Alan Gauld
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Alan Gauld | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1932 Portland, Dorset, England |
| Died | 2024 |
| Occupation | Writer |
Alan Gauld (born 1932) is a British parapsychologist, psychologist and spiritualist writer best known for his research on the history of hypnotism and mediumship.
Gauld was born in Portland, Dorset. In the late 1950s, he attended Harvard University. He obtained an M.S. in 1958 and a PhD in 1962 from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He taught psychology at the University of Nottingham and was the President of the Society for Psychical Research from 1989 to 1992.[1][2]
Gauld has generally been skeptical of physical mediumship. He has claimed that ectoplasm materializations seem to "smack very strongly of fraud and conjuring", such as made from cheesecloth or net curtain. He states however that he believes there is genuine evidence for movement of objects during séances including the phenomena produced with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home.[3] This is in opposition to other researchers who have declared that Home was fraudulent.[4]
He has criticized the Scole experiment, a series of séances that members of the Society for Psychical Research investigated. During one of the séances there was "spontaneous appearance of images on film", though Gauld discovered that the locked box was "easily opened in the dark, which allowed for easy substitution of film rolls."[5]
In 2022, Gauld authored The Heyday of Mental Mediumship, published by the spiritualist company White Crow Books which revealed he has spiritualist beliefs.[6]
