Is There an Afterlife?

 FOREWORD

It is now more than a century since serious research into ostensible paranormal phenomena began. Psychical research has been conducted in many countries throughout the world attracting the attention of some of the most famous scientists, renowned for their important work in disciplines such as psychology, physics, astronomy, biology, to name only a few.

It has also engaged the efforts and allegiance of respected physicians, philosophers and statesmen. Many have been members of the Society for Psychical Research or the American Society for Psychical Research. It is a remarkable fact, for example, that in the first century of the S.P.R.'s existence, among the fifty-one Presidents of the Society there were nineteen Professors, ten Fellows of the Royal Society, five Fellows of the British Academy, four holders of the Order of Merit, and one Nobel prize-winner.

In their studies of the field, often conducted for decades of years, most of them accepted that a wealth of evidence has been collected leading them to the conclusion that a wide variety of different kinds of paranormal phenomena occur. Many concluded that unless one accepts an explanation involving super-telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition (the so called super-ESP theory, never ever demonstrated in a Para psychological laboratory), the possibility that some human beings survive death, retaining their essential personalities, memories, characteristics, skills and concern for those they have left behind, has to be taken very seriously indeed.

And yet more than a century of such evidence is still ignored by the majority of scientists and of course the materialist reductionist. With respect to scientists it might be thought that they have carefully examined the evidence and considered it to be inadequate or faulty. But that is not so. The simple answer is that they have no track record in psychical research, never having studied the evidence or experimented in the subject. At best they may have seen some newspaper or magazine article or some slanted TV programme. With respect to the materialist sceptic who maintains vociferously that no paranormal phenomenon has ever been proven to occur, he or she is equally ignorant of the evidence or so Flat Earth minded that no amount of hard evidence would ever change his or her mind.

For these reasons and more, Professor David Fonanta's new book is of great importance. In it he displays an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the vast field of psychical research and gives a careful and balanced account not only of past investigations, but also of modern significant studies being carried out. The bibliography itself is of great value. His own significant contributions to that subject in the study of mediumship, both mental and physical, poltergeists and the Electronic Voice Phenomenon are also described.

I have no doubt that Professor Fontana's book will become a modern classic, allowing anyone coming fresh to the subject and of open mind to realise why psychical research is of such importance, providing perhaps the best road to our understanding of what a human being is. It gives hope of extending our knowledge of human personality and it shows why many psychical researchers over the past century have taken very seriously indeed the possibility that survival of that inescapable appointment we call death takes place.

Archie E. Roy

Professor Emeritus of Astronomy in Glasgow University, Former President of the Society for Psychical Research.

INTRODUCTION

The Sure Facts of Life

It is rightly said that birth and death are the two sure facts of life. We know a great deal about birth, the prelude to independent existence, but death remains shrouded in mystery. Is death the end of this existence, as many people believe and as many scientists assume is demonstrated by the facts? Or is death the transition to another phase of life, with all the challenges and promises that such a transition may present?

The purpose of this book is to survey the evidence that may help us answer these questions. Some critics may claim that all such evidence can be dismissed as fraud, delusion, or wishful thinking. Others may be surprised that a psychologist should even consider a book on survival, as psychologists are known to be the most skeptical of all scientists on matters relating to any aspect of the so-called paranormal. My reply to these critics is that one should not pronounce on the quality of evidence in any field until one has studied it, and that far from avoiding the subject psychologists should regard it with particular interest as psychology is about people, and people want answers to fundamental questions such as whether or not there is life after death.

Many scientists consider that such questions can never be answered, as they cannot be subjected to proper scientific test. Others insist that even without proper test, science has demonstrated that the chances we live after death are vanishingly small. Science has never found anything resembling a soul or a spirit in the body, and when the body dies that must therefore be the end of it. Even those relatively few scientists (known as parapsychologists) who do take a professional interest in the paranormal prefer for the most part to ignore the issue of survival, preferring to focus instead on paranormal abilities in the living, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. We will explore the reasons for this at appropriate points in the book, but among them is the fear that the question of survival is so closely associated with fraudulent mediumship, spiritualism, religion, ghost stories, and other doubtful areas that any active interest in the subject is likely to give parapsychology a bad name (see e.g. Alvarado 2003). Despite the fact that parapsychologists (by which I mean those based in university and other research laboratories, not those who simply decide to call themselves by that name), using methods as rigorous as those in the other sciences, have established the existence of paranormal abilities beyond reasonable doubt, parapsychology still struggles to obtain acceptance by orthodox science. Thus it prefers to ignore anything, such as survival research, which may make that struggle even more difficult.This generally dismissive attitude towards survival research is not only unfair to a vitally important subject and to the large number of people who seek explanations for personal experiences that suggest deceased loved ones still survive — for example some 50 per cent of those who have lost a spouse report receiving evidence that suggests they have survived (Gallup and Proctor 1984) — it ignores the fact that research into survival does not necessitate the abandonment of scientifically respectable methods, as we shall see in due course. However, as in very many other areas of psychological research, it does mean that at times we have to place some reliance upon human testimony, and take into account the fact that some of this testimony may be influenced by exaggeration and faulty memory. With this proviso in mind, it is fair also to recognize that some people are accurate witnesses. Were this not the case, no court of law and very few social institutions could function. As in all areas of human psychology, the first prerequisite is to pay attention to what people say before dismissing it, and to accept that they may just know what they have experienced, particularly if they do not change their story from one telling to the next. Many of the people I have interviewed, in 30 years and more of active involvement in researching the evidence for survival, have had nothing to gain by pretending to experiences that they have not had. In fact many of them have been fearful of ridicule, and only spoken of these experiences when they are convinced they will not be treated as foolish or as mentally unbalanced. They have answered questions put to them readily and directly, and if they have no answers they say so. Far from wishing to impose their own interpretations upon their experiences, they are often deeply puzzled by them, and anxious for explanations. Not infrequently their experiences have been life changing for them, and not infrequently the details are recalled with great clarity from many years ago. Having listened to many of these experiences I have also been impressed by the degree of consistency demonstrated by them. They conform for the most part to an identifiable pattern, even if the individuals who recount them have read nothing on the subject and have never previously discussed their experiences with others. In addition, far from exaggerating them, the tendency has been to understate them, and to talk of them almost apologetically, as if in this scientific age no rational person should have such experiences.

