Discovery Lab Answers

Karlis Osis — Experiments and Data

The sources retrieved for this question touch on Osis’s work in several areas. Pulling those together with the ESP-Nexus page material gives the following picture.

Who Osis Was

Karlis Osis (1917–1997) was a Latvian-born parapsychologist who emigrated to the United States and became Research Director at the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in New York [2, 4]. His institutional address in the 1990s was 5 West 73rd Street, New York, where he held the title Chester F. Carlson Research Fellow Emeritus ^[2]. Erlendur Haraldsson worked under him at the ASPR during a period when, as one obituary account notes, the organization was at the height of its activity, funded in part through Chester F. Carlson’s estate ^[4].

Major Research Programs

1. Deathbed Visions

One of Osis’s most sustained projects was the systematic collection and analysis of deathbed observations — reports from dying patients and attending medical personnel of visions, apparitions, and related experiences at the moment of death. He pursued this cross-culturally in collaboration with Haraldsson, comparing American and Indian samples, resulting in the book At the Hour of Death (third edition, 1997) ^[4]. The ESP-Nexus Apparitions page notes that deathbed visions “were studied especially by Karlis Osis,” situating this work within the broader literature on apparitional experience.

2. Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) Perceptual Testing

In the 1970s, Osis ran a series of controlled experiments with the psychic Alex Tanous aimed at testing whether veridical perception could occur during reported out-of-body states. The experimental design placed targets at a remote location and asked whether Tanous could identify them while ostensibly projecting. The ESP-Nexus Out-of-Body Experiences page describes this work in detail, including a subsidiary strand with Osis and McCormick that attempted to detect physical effects at the location of Tanous’s supposed projected presence using strain gauges.

3. Near-Death Experience (NDE) Research and Commentary

Osis was an active voice in the NDE literature in the 1980s and 1990s. He reviewed Margot Grey’s Return From Death in the Journal of Near-Death Studies in 1989, engaging with her phenomenological data and her sample’s reported personality changes ^[3]. He also contributed a letter to that journal in 1996 addressing NDE-related satisfaction with life measures ^[2], and appeared in a multi-author exchange about data-collection standards in NDE research, including pointed critique of subject-sample bias and interview methodology in work by others in the field ^[1].

Methodological Stance

Osis’s own critical remarks — visible in the 1996 exchange — show he applied skeptical data-quality standards to NDE research generally, not only to hostile critics. He flagged biased subject samples and poor data-collection techniques as problems in the literature, including in work he reviewed ^[1]. This is consistent with his reputation for quantitative rigor within a field that was, in the mid-twentieth century, moving toward more controlled experimental designs.

Skeptical Critiques

What critics argue. The OBE perceptual testing with Tanous has drawn methodological scrutiny. The ESP-Nexus Out-of-Body Experiences page notes that a subsequent researcher — examining data on the hit rate during OBE trials — concluded the results gave no convincing evidence for accurate perception during OBEs: roughly 108 hits would have been expected by chance alone, and the observed results did not exceed that expectation sufficiently to support the claim.

What the experimental data show. The strain-gauge component of the Tanous work (Osis and McCormick) attempted to move beyond subjective report toward physical detection of a projected presence. The retrieved sources do not contain the quantitative results of that strain-gauge series, so the specific figures cannot be reported here — the ESP-Nexus page carries more detail, and the primary papers would need to be consulted for the statistics.

Analysis. The OBE perceptual series represents an attempt to operationalize a difficult phenomenon under controlled conditions. One independent analysis of the hit-rate data reached a null conclusion on the perceptual accuracy question. The physical-detection (strain-gauge) strand addressed a different hypothesis — whether a presence could be detected instrumentally — and those results are described separately on the site’s OBE page.

For the fullest treatment of Osis’s OBE work and the associated data, the Out-of-Body Experiences page carries the most detailed synthesis currently on the site.