Rest in Peace Garrett Husveth

I only just heard today that Garrett Husveth, a long time paranormal researcher, died on April 30, 2011.  He was only 43!  According to the Bernardsville News he died at home, after a long illness.

Garrett was one of the first people I met when I started researching my book about the Duke Parapsychology Lab.  He’s been investigating the unexplained, particularly in New Jersey, for a long time, and I went to him to learn about EVP (electronic voice phenomena, thought by some to be the voices of the dead). He was just so kind and generous. From my book:

Skeptics answer that the recordings are in fact white noise that only sound like voices.  However audio engineers and linguistics experts and others have been working for decades on speaker identification and evaluation systems and they know what human speech looks like.  A forensics audio examiner was once hired to determine whether a sound from a recording of a fatal accident was a door loudly squeaking or a woman screaming (it was, sadly, a woman screaming).  Garrett Husveth, the President of Latent Technologies, who conducts forensic audio analysis for corporate clients and who also records examples of EVP says, “Forensically, we can prove that they are voices.”

I also learned from the Sturges Paranormal website that Garrett was a contributing editor of Ghosts of Central New Jersey: Historic Haunts of the Somerset Hills, by Gordon Thomas Ward. A book on paranormal investigating based on his 21 years of field work.”

In fact, the last time I saw Garrett was in 2009, when he and Gordon generously interviewed me for their Haunted New Jersey podcast series.

I had no idea that he was ill and this is just so shocking to me.  According to the Bernardsville News, Garrett “is survived by his wife, Krista, and their two daughters, Elisabeth and Katherine; by his parents, Ray and Susan; and by his two brothers, Jason and Ted, and two sisters, Kate and Lara … In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be given in support of the children’s future education.  Checks should be made payable to Barbara Oberding, with ‘Husveth Children’ written in the memo portion, and sent to Peapack Reformed Church, Box 253, Gladstone, N.J., 07934.”

Parapsychology and Consciousness Conference

From October 14th to 16th, Atlantic University in Virginia Beach is hosting a Parapsychology and Consciousness conference titled, The Best in Parapsychology: From Our Minds to Yours.

The list of speakers is a who’s who of current parapsychology, including:

Julie Beischel, PhD, Edwin C. May, PhD, Roger Nelson, PhD, Dean Radin, PhD, Doug Richards, PhD, Carlos S. Alvarado, PhD, Christine Simmonds-Moore, PhD, Nancy L. Zingrone, PhD, Henry Reed, PhD, John Palmer, PhD, James Carpenter, PhD, Robert Van de Castle, PhD, Ginette Nachman, MD, PhD, Frank Pasciuti, PhD, Loyd Auerbach, MS, David McMillin, MA, and Stephen Braude, PhD.

From the brochure: “These dedicated men and women are seeking the answers we need. Some study the relationship of psychic experiences to psychological well-being. Others focus on the intersection of psychic phenomena and modern physics. All are working to get an unbiased understanding of what we know out to the people who need it the most. Our speakers think deeply about the scientific underpinnings of psychic functioning and about what these phenomena say about interconnectedness, entanglement and the meaning of life.”

To see the conference brochure with a complete list of the speakers and talks, click here.

Fringe-ology

I only just heard about this book Fringe-ology a few minutes ago, but the first review by David Pitt at Booklist is promising!

“In the spectrum of paranormal literature, with rigid skepticism at one end and jaw-dropping gullibility at the other, this book occupies a space squarely in the middle. Volk explores the way paranormal phenomena have been reported, investigated, and categorized. He includes numerous personal accounts, including one from his own life, but isn’t really focused on personal stories or even whether paranormal phenomena exist. He is interested in the interpretation of the word paranormal—the meanings attached to it and the way perception of the word colors how we view the world. Arguing that paranormal phenomena, genuine or not, should be openly discussed and analyzed, he proposes adopting a what-if attitude. For example, if some ghost sightings can’t be explained away as products of a person’s imagination, what does this say about the natural world? He points out perceptively that “what is seen today as wacky often leads to tomorrow’s progress,” citing the importance of the study of alchemy to the science of chemistry, A sharply written, intelligently argued book that should appeal equally to believers and skeptics.”

The author is a longtime reporter out of Philadelphia, and his website is here. Oh, and I see he’s doing a reading in New York, on July 13, 7 pm, at Barnes and Noble, the one at 97 Warren Street. Good luck, Steve! Your book sounds great!

Letters to the Lab from a Freedom Rider

I’m taking a side trip from parapsychology today. I watched a documentary on PBS the other night about the Freedom Riders. I learned so much that I hadn’t known before, and I am now even more impressed by what they did. They were just so mind-blowingly courageous.

I bring this up because while I was researching the Lab’s archives at the Special Collections Library at Duke, I came across some letters between Gaither Pratt, one of the scientists at the lab, and his son Joe, who was a freedom rider. Just 19 years old, Joe joined the Freedom Riders and was one of the people arrested in Mississippi and who spent more than a month in Parchman Prison, an experience I now know a lot more about. It was not pretty. I think it’s even more impressive when people like Joe, who was raised in the south, in a segregated state, got on those buses.

Dear Joe, We had begun to despair of hearing directly from you, one letter began.

