentation and the external world, other than via the known mechanisms of the brain and sensory systems, justify continued effort.
Many parapsychologists seek to underplay the possibility that ‘psi’ effects may point to an independence of mind from brain and to a hope for some form of survival of the mind after death. In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in objective evaluations of information given by mediums, which they could not have acquired by normal means, and which are usually presented in the guise of communications from spirits to their surviving relatives. My research in the late Forties, using proxy sitters, and requiring target persons to identify blindly which of a series of readings was meant for them, was an attempt in this direction. In 2000, I published a paper (SPR Proceedings, 64, 233–241) arguing the near-impossibility of obtaining scientific evidence of paranormality from statements made when medium and client are talking face to face, allowing all kinds of clues to be transmitted unintentionally, or when no statistical check on chance coincidence is applied.
By way of illustration of the problems of drawing firm conclusions under such conditions, I reviewed a case of supposed communications though the well-known medium Mrs Osborn Leonard, a long report of which appeared in SPR Proceedings in 1920, authored by the sitters, Radcliffe Hall and Una Troubridge. I admit choosing this particular example, not only because it was typical of its kind, but also because of its sexual background. Radcliffe Hall, known among her social circle as ‘John’, had recently formed a lesbian partnership with Una. John was soon to become notorious as the author of a banned lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. The supposed communicator, who was referred to as AVB, was the recently deceased Mabel Batten, Una’s cousin, a lady well known in aristocratic circles, whose requiem mass in Westminster Cathedral was attended by many titled persons. Shortly before her death, Una had supplanted her in John’s affections. Among the messages from the beyond came a reassurance that this no longer distressed her. This emotionally charged background, to which no reference was made in the published report, might suggest a strong motive for a spirit communication, but might equally account for the surviving couple’s readiness to accept the ‘message’.
The entranced medium made numerous statements about AVB, her house, and her dog, which were said to be beyond what Mrs Leonard could have known or found out. A weakness, however, was that the note-taker at the sittings was Una, who could not have recorded every word and gesture. Moreover, in view of the couple’s friendly relations with Mrs Leonard outside the sittings, the medium might have been guided by casual allusions made by them, but unnoticed or forgotten. Some SPR members who knew John and Una were also the medium’s clients. Even assuming Mrs Leonard made no inquiries herself, the extent of possible leakage of information is uncertain. Furthermore, the statements only occasionally gave precise details and were sometimes ambiguous or definitely incorrect, so the scope for coincidental matches is unknowable.
The effort to avoid mention of lesbian partnerships proved futile. John was a member of the SPR Council and a fellow member, Fox Pitt, a friend of Una’s aggrieved husband, denounced her as an immoral person and a rubbish investigator unfit to serve on the Council. This led to a trial for slander heard before the Lord Chief Justice in 1921. John withdrew her charge when Fox Pitt organised an appeal against an initial decision in her favour. Newspaper commentary exposed her relationships to much criticism. All this happened at a time when the extension of the criminal law to cover lesbianism was a live issue.
In the last few years some determined attempts have been made, both in Britain and the USA, to apply a more scientific approach to the investigation of mediums. The sitters, whose identities are concealed from the medium, are kept at a distance while she is dictating her impressions. Afterwards, they are given several transcripts to score for personal relevance, without knowing which one was intended for them. Results have shown positive statistical effects indicative of above chance associations between mediums’ statements and the target persons, but the level of success has been small in comparison with what might have been expected from the enthusiastic claims of mediums’ supporters. Few mediums are able or willing to work under such conditions, which could well be genuinely inhibitory.
Demonstrations of paranormally acquired information, however impressive they may be, do not settle the issue of where the information comes from. The uninspiring banality of most of the material emanating from mediums is not in keeping with claims to lofty origin. Among numerous communications purportedly from distinguished scientists and scholars there is a total lack of fresh insights. As proof of identity, remembered passwords, telephone numbers, even surnames, are rarely on offer. The supposed contacts with spirits are far from mimicking a telephone connection. Popular TV presentations of extraordinary performances by mediums are frustrating to serious researchers. Celebrated psychics are reluctant to offer their services for research that is not financially rewarding and may not promote their reputation. The failure to obtain results in keeping with a medium’s public image can produce unpleasant recriminations from him and his supporters, as I found to my cost when collaborating with the renowned sceptic Professor Richard Wiseman in one such experiment.
