Stephen Braude, PhD, served as chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has also served as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is author of Crimes of Reason, The Gold Leaf Lady, Immortal Remains, The Limits of Influence, First Person Plural, and ESP and Psychokinesis. He is the recent recipient of the prestigious Myers Memorial Medal awarded by the Society for Psychical Research for outstanding contributions.
In this video, originally recorded in 2015, he notes that apparitions were studied extensively by the British Society for Psychical Research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Basically, there are two categories of apparitions: those of the living and those of the deceased. Thousands of such cases have been reported and researched. The most common of these is known as the “crisis apparition” and often occurs in relationship to a death or accident. Often apparitions are thought of as a mental phenomenon, probably produced by telepathy. Sometimes they are pure psychological projections or are produced by hypnosis. However, Braude maintains that collective apparitions cannot readily be explained this way. He argues that apparitions that are seen by many people simultaneously may be physical phenomena produced by psychokinesis.
(Recorded on September 6, 2015)
Published on December 12, 2020
