Gary Schwartz

Gary Schwartz (1944–present) is an American psychologist (Harvard PhD, formerly Yale and Harvard faculty, professor at the University of Arizona) who directs the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health and has devoted much of his career to laboratory tests of mediumship and the survival of consciousness after death.

In studies described in The Afterlife Experiments (2002), he had mediums attempt to produce verifiable information about deceased loved ones of “sitters” under conditions designed (he argued) to rule out cold reading and sensory cues, and he interpreted above-chance accuracy as evidence consistent with survival.

He has also pursued work on intention, healing, and “energy” phenomena. Schwartz is a prominent contemporary node in the survival strand, notable for bringing credentialed academic machinery to questions of mediumship and after-death consciousness.

FLAG: his work is strongly contested. Critics (including James Randi and Ray Hyman) argued his protocols did not adequately exclude cold reading, rater bias, sensory leakage, and statistical artifacts, and that his interpretations vastly overreach the controls; mediumship-survival claims have not gained scientific acceptance.

Schwartz exemplifies the well-credentialed but scientifically-disputed pole of parapsychology — to be clearly distinguished from the legitimate mind-body science elsewhere in this archive (e.g., Benson, Davidson).