Angelos Tanagras an Experiment to Test Survival

Journal of Anomalistics Volume 21 (2021), pp. 223–242 Angelos Tanagras An Experiment to Test Survival Fotini Pallikari1 Introduction In March 1933, the Librarian and Editor of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Theodore Besterman (1904–1976)2, received a letter from his Greek colleague Dr Angelos Tanagras (1875–1971), requesting the participation of the SPR in an experiment he was preparing to test the survival of the soul beyond death.3 Tanagras, a medical doctor and Sanitary Inspector of the Royal Navy (1898–1923), was the co-founder and the only president of the Greek Society for Psychical Research (1923–1957), GSPR. Three years later, the SPR granted his request. Tanagras posted the details of the experiment in a sealed envelope addressed to the Hon. Treasurer and Joint Hon. Secretary of the SPR, W. H. Salter (1880–1969)4, an acquaintance of his from the 1930 Athens Parapsychology Conference (Salter, 1930). He had included specific instructions for when to open his sealed package after his death. Yet, the package remained locked up at the SPR for 36 years after the death of Tanagras, and 71 years after its submission, awaiting a signal from Greece. In April 2007, SPR officers opened the envelope containing the survival experiment of Tanagras to deposit its content at the Cam- bridge University library archives (Tanagras, 1936). This article revisits the survival experiment of Tanagras (Pallikari, 2017f.) to evaluate whether it had achieved its mission. 1 Fotini Pallikari is a physicist, associate professor (retired) of the Condensed Matter Physics Section at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Her research interests fall within laser spectroscopy, materials science, multifractal analysis of complex processes, foundations of quantum theory and psychical research. Personal website: http://users.uoa.gr/~fpallik/ 2 “Theodore Besterman” (SPR, 2018a). 3 Besterman and Tanagras had met at the 1930 fourth International Parapsychology Congress organized by Tanagras in Athens. Besterman had given two talks (Besterman, 1930a, b) and edited the congress proceedings. 4 “William Henry Salter” (SPR, 2018b). http://dx.doi.org/10.23793/zfa.2021.223 224 Fotini Pallikari Experimental postmortem challenges The 20th century saw several other survival tests proposed to investigate whether life continues in some form after death. Their creators were the parapsychologists F. W. H. Myers (1843–1901)5, Sir A. Conan Doyle (1859–1930)6, Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940 )7, T. E. Wood (1887–1972)8, J. G. Pratt (1910–1979)9, R. Thouless (1894–1984)10, I. Stevenson (1918–2007)11 and A. S. Berger (1920–2016)12. They all shared the common goal to get clear and unambiguous evidence that spirits communicate with mediums. As a first step, the experimenters deposited a secret message inside a sealed package. The aim was to transmit this message posthumously to a medium and thus prove the case of survival. With such an approach, there was increased concern that a clairvoyant medium could access the message directly through ESP. Coding techniques, therefore, improved the experiments. As a test of the strength of coded messages against ESP interventions, their authors released them during their lifetime. If the mediums could read them only after their passing and not before, it was considered clear evidence of communication with the spirits. Unfortunately, there were instances where such coded messages fell victim to the deciphering aptitude of skilled individuals. The spiritualists then invented better message-coding techniques so hard to crack that their messages remain secret long past their death. To date, the overall evidence reviewed here indi- cates that there has been no clear and unambiguous proof of the posthumous communication of spirits with the living. 5 Frederic William Henry Myers was a British poet, classicist, and philologist; he was a co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research (Hamilton, 2017). 6 Arthur Conan Doyle was a novelist and creator of the famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes (Wehrstein, 2019). 7 Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was a physicist and an active investigator of mediums (Braude, 2016). He had participated in the 1930 international parapsychology conference in Athens, organized by A. Tanagras (Pallikari, 2017a). 8 Thomas Eugene Wood was a solicitor from Yorkshire, the UK, and a long-standing SPR member (Bauer, 2017). 9 Joseph Gaither Pratt was an American psychologist specializing in extrasensory perception, psycho- kinesis, mediumship, and poltergeists. 10 Robert Henry Thouless, psychologist, past president of the SPR, especially interested in survival issues. 11 Ian Pretyman Stevenson was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist known for reincarnation research and near-death studies. 