Best Evidence: An Investigative Reporter's Three-Year Quest to Uncover the Best Scientific Evidence for ESP, Psychokinesis, Mental Healing, Ghosts and Poltergeists, Dowsing, Mediums, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation, and Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

by Michael Schmicker (Author)
Key Phrases: best scientific evidence, professional well drillers, world beyond the five senses, Best Evidence, Michael Schmicker, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In Best Evidence, Michael Schmicker assembles scientific documentation for experiences that many readers intuitively believe are real, despite mainstream skepticism: ESP, psychokinesis, mental healing, ghosts and poltergeists, dowsing, mediums, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and, as Schmicker puts it, "Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear." Expect a credible collection of convincing evidence, such as a published report in the American Journal of Diseases of Children in which a Seattle doctor offers a detailed account of a near-death experience. Or a 1995 report from the CIA on the practice of remote viewing, in which the U.S. government hired psychics to spy on other countries. Other evidence is presented to convince readers of death-bed visions, ghosts and poltergeists, and reincarnation. While anyone can manipulate data to draw their own conclusions, Schmicker's evenhanded, journalistic tone brings credibility and a no-nonsense tone to these esoteric discussions. He also possesses a smooth, accessible writing style that makes it easy to digest the research, studies, and data that his book is based upon. After each chapter, he offers a "Highly Recommended Reading" list so readers can continue their own research. --Gail Hudson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"...For skeptics and cautious believers alike, a splendid introduction to 'impossible phenomena that refuse to disappear.'" -- Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., co-editor of Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence

"...a dazzling journey into one of the most important areas of science that has ever existed." -- Dr. Larry Dossey MD, author of Healing Beyond the Body and Reinventing Medicine

"...a well-researched and absorbing overview of psychic phenomena. I recommend it highly." -- William Roll, Ph.D, State University of West Georgia and author of The Poltergeist

"...offers not just one, but a half-dozen stories, any one of which can change the way we think about reality." -- Dean Radin, Ph.D., author of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

"...one -- if not the best itself -- of the major books explaining and offering proof that psi phenomena are here to stay." -- Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D., physicist and author of Mind Into Matter and Taking the Quantum Leap

"...you are not likely to find a more accessible and up-to-date summary of the evidence for paranormal phenomena." -- Richard Broughton, Ph.D., author of Parapsychology: The Controversial Science

"Best Evidence is an important book. It provides background into profound changes in scientific thinking now taking place." -- Edgar Mitchell: Apollo 14 astronaut and author of The Way of the Explorer, Psychic Exploration

"Hard-line skeptics won't be pleased, but Michael Schmicker has done his homework...an excellent survey of the strongest evidence..." -- Marcello Truzzi, Ph.D., Center for Scientific Anomalies Research --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: IUniverse; 2 edition (March 27, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595219063
• ISBN-13: 978-0595219063
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #311,608 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chock full of information and references, August 27, 2001

By	atmj (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Best Evidence : An Investigative Reporter's Three-Year Quest to Uncover the Best Scientific Evidence for Esp, Psychokinesis, Mental Healing, Ghosts and Poltergeists, Dowsing, Mediums, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation and Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear (Paperback)

If you want a book that has details and specific studies and bunches and bunches of references on Psi phenomena, this is it.

MICHAEL SCHMICKER gives the casual skeptic and the believer all the details and information anyone could want on a multitude of topics. From the table of contents this is what is covered:

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Part I: PSIentific Facts
Chapter 1: Nobody Really Believes This Stuff, Right?
Chapter 2: Yeah, But I Bet They're All Wierdos and Nut Cases
Chapter 3: OK, But Do Any Scientists take This Stuff Seriously?
Chapter 4: But Science Says...
Chapter 5: The Times They Are A-Changing

Part II: Best Evidence
Chapter 6: Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP)
Chapter 7: Psychokinesis (PK)
Chapter 8: Dowsing
Chapter 9: The Mind-Body Connection: Mental And Faith Healing
Chapter 10: Death Bed Visions
Chapter 11: Near Death and Out-Of-Body Experiences
Chapter 12: Ghosts and Poltergeists
Chapter 13: Mediums and Channelers
Chapter 14: Reincarnation
Chapter 15: The Future of Science

FIRST HE GIVES US INFO ON ALL THE BELIEVERS OUT THERE. This list is sprinkled with many of the top scientists and world renown people of the last 2 centuries. So much for being a minority of odd balls.

THEN HE GIVES US NUTS AND BOLTS FACTS ON STUDIES DONE ON EACH TYPE OF PHENOMENA. Here is a fact-finders dream. This book references hundreds of sources of information on this phenomena. From the fringes to highly regarded institutions. When you read this, you will be astounded at the level of information provided. You could spend a lifetime reviewing all the references here. This book is a keeper once read for just this alone.

IF YOU ARE OF THE SCIENTIFIC MIND, this book gives you enough information to launch your own investigation into these recorded documentations of this phenomena. Let's face it, if we can use statistics to prove quality levels, prove scientific theorems we can also use it in Psi phenomena. This books points you to studies where scientists did just that. Excellent book. I'm going to dog-ear it for the references for sure.

89 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good review of evidence, weak review of explanations, August 4, 2001

By	Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Best Evidence : An Investigative Reporter's Three-Year Quest to Uncover the Best Scientific Evidence for Esp, Psychokinesis, Mental Healing, Ghosts and Poltergeists, Dowsing, Mediums, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation and Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear (Paperback)

This is an interesting and well-written book and well worth reading for the "best evidence" it offers. It is certainly not just a credulous account, it does a very credible job of bringing some fascinating phenomena into the light. But I had to lower my rating a bit because I also found it very weak in its reasoning, conclusions, and scholarship, in its seemingly implied rhetorical purpose of putting the best evidence into rational or even scientific perspective.

