Discovery Lab Answers

The sources retrieved for this question touch on two distinct people whose surnames are similar — Patric Giesler and Iris Giesler-Petersen — and it is worth being precise about each before discussing what the retrieved sources actually show.

Patric Giesler

Patric Giesler (note the spelling — no “k”) appears in the retrieved sources as a parapsychologist trained at the Department of Consciousness Studies, John F. Kennedy University (JFKU), Orinda, California, where he first met Carlos Alvarado in 1978 ^[4]. His 2021 tribute piece in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik recalls the early cohort of that program and places him as a graduate student there alongside Alvarado, Loyd Auerbach, and John Palmer, among others ^[4].

His field research is referenced in the context of anthropological psi studies — specifically work touching on ritual and cultural contexts. David Luke’s 2010 review of cross-cultural and anthropological psi research cites Giesler’s work on the relationship between trickery and psi:

• Giesler (1984) is cited as a caution that researchers in the field — particularly those observing practices such as psychic surgery — may overlook normal explanations if they are not trained to detect them ^[1].
• Giesler (1983) is cited for a different point: that trickery and genuine psi “may make good bedfellows,” i.e., the presence of fraud does not necessarily preclude the presence of anomalous phenomena ^[1].

Luke’s 2010 article also includes a direct acknowledgment thanking Patrick Giesler for assistance in providing materials for the preparation of that article ^[1]. (The acknowledgment spells the name “Patrick” rather than “Patric” — the sources do not resolve whether this is a variant spelling or a different individual; they are likely the same person.)

Beyond these citations, the retrieved sources do not contain experimental data, effect sizes, sample sizes, or detailed methodological descriptions of Giesler’s own primary research. The retrieved excerpts reference his published work by year but do not reproduce the studies themselves.

Iris Giesler-Petersen

Iris Giesler-Petersen, identified in the sources as an Assessor iuris based in Hannover, Germany, is the co-author — alongside James G. Matlock of the Parapsychology Foundation — of a 2016 comparative study of intermission memories (memories purportedly from the interval between death and rebirth in reincarnation cases) ^[5]. This is a distinct research area from experimental psi testing.

That study analyzed 85 published reincarnation cases with intermission memories — 58 from seven Asian countries and 27 from Western countries — comparing features across the two populations ^[5]. One reported finding is that unsolved cases were significantly more common in the Western subsample than in the Asian subsample (p < .0005) ^[5]. The paper is in the Journal of Near-Death Studies (2016) and examines cultural variation in the phenomenology of reported intermission experiences, not laboratory experimental outcomes.

What the sources do and do not cover

The retrieved sources do not include the primary text of Giesler’s 1983 or 1984 publications, so specific experimental designs, participant numbers, stimuli, controls, or effect sizes from those works are not available from the excerpts at hand. If you are looking for the quantitative details of his fieldwork — protocols used, hit rates, statistical tests — those would need to be drawn from the original publications directly.

For broader context on anthropological and cross-cultural psi research of the kind Giesler contributed to, the Phenomena section of ESP-Nexus may carry relevant topic pages.