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Malcolm Bird
AUTHOR, RESEARCH officer of the ASPR from 1925-31. His first touch
with psychical research was established in 1922 when he served as
secretary on the committee of The Scientific American, of which he was
an associate editor, for the investigation of the physical phenomena of
Spiritualism. On Conan Doyle's suggestion he was sent to Europe to collect
observations for a supplement to the report. He sat with John
Sloan, Mrs.
Osborne Leonard, William Hope, Mrs.
Deane, Evan Powell and Frau Maria
Vollhardt.
In My Psychic Adventures he concludes that the phenomena are
truly objective, i.e., neither due to hallucination, nor collective
hypnosis, and that a good degree of probability exists for the genuineness
of some of the psychic phenomena he witnessed.
In Margery, the Medium,
he traces the development of the powers of Mrs. Margery Crandon from the
incipient stage and gives an account of the investigation of The
Scientific American of her mediumship. Though the committee, owing to
internal friction, could not reach a verdict, he himself became convinced,
after 10-12 sittings, that the mediumship was genuine.
When his articles in
The Scientific American created undue anticipation for a verdict in
Margery's favour he resigned his position on the committee, and soon after
severed his connections with the Scientific American. Dr. Walter
Franklin Prince
founded the Boston SPR at this time and Malcolm Bird was elected to the
position in the American SPR which he vacated.
Source (with minor modifications): An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science by Nandor Fodor (1934).
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