Obtaining scientific evidence for ‘psi’ from the study of everyday experiences remains no less frustrating than experimental testing. Belief in the paranormal is widespread, as are experiences that people attribute to telepathy, premonition, ghosts or inexplicable forces. In any gathering where the conversation turns to the paranormal, there are always some who have personal stories to relate. My last attempt at investigation in this field was yet another survey, published in 1990 (SPR Proceedings, 57, 163–204). Respondents were presented with a questionnaire about experiences they may have had and their belief or scepticism about ESP. From 1,129 questionnaires presented to members of the public, largely in Cambridge, 840 (74.4%) produced a response. Well-educated respondents were over-represented, 110 being graduates at Darwin College where I was a Fellow. Interestingly, this group were almost as forthcoming with positive experiences as were townsfolk. In some sections of the sample, notably where collectors had used doorstep calling or approaches to work colleagues, there was virtually 100% response. The frequency of experiences reported among these groups was much the same as in the remainder of the sample, suggesting that the 25% who had not bothered to respond had not greatly biased the results.
A third of respondents found the reality of ESP either “probable” or “a fact”. The proportion reporting distinct hallucinatory experiences, mostly apparitions, sometimes voices, was 11.3%, comparable to the figure obtained in the nineteenth century SPR Census and in my small 1950s survey via ‘Mass Observation’. Most of these experiences were not claimed to correspond to any external reality or event, although they had often created an unforgettable impression, especially when described as unique in the respondent’s lifetime. Some attempted, not very convincingly, to attribute meaning to their experience. For instance, a sixty-seven year old recalled a “very realistic” experience when a young man in the air force. He was sleeping in a hut with twenty-six others when he awoke feeling a weight on the foot of his bed and saw his deceased father sitting there. He also sensed the aroma of the tobacco his father used to smoke. He sat up and the apparition touched his head, saying “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you”. Sometime later he had a lucky escape when his participation in a flight was cancelled and the plane he should have been in crashed. Even supposing this distant memory to be accurate, the connection between the vision and the event, both as to content and timing, was too tenuous to eliminate coincidence.
Only one response came near to the many cases of apparitions coinciding with crisis or death of the person ‘seen’ that were frequent in earlier surveys. The respondent reported having been woken by her dead uncle with his hand on her shoulder shaking her. He told her not to go to work as her mother needed her. When she got up in the morning she thought it must have been a dream. However, when she got to work she was told to go home as they had word her mother had been stabbed, which had indeed happened. Unfortunately this questionnaire had been returned without any identification, so further inquiries were not possible. It seems almost a rule in these kind of investigations that the best cases are the most elusive when it comes to seeking corroboration. Another case that seemed to communicate verifiable information, concerned a young law graduate. She recalled that two years previously, arriving at the house of her future fiancé, she saw through the open door of the sitting room an elderly man in a navy blue sweater sitting in an armchair. After a pause to hang up coats, she entered the room and was surprised to find the chair empty. Convinced that the man must have slipped out into the bathroom, she waited a while before asking if he was finished so she could use the bathroom. When she described her vision her friend joked that it sounded like his dead grandfather. His mother took the matter more seriously, because the chair was the one her father always used, and a blue, fisherman’s style sweater had been his favourite. The young lawyer was so puzzled she went back to the position from where she had seen the figure, but could find nothing that might have formed the basis of an illusion. Because this informant happened to be one of my students, and was not keen to pursue the matter, no further inquiries were made.
Supposedly premonitory dreams were the most frequently reported experience, but the accounts given were often disappointingly vague and unverifiable. The most interesting one was a vivid dream, on the night of 18 Oct. 1988, of a helicopter gunship shooting at a Pan Am jet airliner, causing it to fall and crash into some buildings. The dreamer related this to her husband and daughter in the morning, each of whom confirmed their recollection of it in letters to me. The fatal explosion of a Pan Am airliner over Locherbie occurred on 21st Dec., 1988. This was held to be fulfilment of the dream. The dreamer had received our questionnaire before that date, but unfortunately had not completed it until afterwards. The two months gap between the dream and the disaster increased the possibility of coincidence.
My experience with this survey, and in other attempts at following up individual cases, confirms the difficulty of obtaining unchallengeable proof of stories that at first sight appear convincing. Experimental psychologists have developed questionnaires that purport to measure dimensions of personality, such as fantasy proneness, transliminality and schizotypy, that correlate both with proneness to anomalous experiences and with readiness to believe in the paranormal. Transliminality includes unusually imaginative fantasy, self-absorption in private thoughts, magical ideation etc. Schizotypy embraces ideas of reference (finding personal meaning in irrelevant events) unusual perceptive experiences (e.g. hearing voices), cognitive disorganisation (attention difficulties), and introverted anhedonia (unsociable, with a preference for solitude). In extreme form schizotypy merges into schizophrenic psychosis. Although not usually expressed so brutally, the implication is that reports of paranormal experiences are the product of over-active imagination, irrational thinking and faulty perception and interpretation, in short subjective and illusory.
