The Philip experiment was a 1972
parapsychology
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (also called telekinesis), and psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near ...
experiment conducted in
Toronto, Ontario
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...
to determine whether subjects can communicate with fictionalized ghosts through expectations of human will.
Experiment
The experiment was conducted by a Toronto parapsychological research society led by mathematical geneticist Dr. A.R. George Owen and overseen by psychologist Dr. Joel Whitton. The test group consisted of Owen's wife Iris Owen, former chairperson of
MENSA in Canada Margaret Sparrow, industrial designer Andy H., his wife Lorne, heating engineer Al Peacock, accountant Bernice M, bookkeeper Dorothy O’Donnel, and sociology student Sidney K.
Their goals were to create a fictional character through a purposeful methodology and then "attempt" to communicate with it through
séance
A séance or seance (; ) is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word ''séance'' comes from the French word for "session", from the Old French ''seoir'', "to sit". In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, spe ...
. The character created and agreed upon was named "Philip Aylesford", referred to as Philip during the test. His fictional history partially coincided with actual events and places, but with multiple contradictions and errors. He was born in 1624 in England, had an early military career and was knighted by the age of sixteen. He was involved in the
English Civil War
The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of civil wars and political machinations between Parliamentarians (" Roundheads") and Royalists led by Charles I ("Cavaliers"), mainly over the manner of England's governance and issues of re ...
and became personal friends with
Charles II, working for him as a spy. Philip was unhappily married to a woman named Dorothea and later fell in love with a Romani girl who was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. In despair, Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty.
The group was seated around a table with initial séances yielding no contact, no communication, and no phenomenon. Owen changed test conditions by dimming lights and changing the environment to mimic that of a more “traditional” séance. Participants began feeling a presence, table vibrations, breezes, unexplained echoes, and rapping sounds which matched responses to questions about Philip's life. At one point the table tilted on a single leg, and at other times moved across the room without human contact. Although audio, video, and witness accounts document the paranormal phenomena, Philip never appeared to the participants.
Criticism
The experiment has been criticized for lacking solid controls and providing ambiguous results due to the unreliability of séances.
Repeated tests, which created fictional characters named "Lilith" and "Humphrey", yielded similar results under similar circumstances and were deemed inconclusive.
In popular culture
The experiment loosely inspired the horror films ''
The Apparition'',
released in 2012, and ''
The Quiet Ones'', released in 2014.
See also
*
Global Consciousness Project The Global Consciousness Project (GCP, also called the EGG Project) is a parapsychology experiment begun in 1998 as an attempt to detect possible interactions of "global consciousness" with physical systems. The project monitors a geographically di ...
References
{{reflist, 2
1972 in science
Group processes
Parapsychology
Psychology experiments