A desperate father, Gaither had even written the prison and offered to take his son’s place. But on the whole, Gaither doesn’t say much. He’d learned that his letters weren’t getting through, so he had written accordingly. “I hope you appreciate the fact that I’ve been speaking carefully to make certain you get this,” he said at the end of one. In a letter to his other children he wrote how “people like Joe are suffering a lot personally to make the rest of us wake up to the fact that a lot of our citizens are regularly denied the rights of citizenship.”

Anyway, I just wanted to note this. You raised good kids, Mr. and Mrs. Pratt.

Consciousness and the Source of Reality

I wanted to quickly post about a new book by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne called Consciousness and the Source of Reality. From Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds:

“Princeton University’s PEAR Lab, definitively documented in Jahn and Dunne’s masterful book, has consistently challenged one of science’s most stubbornly held assumptions—that objective reality is completely independent of consciousness. Their experimental evidence is persuasive, tantalizing, and ultimately staggering in its implications. Orthodox thinkers will protest, but the scientific revolution is charging ahead and this book blazes the trail.”

Also, if you’re going to be in Virginia on June 10, Carlos Alvarado is giving a lecture that night from 7-9pm at Atlantic University titled: The Spirit in Out-of-Body Experiences. The address for Atlantic University is 215 67th Street, Virginia Beach. It’s $25 in advance or $35 at the door. To register call (757) 428-3588, or email info@atlanticuniv.edu.

Forgotten Sorrows

These pictures are from a March 28, 1956 New York Journal-American article titled Mysteries of the Mind. The caption for this picture to the left reads:

VICTIM … Here is a portrait of Irene Lee, 6, who dreamed that she was being run down by a truck. Several days later the child was struck and killed.

Next to that picture was this one of her parents.

This caption reads:

PARENTS BLAMED FATE … Mr. and Mrs. Earl Lee of Miami, kneel beside the grave of their daughter, Irene, 6, who was the victim of an auto accident in November, 1938.

And that’s it. There’s isn’t another word about Irene or her family. It isn’t clear if the picture of her parents is from 1938 or 1956. They’re probably long gone. I wonder if they had any other children.

Another child is mentioned in the article, Ilga Kirps, “a 12-year-old shepherdess, who lived with her mother and young brother and sister in Ilzene, Latvia, in the 1930′s … A feeble-minded child, she was unable to read a book, but was supposed to be able to read other people’s minds. So fantastic were her telepathic powers, that Prof. Ferdinand von Neureiter, noted European psychologist, put her through stiff tests, which, he decided, eliminated all possibilities of fraud.”

I don’t know why I even mention any of this. A child has a bad dream, is tragically killed, and for the rest of their lives her parents somehow think destiny was against them. Or the Journal-American exaggerated.

I was just talking about this today, though. Losing a child is something many people never recover from. Some people are destroyed a little, some a lot, no one is ever the same. I think that’s why when I was going through some of the papers I copied while at Duke University, deciding which to post about, this one stood out. I hope they had other children. I hope they were able to recover some happiness out of life.

George R. Price

Sally Rhine Feather mentioned this book to me, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness by Oren Harman.

George Price was a scientist who wrote an article in 1995 for Science attacking parapsychology and accusing Rhine and others of cheating (Science and the Supernatural, August 26, 1955). He then got into a nasty exchange with Rhine, and Price was so particularly, shockingly hostile that a book with “kindness” in the title along with his name was so jarring it got my attention. I read the first few pages and was immediately sucked in.

I skipped to the section about Rhine and got even more sucked in. There are just so many interesting revelations. It turns out that Price went after Rhine because he thought the purpose of Rhine’s experiments were to promote Rhine’s Christian beliefs. But Rhine was not religious, he was something between agnostic and atheist. Price apologized years later, both publicly in a letter to the editor in Science (January 28, 1972) and in a letter to Rhine. They started writing each other again, and it was friendly at first, but apparently Price lost it again. He had since converted to religion and was now attacking Rhine for his lack of belief.

Price had actually grown up believing in ESP and even wrote Rhine when he was an instructor at Harvard in the 1940′s. But at some point he decided instead that Rhine was cheating. Also, Price’s mother regularly communicated with the dead (she believed) and it looks like Price wasn’t any kinder to her then he was with Rhine. After the Science article came out in 1955, at least one New York journalist got a letter from her saying that she was psychic and knew her son was wrong. (That wasn’t in the book, that I got from the Parapsychology Lab archives at Duke.)

Price never comes off like a very nice guy, but after his religious conversion he dedicated his life to helping the homeless and he killed himself by slashing his throat with a pair of nail scissors on January 6, 1975, because he couldn’t help the homeless enough! Christ. Nail scissors are tiny. The only people at his funeral were five homeless men who he’d been kind to.

Due to various deadlines I haven’t been able to get to reading the entire book, but I wanted to mention it because it’s so well written and looks like such an incredible story.

Price’s article caused a flurry of responses for a while. The following is from a letter from Rhine to his daughter Sally, when she asked him about the scientific method. “I have always thought of scientific method as simply the best developed way mankind has found as yet of finding the most satisfactory answer to questions about nature …” I also have letters between Price and Upton Sinclair, discussing Mental Radio, Sinclair’s book about his wife’s telepathy experiments. Price is pompous, Sinclair is patient.