As an explanation for experimental ‘psi’ effects, findings about the fallibility of subjects’ perception and memory are irrelevant, since a fundamental feature of ‘psi’ testing is immediate, objective recording. However, by attaching these sceptical-sounding measures to ‘psi’ tests, parapsychologists have been able to get their reports accepted by mainstream journals.
From the earliest days of psychical research, investigators have been aware of the role of exaggeration and self-deception in reports of psychic experiences, especially memory distortions from emotional attachment to a particular interpretation. The best safeguards are witness corroboration and recording of psychic impressions in advance of their apparent confirmation. Owing to the circumstances and personal nature of spontaneous psychic impressions, these requirements for a legal standard of proof are rarely available in the majority of cases. However, there are some very well authenticated and convincing incidents tucked away in the vast literature of psychical research. The personality variables cited are implausible as an explanation of the more credible cases, since the testimonies are often of a quality that could only be challenged by an assumption of virtual insanity or gross dishonesty. I do not go along with the idea that the study of testamentary evidence is unscientific. What is puzzling, however, is the increasing rarity of well-authenticated cases, perhaps because people have become lazy about producing careful reports, or perhaps because the development of instant communication by mobile phones and the like have diminished the need for paranormal impressions.
Parapsychology has seen a revival of interest in near-death experiences. One of the first Presidents of the SPR, Sir William Barrett, studied death-bed visions of deceased family members welcoming the dying person into the afterlife. Present day concerns are more with people revived from near death who relate experiences of moving through a tunnel, seeing a bright light, and then being called back to life. A sense of time standing still and a review of past life passing through consciousness are also sometimes reported. Oddly, similar experiences may occur when someone is threatened with imminent death, fear-death experiences.
The topic has broken through into mainstream medical journals because of the apparent persistence of thought when, according to cardiac and electrographic recordings, the brains of patients under surgery are inactive. After surgery, some survivors, resuscitated after apparent brain quiescence, report having been conscious of events in the operating theatre that they had been able to view from a point overlooking their unconscious body. This is difficult to prove, since survivors may mistakenly attribute retrospectively experiences while recovering consciousness to the time they were brain-dead. However, if events are accurately described that occurred only during a carefully monitored brain dead period, as seems to be so in at least one well-documented case, the evidence for paranormality is strong. The possibility of consciousness persisting without the help of a functioning brain has obvious philosophical importance, but the need for precautions against self-deception or dishonesty are as relevant here as in other parapsychological investigations.
‘Out-of-the-body’ experiences (OBEs) may also occur when fatigued or following procedures analogous to the induction of hypnosis. On recovering normal consciousness after an OBE some people describe places they have ‘visited’. Under the label ‘astral travelling’, believers suppose the spirit leaves the body temporarily and experiences an independent conscious existence. One is reminded of Scrooge’s nocturnal adventures in Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Sceptics, prominent among them the former parapsychologist Professor Susan Blackmore, assume the experiences to be dream-like constructs without objective foundation. However, in rare cases, percipients have apparently described correctly things they could not have known about normally.
Experimental psychologists have been more preoccupied with PK influences on machines and random event generators than on biological systems. However, there have been experiments testing the effect of mental concentration on the germination and growth of seedlings, the spread of bacteria in petri dishes and the speeding up of enzyme activity. The possibility that PK may be a factor in paranormal healing in humans is raised by recent applications of evidence-based treatment evaluations to cures by ’alternative’ medical procedures that have no known rational basis. Evaluative research has to take account of placebo effects by ensuring that neither the patient nor the person administering it knows whether the medicine or the ritual involved is genuine or an imitation used as a control. The effectiveness of prayer in altering the course of illness has been tested with similar techniques. Where the intervention takes the form of distant prayer of which the patient is unaware, evaluation is effectively a test of PK. So far results seem uncertain, but, unlike much experimental PK work, these approaches have obvious practical application.
The Global Consciousness Project is perhaps the most extraordinary parapsychological enterprise currently under way seeking to detect effects of collective consciousness on the material world. Researchers believe there have found detectable perturbations in the output of REGs across the world in synchrony with events producing great human perturbation, such as the 9/11 attacks on the US Trade Centre and Pentagon.
