Parapsychology Foundation’s Legacy

Regular readers of this blog might be surprised by the by line. Our President, Lisette Coly and I felt it fitting, as we turn the page to the foundation’s next chapter that we have a new narrator for this month’s blog. I have had the pleasure of working for the foundation for over 9 years, and although the PF will soon no longer have the resources to employ Lisette and I, we are still committed to the aims of the foundation, to disseminate quality information about the science of Parapsychology.

Over seven decades of work have been devoted to gathering information and seeking answers to the questions raised by psychic functioning. I don’t know if there will ever be a universally held belief on the paranormal, but I do know that the effort and commitment put forth and the life-long careers dedicated to this question weren’t for naught. PF did its best to shepherd the bountiful resource of the Eileen J. Garrett Library to a place where it would be kept together and utilized by researchers and students. We are so happy that the University of Maryland Baltimore County, UMBC, now maintains the collection.

In the same vein we wanted to find a way to make our varied publications containing hundreds of academic papers accessible. We have been working to digitize all of the PF Conference Proceedings, Scholarly Monographs and Pamphlets with the aim to make them available for viewing and downloading for both those can’t spell parapsychology and those who are wading knee deep in its research. Our hope is that although we cannot proceed the way we once did, we will continue to be a resource people can utilize in perpetuity so that as Eileen Garrett our founder envisioned, we are “setup to answer the demands for literature and eventual study for those who might be ready to work in a parapsychological atmosphere”.

We are in the process of creating a searchable page, so that one can type in the subject of their choosing or the name of a researcher who has piqued their interest and easily access all relevant works across our publications. If you aren’t familiar with the scope of our publications, we published scholarly papers with topics ranging from brain lateralization and quantum physics to hypnosis and survival. These varied works were written by some of the field’s most brilliant minds– J.B. Rhine, Stanley Krippner, Charles Tart, Robert Morris, William Roll, Etzel Cardeña, Carlos Alvarado, and Chris Roe to name a few. We are going to create a crowd funding page with the aim to collect donations to underscore the cost of maintaining the website and its new digital library for years to come.

We are working to get this project up on the Parapsychology Foundation website (Parapsychology.org) before the years end to mark our 72nd anniversary! We hope you will be as excited as we are about the quantity and quality of information we are working to make accessible to everyone for free.