2004 DPE Reports

October 2004 Department of Phenomenal Evidence Report
By The Revs. Tom and Lisa Butler, NST

David Thompson Séance. There has been a lot of information coming out of the UK on the remarkable physical phenomena that is happening during David Thompson’s séances. The April 2004 Journal of Religion and Psychical Research published a case study written by Montague Keen regarding a Thompson séance that he attended in October 2003. Keen took detailed precautions to prevent fraud. During the séance, the medium and his chair were moved to another part of the room. The medium was bound with plastic ties and yet his sweater was reversed during the séance even though the ties remained unbroken. There were loud and clear spirit voices that answered questions and many other types of physical phenomena. Keen concluded that the “effects were genuine.”

Picture of Montague Keen is Courtesy of Veronica Keen

Montague Keen Continues his Work. Montague Keen made his transition to the other side on January 15, 2004. He was a psychic researcher and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research for 55 years. Monty was the principal investigator of the Scole Group of physical mediums, and author of the Scole Report, published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) (Vol 54 Pt 220) in 1999 with his co-investigators Arthur Ellison and David Fontana. His wife, Veronica, has reported that he fully materialized at a David Thompson séance in England about a month after his passing and that there have been other communications from him in New Zealand, Ireland and the United States. He has communicated that his work is now even more important than the work he was doing when in the physical.

Separation of Consciousness. In the Spring 2003 Journal of Near-Death Studies a nurse describes a cardiac arrest patient who said that she was “flying above everyone” while she was being resuscitated. She told the doctors that there was a one-cent coin on top of a cabinet. A nurse climbed up on the cabinet and the coin was most assuredly there. We have reported on studies that are being conducted in England where items are being placed on top of cabinets so that just this kind of thing will hopefully happen under controlled circumstances.

Discontinuities. In November 2003, the SPR focused its Study Day on the “jottle.” The jottle, we are told in April 2004 Paranormal Review, “Is a particular form of JOTT (Just One of Those Things), a general term for discontinuities with time and place.” Mary Rose Barrington has identified six variants of the jottle:

1)      Walkabout: The basic jottle; when an object disappears from a known location and reappears in a new location.

2)      Comeback: An object disappears and later reappears in the same place.

3)      Flyaway: The object disappears and never comes back.

4)      Turn-up: An object appears in a location where it couldn’t have been before.

5)      Windfall: An object appears that has never been seen before.

6)      Trade-in: An object disappears, and is replaced with a similar object.

The article written by Nicola Holt tells us that, “The jottle is distinguished from apports in séances and bereavement cases, or from the movement of objects in poltergeist cases, the term referring to discontinuities out of the context of an ongoing paranormal event or syndrome.”

From Study Day No. 45: “Discontinuities: Things That Come, Go and Relocate” by Nicola Holt, The Paranormal Review, April 2004, Issue 30.

Psypioneer News. Some people may recall the Psychic Pioneer web site which carried information on Spiritualism and reports on early workers in the field. Leslie Price of London, England is planning to relaunch this project, starting with a free monthly electronic newsletter. You can obtain the newsletter direct from leslie.price@blueynder.co.uk by heading a message “Subscribe.” You can also find copies on the web at http://www.woodlandway.org/PSYPIONEER_NEWS.HTM. An interesting item we noted in the first issue, Psypioneer Newsletter - Volume 1 No. 1 - May 2004, is that the famous Society for Psychical Research was started by some of our Spiritualist Pioneers.

New Book: Talking to the Dead:Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism, by Barbara Weisberg, is receiving great reviews for its balanced look at the Fox family and the rise of Spiritualism. The book is well researched and brings out new details regarding the lives of Leah, Kate and Maggie Fox. One of the last things that our dear friend, The Rev. Barbara Thurman told us while she was still on the earth plane was how good this book was.

Animal Minds. The June issue of New Scientist shows that current research on various animals is proving that they are much smarter then humans give them credit. There are not many people who think of fish as being particularly smart. In his article, “Not just a pretty face,” Culum Brown, a researcher with the University of Edinburgh in the UK, has shown that fish learn quickly, use tools, have sophisticated social structures and also possess impressive long-term memories. In five attempts, Brown trained fish to find a hole in fishing net. Eleven months later, he re-tested them and they immediately found the hole again, this after not seeing the net during those eleven months.

Alex Kacelnik, in his article, “Don’t call me bird-brain,” writes about a famous crow named Betty who made a complex shaped tool for a problem that she hadn’t experienced before using a material that she had no experience in working with. Keith Kendrick in, “Here’s looking at ewe,” writes that, “Our studies show that sheep are remarkably good at recognizing, differentiating and remembering both sheep and human faces—an ability that suggests a level of mental and social sophistication way beyond what they are usually credited with.… After seeing them in tests over the course of a few weeks, they can remember all these faces for at least two years.

In the article, “Trait spotting,” author Liz Else asks, “Does your pet have a personality?” Most of us would certainly say our pets do and when we talk about personality, aren’t we also talking about survival?

From: NewScientist,June 12-18 2004 Vol 182 No 2451

Giraffe Talk: From the Encyclopedia Britannica comes this information on the giraffe “The voice of the giraffe has so rarely been heard that the animal is popularly supposed to be voiceless, but it is capable of producing low call notes and moans.”

Denise Forester wrote about a program that she had been watching on a researcher who was working on a project and had a computer hooked up with a microphone and an editing program. She was recording and accidentally picked up the sounds made by a herd of giraffes. She went to Africa to record the giraffes and has since recognized a pattern of language in the noises that they make. Their voices are in-audible to the human ear.