The Anniversary
Parapsychology Foundation President, Lisette Coly, is pleased to announce that 2016 is the 65th Anniversary Year of the Parapsychology Foundation. The PF was incorporated on December 14th, 1951 to support the scientific and academic study of psychic phenomena. Over the course of its almost 65 years of operation, the Foundation has supported qualified scientific and academic researchers in their quest to understand psychic phenomena.
Not only has this been done through the grants and awards programs administered first by Coly’s grandmother, Eileen J. Garrett, who founded the PF with her close colleague the Honorable Frances Payne Bolton, but also by Coly’s mother Eileen Coly.
Under the administration of Mrs. Eileen Coly, scholarship and fellowship programs were also inaugurated to support serious young students who were eager to incorporate what is now known as psi research into their undergraduate and masters’s level programs, as well as to support post-graduate students completing PhDs relevant to the topic. Young researchers in various areas of the field were also provided with support as well individuals writing both academic and popular books.
Even before the Parapsychology Foundation was officially founded in 1951, Mrs. Garrett and Mrs. Bolton fully funded an international conference of researchers, theorists and worthy others in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, as well as other conferences elsewhere in the world. They both understood — as Lisette Coly still does — how important it is for active contributors to the scientific and academic side of the field to come together and be able to present and discuss their work with their colleagues. These days those kinds of gatherings are also possible online, and a number of such gatherings are planned for 2016.
The Impact of the Redesign on Sites “Under Construction”
As for the public face of the Parapsychology Foundation, in addition to the PF’s presence on social media, and its excellent Eileen J. Garrett Research Library in Greenport, Long Island, New York, the PF is known to its friends and contributors through its websites. The first website was designed back in the 1990s, and then redesigned and expanded to four websites from 2000 to 2002. A fifth website was bequeathed to the Foundation by the noted researcher, Rhea A. White, after her death in 2007. All of these sites have provided news and information for those who are interested in the scientific side of the field.
Time moves on, however, and website standards are much improved these days, with most folks accessing websites through their smart phones and other handheld devices. So the time has come to edit, expand, renew, and make mobile-ready the content the Foundation has available.
Over the next several months then all five of the PF websites will be redesigned. The first up in www.psi-mart.com, the online store the Foundation has run since 2002. In preparation of the change we have disconnected the pages from the databases and are working on a new site that will be revealed when it is finished. Over the next few days, we will change the home page of that site to return the viewer to relevant pages on the main website.
But because Psi-Mart needs a significant amount of backend redesign to fit into modern standards of e-commerce, sales off that site have been discontinued, including new memberships in the Psychic Explorers Club. In the meantime, if you are interesting in purchasing the publications of the Foundation, we are updating the main website with links to our stock on Amazon.com. For Psychic Explores Club members, because that site is also undergoing some changes, we invite you to visit our Facebook pages to keep in touch with us and each other.
Thanks for your patience with the process! More news as soon as the new store launches!
*******************
Don’t forget to like our Facebook page by clicking here.
Previous Press Releases are available in the Press Release Archive on the Parapsychology Foundation Lyceum website.