Formal parapsychological journals, the Journal of Parapsychology, the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and the Journal of Scientific Exploration, publish experimental findings, theoretical arguments, and occasional historical surveys. They do not systematically collect first-person accounts of why researchers entered the field, what anomalous experiences (if any) motivated them, or how they navigated careers that placed them outside mainstream scientific consensus. Pilkington’s anthology project addressed this gap directly. The 1987 volume¹ and its 2010 and 2013 successors² collected essays and interviews from researchers who were, in many cases, still active, making the series a contemporaneous record rather than a retrospective reconstruction.

The 2010 reissue of the original anthology as Esprit Volume 1 (Anomalist Books) preserved and updated the 1987 material while making it available to a new generation of readers.² The series as a whole covers researchers working across the major experimental paradigms of twentieth-century parapsychology, ESP, PK, dream telepathy, survival research, and spontaneous-case investigation, as well as figures whose contributions were primarily theoretical or organizational. Contributors were asked to write in their own voices about personal motivations and intellectual development, not to produce formal literature reviews. This editorial choice means the volumes capture information, about anomalous personal experiences, about the social dynamics of research groups, about the experience of peer rejection, that does not appear in the experimental literature.

Pilkington completed her doctoral work at Saybrook Graduate Institute under Stanley Krippner, one of the contributors to the anthology series and a central figure in the Maimonides dream-telepathy program. Krippner’s own career, spanning laboratory ESP research, cross-cultural studies of anomalous experience, and humanistic psychology, exemplifies the kind of multi-domain engagement that the anthology series documents. The Saybrook program in Consciousness Studies provided an institutional home for researchers whose work did not fit comfortably within conventional psychology departments, and Pilkington’s editorial project can be understood partly as an extension of that institutional mission: creating a record of how parapsychological research was actually conducted and experienced from the inside.²

Felicia Parise worked at Maimonides Hospital in the Department of Special Hematology during the period when the dream-telepathy laboratory, directed by Montague Ullman and staffed by Krippner and Honorton, was conducting ESP experiments in the basement of the Community Mental Health Building.³ She became one of the laboratory’s most productive subjects, demonstrating what researchers described as strong clairvoyant and telepathic abilities, and later attempted to replicate the macro-PK feats of Nina Kulagina after Ullman returned from a visit to the USSR with film of Kulagina’s demonstrations. Parise eventually withdrew from public parapsychological activity, citing the physical toll of PK work and, as Pilkington notes, possibly also the social cost of sustained skeptical scrutiny, and her number was unlisted for years. Pilkington located her through a mutual contact and conducted the interview in August 2013, with transcript review completed in summer 2014. The published interview in the Journal of Scientific Exploration represents the first extended first-person account Parise had given to the parapsychological literature.³ Pilkington’s introduction to the interview corrects several inaccuracies that had accumulated in secondary accounts of Parise’s career, a function that oral-history interviews are uniquely positioned to perform.

Jule Eisenbud (1908–1999) was a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado who investigated the claimed thoughtography abilities of Ted Serios, a subject who reportedly produced images on unexposed photographic film through mental intention alone. Eisenbud’s decision to pursue and publish this research placed him in direct conflict with mainstream psychiatric and scientific opinion, and his career illustrates the institutional costs that parapsychological research could impose on researchers with established positions in conventional medicine. Pilkington’s 1999 profile in the Journal of Parapsychology, titled “A Profile in Courage,” frames Eisenbud’s career explicitly in terms of the personal and professional risks he accepted.⁴ This framing, courage as a category of analysis for parapsychological careers, recurs across the anthology series and reflects Pilkington’s broader argument that the sociology of the field cannot be understood without attending to the costs researchers bore.

In her review of Simonsen’s Our Secret Powers (Pari Publishing, 2018), Pilkington notes that the 531-page volume, which covers anthropology, archaeology, laboratory experimentation, consciousness studies, philosophy, and reincarnation research, contains no discussion of D. D. Home, Eusapia Palladino, Sir William Crookes, or Charles Richet, and no treatment of psychic photography or the Eisenbud-Serios research.⁵ She also notes the absence of in-depth treatment of RSPK research. These omissions, she argues, give readers a distorted picture of the field’s historical scope. The review illustrates how critical reviewing, when conducted by a historian with deep familiarity with the primary literature, can itself constitute a contribution to the historical record, identifying what has been lost or marginalized in the transmission of the field’s history to new audiences.

Pilkington’s 2021 review of Federico Faggin’s Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness (Waterside Productions, 2021) addresses a different historiographical function: documenting the trajectory of a figure from mainstream technological achievement, Faggin co-invented the microprocessor, to engagement with consciousness studies and parapsychology-adjacent questions about the non-material dimensions of mind.⁶ Pilkington’s review situates Faggin’s intellectual journey within the broader pattern she has documented across the anthology series: accomplished researchers in mainstream fields who, through personal experience or theoretical dissatisfaction, come to take seriously questions that orthodox science has dismissed. The review also reflects Pilkington’s own position as a participant-observer in the parapsychological community, she notes a personal encounter with Faggin at an SSE conference that shaped her interest in reviewing the book.⁶

The Men and Women of Parapsychology series, across its three volumes (1987, 2010, 2013), covers researchers who worked across the major experimental and theoretical traditions of twentieth-century parapsychology.¹² Many of the contributors to the earlier volumes have since died; their essays and interviews now constitute primary sources for historians of science interested in how a marginalized research tradition sustained itself across decades of institutional opposition. The series also documents the range of motivations that brought researchers to the field, from personal anomalous experiences to theoretical dissatisfaction with materialist accounts of mind, providing data for sociological and philosophical analyses of why parapsychology persists as a research program despite its contested status.

The recovery of Felicia Parise’s account illustrates a specific archival function of Pilkington’s interview practice.³ Parise had been discussed in secondary literature, Pilkington herself had written about her in The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof (2006), but without access to Parise’s own account. Secondary accounts had accumulated inaccuracies. The 2014 interview corrected these inaccuracies at the source, providing a first-person record that supersedes the secondary literature on several points. This model, locating subjects who have withdrawn from public parapsychological activity and recovering their accounts before they are permanently lost, is a distinctive contribution that no amount of experimental replication can substitute for. The historical record of who did what, under what conditions, and with what understanding of the significance of their work, can only be preserved while the participants are alive to give it.