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Science and the Paranormal: Probing the Existence of the Supernatural
Essays by authorities in the field of the paranormal take a look at phenomena that have long been dismissed by scientists and discuss new evidence surrounding such topics as UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.
- GenresNonfictionScience
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1981
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April 5, 2025
A SERIES OF ESSAYS EXAMINING PARANORMAL CLAIMS ‘SCIENTIFICALLY’
Editors George Abell and Barry Singer wrote in the Introduction to this 1981 book, “scientists who work at the frontier of knowledge in a particular subdiscipline often disagree with each other… Meanwhile, scientists in other subdisciplines … may frequently misunderstand hypotheses recently accepted by those in a different subdiscipline… If even scientists within the same discipline are often in the dark about an aspect of their own discipline not in their own field of specialization, how can the public hope to interpret strange-sounding claims that purport to apply at the frontier?... Yet many of those fields at the very frontier of science are of tremendous interest to all of us.” (Pg. 2)
They continue, “The subjects discussed in this book are those in which dramatic claims and speculations, usually made by nonscientists, have aroused considerable public interest. The claimants typically assert that they have made discoveries beyond or in contradiction to traditional science, hence the term ‘paranormal.’… The term ‘pseudoscience’ is often used by scientists to describe such topics and claims. The reason scientists have rejected most of them is … because the claims cannot withstand rigorous scrutiny and are not consistent with what has been well documented and what is well understood.” (Pg. 4)
They continue, “First, all the authors in the book are recognized experts in the fields they are writing in… Second… our authors… do not merely debunk, but look at each topic thoroughly and simply… Third, not only have out authors attempted to be open, clear, and detailed in their reasoning, but the charge of scientific prejudice or double standards with respect to the paranormal is explicitly addressed…” (Pg. 4-5)
George Abell says of astrology, “The division of the zodiac into twelve signs is a completely arbitrary invention of the Babylonians (the Egyptians… divided the sun’s path into 36 divisions). The stars have the same names… But the positions of the signs do not coincide with those of the constellations of the same names. They did coincide about two thousand years ago when they were named, but… they have been forced to slip westward about thirty degrees since then because of precession, a slow motion of the earth’s axis of rotation. Today, the sign of Pisces is roughly aligned with the constellation of Aquarius. The constellations, by the way, are not groups of stars actually clustered together in space; stars are extremely remote, all at different distances from the earth…” (Pg. 71-72)
Ray Hyman states, “With the possible exception of Daniel Dunglas Home, all of the alleged psychics who supplied the phenomena upon which the scientists based their endorsements were at some point in their histories caught in outright fraud or accused of fraud under conditions that at least raise strong suspicions. Just about all of the more than two dozen mediums that Alfred Russell Wallace publicly endorsed were caught cheating at least once, and often several times, in their careers… Of course… almost from the very beginnings of psychical research, defenders of paranormal claims viewed the tendency to cheat as an occupational hazard of mediums and psychics. Such gifted individuals, so the argument goes, do have genuine paranormal activities. But these abilities are erratic and not under conscious control… The psychic … is frequently tempted to supplement these powers with trickery in order to ensure that audiences will not be disappointed.” (Pg. 125)
Medical doctor William Nolen points out, “Healers have no success in treating purely organic diseases. In fact, most healers, if they are clever enough to recognize that a patient is suffering from a purely organic disease, will tell the patient, ‘Your disease is a simple one. It can be easily treated by regular doctors. I save my powers for the patients who suffer from ailments that regular doctors cannot successfully treat.’ There are no well-documented cases of hernias, stone-laden gall bladders, inflamed appendixes, ruptured spleens, or cancers that have been successfully treated by healers.” (Pg. 192)
Barry Singer says of Kirlian photography, “Research on the Kirlian effect is still in progress. We have found that it is a quite complex phenomenon. Rather than being able to claim immediately that something supernatural is being photographed or measured when a healer’s ‘aura’ changes before and after ‘psychic healing,’ we now know that there are more than 25 physical variables that influence the images… the Drexel team repeatedly found that … the physical extent of the branching shafts of light that emanate from a photographed fingertip---is influenced by film type, unipolar versus bipolar current, voltage, electrical pulse rate, pulse rate time, circuit resistance, thickness and other properties of the insulator, water vapor in the atmosphere, and geometric characteristics of the surface of the photographed object.” (Pg. 207)
