Shortlisted for Food Photographer of the Year

My picture of a steaming hot pot photographed in Ha Long, Vietnam, is shortlisted for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2021. The picture was taken during a meal at the end of the 2nd International Life Science and Parapsychology Studies Association Forum and Sixth Sense Mind Sport Competition in Ha Long in…

Photography Exhibition

My photograph ‘Ausgang’ has been chosen for an international photography exhibition in Rome this year. Produced by LoosenArt and taking place in the Millepiani Gallery, the exhibition is on the theme of ‘Language’. Shot in the Staatsoper Hamburg (Hamburg State Opera House) last year, the photograph captures a prophetic moment before the world went into…

Is There Life After Death? (2)

Call for Chapters Is There Life After Death? Vol. 2: Case Studies Edited by Dr Leo Ruickbie and Robert McLuhan for the Society for Psychical Research Rationale It is one of the fundamental questions that everyone will ask themselves, but in an age of global pandemics, with the increasing challenge to once universal religious certainties…

Phantasms of the Victorians

Funding Enables New Research Project The John Björkhem Memorial Foundation has awarded a research grant to enable the launch of my new project ‘Phantasms of the Victorians’. The project will analyse a largely unknown and unexamined case collection and a well-known but under-researched collection, both from the late Victorian Period, as means of advancing our…

26 Reasons Why the Evidence Has Been Ignored or Rejected

The Magazine of the Society for Psychical Research, 1 (2021) The global pandemic has re-focused attention on the ultimate questions. The new year has crept slowly out of its hole, only to be greeted with more of the same. A raven has forsaken the Tower of London prompting suspicions that the old prophecy is fulfilling…

Paranormal Review 96

Parapsychology in the Far East The Paranormal Review has been more than a magazine for me, it has been a journey through all that is going on in the world of psychical research. And so, the magazine itself has been something like a documentary project. It can never be a pure documentation because I am…

The Witchcraft Trial of Jean Grenier

I Was A Real Teenage Werewolf: The Seventeenth Century Witchcraft Trial of Jean Grenier In 1603, the French teenager Jean Grenier was tried for assault, murder, cannibalism and witchcraft by the Parlement of Bordeaux. Despite the loss of the trial records, the case is known through the writing of Pierre de Lancre (1553?–1631), but was…

Paranormal Review 95

Star Gate (2): The US Government Programme on Psi Research, Part 2: Operational Psi With a letter from Tom Butler on the future of the SPR, I am delighted to see that the questions raised in my editorial for PR92 are still stimulating discussion. But as the debate continues, I see that the SPR suffers…

Paranormal Review 94

Star Gate (Part 1) In this issue, I am privileged to be able to bring you part one of a comprehensive overview of the US Government’s research programme on psi. From 1972 to 1995, various US militaries, agencies and departments contributed funding to a series of exotically codenamed projects, from Gondola Wish to Star Gate,…

Paranormal Review 93

Everyday Psi My children looked at this issue’s cover picture and asked ‘how do they do that?’ Still young enough not to be quite sure if it is a trick or real magic, they nevertheless see that it is extraordinary, if not impossible. This, in a sense, is how we often encounter the ‘paranormal’, in…

Is There Life After Death?

Call for Chapters Is There Life After Death? Arguments, Theories, Evidence Edited by Dr Leo Ruickbie and Robert McLuhan for the Society for Psychical Research

Paranormal Review 92

The Other Side I walk over the bridge pictured on the front of this issue almost every day and when, early in the morning, the ground mist rises on the other side, it obliterates the real world beyond and turns this simple wooden footbridge into something magical, like Bifröst bridging the worlds to Asgard. The…

Leicester Through the Looking Glass

The 43rd Annual International Conference of the Society for Psychical Research, Leicester, 2019 Eyes closed, I held the folded piece of paper to my forehead. Nothing. A dried sheet of bleached wood pulp at room temperature. Then close to my ear, as if it might speak to me. Now, I began to get something: it…

Talking About War and the Paranormal

Angels in the Trenches on the Radio Angels in the Trenches author Leo Ruickbie spoke to Dave Shrader on syndicated US radio show Midnight in the Desert for Veterans’ Day 2019. Dr Ruickbie talked about the inspiration behind writing Angels in the Trenches: Spiritualism, Superstition and the Supernatural During the First World War and highlighted…

15th Anniversary of Witchcraft Out of the Shadows

It’s amazing to think that my first book was published fifteen years ago this year. A lot has happened since then, I got my PhD, published five more books and fifty-eight articles and chapters (as well as a ton of online posts), launched six websites and became the editor of the Paranormal Review. But Witchcraft…

Paranormal Review 91

The Roots of Reality This issue we turn to the problem of theory in parapsychology. Following a ‘Workshop on Psi Theories’ in Paris in 2019, SPR President Prof. Chris Roe addresses the question directly on pp. 4-5, with my report on the workshop on pp. 22-24. Dr Charles Whitehead takes the matter into his own…

The Catacombs of Paris

In the Empire of the Dead: A Journey Through the Catacombs of Paris There is a queue, there is always a queue. It curls round an unexpectedly uninteresting eighteenth-century building surrounded by busy roads in the Montparnasse district of Paris. And as we stand there in the summer sunshine, high spirits fade into boredom, tempered…