My book, The Articulate Dead, was released during December by Galde Press.  I have had numerous questions concerning the book from friends, correspondents, and from a half-dozen Internet radio stations.  Thus, I decided to put these questions together in something of a self-interview in an attempt to explain what the book is about and why I wrote it.   

      So, Mike, what's the book about?

      It's about psychical research that took place between 1850 and 1940 - research aimed primarily at proving that humans survive physical death and continue on in other realms of existence.

      Yuck, sounds like a pretty dull read.

       It probably is for those who prefer to escape reality by reading fiction, or for those who find spiritual enlightenment in reading Harry Potter.

       Who is your audience?

       Anyone who expects to die, but primarily people suffering from "GR-10 Syndrome."

       GR-10 Syndrome?  What's that?

        I'm glad you asked.  It's something I identified after I retired and started coming in contact with other retired people.  I call them the 10 G's of Retirement:  Graying, Grunting, Grumbling, Grimacing, Groaning, Growling, Griping, Grieving, Groveling, and Groping.

        Far out!  But how does your book deal with those things?

        As I see it, most older people are suffering from a number of those GR's  because they sense their lives winding down and they have nothing to look forward to.  They see death as the grim reaper, nothing else.   The material in my book suggests that there is something beyond death and that death is to be embraced.         

      ‘One life at a time' is my motto.  Shouldn't we be living in the present rather than looking ahead to some future life, if there is one?

      Definitely.  But this life can be so much sweeter, especially in our final years, if we are assured that there is meaning to it and that we are not all just marching toward an abyss of nothingness or total extinction.  Once we begin to see the bigger picture, we don't live in the past, nor do we live in the future.  The best way to live in the present is to "live in eternity."  To do that, you must accept this life as a small part of a much larger life.

      But various polls say that 80-85 percent of the U.S. population believes in an afterlife. 

       I know quite a few of those people.  They say they believe, but they really just hope.  Some of them go to church on Sunday, but the rest of the week they strive to be "one with their toys," living the hedonistic lifestyle and envying people like Hugh Heffner and Britney Spears.   Celebrities have become our gods.  Blind faith based on religious dogma just doesn't do it for most people these days. A recently report study in the Journal of American Medical Association suggested that dying cancer patients who relied strongly on their religious faith to cope with their illnesses were three times more likely than others to receive intensive, invasive medical procedures, even during their final days.  While there might be other explanations for that, one might infer that they are more afraid of dying than others.

      I don't believe in an afterlife and I'm content.   

      William James, the renowned psychiatrist, said he had tried to adopt that frame of mind but called it all humbug - so much bravado that melts away as the person approaches death's door.  I know some people who do a very good job of repressing the idea of death by escaping into mostly meaningless activities.  Kierkegaard called it "Philistinism" - man fully concerned with the trivial, so focused on meaningless things that he has lost sight of the big picture. There may be some people who have no fear of extinction, of obliteration - of their march toward nothingness - but few people are able to adopt such a "courageous" outlook on death. I don't think there is any question that the vast majority of people fear death and do everything possible to repress the idea of it. .  

     
       And how does your book play into all this?

       It offers quite a bit of evidence that man survives death and lives in a spirit world.  Seeing the evidence offered by the various researchers helps one move from disbelief or from blind faith to true faith or conviction. 

     
      Who are the researchers?

       A number of distinguished scientists and scholars, including two British physicists, both  knighted for their discoveries in mainstream science, a British chemist also knighted for his work in science,  a world-renowned American chemist and inventor, a professor of logic and ethics at Columbia, a Cambridge classics scholar and poet, a New York Supreme Court chief justice, a biologist who was Darwin's collaborator in the theory of natural selection, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, two Christian clergymen, and a French educator, to name the primary researchers I discuss in the book.

     
     What did their research turn up?

     They concluded that humans can communicate with the spirit world, and, concomitantly, that consciousness survives physical death.

      
     How did they come to that conclusion?

     By investigating mediums - intermediaries between other dimensions of reality and the material world.   And I'm not talking about one or two observations.  Consider that Dr. Richard Hodgson spent 18 years observing Leonora Piper of Boston, Mass. or that the Rev. William Drayton Thomas had well over 500 sittings with Gladys Osborne Leonard of England.

     
      But isn't that all outdated science?  

      That's what the pseudo-skeptics and debunkers want you to believe. They say it was all pseudo-science and that those distinguished researchers were all victims of charlatans.  The fact is that the methods used by those early researchers are the same methods used today when mediums of that quality are found.  Unfortunately, though, we don't seem to have the quality of mediumship today that we did 75-150 years ago.

