by Óscar Iborra
The modern parapsychology field in Spain began with two important events that appealed to the general public. The first was the Bélmez Faces phenomenon in 1971, which was alleged paranormal “impressions” of faces and figures on the floor of a house in Bélmez de la Moraleda, a small village in Andalucía. For the first time, people were talking about “parapsychological phenomena” and “parapsychology.” The other event was the visit of Uri Geller in 1975. He appeared on a TV show ostensibly bending metal.
In a more academic vein, parapsychology became a part of the university system in the 1970s. In 1973, José de Solás, professor at the Madrid Autonoma University, introduced Germán de Argumosa’s work, a philosopher who investigated the Bélmez case and offered talks and courses on parapsychology. In 1975, Madrid Complutense University did the same with Ramos Perera, president of the Spanish Society of Parapsychology (SEP). Also, in 1975, Miguel Ángel Romero, who was 21 years old, and Lorenzo Egido Miguel, who was 22 years old, both students, founded a parapsychology laboratory at the Madrid Politécnica University, as a student association named “Overmatch.” Stanley Krippner and John Beloff were Miguel Ángel Romero’s sponsors when he decided to join the PA. Stanley Krippner even visited the lab. This laboratory carried out ESP and PK research, and the lab members built their own research devices. In 1981, they created a database on premonitions to carry out statistical studies on premonitions.
The Spanish Society of Parapsychology (SEP) was founded in 1979 in Madrid by Ramos Perera Molina with the aim of studying paranormal phenomena from a scientific perspective. It emerged in a context of growing interest in the occult in Spain, especially after the Franco dictatorship, when freedom of thought and expression increased. They published the journal Psi Comunicación from 1975 to 1999. For decades, they carried out various experiments in ESP, PK, poltergeist field studies, and psychological studies. Some members of Madrid Complutense University collaborated occasionally with the Society.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many parapsychology research groups were operating at the local level – it is impossible to list them all here. They were connected to each other by phone, letters, and bulletins where they published their research. Today, Manuel Carballal keeps a large number of these documents. He studied theology and criminology, specializing in criminality associated with paranormal beliefs. His book Investigación PSI (2023) covers the history of parapsychology research in Spain.
Here is a bit of background on some of these societies that investigated parapsychological topics. Hipergea, located in Barcelona, from the 1970s through the 1980s, was led by José Antonio Lamich Cámara for more than 20 years. He worked with the Hispano-American Institute of Parapsychological Sciences in the 1970s. In 1975, he left the institute to conduct independent research with a multidisciplinary team. Most of them were members of the Santa Creu Hospital in Barcelona. One of the most extraordinary experiments carried out by Hipergea consisted of the production of an ectoplasmic formation by a medium and subsequent analysis by Kamal Hawtahme. According to the results, the ectoplasm was a lingual extension: the cells were lingual epithelial cells that had not finished forming (Moreno, 2012). The researchers worked secretly. Sometimes they used the hospital equipment for their research by night so as not to be discovered for fear of the academic consequences they might suffer if their interest in parapsychology became known.
Another research society was AVIPO (Valencian Association of Parapsychological and Ufological Research), founded in 1988 with Francisco Máñez as president beginning in 1991. They conducted ESP, PK, and electronic voice phenomena (EVP) research. Máñez expanded research on EVPs to obtain psychoimages: images that appear spontaneously manifest on a television screen, often without a transmission signal. These images can vary in content and quality, sometimes accompanied by audio, suggesting an intelligent message. A basic procedure to get psychoimages would be as follows: a feedback loop is used with a video camera, a television, and a VCR. The camera captures the television image, the VCR records and plays it back, creating a cycle that can generate different shapes and figures on the screen. Máñez obtained numerous images of this type, which, unlike those obtained by other European researchers, do not point to the afterlife as the origin of these paranormal images, but rather to a parapsychological cause directly related to the researchers. The images obtained by AVIPO are not limited to human faces, landscapes, and so on, but have even obtained paranormal images of standard Zener cards, mandalas, etc. (Máñez et al., 1995). In 1996, Máñez attended the Second PSI Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to present his talk: “Contributions of Modern Parapsychology to Psychology.” He published Cuando la razón duerme (When reason sleeps) (Máñez Ferrer, 1997), which was the book where he expressed his conclusions on the origin of parapsychological phenomena, calling this the “collapse theory.”
