Gustav Geley

Gustav Geley (13 April 1868 – 15 July 1924) was a French physician, psychical researcher and director of the Institute Metapsychique International from 1919 to 1924.

Career Geley was born in 1868 at Montceau-les-Mines, France. He studied medicine in Annecy. In 1919, he gave up his practice as a physician and become the director of the Institut Mètapsychique International.

In the early 20th century Joaquin María Argamasilla known as the "Spaniard with X-ray Eyes" claimed to be able to read handwriting or numbers on dice through closed metal boxes. Argamasilla managed to fool Geley and Charles Richet into believing he had genuine psychic powers. In 1924 he was exposed by Harry Houdini as a fraud. Argamasilla peeked through his simple blindfold and lifted up the edge of the box so he could look inside it without others noticing.

Geley investigated the physical mediumship of Eva Carrière and Franek Kluski, It was reported in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology that Geley's "belief system seems to have made him a target for tricks by the mediums he studied and, in the end, capable of suppressing negative evidence." Lambert who had studied Geley's files on Eva Carrière discovered photographs depicting fraudulent ectoplasm taken by her companion Juliette Bisson.

Geley died in an airplane accident on 15 July 1924. He was 56.

Publications From the Unconscious to the Conscious (1921)