     
      Why is that?

      Those same pseudo-skeptics and debunkers will tell you that it is because the mediums on whom the research was based were all frauds and were exposed as such. No doubt there were a number of frauds, but there were clearly genuine mediums.  There are two primary explanations for the lack of such mediumship today.  For one, it involves a lot of quiet time, experimentation, and small harmonious groups.  In those days before radio and television, people had the time to experiment and had the patience to wait for results.  They gathered together in harmonious mediumship circles, sang and listened to music while waiting for the proper conditions.  Sometimes they waited an hour or so before the spirits could draw enough power from the medium and the sitters to come through. In today's fast-paced world, people don't have the patience for that type of thing.  They'd rather watch television.      

      
      That's one explanation.  What's the other?        
      Some of the early spirit communicators said that they had just learned to communicate with us on this side of the veil.  It was reported that Benjamin Franklin and Emanuel Swedenborg, two of the world's greatest scientists when alive, figured out how to manipulate matter after many experiments on their side.  However, they and all the other spirit communicators who joined in didn't anticipate the resistance they were to receive.  They gave us all the evidence they could possibly give and saw no point in continuing, especially when seeing how innocent people were being hurt by being called fakes.   Why should they have to go on reinventing the wheel?   As they say in the engineering profession, efforts to keep reinventing the wheel eventually lead to a square wheel.

         What resistance are you referring to?

         On the one hand, there were the scientific fundamentalists - those scientists stuck in the muck and mire of scientism, unwilling and unable to accept things which could not be explained by strict scientific methods or mechanistic causes.   One Columbia University professor tried to have Professor James Hyslop fired when he found out about Hyslop's interest in psychical research.   In his defense, Hyslop, noting scientific efforts to find a species of useless fish to support Darwin's theory, asked "why is it so noble and respectable to find whence man came, and so suspicious and dishonorable to ask and ascertain whither he goes?"

       Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the physicists involved in the research, put it this way:  "It is not easy to unsettle minds thus fortified against the intrusion of unwelcome facts; and their strong faith is probably a salutary safeguard against that unbalanced and comparatively dangerous condition called ‘open-mindedness,' which is ready to learn and investigate anything not manifestly self-contradictory and absurd."

       
        And on the other hand?

        On the other hand, there were the religious fundamentalists who saw that some of the things coming out of mediumship were in conflict with established dogma and doctrine.  To protect themselves, the religious hierarchy brainwashed their flocks with the idea that it was all the work of the devil.   And the press also played a big part in the resistance.  They sided with either the scientific fundamentalists or the religious fundamentalists in attacking both the mediums and the researchers.   They turned serious research into tongue-in-cheek spook stories, and that's how the media continues to treat it to this day. 

     
       But you mentioned two Christian clergymen among the researchers?

       Yes, one Anglican and one Methodist minister.  They were mavericks, just like the scientists and scholars were.   There are always courageous people more interested in getting at the truth than in protecting their reputations among ignorant people.

        Why isn't the research of those distinguished scientist better known today?  

        Because of the scientific and religious fundamentalism I just mentioned, as well as the ignorant media.  The scientific fundamentalists are unable to accept anything that falls outside of the mechanistic paradigm, while the religious fundamentalists are unable to accept anything they see as conflicting with the Bible.  And the media is more interested in sensationalism than it is in truth.

      
        Why did it end in 1940?

        It didn't really end then.  It began to tail off around 1925, but there was still some good research going on during the 1930s.  All of the distinguished researchers mentioned in the book had pretty much died off, Sir Oliver Lodge being the last, in 1940.  Seeing all the flak they received from mainstream science, others weren't willing to subject themselves to the same criticism.  A new field called parapsychology developed and most of its practitioners are more interested in examining extra-sensory perception while just beating around the bush on the subject of survival.  It was as if they had to go back and work on the spokes of the wheel rather than the wheel itself.

     
       Is the book like reading a bunch of scientific reports?

       No, that's one of the reasons I wrote the book. The original reports are written in the usual academic manner.  Academicians are very poor writers by journalistic standards.  I've tried to convert the academic language to language that people can understand.  A number of very interesting stories unfold, including spirits directing an archaeologist to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, spirits leading a researcher to crosses buried by American Indians, a deceased author completing his book through a medium, a Titanic victim coming back to tell about his new environment, a lost hunter contacting his family to explain what happened to him, soldiers killed in the war telling what it was like to die and then cross over to the other side, and three of the researchers involved in the original research dying and then continuing their research on the other side, communicating with their fellow researchers left behind, to name just some of the stories.

     
      But aren't there other books on the subject?