On the topic of EVPs, it is worth mentioning the work of Anabela Cardoso, who was a Portuguese diplomat and researcher. During 2008 and 2009, she conducted a research project on electronic voices carried out under strictly controlled conditions (Cardoso, 2012). It took place over two years in acoustically isolated professional recording laboratories with the participation of renowned European experimenters from Germany, Spain, and Portugal. The research was conducted in the most modern acoustics laboratories in Vigo, Spain, with the collaboration of the Telecommunications Department of the School of Engineering of the University of Vigo. During 2008 and 2009, dozens of recording sessions were carried out, always supervised by sound technicians. The conclusions of the study, reflected in the article, state that the reality of anomalous electronic voices was confirmed in acoustically controlled environments and with different operators. The voices seemed to benefit from the presence of ambient noise, primarily human voices and metallic clicks.
The conclusions of the study, reflected in the article, state that the reality of anomalous electronic voices was confirmed in acoustically controlled environments and with different operators.
One of the most amazing cases in Spain on ESP and macro-PK research is Mónica Nieto (Carballal, 2023). She was 15 years old at the beginning of the research in 1987. According to her mother, she folded a piece of cutlery in 1977 while listening to a radio broadcast, which was similar to what Uri Geller did on TV two years before. Mónica Nieto reported to family and close friends that she had strange perceptions and dreams, some of them premonitory.
The research on this case was conducted by the CEPEX (Centro de Estudios Parapsicológicos de Extremadura). The core research team was composed of Pedro Criado, Rafael Rivera, and Juan Carlos Hernández Cárrica. The researchers funded the entire three-year research project personally. They received no institutional support. Mónica Nieto never had any objections to the controls used by CEPEX. The research consisted of two phases: PK and ESP. All the data presented below regarding the research with Mónica Nieto comes from the CEPEX’s reports. These reports are currently in the possession of Manuel Carballal (2023), who presents these results in his book Investigación PSI.
The research team included, among others, physicists, psychiatrists, and illusionists. Out of 515 PK experiments, 292 gave positive results. On numerous occasions, the researchers placed the objects in sealed tubes. The participant could also return them to their original shape, after having been bent, with a 90% success rate. In some tests, she was asked to make the metal take certain shapes, with positive results. In April 1987, she did some tests similar to these in the presence of an unbiased witness (public notary), also with positive results. One interesting finding was that the temperature of Monica’s hands increased when she was bending metal. Other researchers corroborated this during the three years of research. In 1988, CEPEX unveiled the results of the PK research at a public conference. Mónica Nieto became famous internationally. Researchers from other countries (Germany, Italy, and Japan, for example) traveled to Spain to study Monica, who even traveled to Japan to demonstrate her paranormal abilities.
The ESP results were poor regarding telepathy and precognition, but spectacular regarding clairvoyance – the results were far above chance. Again, CEPEX carried out another session with an unbiased witness, also with successful results.
However, Mónica Nieto was not interested in proving these abilities. She took the tests at her mother’s insistence. When she turned 18, the age when a person is considered an adult in Spain, she refused to take any more tests and disappeared. Guessing Zener cards or bending metal seemed silly to her; she once said to one of the researchers, Manuel Carballal, that she would like to do something useful with her ability, such as healing. Today, she works as an herbalist, and she uses her “power,” if we can call it that, for healing.
To fully understand the history of parapsychology in Spain, it is necessary to take into account the role of television. In the 1980s, there were TV shows about parapsychology and related topics, with guests who had a scientific background. In 1990, private television channels began broadcasting. These new channels did great damage to academic parapsychology because they offered a grotesque and ridiculous image of parapsychology. This favored the skeptical movement because it gave credibility to the idea that parapsychology is a pseudoscience.
Two of the most prominent pseudo-skeptical groups in Spain were Alternativa Racional a las Pseudociencias (Rational Alternative to Pseudoscience), founded in 1986. It changed its name to ARP – Sociedad para el Avance del Pensamiento Crítico (Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking) in 1998. The other main group was Círculo Escéptico (Skeptical Circle), which split from ARP and was founded in 2001. In theory, its objective was to fight against pseudoscience and promote critical thinking. But nothing is what it seems with pseudo-skepticism. These groups have a dark side that reflects their true purpose, a purpose that has little to do with promoting critical thinking. They continually put scientific parapsychology on the same status as believing in outlandish claims. They mobilize very aggressive public campaigns against any university that carries out any activity that these pseudo-skeptics consider pseudoscience. Why is pseudo-skepticism so successful in Spain? Real skepticism is necessary. However, these groups did not espouse real skepticism. Pseudo-skeptical discourse is successful among academics because it remains unaware of the existence and history of scientific research in parapsychology. Psuedo-skeptics have a distorted image of parapsychology as being far from scientific research. Sometimes universities themselves take advantage of the tactics of pseudo-skeptics for their internal struggles if necessary. This happened in the 1970s and 1980s with the pioneers in parapsychology research in Spain – many academics now do not carry out research or education on parapsychology due to fear of the consequences in their academic career.