The author seriously researched the evidence, and once he concluded that there was reasonable evidence for *something real* behind of the more seemingly unlikely phenomena, he seems to have made up his mind that the believers were right and the skeptics were simply being unreasonable. Clearly, this natural and very human leap of faith does not itself make this a balanced treatment, the author simply takes the side of the underdog, the psychic believer, and becomes a rational advocate in their behalf.

This is a reasonable thing to do, but the tone of the book misleads the reader into thinking this is a balanced treatment, or even a scientific one.

It is a very fair book in the sense that he considers the best evidence for things that seem impossible without rejecting them out of hand, which is laudable. But in doing so, he missed most of the important technical issues raised about each of the points of evidence. It isn't any more "open-minded" to reject skeptical explanations and interpretations out of hand than to reject credulous ones. The author takes a balanced tone, but does not produce a balanced treatment, indeed he sometimes bends over backwards to avoid seriously confronting the implications of the evidence he competently and clearly reviews. Some of the explanations just don't work. To his credit, he does point this out in places, but it doesn't make as strong an impression as the inference that the various "impossible" phenomena are actually real. The subtlety is lost on the reader.

In particular, the author does a very credible job presenting the _evidence_ for anomalous phenomena. I will agree with the other reviewers that far. But where he fails is that his scholarship is virtually non-existent. This may at first blush sound picky, but the reason this is an important criticism to the authors conclusions is that he takes almost no notice at all of the contextual factors in building theories for understanding the evidence. The intellectual history of the theories is missing. The evidence supposedly stands on its own, a very naive view of how science works.

In other words, his contribution here is to give us good evidence of something that really isn't all that hard to believe, that people have experienced and reported some seemingly inexplicable things. He is right that people who reject such reports out of hand simply out of surface implausibility would be cynics rather than reasoned skeptics. But he misses the nut ... because he doesn't review the whole issue of why one explanation is better than another. He often makes an intuitive but unscientific leap from something like "there is no way I can explain this experience" to "it must be a ghost !".

Evidence without context leaves us to simply apply arbitrarily selected theories, which is the greatest sin of weak parapsychology research. Good evidence of anomalies of information and energy transfer is not neccessarily also evidence for ghosts, reincarnation, or other elaborate supernatural beliefs. That's where the missing scholarship would have strengthened this book's message tremendously, and helped the author be more fair to the "debunkers" he glibly dismisses.

Logically, the fact that information or energy can be transmitted in some way that is not explained by one model obviously doesn't automatically mean that a spiritualist or supernatural model of similar anomalies is true.

One principle missed by the author provides an example. Information acquired in one sense at one time in one way can and is easily transformed by the brain into a completely different sense and a completely different form, at another time, which is amazing but not supernatural. People may detect illness in others by smell for example, and translate it to an "aura." Finding the diagnosis to be accurate wouldn't mean that the aura reading should be taken at face value as an electromagnetic reading of the spritual body.

Another similar case. The author sometimes talks about "mind" influencing "body," a scientific anachronism (since we now have evidence that is not reasonable disputable in neuroscience that the body embodies the mind). The phenomena of "mind over body," as remarkable as they can be, are more accurately considered phenomena of the body influencing itself in ways previously not known or not understood. Viewing them as influence of a non-corporeal spirit on a corporeal body is almost certainly archaic, and certainly unscientific. But the best evidence ?? The author does a very good job with the evidence, but misses the boat in the modes of explanation for that evidence, a subtle but crucial point for eventual understanding of the real phenomena behind the reported experiences.

I suppose I would give this book 4 stars if I weren't so disappointed by the missed opportunity here to do a really first rate job presenting the case for experimental parapsychology, which I think is often a worthwhile pursuit. But because of the lack of cultural or scientific context for the ideas, I have to give it 3, for a very good discussion of reports of anomalies but a failure to make anything of them. If we take this best evidence seriously , there are either more things in our natural world than we currently understand, or that there really is a supernatural world beyond our own. But we still have no idea even how to tell the one possibility from the other, other than making a metaphysical assumption. The author did the job of a good journalist, but not the job of a writer of exceptional books.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive Overview of PSI Evidence, May 25, 2001

By	Cynthia Sue Larson "www.realityshifters.com" (San Francisco bay area, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Best Evidence : An Investigative Reporter's Three-Year Quest to Uncover the Best Scientific Evidence for Esp, Psychokinesis, Mental Healing, Ghosts and Poltergeists, Dowsing, Mediums, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation and Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear (Paperback)

Do you have an open mind -- and are you ready to explore one of the most interesting collections of scientific evidence for paranormal phenomena ever assembled between the covers of a book?

If so, you're in luck! Michael Schmicker's book BEST EVIDENCE presents a comprehensive overview of a wide range of "psi" phenomena including: extra-sensory perception, psychokinesis (PK), dowsing, mental and faith healing, death bed visions, near death experience, out of body experiences, ghosts and poltergeists, mediums and channelers, and reincarnation.

What makes BEST EVIDENCE such a gem is that it not only clearly describes each kind of psi phenomena along with the facts supporting its existence and references to the original studies and sources, but it also includes some intriguing insights about why people sometimes avoid investigating the evidence surrounding paranormal phenomena. For example, Schmicker cites the work of researchers like Kenneth Batcheldor, who has identified two blocks to PK production (ownership resistance and witness inhibition). I find it just as interesting to examine the reasons why people find the subject of the paranormal disquieting as it is to see such a thorough review of the evidence showing how psi is a real phenomena which simply won't go away.

If you've ever wanted to tell your friends, colleagues and family that there is an ever-increasing body of scientific evidence proving that the paranormal is part of everyday life, this is the book for you!