Arthur Allan Thomas spoke from his farm in Orini years after he was pardoned in 1979 for the murders of the Crewe family in Pukekawa. Photo / Greg Bowker
OPINION:
I’ve had some crazy research experiences. The fieldwork research makes for the best dinner party stories, but some of my favourites come from doing boring old archival work.
Telling the tale of how I accidentally instigated a prison break in Papua New Guinea is clearly a cooler story than finding a note in a box of old documents, but it’s often the latter that offers the most interesting insights. Moreover, I’m fond of them because the archives never end in me getting physically assaulted or risking arrest, which my best fieldwork stories do.
Recently, I started flicking through a huge collection of old newspaper clippings, carefully collected over the best part of four decades and glued into a big bundle of scrapbooks. They were the handiwork of retired professor Greg Newbold.
Each of the scrapbooks covered different topics over many years, but I was drawn to the ones with ‘Arthur Allan Thomas’ written on the front. Four scrapbooks, in all. Like it has for many New Zealanders, the case has always held a fascination for me. Beyond Reasonable Doubt, the David Yallop book that led to Thomas’s conviction being overturned, was the first adult book I read. At the time, I was more interested in the adventures of The Hardy Boys or The Famous Five.
Seeing the Thomas case unfold page by page in these old scrapbooks as the 1970s progressed was as interesting as you’d expect, but then I noticed an article covering the insights of a psychic. ‘Huh’, I thought to myself. Some pages later, I saw another, and so I started keeping an eye out for them – and there were a bunch.
One said Thomas was simply innocent, while another got more specific, saying the killers (yes, plural) were in the US. Another said they predicted that one of Thomas’s close relatives would die before he was released - but given he was in prison for nine years, that was a gimme. Among the psychics there was also another flavour of mystic, an astrologist, who claimed the stars clearly showed what didn’t happen, but the stars were unable to say exactly what did.
As it turns out, the 1970s were a good time for this type of folly. A less prominent battle in the Cold War appears to have been the battle between the USSR and the US in research, trying to discover an advantageous use for psychics.
In 1977, a psychic who defected from the Soviet Union said that the USSR had been doing work on parapsychology for military and police purposes. In 1978, the US army established Project Stargate, a secret venture to determine whether “remote viewing” could be used to peer into the dark and secretive Soviet Union. It employed around 20 psychics over its lifetime, and at its height had a staff of around 15 to 20 people.
It appears as though both sides of the iron curtain, at least in part, were driven by concerns that the other side was making advances in this area.
During this period there were also the sceptics; the most famous was James Randi, a magician turned champion of non-bullshit. Randi helped uncover numerous frauds, not least of whom was Uri Geller, who claimed – and was remarkably believed – to be able to bend spoons with his mind.
God knows when the Russians pulled the plug on their psychic programme, but the CIA scuttled and declassified theirs in 1995, declaring it to have been of no value.
It was easy for me to write this off as folly of the past until somebody in my office mentioned two words: Sensing Murder.
Sensing Murder was a shameful act of television that laughingly said it would help solve cold-case murders in New Zealand. In reality, it gave terrible hope or trauma to victims’ families and raised the profile of – and enriched – three people I consider utter charlatans who starred in the show. Surely it would be better to fund shows by dogged journalists in the mould of Pat Booth, who worked tirelessly on the Thomas case - but that’s not what we do, apparently.
Needless to say, Sensing Murder never led to anything that assisted in any case, let alone come even close to solving one. The only surprising thing is that the show was on air for six seasons. And this is recently, running until 2018; a nonsense of our time. That’s without talking about the likes of Ken Ring and the scores of people swayed by pseudoscience nonsense around vaccines or climate change.
Whenever I write a column, I get people emailing me to complain or to abuse me. So, proving my own mystic powers, I predict that this week I will hear from those claiming psychic ability. But, really, if they wanted to prove their point, they should have emailed me before this column was published.
Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the Director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.