      Quite a few have been written over the years, but most of them are out of circulation.  There are a few fairly recent books dealing with the same subject.  Deborah Blum, Victor Zammit, Michael Schmicker, Craig Hogan, Ray Stemman, and Archie Roy all have good books dealing with the basic subject. While there is some overlap in the books, we all approach it a little differently and hit upon different aspects of the research. Look at how many books there have been during the past two years on atheism.  I can think of at least six, which all seem to say the same thing.  

       
       Is there any similar survival research going on today?

       Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona did some interesting research with clairvoyants and clairaudients a few years back and reported on it in a couple of books, but the pseudo-skeptics attacked him just as they did those distinguished scientists of yesteryear.

     
      So why did you write the book?

      Because I believe all the turmoil we are experiencing in the world today is a result of extreme materialism.  Materialism in the extreme is really hedonism or Epicureanism.   "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die."   As I see it, this attitude is a result of people not really believing in an afterlife, a larger life.  I felt that in resurrecting some of the best evidence for the survival of consciousness I might prompt a few hedonists or Epicureans to rethink their philosophy of life.

     
       And you expect your book to change all that?

       Of course not.  I'll be happy if a few thousand people read it.  This type of book doesn't sell well.  Most people would rather escape into some work of fiction.   As they say, though, small streams eventually create large rivers.  I just felt a need to add a drop of rain that might contribute to one small stream.

     "The Articulate Dead" is available from Galde Press http://www.galdepress.com/ or at Amazon.com

         Having heard that Dr. Richard Hodgson, an Australian teaching in England and serving as an investigator for the Society for Psychical Resarch (SPR), had supposedly exposed Madame Blavatsky as a charlatan, Mr. R. Pearsall Smith of Philadelphia instigated the offer to Hodgson to come to America and head up the American branch of the SPR.  Smith's intent was to debunk all mediums, as his grieving brother had been led astray by a charlatan.

       Soon after his arrival in the U.S. in April of 1887, Hodgson had his first sitting with medium Leonora Piper, who had greatly impressed Professor William James of Harvard University.  James had arranged the sitting for Hodgson, careful not to reveal Hodgson's name or purpose for being in the country.

       After Mrs. Piper went into the trance state, "Phinuit,' her spirit control at the time, took over her body and mentioned the name "Fred" to Hodgson.   "You went to school together, and Fred was very fond of playing leap-frog," Phinuit relayed the message from Fred.  "He was swinging on a trapeze when he fell and injured his spine, finally dying in a convulsion.  You were not present at the time of his accident or death."

        Phinuit continued: "Fred states his father was your mother's brother.  He also wants to remind you of Harris at school.  He was a very able man.  Fred says you come from Australia.   After your father's death you went to Germany.  Fred was with you then in spirit.  While there you got provoked with a lady.  You said she was deceitful, a story teller. He also says one of your chief reasons for choosing St. John's College (at Cambridge) was that Wordsworth was a Johnian."

         Hodgson was stunned by the accuracy of the communication, as he recalled his cousin Fred, whose father was his mother's brother, excelling at the game of leap-frog by taking long flying jumps that attracted crowds of schoolmates.  Fred injured his spine in a gymnasium in Melbourne in 1871 and died within a matter of days.   Hodgson was not present at either the accident or the death.  

         Harris was the name of their schoolmaster in 1868 or 1869.    While in Germany, Hodgson charged a lady with falsehood under somewhat peculiar circumstances, although Hodgson recalled going to Germany before his father's death in 1885, not after it.   And it was true that Hodgson chose St. John's College because Wordsworth had been educated there.   

        At a second sitting, Phinuit described a lady with dark hair, dark eyes and a slim figure, but he could not get her name. He could get only that her Christian named ended with an "sie."  "She was much closer to you than any other person," Phinuit communicated.  "Too bad, you were not with her at the time.  She died in England when you were across country.  The lady had two rings, one went with her body to the grave, the other ought to have gone to you...She had a brother and a sister.  She had a black lace collar, with a pin with a head, and a ring with a stone which she wanted given to you.  This lady had beautiful teeth. She wants you always to keep a book of poems which you had given her and had been sent back to you.  You had written her name in it in connection with her birthday." 

         Phinuit went on to tell Hodgson that the woman was a great friend of his sister's and that he (Hodgson) heard about her death from his sister.   Still struggling with the name, Phinuit suggested it might be "Ellerton,"  He then said that her left eye is brown and on the right eye there is a spot of a light color in the iris, the spot being straggly and of a bluish cast.  He said it was a birthmark.

