The British Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in 1822.

Professor Henry Sidgwick

The SPR was probably the prototype for other psychical research organizations.

Its membership consisted of Professors Henry Sidgwick and Frederick Myers of Cambridge University, Professor William Barrett (physicist, from Dublin), Charles Dodgson (whose pen-name was Lewis Carroll--the author of "The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland"), Mark Twain, William Gladstone, Sir Oliver Lodge (physicist), Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sir William Crookes (physicist, discovered thallium), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (physician and author of the "Sherlock Holmes" mysteries), and Edmund Gurney.

The American Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1885.

Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980)and his wife, Louisa, studied psi phenomena at Duke University in North Carolina. Dr. Rhine was the director of the parapsychology lab at Duke from 1940 to 1965.

Dr. Rhine coined the term "extrasensory perception". He divided ESP into these categories: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. This link takes you to a Swedish site that offers information about Dr. Rhine (in Swedish) and a photo of Dr. Rhine.

Karl Zener, an associate of Dr. Rhine, helped devise the cards traditionally used to test for ESP.

Some American psychics have been trained at the British College of Psychic Studies.

Some Researchers

Upton Sinclair (author of "The Jungle")
Aldous Huxley ("Brave New World")
Julian Huxley (biologist)
Haakon Forwald (Sweden)
Gertrude Schmeidler (Psychology, Professor City of New York University)
S.G. Soal (mathematician)

Sir Oliver Lodge