I am sometimes asked what prompted my interest in survival and in psychical research. My answer is that I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not interested in these things, or a time when I wasn't surprised that not everyone shared this interest. For me, the study of the mind naturally raises the question whether or not the latter survives death, and whether or not it has the paranormal abilities that from time immemorial have been claimed for it. It was my concern to study the mind that brought me into psychology, and it has made sense to research these questions alongside my mainstream work as a scientific psychologist. As will become clear during the book, this research has not been confined to studying the discoveries made by others. I have sought to investigate paranormal phenomena at first hand, and have been fortunate to experience sufficient of these phenomena to leave me in no doubt of their reality. I will refer to some of this experience as we go along.

Problems of Selection When Writing About Survival

The field of psychical research (my preferred term for research into the paranormal) is so vast, and the areas of it that relate to survival so extensive, that it is impossible to cover more than a small part of it in any one book, no matter how long. Any writer on the subject is therefore faced with the dilemma of what to select and what to leave out. In tackling this dilemma one of my regrets is that I have had to confine myself primarily to phenomena reported in the English-speaking world. Much careful and highly successful work has been carried out over the years in countries such as Italy, France, Germany, Russia and Brazil, but problems of language and the absence of available translations mean that a great deal of the literature describing this work is inaccessible to readers of this book. There is little point in referencing numerous original sources in foreign languages knowing that readers cannot go to them in order to take their studies further, and I have therefore kept such references to a minimum. But no reader should be left with the impression that the English-speaking world has a monopoly of good psychical research. In some areas, such as reports of apparent spirit communications through electronic media (discussed in Chapter 14), the English-speaking world in fact lags significantly behind a number of other European countries.

Another aspect of the dilemma as to what to select is whether to refer to older cases, or whether to keep exclusively to those of recent date. Many of the older cases have already been dealt with at some length in the literature, and it would be superfluous to devote too much space to them. On the other hand, some of the older cases have stood the test of time, having been subjected to every form of criticism without being found wanting. If the picture I hope to present is to be anywhere near complete, they cannot therefore be ignored. In looking at these older cases it is also important not to be beguiled by the myth of eternal progress — the myth that we always do things better nowadays than our parents and forebears. Many of the older cases were meticulously researched, and there is no reason to suppose we could do things very much better. In addition, there is no area of study that ignores seminal findings in its own field simply on the basis of age. Each area of study advances by accumulating findings over the years, and this is particularly true of areas that rely upon observation rather than only upon experimentation. Furthermore, survival research depends upon the availability of data, and availability has fluctuated markedly over the years. For example, although it is untrue to say that there are no good ("good" in the sense of providing material worthy of investigation) mediums working today, mediumship, like so many human abilities, appears to be more of an art than a science. And in all areas, great artists are few and far between. Two of the most thorough and objective earlier attempts to survey the evidence on survival, with critical appraisals at each point of the various arguments for and against the strength of this evidence (Hart 1959 and Jacobson 1973), deal both with earlier cases and with those contemporary at the time of writing, and I have no doubt that this approach produces the most illuminating results.The Dangers of Theory-Building

The final part of the dilemma is whether or not to spend time trying to build elaborate theories or hypotheses about survival. There is a tendency these days for writers in any field of science — perhaps particularly in psychical research where it is said we have no theory to explain data seemingly at odds with other scientific facts — to feel they must build theories if they are to be taken seriously. No matter how unlikely the theory, it seems it is better than nothing. But there are areas where theories can actively be a hindrance to further thought and research (note that theories are not the same as conclusions, we can arrive at the latter without necessary recourse to the former). Survival is one of these areas. As I shall point out at more length later in the book, some scientists and philosophers reject the possibility of survival (or find great difficulty with it) because they argue that there is no acceptable theory as to what might survive the death of the body and the brain. Others reject it because they have no theory as to where an afterlife might take place, or no theory as to what it might be like, or no theory as to how existence could be possible outside space and time. Yet others hinder things by putting forward theories designed to wean people away from the possibility of survival by stressing that if paranormal phenomena of any kind should prove to occur the whole edifice of science would collapse. We shall meet some of these theories in due course. However, in an area such as survival research, observation and description should precede theory. The need is to observe and describe, accurately and objectively, the evidence before us, even in the absence of any plausible theory to explain it. As Sir William Crookes said of the physical phenomena he witnessed when investigating the medium Daniel Dunglas Home (Chapter 12), "I do not say it is possible. I say that it happened." I can think of no better advice.

IS THERE AN

AFTERLIFE?

David Fontana