        Hodgson was further impressed, although there were several bits of information that he was unsure of.  He did not recall a brother or sister, although he remembered that at least one sibling had been stillborn.  Not wanting to name his friend in his report, Hodgson referred to her only as "Q."  He confirmed that she was his sister's good friend and that his sister informer him of  Q's death.  Moreover, her name ended with a "sie."  (Hodgson's biographer Alex Baird later revealed that her name was "Jessie D----.")   Strangely, Ellerton was the surname of one of Q's other cousins. 

       "The description of "Q," her relationship to me, the manner of her death, and my absence from her side are true," Hodgson recorded. "She died in Australia while I was in England."    But Hodgson knew nothing about the rings.   He recalled the black lace collar distinctly and the pin vaguely, but not the stone in the ring.  He did not recall that she had beautiful teeth. Rather, he recalled that a year or two before her death she had some teeth extracted (which may have been replaced with "beautiful" teeth).

       As for the book of  poems, Hodgson remembered lending her Tennyson's The Princess and her having returned it. He remembered writing her name on one of the fly leaves.

       Hodgson further recalled the eye blemish, but thought it was grey rather than blue.  He asked Phinuit how he knew about the eye.  Phinuit replied that "Q" was standing close to him and showing him her right eye, so that he could see it plainly. 

        Phinuit went on to tell Hodgson that his mother was living but his father and little brother had died.  "There are two Toms in your family, both brothers, one alive and one in spirit," he continued.   Hodgson confirmed the facts as given by Phinuit.

       "Here is a schoolmate, with a lot of freckles, little fellow with red hair," Phinuit continued.  "Name like Wingford, he lived with his grandmother."   Hodgson knew to whom Phinuit was referring, although he recalled the boy's name as Grimwood, not Wingford.

       Another old schoolmate then presented himself to Phinuit.  Phinuit said he was lame when he was a boy and that his name sounded like Brookford.  Hodgson recalled the lame boy but remembered his name as Brooks.

      Phinuit informed Hodgson that his young married sister would soon have another child, a boy.  This prophecy turned out to be true, as his sister gave birth before the end of the year.

       As biographer Baird saw it, Hodgson's whole attitude about mediums began to change with those first few sittings.

       After Hodgson's death in 1905, fellow psychical researcher Hereward Carrington wrote that Jessie  ("Q") continued to communicate with affectionate and evidential messages for Hodgson, a life-long bachelor, in his many additional sittings with Mrs. Piper over the next 18 years.    

        Hodgson's views changed after the death of George Pellew, a 32-year-old member of the ASPR, as a result of a fall from a horse during February 1892.  Sometime before his accident, Pellew, the author of at least six books, including biographies of statesmen John Jay and Henry Addington, had told Hodgson that he could not conceive of an afterlife but that if he died before Hodgson and found himself "still existing" he would attempt to let Hodgson know.

       On March 22, 1892, a little over a month after Pellew's death, Hodgson brought John Hart, a friend of Pellew's, for a sitting with Leonora Piper, a Boston, Mass. trance medium whom Hodgson was studying.  Mrs. Piper would go into a trance and Phinuit, her spirit control, would speak through her, relaying messages from other spirits.  Apparently, it was too difficult and risky for other spirits to occupy her body; thus Phinuit acted as an intermediary.

         Early in the sitting, Phinuit announced that "George" was there. He then gave his full name and the names of several close friends, including the sitter.  To give assurance that it was actually him communicating through Phinuit, Pellew told Hart that the pair of studs he was wearing were once his and were given to Hart by his (Pellew's) parents, which Hart confirmed as true.  Pellew then mentioned some mutual friends, Jim and Mary Howard, and asked Hart if he could get them to attend a sitting.  He also brought up a discussion he had had with Katharine, the Howard's 15-year-old daughter, about God, space, and eternity.  As neither Hart nor Hodgson, who was also in attendance and taking notes, was aware of any such discussion with Katharine, this information, later verified as fact, clearly fell outside the scope of telepathy.      

       Hodgson recorded that many personal references were made by Pellew and that Hart was very impressed, mentioning that various words of greetings and speech mannerisms were very characteristic of Pellew, even though relayed through Phinuit.

       Some three weeks later, Jim and Mary Howard had a sitting with Mrs. Piper. As was the procedure, Hodgson did not tell Mrs. Piper their names or give her any clue as to their connection with Pellew. Yet, Pellew communicated.  However, rather than Phinuit speaking through Mrs. Piper and relaying messages from Pellew, Pellew took over Mrs. Piper's body and spoke directly to his friends.  "Jim is that you?" Hodgson recorded Pellew's initial greeting.  "Speak to me quick.  I am not dead.  Don't think me dead.  I'm awfully glad to see you. Can't you see me?  Don't you hear me? Give my love to my father and tell him I want to see him.  I am happy here, and more so since I can communicate with you..."

