New Books and Media

Ghostly voices have been appearing on tape recordings for decades . Known as EVP (electronic voice phenomenon), learn all you need to know about EVP like where it came from, how it works and the theories as to why these voices appear on recordings. We start by exploring the research from pioneers such as Friedrich Jurgenson & Konstantin Raudive and how EVP research has evolved throughout the years. How can you do you own recordings? What are the different recording methods and equipment you can use? What techniques and experiments can you try besides just the typical question and answer sessions? How do you review your audio? What natural causes can be mistaken for this phenomenon and what interferes with our recordings? Finally let's talk about what these voices potentially are. Could the voices be from the other side or maybe from out of this world? This is a comprehensive instructional and interactive guide suitable for anyone interested in the paranormal designed to make you think and question everything you think you know. There are even interactive worksheets to help you make this guide your own complete with your own thoughts and research. Whether you are a fan of watching your favourite television personalities walking around with a digital recorder or starting out as a paranormal investigator yourself, this will give you everything you need to know and more! If you have been out in the field for years, there are some new ideas and technical information for those wanting to take their research a little further. There is something for everyone in this guide!Written by blogger Sarah Chumacero from the popular paranormal blog Living Life In Full Spectrum and author of Stuff Paranormal Investigators Need To Know, this is a must have guide for anyone interested in the paranormal and something you will refer to time and time again!

From the publisher's website: About 30 percent of hospice patients report a “visitation” by someone who is not there, a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as a deathbed vision. These visions can be of dead friends or family members and occur on average three days before death. Strikingly, individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and religions—from New York to Japan to Moldova to Papua New Guinea—report similar visions. Appearances of our dead during serious illness, crises, or bereavement are as old as the historical record. But in recent years, we have tended to explain them in either the fantastical terms of the supernatural or the reductive terms of neuroscience.

Further information at the publisher's website: Columbia University Press.

From the publisher's website: In this exploration of consciousness, after-death communication, and near-death and out-of-body experiences, Chris Hardy reveals that all beings exist simultaneously in the material dimension and in the soul hyperdimension. She offers tested methods for accessing the soul dimension and explores what can be accomplished there, including communicating with those who exist beyond our own material world.

Further information at the publisher's website: Bear & Company.

From the publisher's website: When TED, the global media platform, took down scientist Rupert Sheldrake’s lecture, “The Science Delusion,” deeming it not scientific, it ignited a fierce discussion around the globe. Bloggers, commenters, distinguished scientists, Internet trolls and even a Nobel Prize winning physicist all contributed to this once-in-a-lifetime debate. The subject? The most controversial question of all time—what is nature of reality? In Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet, Craig Weiler, in journalistic fashion, demonstrates how science, the accepted arbiter of truth, is constantly being manipulated and propagandized in an effort to uphold prejudices and beliefs in the scientific community.

Further information at the publisher's website: White Crow Books.

From the publisher's website: The paranormal has long been a hotly contested topic, especially in academia. Most people are entertained by the paranormal or casually read a few books they come across on the topic, perhaps assuming that these topics are nothing more than campfire fodder. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being entertained by the paranormal, but how many people know that there is a long history of academic, scientific, and credible research into topics such as extrasensory perception, hauntings, poltergeists, cryptozoological sightings, near-death experiences, and more?

Further information at the publisher's website: Rowman & Littlefield.

Review by Christopher Josiffe.

From the publisher's website: Across thousands of years, people have described one of the most astonishing of all human phenomena: the near-death experience (NDE), the subjective experience of an Afterlife, a place where we apparently survive death.The more powerful the NDE, the more profound the after effects. The ambitious reset their priorities. Atheists change their values. Doctors rethink their beliefs.But what if the after effects of an NDE were undeniable? What if someone suddenly developed the ability to produce high quality paintings of their NDE, a new-found skill that went far beyond the artistic ability they had before? And what if that same person then suddenly acquired the ability to compose classical symphonies after their NDE? And their symphonies were then premiered at sell out orchestral concerts, even though, to this day, they are unable to read or write a single note of musical notation. Wouldn't this be proof that even a cynic would have a hard time explaining?After his NDE, this is exactly what happened to David. And this is his story.

Further information at the publisher's website: O-Books.

Review by Ciaran Farrell.

From the publisher's website: The word miracle is rooted in a Sanskrit syllable smi, from which we get the English word smile. So a miracle refers to a smile induced by certain sensations of awe, beauty, and wonder. Humans have always had extraordinary experiences, often called miracles.  An account of reported miraculous phenomena, Smile of the Universe takes us beyond conventional religion and science to explore the outer reaches of human potential. Grounded in true stories and matters of fact, Michael Grosso argues for the reality of a great Mind and for the human ability to communicate with that Mind. In an age of disbelief, it presents a fact-based template for experimental spirituality and makes the case that every one of us, rightly understood, is a smile of the universe.  