12 Arthur Seymour Berger, lawyer (JD), was director of the International Institute for the Study of Death, president of the Survival Research Foundation. Angelos Tanagras: An Experiment to Test Survival 225 The spiritualists mentioned had followed a variety of experimental approaches to prove survival. Myers had collaborated with his friend Sir Oliver Lodge entrusting him with his survival test in a sealed envelope (Berger, 1990: 53). Three years after the death of Myers, a woman’s claim that she received his message through automatic writing prompted the opening of his sealed envelope in the presence of SPR members. They discovered that the message Myers had left did not match what the medium claimed to have received from him (anonymous, 1905). However, the disclosure of the secret message of Myers inevitably rendered the test useless for further experimentation. Sir Oliver Lodge deposited a similar secret message in a sealed envelope to test survival. After his death, the SPR members opened the envelope to discover that the mediums who alleged communication with his spirit had not received his message (Thouless, 1972). At that time, Tanagras had already registered his sealed envelope at the SPR. Thouless had designed several survival tests applying coding techniques. His approach was to consider particular design problems made by others before him. One problem was the risk of getting to the content of a message through telepathy and clairvoyance. He first produced two encrypted survival messages (Thouless, 1948) using two different techniques, the so-called Playfair cipher (Simmons, 2013) and a book cipher.13 After death, he noted, the material brain in which memories are stored is no longer present. He planned, therefore, to posthumously communicate just the lighter and easier to recall short key that deciphers his encrypted passage. Therefore, if a communication attempt was unsuccessful, a new trial was still possible keeping his encrypted message safe. An anonymous cryptanalyst deciphered the first passage of Thouless shortly after its announcement. Thouless replaced it with a third encrypted passage using the double Playfair cipher, which introduced two English keywords to the code instead of one (Thouless, 1949). Powerful computers recovered these two keys in 1995, deciphering the third and last secret message of Thouless before mediums could claim success (Gillogly & Harnisch, 1996). Consid- ering such development, an SPR member commented: “When Thouless devised the test in the late 1940s he could hardly have foreseen the future power of computers.” (Pool, 1995: without page) The remaining second and most difficult to crack encrypted message from Thouless was decrypted in 2019 (Bean, 2020 a, b), again using computers that searched for keywords in the Project Gutenberg online library. Thouless had urged others to organize more ciphered survival tests, a call that had encour- aged SPR member T. E. Wood to follow suit. Wood created his test according to the Vigenère letter square that Thouless had previously adopted (Wood, 1949). He took his coding key from 13 A book cipher is a coded key, often from some aspect of a readily available book. 226 Fotini Pallikari a book written in a language other than English. As a result, his secret message contained words in more than one language, making Wood’s encrypted message quite severe to crack by either computer or ESP. It has remained unsolved so far. The survival experiments of Thouless and Wood are outlined in the book by Klaus Schmeh Nicht zu knacken (Schmeh, 2012).14 The author has also added in it his encrypted survival test. To overcome the difficulties encountered in ciphered postmortem survival tests, Ian Stevenson (Stevenson, 1968) and J. G. Pratt (cf. Berger, 1990: 56) separately developed the combination- lock test approach. Their code key consisted of a six-word phrase or six-letter word. A formula converted the code key letters to numbers, which were used to set the combination lock. The idea was that after death their spirits would deliver their keys to respective mediums in each case. The recipient of the key would convert it into numbers according to the familiar formula. If the converted key opened the lock, it was confirmation that the experimenter had posthumously communicated with the living. The combination locks were expensive and operated by a delicate mechanism whose setting required absolute precision. Their complex alignment required skilled fingers and good mem- ory. There was also the risk that an inaccurate key could also break them. Stevenson and Pratt have not yet communicated their coded keys posthumously. Berger attributed these failures to the fact that both experimenters were not good communicators as spirits (Berger, 1990: 59). Arthur Berger took up the procedure of the text-coding survival test with his By-the- Numbers test. His approach required a simple dictionary from which he randomly selected one word as his key. Berger numbered consecutively each letter of this keyword and its defini- tion provided in the dictionary. Thus he had created a table in which each letter of the alpha- bet corresponded to a number. With the help of this table, he converted his secret text into a sequence of incomprehensible numbers (Berger, 1990: 56). He deposited the coded message with researchers, together with the name and edition of the dictionary he had used.

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