The psychic life of Dr Tanous

That rare individual, Dr Alex Tanous, may no longer be with us, but his memory and work lives on, mostly due to the activity of the Alex Tanous Foundation and now also due to the enterprise of SPR member Callum E. Cooper. Amongst the plethora of people claiming to be psychic, Tanous is noteworthy for his involvement with Dr Karlis Osis and the American Society for Psychical Research, and his willingness to test his claims under laboratory conditions. Cooper has recently edited some previously unpublished material by Tanous and published it as Conversations with Ghosts with White Crow Books. It was Cooper who approached me to do this special feature and introduced me to Alice Tanous Kelley, Alex Tanous’s niece and Research Assistant at the Alex Tanous Foundation. She has been exceptionally helpful in providing illustrative material for this issue. In addition, Callum solicited some very personal contributions from well-known and much-respected figures in psychical research, in alphabetical order: Prof. Erlendur Haraldsson and Gerd Hövelmann. Attendees at last year’s SPR conference (jointly held with the Parapsychological Association) will remember Prof. Haraldsson’s excellent talk on the Icelandic medium Indridi Indridason and Hövelmann being presented with the greatly deserved Parapsychological Association’s Outstanding Career Award. Special features give the Paranormal Review a unique character and allow us to explore issues in a greater depth than one normally finds. But of course, I always aim to include articles on different topics. This issue we have a number of original historical and theoretical researches, as well as some new features. Wim Kramer and Maurice van Luijtelaar recently made some important archival discoveries and now present their thorough analysis of a most interesting case; and Robert Charman takes the implications of Predictive Anticipatory Activity head on. Readers will also notice two new features: one focusing on the people; the other on some of their weird things. To make this work, I need your help and to risk sounding like Number Two from The Prisoner: ‘We want information... information... information’. Please do send me an email when you do anything paranormal.