Episode 5: Reincarnation, Randomness, and Retrocausality Despite funding cuts, media evisceration, and the onslaught of skeptics and their muddying of data, parapsychology rises from the ashes. Into the twenty-first century, academic parapsychologists, sometimes working in isolation, make remarkable strides, even in areas that surpass traditional psi research.   Serious studies of life-after-death, extra-physical survival, and reincarnation reenter the fold—sometimes with impeccable...

Episode 4: The Empire Strikes Back  Alarmed by intelligence that the Soviets are using “psychic spies,” the CIA inaugurates its own distance-spying program, Project Stargate in 1972.  Stargate’s key researchers, physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, coin the term “remote viewing.” The controversial program, whose subjects include psychic-artist Ingo Swann, lasts more than 20 years and wins over President Jimmy Carter.  For skeptics, however, it’s knives-out. Disgusted with the...

Episode 3: Mushroom X The Age of Aquarius intermingles uneasily with the Parapsychology Revolution. The two cultural currents, like many in the Western world, both interweave and repel.  This symbiosis and friction appears within the relationship of J.B. Rhine and the young scientist who seems his natural protégé: Charles Honorton. But J.B. and the researcher clash, resulting in Honorton departing the Rhine lab to pioneer an extraordinary series of trials testing for telepathy. They are...

Episode 2: Institute for Experimental Religion As the twentieth century dawns, parapsychology is divided between ghost hunters—like Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle—and psi seekers—like a young Sigmund Freud, who takes deeper interest in ESP and telepathy than is commonly understood. Early parapsychologists made strides with the British and American branches of the Society for Psychical Research. William James and colleagues probe mysteries, expose fakes, and generate...

Episode 1: Moonrise For millennia, humanity has pursued higher knowing. In antiquity, soldiers and statesmen turned to oracles such as the prophetess at Delphi and pictogrammatic language of the I-Ching.  Seen from a certain perspective, nearly all religion predates science as the wish to know first causes. In that vein, nineteenth-century séances treat gawkers to floating pianos, viscous “ectoplasm” spilling from the orifices of (mostly female) mediums, and ghostly figures materializing....

Coming This Fall - Extraordinary Evidence | ESP Is Real is a limited series on the history, struggles, and proofs of parapsychology and the science of studying the supernatural. Mitch Horowitz—today’s leading independent scholar of the occult—uses revealing, stringently documented historical and scientific data, interviews, and archival recordings to explore the dramatic rise, attacks on, and revolutionary findings of parapsychology in areas from ESP and precognition to after-death survival...