These groups have a dark side that reflects their true purpose, a purpose that has little to do with promoting critical thinking.
Given these movements occurring in the 1990s, parapsychology, nonetheless, continued its journey in Spain. One research project that was a part of the Ph.D. studies of the author of this essay was to study the effect of global consciousness on motor performance. We ruled out the PK hypothesis since motor explanation was more accurate. I taught two editions of a course on scientific parapsychology at the University of Salamanca in 2007 and 2008. My current project involves the use of thermography in the search for a somatic marker in hits on an ESP task.
Jaume Esteve and José Luis Ortiz are two psychologists and researchers situated in Barcelona. They have conducted several investigations in the last 20 years on psi and altered states of consciousness. Esteve carried out a pilot Ganzfeld (2004-2005) as a practical experimental activity at UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) (Esteve, 2016). From 2006 to 2015, they led their work through PSILAB, a student association of Barcelona University, with projects including suggestion and its relation to anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness and anomalous activity of the environment. In 2015, they left the PSILAB association and the University of Barcelona, and later created another group of students and activated a new association linked to the university with the name of PSILAB BCN, this time with a neuroscientific orientation. They developed new projects that include field research, studies on poltergeist, EEG, and tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) in 2016, research on altered states of consciousness between 2017-2022. The results of all these studies will be published in a book that Jaume Esteve is currently writing.
As one example, Álex Escolà-Gascón, from the Department of Quantitative Methods and Statistics (Comillas Pontifical University), has published over 40 papers on areas such as paranormal beliefs, remote viewing, review of demonic possession, and anomalous cognition. He created MMSI-2, a questionnaire (full version: 174 items) developed specifically for psychological assessment and prediction of anomalous phenomena. In 2024, he won a grant from SPR with his research “quantum-like psi learning.”
Jose Miguel Pérez Navarro, in the Department of Psychology at Coventry University, has several publications on the Ganzfeld and is a professor at La Rioja International University. His research interests focus on the study of the formation and support of paranormal beliefs, subjective extraordinary experiences, and the experimental evaluation of paranormal claims.
A current example of the negative attitude that still exists in today’s Spanish academy is related to the work of Carlos Romero Rivas of Granada University, who has conducted studies on remote interpersonal synchrony (not yet published), based on observations from the field of physics, such as quantum pseudo-telepathy and non-locality. He presented a study entitled “Testing pseudo-telepathy in human behavior: A pilot study” at the 2024 Congress of the Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology (SEPEX). The scientific committee of the congress forced him to change the title of his paper to “A pilot study on remote behavioral synchrony” and to eliminate any reference to the term “pseudo-telepathy” or related studies.
In conclusion, there is little continuity in the Spanish university regarding parapsychological research. We are always starting over repeatedly. We have no cumulative work, and the new researchers do not know the old ones. We also have to fight against the problem of pseudo-skepticism and the popular and erroneous image of parapsychology. There is a lack of knowledge about the scientific research in parapsychology within the Spanish academy and the larger public. We need not only more research, but also more education on parapsychology.
Carballal, M. (2023). Investigación PSI. El Ojo Crítico.
Cardoso, A. (2012). A two-year investigation of the allegedly anomalous electronic voices or EVP. NeuroQuantology, 10(3), 492-514. http://www.itcjournal.org/?p=6167
Esteve Pérez, J. (2016). Proceso cognitivo-anómalo de transferencia de información y dimensiones de la personalidad: un estudio piloto. RAAC. Revista Académica sobre Anomalías del Comportamiento, 1(1).
Máñez, F., Roselló, J., & Fletcher, J. (1995). Psicoimágenes: ¿Creaciones de la mente o mensajes del más allá? Año Cero, 6(56), 32-35.
Máñez Ferrer, F. J. (1997). Cuando la razón duerme. Tetragrama.
Moreno, J. (2012). Experimentación ectoplasmática por el grupo Hipergea. Realidad Trascendental. https://realidadtrascendental.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/experimentacion-ectoplasmatica-por-el-grupo-hipergea/
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