Discovery Lab Answers

The sources retrieved for this question do not contain primary documents from Thelma Moss’s own UCLA laboratory research — the retrieved passages concern unrelated authors (an online-survey fraud study and a Cambridge ganzfeld study by Carl Sargent’s group). What follows draws on the ESP-Nexus page for Kerry Gaynor, who trained and worked directly under Moss, plus general background clearly labeled as such.

Thelma Moss — UCLA Laboratory and Field Research

Laboratory context

Between 1966 and 1978, Thelma Moss taught psychology at UCLA while operating a parapsychology laboratory on the fifth floor of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. The ESP-Nexus page for Kerry Gaynor describes it as “largely unsanctioned and unfunded” — an informal research environment rather than a formally chartered university program. That institutional ambiguity shaped both what the lab could do and how its outputs were received.

Field investigation program

Moss ran an active field-investigation program alongside any laboratory work. Kerry Gaynor, one of her trained field investigators, participated in on-site investigations of nearly 500 reportedly haunted locations around the Los Angeles area. The most widely documented case from that program was the 1974 Doris Bither investigation in Culver City, which Gaynor was centrally involved in and which later inspired the 1978 book The Entity and its 1982 film adaptation.

The scale of that fieldwork — close to 500 sites — is notable as a spontaneous-case database, though the retrieved sources do not provide the statistical outcomes, experimental controls, or published analysis from those investigations. For that detail, the primary literature from the lab itself would need to be consulted directly.

What the sources do not cover

The retrieved excerpts do not contain:

• Moss’s Kirlian photography experiments (for which the lab was also known)
• Her telepathy or remote-viewing protocols
• Published effect sizes, hit rates, or other quantitative results from UCLA lab sessions
• The lab’s publication record in journals such as the Journal of Parapsychology

This is a gap in what was retrieved for this question, not necessarily a gap in the library’s holdings. Those figures, if indexed, would be in the primary literature.

Kerry Gaynor’s role

Gaynor is the ESP-Nexus-profiled figure most directly connected to the Moss lab. His page at Kerry Gaynor is the site’s primary entry point for the UCLA field-investigation program and its best-documented case.

Skeptical critiques

The ESP-Nexus page notes the lab operated in an “unsanctioned and unfunded” capacity — a structural condition that critics of the period regularly raised: without institutional oversight, formal peer review of protocols, or independent replication, results from the lab were difficult to evaluate against standard experimental criteria. The retrieved sources do not include a specific published methodological critique of Moss’s laboratory procedures, so a detailed critique/rebuttal breakdown cannot be provided here without fabricating citations. What is documented is that the lab’s field investigations, including the Bither case, have been discussed in the broader literature on poltergeist and haunting research, where observer-effect and confirmation-bias concerns are standard methodological objections to non-controlled on-site investigations.

For deeper coverage of Moss’s experimental work and any audit of specific studies, the Studies section and Scientists hub are the places to check for any dedicated Moss pages the site may carry.