Larry Kusche says of the Bermuda Triangle, “After investigating… I saw that the ‘boundaries’ of the Triangle are extremely flexible; it’s ‘edges’ are very wide… writers… have included ‘mysteries on the edge of the triangle’ that actually occurred as far away as Newfoundland, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and, incredibly, in the Pacific Ocean… Some of the vessel may have passed through the Triangle, but it has not been established that they ‘disappeared’ there.” (Pg. 304, 308)
He continues, “There is no evidence that the percentage of aircraft and shipping losses is higher in the Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else in the oceans. It is certain, however, that the number of vessels that are FALSELY REPORTED as being mysteriously missing is much higher in the Triangle than elsewhere.” (Pg. 308)
Philip Klass admits of the October 17, 1973 UFO sighting near Mansfield, Ohio that “This incident is one of the most mysterious and credible in the three decades of UFO reports. It is a multiple-witness incident and one in which the possibility of a hoax can be quickly dismissed. If all of the seemingly mysterious aftereffects reported by the [helicopter] crew were DIRECTLY related to the flaming object that passed overhead, even I would be forced to admit the incident defies prosaic explanation. But my long experience in the field has shown that in the excitement, or terror, of a UFO encounter, the observer may later deduce a cause-and-effect relationship where none really exists.” (Pg. 321-322)
Frank Drake says of extraterrestrial travel, “Present rockets may be fine for flying around the solar system, but for traveling over interstellar distances we need something much faster than we have today: to move from one star to another is a usefully short time would require spacecraft that can travel at nearly the speed of light. And there’s the rub! We come face to face with the unavoidable consequences of special relativity, which states that as an object approached the speed of light it becomes heavier… as [a rocket] becomes heavier it needs more fuel to accelerate it, but the fuel itself becomes heavier, so that more fuel is needed just to accelerate the fuel, and so on and so on.” (Pg. 337)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking ‘scientific’ critiques of the paranormal.
Editors George Abell and Barry Singer wrote in the Introduction to this 1981 book, “scientists who work at the frontier of knowledge in a particular subdiscipline often disagree with each other… Meanwhile, scientists in other subdisciplines … may frequently misunderstand hypotheses recently accepted by those in a different subdiscipline… If even scientists within the same discipline are often in the dark about an aspect of their own discipline not in their own field of specialization, how can the public hope to interpret strange-sounding claims that purport to apply at the frontier?... Yet many of those fields at the very frontier of science are of tremendous interest to all of us.” (Pg. 2)
They continue, “The subjects discussed in this book are those in which dramatic claims and speculations, usually made by nonscientists, have aroused considerable public interest. The claimants typically assert that they have made discoveries beyond or in contradiction to traditional science, hence the term ‘paranormal.’… The term ‘pseudoscience’ is often used by scientists to describe such topics and claims. The reason scientists have rejected most of them is … because the claims cannot withstand rigorous scrutiny and are not consistent with what has been well documented and what is well understood.” (Pg. 4)
They continue, “First, all the authors in the book are recognized experts in the fields they are writing in… Second… our authors… do not merely debunk, but look at each topic thoroughly and simply… Third, not only have out authors attempted to be open, clear, and detailed in their reasoning, but the charge of scientific prejudice or double standards with respect to the paranormal is explicitly addressed…” (Pg. 4-5)
George Abell says of astrology, “The division of the zodiac into twelve signs is a completely arbitrary invention of the Babylonians (the Egyptians… divided the sun’s path into 36 divisions). The stars have the same names… But the positions of the signs do not coincide with those of the constellations of the same names. They did coincide about two thousand years ago when they were named, but… they have been forced to slip westward about thirty degrees since then because of precession, a slow motion of the earth’s axis of rotation. Today, the sign of Pisces is roughly aligned with the constellation of Aquarius. The constellations, by the way, are not groups of stars actually clustered together in space; stars are extremely remote, all at different distances from the earth…” (Pg. 71-72)
