Researchers

 

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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