Discovery Lab Answers

Carlos S. Alvarado, PhD

Carlos S. Alvarado, PhD was a historian of parapsychology and empirical researcher whose career centered on the historiography of psychical research and on survey work into anomalous experiences, particularly out-of-body experiences and mediumship. Based at the Parapsychology Foundation and Atlantic University, and a co-editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, he worked primarily as a historian, archivist, and critical reviewer rather than as a laboratory experimentalist. He died in 2021. The retrieved sources for this question are concentrated on his historiographical and review output from 2020–2022; the site’s own hub page also describes empirical survey work on OBEs, but that particular work is not among the passages retrieved here.

Experiments

The retrieved sources do not document laboratory experiments Alvarado himself ran; his work in these sources is historical scholarship, essay reviews, and archival recovery. What they do document:

• Materialization phenomena in 1920s France — a 2021 essay review of Antonio Leon’s monograph on ectoplasm experiments at the Institut Métapsychique International, examining the work of French researchers such as Gustave Geley and Juliette Bisson and their documented fraud precautions ^[2].
• Bozzano on bilocation / OBEs — a 2022 review, co-authored with Massimo Biondi, of Ernesto Bozzano’s La Bilocazione, treating subtle bodies, out-of-body experiences, and apparitions of the living ^[1].
• Luminous phenomena at death — a 2021 paper co-authored with Michael Nahm reprinting and analyzing the Monk family case, on reported perceptions of mists, lights, and spirit bodies around dying persons ^[5].
• Spiritism and mediumship in Spain — a 2021 review of Andrea Graus’s history of Spanish spiritism, 1880–1930, including Alvarado’s own prior work on Eusapia Palladino’s influence on psychical research ^[3].
• Physics and the occult in Britain — a 2021 essay review of Richard Noakes’s Physics and Psychics, noting where the account omits, e.g., Hereward Carrington’s vitalistic concepts ^[4].
• Early reference works — a 2020 historical study of Nandor Fodor’s Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science ^[6].

His collaborators in these sources include Massimo Biondi ^[1] and Michael Nahm ^[5].

Methodology

The retrieved sources reflect a historiographical and critical-review method rather than an experimental protocol, so there is no sample, randomization, or blinding to describe. What the sources do show about his approach:

• Content-analytic work on the historical literature — he analyzed the balance of mental versus physical mediumship articles across the Proceedings of the SPR and the Revue Métapsychique for 1920–1930, reporting that the SPR journal carried more on mental than physical mediumship ^[2].
• Attention to documented controls and fraud precautions in the historical cases he reviewed, e.g., the IMI materialization work ^[2].
• A critical-evaluation stance in his essay reviews, flagging omissions and contextual gaps in the works under review — for instance noting Carrington’s vitalism where a reviewed account left it out ^[4].

Data

The retrieved sources are historical and review works and do not report trials, hit rates, effect sizes, z, or p values. One quantitative figure appears in an intact sentence: in his content analysis of 1920–1930 mediumship literature, the Proceedings of the SPR carried a higher share of papers on mental than physical mediumship (75% vs. 25%), with mental mediumship less covered in the French journal by comparison ^[2]. Beyond that, the excerpts retrieved for this question do not show statistical data; the underlying papers are historiographical rather than experimental.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question do not include published criticism of Alvarado’s work. His essay reviews contain his own critical evaluations of other authors’ books, but that is not skeptical engagement with his own scholarship, and the retrieved passages carry no named critique or reanalysis directed at his research.

For his review and critical-evaluation output specifically, see Alvarado: Critical review and evaluation of parapsychology literature; his hub page is Carlos S. Alvarado, PhD.