The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/John Palmer.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	relations	created	updated
John A. Palmer	Scientists & Researchers	Person JohnPalmer Parapsychology RhineResearchCenter	Parapsychologist, Rhine Research Center research director and Parapsychological Association president in 1979 and 1992, who wrote a 1985 Army Research Institute assessment of the field.	type with start end role fn head_of Parapsychological Association 1979 1979 president, convention year 1979 (Moraga, California) 1 type with start end role fn head_of Parapsychological Association 1992 1992 president, convention year 1992 (Las Vegas, Nevada) 1	2026-09-22	2026-10-09

John A. Palmer graduated from Duke University in psychology, took his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, spent two years on the psychology faculty at McGill University and "entered parapsychology on a full-time basis," heading the graduate program in parapsychology at John F. Kennedy University from 1977 to 1981 and holding research posts at the University of Virginia, the University of California, Davis and the University of Utrecht. The association's member directory states that he was president of the Parapsychological Association in 1971, 1979 and 1992; the association's convention table lists Gertrude Schmeidler as president for 1971 and Palmer for 1979 and 1992.¹ He became director of research at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, editor of the Journal of Parapsychology and director of its summer study program. His publications include, with Whitson, Bogart and Charles Tart, "Preliminary experiments in group 'remote viewing'" (Proceedings of the IEEE, 1976), "In defense of parapsychology: A reply to James Alcock" (Zetetic Scholar, 1983), "An evaluative report on the current status of parapsychology," under contract DAJA 45-84-M-0405 for the United States Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (1985), and, with Charles Honorton and Jessica Utts, the Parapsychological Association's reply to the National Research Council's 1988 report. The CIA's chronology of the Star Gate transfer records that on March 15, 1995, "Jessica Utts, John Palmer, James Alcock, and Ray Hyman contacted by NRC and agree to act as commissioned reviewers," and that on May 10 the NRC "formally rejects" the study.²

Footnotes

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1. "PA Convention History," Parapsychological Association website, archived December 29, 2016, listing John Palmer as president for the 1979 convention (Moraga, California) and the 1992 convention (Las Vegas, Nevada) and Gertrude Schmeidler for 1971. https://web.archive.org/web/20161229231222/http://www.parapsych.org/section/23/convention_history.aspx ↩︎

2. "Who is John Palmer?" Parapsychological Association member directory, archived.parapsych.org/members/j_palmer.html, Wayback Machine capture of 2020. "Star Gate Transfer Chronology: 1995," CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190017-9. ↩︎