        Pellew went on to tell his friends that he was very limited in what he could do as he had just "awakened to the reality of life after death."  He told them it was all darkness at first and that he was puzzled and confused.  He said that he could see Jim, but that his voice sounded like a big bass drum.  Jim Howard asked Pellew if he was surprised to find himself still living.  "Perfectly so," Pellew responded.  "Greatly surprised.  I did not believe in a future life. It was beyond my reasoning powers.  Now it is as clear to me as daylight.  We have an astral facsimile of the material body."  

      At a later sitting, the Howards brought their daughter, Katharine. Pellew came through and asked Katharine about her violin lessons, commenting (apparently jesting) that her playing was "horrible."   Not realizing the humor in it, Mary Howard spoke up to defend her daughter's music, but Pellew then explained that he mentioned it because that is what he used to do when in the flesh. It was intended as verification of his identity. 

      However, there was some confusion on Pellew's part in responding to various questions put to him by the Howards.  Pellew explained that he was somewhat "dull" in his new sphere and that his memory was not much different than when he was on the earth plane, i.e., that he couldn't always recall everything in a moment.  He went on to say that he had lost all sense of time in his new environment, but he was determined to make his identity clear.   "Hodgson, I mean, and Jim, I want you both to feel I am no secondary personality of the medium's," he told them, adding that he lives, thinks, sees, hears, knows, and feels just as clearly as when he was in the material life.  "...but it is not so easy to explain it to you as you would naturally suppose, especially when the thoughts have to be expressed through substance materially." 

       Phinuit broke in and took back control from Pellew, commenting that Pellew had bypassed him by mistake and that he would act as the go-between the remainder of the session.  Phinuit began speaking fluent French to Katharine, who had lived in France and knew the language.  Someone known to Mary Howard as Madame Elisa then interrupted, speaking in Italian.  Mary Howard responded in Italian.  (Piper did not know French or Italian.)

        As a further test of telepathy, Mrs. Howard brought three pictures to a sitting and asked Pellew to identify them.  Pellew correctly identified the first picture as the Howard's summer home.  He correctly identified a second picture as a country place where they had stayed, recalling a little brick henhouse which was not in the picture.   Mrs. Howard confirmed the accuracy of this report and then showed a third picture, which Pellew could not identify.  In fact, Pellew had never seen it.  Had Mrs. Piper been reading Howard's mind, she should have been able to identify it, unless, of course, she could also read Howard's mind relative to the test, and her subconscious was aware and devious enough to know that it was more important to show ignorance than it was to identify the location in the picture.

      The communication with Pellew caused Hodgson to abandon all other theories in favor of the spirit one.   While the earthly existence of Phinuit could not be verified, there was no doubt that Pellew had lived in the flesh.  Moreover, there was too much individuality, too much purpose and persistence, expressed by Pellew to attribute it to telepathy of a limited or expanded nature.   It was one thing for a medium to tap into another mind or cosmic reservoir for information, quite another for that other mind or reservoir to come back with the fullness of a personality rather than just fragmentary bits of information.

       "I had but one object, to discover fraud and trickery," Hodgson wrote. "Frankly, I went to Mrs. Piper with Professor James of Harvard University about twelve years ago with the object of unmasking her...I entered the house profoundly materialistic, not believing in the continuance of life after death; today I say I believe.  The truth has been given to me in such a way as to remove from me the possibility of a doubt."           
        Pellew then began sharing "control" duties with Phinuit and eventually took over for him. Hodgson noted that when someone Pellew had known when alive happened to be sitting, he (Pellew) would greet him or her by name.  When someone unknown to him was sitting, he didn't address the person by name.  The non-recognition went against any telepathy theory.  "There are thirty cases of true recognition out of at least one hundred and fifty persons who have had sittings with Mrs. Piper since the first appearance of G.P. (George Pellew), and no case of false recognition," Hodgson reported.  "The continual manifestation of this personality - so different from Phinuit or other communicators - with its own reservoir of memories, with its swift appreciation of any reference to friends of G.P., with its ‘give and take' in little incidental conversations with myself, has helped largely in producing a conviction of the actual presence of the G.P. personality, which it would be quite impossible to impart by any mere enumeration of the verifiable statements."   

         At a sitting on June 17, 1895, Hodgson asked Pellew what Phinuit was doing when he (Pellew) was the only one using Piper's body.  Pellew replied that Phinuit was holding back "a million others" from interrupting him.