John Edgar Coover

Career

Coover carried out a psychical research programme at Stanford University (1912-1917). He conducted approximately 10, 000 experiments with 100 subjects to test for extrasensory perception (ESP). He concluded after four years of research that "statistical treatments of the data fail to reveal any cause beyond chance". He also conducted 1,000 experiments with psychics and it was revealed that they had no advantage of any supposed psychic ability over normal subjects.

His book Experiments in Psychical Research (1917) was well received by the scientific community for its methodology, rigorous statistics and use of experimental controls. It was considered a debunking work of psychical research by the psychologist Edward B. Titchener.

Coover had criticized the "metapsychism" of parapsychologists as it did adhere to the scientific method. He was highly critical of mediumship which he considered the result of credulity and deception. This led to a dispute with Thomas Welton Stanford a wealthy spiritualist and brother of the university's founder, who had helped fund the psychical research programme at Stanford. Thomas Stanford had endorsed the fraudulent medium Charles Bailey as genuine and requested for Coover to test the medium. However, Coover held strong doubts about Bailey and noted he been exposed as a fraud several times, most notably by the Society for Psychical Research.