Further information at the publisher's website: Anomalist Books.

Review by Graham Kidd.

From the back cover: This is undoubtedly the biggest poltergeist case of its kind in Scotland, (if not the United Kingdom) Not only were the poltergeist events witnessed in the family household, but they also followed the unfortunate little girl to her local school, where the poltergeist was equally disruptive in full view of Virginia’s classmates and teacher.The credibility of the witnesses to these bizarre events consisted of two local doctors, a local minister, and a number of other Church of Scotland Ministers, each of whom were stunned to view the astonishing events in the Campbell household.Researcher Malcolm Robinson takes a look back at this impressive 1960 case, and his re-investigation of it. Malcolm managed to track down some of the witnesses, and their impressive testimony is included in this block buster of a book.

Review by Ted Dixon.

From the publisher's website: Sir Oliver Lodge was a polymathic scientific figure who linked the Victorian Age with the Second World War, a reassuring figure of continuity across his long life and career. A physicist and spiritualist, inventor and educator, author and authority, he was one of the most famous public figures of British science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A pioneer in the invention of wireless communication and later of radio broadcasting, he was foundational for twentieth-century media technology and a tireless communicator who wrote upon and debated many of the pressing interests of the day in the sciences and far beyond. Yet since his death, Lodge has been marginalized. By uncovering the many aspects of his life and career, and the changing dynamics of scientific authority in an era of specialization, contributors to this volume reveal how figures like Lodge fell out of view as technical experts came to dominate the public understanding of science in the second half of the twentieth century. They account for why he was so greatly cherished by many of his contemporaries, examine the reasons for his eclipse, and consider what Lodge, a century on, might teach us about taking a more integrated approach to key scientific controversies of the day.

Table of contents. 

From the publisher's website: In ten chapters, contributed by leading parapsychologists and philosophers, These essays explore experiences that present significant challenges to the modern scientific worldview, in particular, to its insistent refusal to reconsider its underlying commitment to a materialistic, mechanistic, atheistic metaphysics. Philosophically, Alfred North Whitehead’s process view of experience is described as being more congenial not only to extraordinary experience, but to the current state of scientific research, which has revealed that activity, selection, and response are facets of every level of reality from the quantum event to the neural cell. Ironically, the only part of our world whose synthetic responsiveness—whose “subjectivity”—is regularly called into question by the academy is the human subject. And the primary reason for this most peculiar situation is modern science and philosophy’s largely unconscious metaphysical allegiance to one-half of an abandoned Cartesian dualism, which in practice is no longer accepted by any scientific discipline. Nonetheless, try to assert some idea that does not cohere with this assumed notion of reality and prepare to be informed it is “impossible,” while at the same time being told that this response is not related to any preexisting metaphysical sentiments.

Further information at the publisher's website: Process Century Press.

From the publisher's website: Across the globe and through time, diverse cultures have developed elaborate systems for understanding and interacting with strange forces and invisible beings. Since the nineteenth century anthropologists have theorised about the nature of the extraordinary experiences and beliefs recounted to them by their fieldwork informants, at home and abroad.

Spirits, Gods and Magic is an introduction to the anthropology of the supernatural. The book features introductory chapters outlining key anthropological perspectives on Shamanism and Spirit Possession, Witchcraft and Magic, and Ghosts, Spirits and Gods. It also includes chapters exploring the relationship between Ethnography and the Paranormal and what the fields of Anthropology and Parapsychology can learn from each other.

With a Foreword by anthropologist Dr. Fiona Bowie and an Afterword by parapsychologist Dr. David Luke, the book makes an important contribution to inter-disciplinary paranormal studies.

Review by Sarah Porch-Lee.

The Mysteries of Healing: Dialogues with Doctors and Scientists reports on the current research and personal characteristics of 19 visionaries from the US, Canada, and the UK. They discuss healing with hands, with frequencies, with altered states of consciousness, and with helpful beings. Vanguard scientists believe there is more than we see and formulate a non-materialist paradigm that expands human potential, including mind and matter interaction. Going against the dominant worldview evokes criticism so the book explores the personal backgrounds of the scientists to find out why they are so courageous. We learn that there is another dimension that allows for enhanced abilities, based on extensive interviews by Gayle Kimball, the author of 20 books. 

Review by Robert A. Charman.