Scole: No Evidence of Fraud

Before the correspondence prompted by John Samson's letter on the policy and posture of the Society for Psychical Research gets swamped by a dispute with Ronald Pearson, can I clarify one rather important matter about the SPR's Scole Report on the activities of the mediumistic group based at Scole, Norfolk?

As our Hon. Secretary, Professor John Poynton, says opinions about the genuiness of the physical phenomena, which my colleagues and I describe in our very lengthy Report differ, both within and outside the Council of the SPR. No doubt there may be people who think all or some of the evidence is fraudulent. If so, they have yet to publish or provide the authors of the Report with a shred of hard evidence to support that view. They have had more than a year (and every opportunity and incentive) to do so. The reservations of our three principal critics were printed alongside the Scole Report. None either produced such evidence or made the specific charge of fraud. They were concerned to point to the possibilities of fraud in relation to a number of specified events.

Along with virtually everyone who has corresponded with or talked to me about the Report, my colleagues and I consider our rejoiner to these reservations dealt pretty conclusively with those criticisms, both in the Report itself and subsequently in the Study Day held to debate it. Indeed, only one person who claims to have read the Report has written to me in the belief that it was obviously fraudulent, and he did not attend the Study Day when Professor David Fontana and I, as well as a number of members of the audience, gave examples to show the feebleness of the fraud hypothesis when matched against actual evidence. Virtually all my other correspondents have been profoundly impressed by the Report.

What is depressing about the critics is their willingness to construct an upturned pyramid of hypotheses and speculations, all balanced on one improbable assumption after another. What is so remarkable is their unwillingness to accept the oftrepeated challenge to take the scientifically warranted course of viewing all the evidence together, rather than attempting to pick theoretical holes in every individual item.

May I add a more general point to those of your readers who still believe that the SPR is somehow inherently hostile to evidence indicative of survival or consciousness? The most recent issue of our Journal contains Professor Gary Schwartz's not unimpressive account of blind experiments with five leading USA mediums in identifying and providing evidential details of deceased members of a sitter's family, when the sitter was unknown to them and screened from them.

Montague Keen - Chairman of SPR's Image and Publicity Committee, Secretary of its Survival Research Committee and Principal author of the Scole Report with Professor David Fontana and the late Professor Arthur Ellison.

"The Afterlife Experiments" - by Gary Schwartz (2003)

Is The SPR Serious About Being Even Handed? - Letter from Ronald Pearson, written in response to Prof. Carr's letter to Psychic News, March 17, 2001