George P. Hansen

American former laboratory researcher in parapsychology, at the Rhine Research Center and the Psychophysical Research Laboratories, whose The Trickster and the Paranormal (2001) is the standard statement of the Trickster reading of the field. Drawing on Victor Turner’s liminality and Max Weber’s account of rationalisation, Hansen argues that psychic phenomena are intrinsically destructuring: they do not flourish inside stable institutions, and groups that succeed in institutionalising them acquire buildings, paid staff, and accusations of fraud. Self-published, and routinely discounted on that ground, it is nonetheless the book the field returns to whenever the deception is treated as data rather than noise.

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Trickster · John Keel · Charles Fort · Jason Reza Jorjani