‘True skepticism has nothing to do with disbelief,’ says Susan Blackmore. ‘It is about taking people’s claims seriously and trying to understand them.’ As a starry-eyed student, Blackmore was convinced of the reality of astral planes, telepathy, and life after death. She was determined to devote her life to parapsychology, but what she found wasn’t what she had bargained for. None of her cleverly devised experiments revealed a hint of the psi she was seeking. In a determined effort to find it somehow, she tested young children in play groups, trained students in imagery and altered states of consciousness, and even put Tarot cards to the test. She visited haunted houses and was regressed to a ‘past life.’ Finally, accused of being a ‘psi-inhibitory experimenter’ with the power of abolishing paranormal effects, she visited other, more successful, experimenters. Here she found only errors in their experiments. In this new and updated edition of The Adventures of a Parapsychologist, Blackmore is at last at liberty to explain just what she found in those ill-fated experiments at Cambridge. She brings her story up to date in a lively and personal account of one scientist’s never-ending search for the paranormal.
