Stacy Horn - Unbelievable

Stacy Horn - Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.

When I started writing this book the over-riding idea was: this is going to be fun. The real Ghostbusters! Haunted houses! And it was a blast.

But when I went down to Duke University and started going through the 700+ boxes that comprise the lab archives I realized, good God, these scientists were serious.There were thousands and thousands of meticulously conducted, recorded and evaluated experiments (millions in the end).

They were not kidding around. I focused on the lab scientists’ correspondence because that was where the real battle for parapsychology—and there was a tremendous battle—was played out.Who knew scientists could be this venomous?

Every time the lab published their results there was an outcry and a flurry of letters from other scientists around the country who were not happy with their findings. For every letter from an offended scientist however, there were thousands more from people all over the world who had experienced something strange that demanded an explanation. A certain percentage of them can, in fact, be explained away by fraud, delusion or wishful thinking, but not all.

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Rain barrels that refill themselves. Psychic horses. Mind-reading Cold War spies. For many, these phenomena are evidence of an unseen world just beyond the grasp of our five senses. For a group of scientists at Duke University, such mysteries demanded further investigation.

From 1930 to 1980, under the leadership of Dr. J. B. Rhine, often considered the Einstein of the paranormal, the scientists at the Duke Parapsychology Lab attempted to test the bizarre, the frightening, and the unexplainable against the rigors of science.

In Unbelievable, Stacy Horn reveals the strange, lost history of these first attempts to prove—or disprove—the existence of the paranormal, bringing to light a half-century's worth of ghost stories, poltergeists, and paranormal activity.

The Duke scientists were queried by the likes of Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, and Helen Keller; the U.S. Army,The Rockefeller Foundation and blue-chip corporations such as IBM and Zenith seized upon their findings.

Investigating telepathy, clairvoyance, ghosts, poltergeists, and the myriad other strange phenomena that people claim to have experienced, the scientists did find proof that the human mind can exhibit telepathic powers—but their discovery would put them at odds with both the scientific community and the community of believers at large, beginning a multidecade battle among unyielding critics, die-hard believers, and scientists themselves.

Yet Horn reveals that between the power of belief and the promise of scientific investigation, there is room for everyone to acknowledge that the truth is out there.

About the Author:

Stacy Horn, a contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered, is the author of The Restless Sleep, Waiting for My Cats to Die: A Memoir, and Cyberville. She lives in New York City.

“Some of the explanations here, backed by scientific fact, will send shivers up readers’ spines.” (Bust Magazine )