Ray Hyman states, “With the possible exception of Daniel Dunglas Home, all of the alleged psychics who supplied the phenomena upon which the scientists based their endorsements were at some point in their histories caught in outright fraud or accused of fraud under conditions that at least raise strong suspicions. Just about all of the more than two dozen mediums that Alfred Russell Wallace publicly endorsed were caught cheating at least once, and often several times, in their careers… Of course… almost from the very beginnings of psychical research, defenders of paranormal claims viewed the tendency to cheat as an occupational hazard of mediums and psychics. Such gifted individuals, so the argument goes, do have genuine paranormal activities. But these abilities are erratic and not under conscious control… The psychic … is frequently tempted to supplement these powers with trickery in order to ensure that audiences will not be disappointed.” (Pg. 125)
Medical doctor William Nolen points out, “Healers have no success in treating purely organic diseases. In fact, most healers, if they are clever enough to recognize that a patient is suffering from a purely organic disease, will tell the patient, ‘Your disease is a simple one. It can be easily treated by regular doctors. I save my powers for the patients who suffer from ailments that regular doctors cannot successfully treat.’ There are no well-documented cases of hernias, stone-laden gall bladders, inflamed appendixes, ruptured spleens, or cancers that have been successfully treated by healers.” (Pg. 192)
Barry Singer says of Kirlian photography, “Research on the Kirlian effect is still in progress. We have found that it is a quite complex phenomenon. Rather than being able to claim immediately that something supernatural is being photographed or measured when a healer’s ‘aura’ changes before and after ‘psychic healing,’ we now know that there are more than 25 physical variables that influence the images… the Drexel team repeatedly found that … the physical extent of the branching shafts of light that emanate from a photographed fingertip---is influenced by film type, unipolar versus bipolar current, voltage, electrical pulse rate, pulse rate time, circuit resistance, thickness and other properties of the insulator, water vapor in the atmosphere, and geometric characteristics of the surface of the photographed object.” (Pg. 207)
Larry Kusche says of the Bermuda Triangle, “After investigating… I saw that the ‘boundaries’ of the Triangle are extremely flexible; it’s ‘edges’ are very wide… writers… have included ‘mysteries on the edge of the triangle’ that actually occurred as far away as Newfoundland, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and, incredibly, in the Pacific Ocean… Some of the vessel may have passed through the Triangle, but it has not been established that they ‘disappeared’ there.” (Pg. 304, 308)
He continues, “There is no evidence that the percentage of aircraft and shipping losses is higher in the Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else in the oceans. It is certain, however, that the number of vessels that are FALSELY REPORTED as being mysteriously missing is much higher in the Triangle than elsewhere.” (Pg. 308)
Philip Klass admits of the October 17, 1973 UFO sighting near Mansfield, Ohio that “This incident is one of the most mysterious and credible in the three decades of UFO reports. It is a multiple-witness incident and one in which the possibility of a hoax can be quickly dismissed. If all of the seemingly mysterious aftereffects reported by the [helicopter] crew were DIRECTLY related to the flaming object that passed overhead, even I would be forced to admit the incident defies prosaic explanation. But my long experience in the field has shown that in the excitement, or terror, of a UFO encounter, the observer may later deduce a cause-and-effect relationship where none really exists.” (Pg. 321-322)
Frank Drake says of extraterrestrial travel, “Present rockets may be fine for flying around the solar system, but for traveling over interstellar distances we need something much faster than we have today: to move from one star to another is a usefully short time would require spacecraft that can travel at nearly the speed of light. And there’s the rub! We come face to face with the unavoidable consequences of special relativity, which states that as an object approached the speed of light it becomes heavier… as [a rocket] becomes heavier it needs more fuel to accelerate it, but the fuel itself becomes heavier, so that more fuel is needed just to accelerate the fuel, and so on and so on.” (Pg. 337)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking ‘scientific’ critiques of the paranormal.
November 29, 2025
Think you understand the paranormal? You don't! This book breaks down the science and the bullshit people have been selling to you. This explains everything you need to know and then some about how the paranormal works in science. It's written by over 10 scientists, each commenting on their field of expertise across several subjects. You don't need to be a science major to read this book. Only open to learning the facts and data.
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