In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist [Paperback]

"... Blackmore's devastatingly honest account of her struggle to make sense of the paranormal is as gripping as ever." New Scientist "A revealing autobiographical story of the appeal of parapsychology." -- Skeptic

'True skepticism has nothing to do with disbelief', says Susan Blackmore. 'It is about taking people's claims seriously and trying to understand them'. As a starry-eyed student, Blackmore was convinced of the reality of astral planes, telepathy, and life after death. She was determined to devote her life to parapsychology, but what she found wasn't what she had bargained for. None of her cleverly devised experiments revealed a hint of the psi she was seeking. In a determined effort to find it somehow, she tested young children in play groups, trained students in imagery and altered states of consciousness, and even put Tarot cards to the test. She visited haunted houses and was regressed to a 'past life'. Finally, accused of being a 'psi-inhibitory experimenter' with the power of abolishing paranormal effects, she visited other, more successful, experimenters. Here she found only errors in their experiments. In this new and updated edition of "The Adventures of a Parapsychologist", Blackmore is at last at liberty to explain just what she found in those ill-fated experiments at Cambridge. She brings her story up to date in a lively and personal account of one scientist's never-ending search for the paranormal.

How I set out as a believer and had to change my mind
In 1970, as a young and idealistic student, I had a dramatic out-of-body experience that was to change my life. I started meditating, studied witchcraft and theosophy, learned to read the Tarot cards and became fascinated with the problems of consciousness and altered states. I was convinced my teachers had got it all wrong and that parapsychology was the great science of the future. I decided to devote my life to it.

Without grants or support of any kind, I found a way to do a PhD on parapsychology and that’s when my doubts began. Every psychic claim I followed up became less and less convincing the more I learned about it. Every experiment I did got chance results, even though other people claimed to find ESP or PK. I began to become just a little bit skeptical - and eventually very skeptical indeed. The wonderful thing about science is that you can turn its methods to studying almost anything and, as long as you are prepared to be open minded, you should find out the truth. For me being open minded meant having to change my beliefs completely. I thought I was going to stun the world with my brilliant new psychic theories, but I was forced to realise I was wrong. Yet even then I could never be sure that psychic phenomena do not exist.

This was some experience! But not one I would wish on other people. I therefore decided to write about my work in the hope that it might be of some use to others who might set out on the same path. I originally wrote it as "The Adventures of a Parapsychologist", and it was referred to as both "a classic in the annals of skeptical literature" and "parapsychology’s first kiss and tell book"! This new version includes three more chapters. I hope you enjoy my personal story whose only conclusion was, and is, "I don’t know".