The phenomena that have attracted the heaviest scepticism, both within and without the parapsychological community, namely the physical effects produced by mediums – spirit photos, writing, raps, musical instrument playing, winds, temperature changes levitations, table turning, floating lights, materialisations – remain as difficult to substantiate as ever they were, notwithstanding the ease with which modern instrumentation could record and measure such events for posterity. The history of this type of investigation is littered with exposures of unsavoury frauds. With the exception of the Scole Report in 1999 (SPR Proc. 58, 150–452), to my knowledge there has been no published report of anything like credible testing of such phenomena in the last fifteen years. An insuperable difficulty is that mediums producing physical effects, and their supporters, dictate conditions – sometimes attributed to directions from spirits – that make proper testing impossible. The Scole report aroused controversy within the SPR and various criticisms, including my own, were included in the publication. My chief complaint was the Scole circle’s refusal to continue with a non-intrusive test of their claim to produce images on unused film placed within a secure locked box. They had apparently succeeded in doing this, but when the box was found to be demonstrably insecure, they declined to repeat the test. It is frustrating that incredibly strong testimony to phenomena in the distant past continues to be republished and endlessly discussed in the absence of any contemporary examples investigated using modern technology.
Claims for macro-PK are not limited to spiritualistic circles. The paranormal production of images on film was a speciality of Ted Serios. His procedure was to have the investigator, indoors in normal light, to point a loaded polaroid camera towards him and push the button to trip the shutter. Pictures would appear on the film when it was delivered that bore no relation to the scene where they were sitting. The phenomena continued over several years, but no explanation was ever found.
The fashion for paranormal metal bending, encouraged by the performer Uri Geller, for a time attracted many mischievous children. Matthew Manning was a serious exponent who convinced some parapsychologists. He produced both visible and micro effects, the latter being slight deformations detectable with electronic strain gauges cemented to the metal. The problems with such happenings are that they are linked to rare individuals whose activities do not continue indefinitely and do not lead to any information about the processes at work. Some of these individuals produce a mixture of phenomena. When a schoolboy in Cambridge, Manning was the focus of poltergeist disturbances in his parental home that included writings scrawled on the walls. I was introduced to his family and tried, unsuccessfully, to interest him in ESP tests. He was producing automatic writing at the time, ostensibly from spirits. I was shown a scrap in Arabic script that on translation read “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, something one might expect on a postage stamp. Matthew Manning has since become famous as a spiritual healer and has published his own account of the development of his powers.
Reports of poltergeist hauntings have been extraordinarily persistent over hundreds of years. They occur most often in households where an adolescent agent attracts mysterious rapping noises and spontaneous movements of objects. Many such occurrences have turned out to be hoaxes, but some are supported by seemingly incontrovertible eye-witness testimony from responsible and disinterested outside observers. However, repeated attempts, notably by the late Tony Cornell of the SPR, to record poltergeist events by leaving electronically triggered cameras and other instruments in areas affected, have yielded almost nothing.
An exception to the general rule that investigation of such phenomena produces no interesting information is a recently published report by Barrie Colvin (2010, SPR Journal, 73, 65–93). He submitted recordings of poltergeist raps to acoustic analysis and found them to be significantly different from noises produced by ordinary percussion. Many parapsychologists find sporadic reports of macro-PK above their boggle threshold. I prefer to suspend condemnatory judgement, while recognising that unless and until such gross effects can be produced, measured and analysed by engineering experts no progress will be made.
I have no regrets about lifetime involvement in parapsychology without reaching any final conclusions. The subject, disgracefully ignored by mainstream science, is extraordinarily challenging, with potentially revolutionary philosophical and scientific implications.
Looking back, have I learned anything? There has been no resolution to the controversial issues I chose to study, namely the causes of homosexuality, the treatment of criminals or the reality of the paranormal. It has been rewarding being involved in these matters, all of them of social importance. As regards the human rights of homosexuals, it is pleasing to note the enormous change in official attitudes that has come about in the UK, once one of the most rigorously condemnatory of European nations. Not only can we live a minority sexual orientation openly, if we wish, but our partnerships can be legally recognised, and facilities for contacting each other via the internet and in other ways are easy to access. In London and some other large cities special interest clubs are well established, and some public services are directed to our specific needs.
Sadly, these once unimaginable changes are not universal. In some countries gays live secretly, sometimes in real fear for their lives. Even in parts of Europe severe social disapproval and discrimination persists. Religious prohibition is active throughout the Muslim world. In the most influential English-speaking nation, the USA, powerful and condemnatory religious ideologies remain active. Children in UK schools do not necessarily follow a politically correct stance towards gays. Liberation is fragile.