Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death. - book reviews

I am afraid that I cannot recommend this book to anyone, much less to persons who know little about survival research, since they would come away from the book not only still knowing little but, worse, with misleading ideas about it. There is little point in recounting here the contents of the book; it deals with the usual, expected topics in a book of this sort, such as reincarnation research, OBEs, NDEs, and apparitions. It does not, significantly, discuss mediumship, which is dismissed in a few lines (in, curiously, the chapter on reincarnation) as the product primarily of fraud, "autosuggestion," and guessing, or occasionally telepathy. The book also contains chapters on some issues in the philosophy of science, the relationship of parapsychology to modern science, and the dismissal of parapsychology by critics. Nevertheless, the book has so many inaccurate or misleading statements and oversimplistic conclusions and generalizations that the reader who wishes to sort the valid from the invalid material in it faces a formidable task.

Readers will also find here little in the way of guidance toward reliable literature. Although the book has 60 pages of notes and bibliography, leading the naive reader to suppose that the author's statements are well grounded in empirical data and scholarly research, the references are in fact often unsatisfactory. First of all, there are sometimes no references, in places where one would particularly like and expect them - as, for example, when the author states that "the nature of the ethereal body of consciousness is not yet adequately understood, but it sometimes affects laboratory thermocouples and TV monitors" (p. 119); or in the unqualified statement that people in "semiliterate" developing societies have better memories than people in western industrialized nations (p. 34). More frequently, however, the references are to secondary sources only. (Some of the many distortions in the book may, in fact, be the result of the author's having relied too heavily on secondary sources.) Even when the author does cite primary sources, there are indications that he has either not read or not read carefully enough the source cited (as I shall illustrate). Moreover, such references as there are sometimes completely wrong. In trying to go back to the author's source for some of his more questionable statements, I frequently found either that the reference was full of errors, making it difficult to identify the actual source, or that in the book, article, or page cited, there was little or nothing corresponding to the author's statement.

Lest one think that my criticism of the book's faulty or inadequate references is simply a minor quibble about an otherwise reliable book, let me illustrate the seriousness of the problem with a few examples of the kind of unsupported statements that the author makes that, to a naive reader who is not in a position to check the sources, may seem to be backed up by empirical research since they are made with the trappings of references:

1. Becker says that it is a "fact that drugged or hypothermic people may be revived after hours of no brain activity" and that there are NDE reports from people whose "brain waves were nonexistent for several hours" (p. 98). His major source for these remarkable statements - which would presumably bring any moderately educated reader up a little short - is apparently a 1981 article in McCall's, a newsstand magazine, which refers (as many others have done since) to the legendary studies of Fred Schoonmaker. Regrettably, Schoonmaker himself has never published anything about these studies, much less firsthand data supporting Becker's assertion that people who have had no brain activity for several hours can be revived and report experiences.

2. Becker claims that the 1894 SPR Census report demonstrated "several important correlations borne out by subsequent studies: that most apparitions of the dead are seen within an hour of death, and most apparitions of the living are seen at the time and place when the living person was dreaming about being there" (p. 45). In elaborating on the first "correlation," he even says that Sidgwick found that in nearly 200 cases of an apparition of a dead or dying person, 60% "were confirmed as having been within an hour of the actual death somewhere else" (p. 51). References to the Census report are duly given for these statements; but to people who know anything at all about the Census, it is perhaps needless to say that if one goes to the pages Becker cites (or anywhere in the Census report), one will find nothing backing up Becker's statements. I am certainly curious to know where he got his information and to know what the "subsequent studies" are that bore out these "findings."

3. Becker states that "poltergeists are particularly common in homes at the moment of someone's death" (p. 41). The reference, inexplicably and erroneously, is to a 1963 paper by Louisa R

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