[Topher Cooper]

I was born a long time ago (1951) in the US. Since I was a small child I was interested in science and science fiction (There was always lots of SF around the house since my father was also a reader -- when he was a boy he used to go to the movies with his cousin, Rod Serling, to watch SciFi movies and serials like Buck Rogers). I got interested in computers because I thought that as a computer scientist I could work in many scientific fields.

I enjoyed reading Fortean material, including stuff about parapsychology, but as a science geek, I was skeptical without really giving it much thought. I wasn't going around and putting down people who thought otherwise, but I thought that it was so unlikely to be true that I never went beyond the popular accounts, which were easy to not take seriously.

I went to C-MU to study math and CS (there was no undergraduate CS degree at C-MU at that time) and began working for the AI lab the summer after my Freshman year. Eventually I switched from full-time student/part-time lab worker to full-time worker/part-time student.

With convenient access to a world-class science/engineering library I got in the habit of going through the stacks and reading technical journals in whatever fields my hands came to -- sometimes I just picked at random and sometimes I followed some themes. Obviously, without much training in most of the fields, a lot went mostly over my head and perhaps more went completely over my head, but I got a feel for what science was like in many different areas.

Then my hand came upon the Journal of Parapsychology and like anything else I began reading it.

There was something very wrong there. The science was not only as good as in other fields, the typical experimental paper was up there, in terms of care and attention to detail, with the best in other fields. Certainly there was stuff to nit-pick but that can always be done. There was other stuff I admired -- the field was far and away the most openly self-critical that I had ever found. In other fields, you mostly find criticism limited to areas of controversy or between people who could be quickly identified with a bit of research as being from rival groups in the field. But in the parapsychology there was great gobs of criticism from people who clearly supported the other's goals and who elsewhere published papers with the person criticized.

This was science as it should be -- except for the damned (using the word metaphorically rather than as a curse) results.

These did not fit in with my view of the way the Universe works. So I read more -- both back issues of the JoP, other journals found in other libraries, books in the field, and learned more of other relevant fields. At times I was tempted to just say that appearances must be deceiving and that these were a bunch of poor researchers with faulty experiments. But I had always believed that in science one does not throw out experiments because you don't like the outcome.

This was not easy -- it created real emotional turmoil, complete with bad dreams, irritability and loss of appetite. Eventually, though, I came to terms with it -- there was a big gaping whole in science's picture of how the universe was put together. Rather than try to ignore it, I decided to become involved. I made contact with people in the field, got "self-study" lab projects set up analyzing data, delivered some papers, etc.

Since that time I've continued my interests. I've stuck with what I consider to be my areas of expertise: statistical computation, theory, interpretation; and mostly just dabbled with doing experimental and field work myself. For a while I had a mailing list of stuff of interest (not just parapsychology) I trolled from the Internet, with comments, and sent out to people I thought would be interested. Sort of a early-WWW news-blog via EMail. This became a "news of interest" column for the Journal of Scientific Exploration that I did for a few years. I'm also one of the authors of the widely circulated parapsychology FAQ.

In the last few years I've been less active in parapsychology. Still as interested as ever, but my employment situation, and some other things going on in my life, has left me unable to attend meetings and I've sort of drifted away from most personal contact. I'm currently trying to reverse at least the latter and get back in the swing of things.