John Edgar Coover

John Edgar Coover (March 16, 1872 – February 19, 1938), also known as J. E. Coover was an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his experiments into extrasensory perception.

Career

Coover carried out a psychical research programme at Stanford University (1912-1917). He conducted approximately 10, 000 experiments with 100 subjects to test for extrasensory perception (ESP). He concluded after four years of research that "statistical treatments of the data fail to reveal any cause beyond chance". He also conducted 1,000 experiments with psychics and it was revealed that they had no advantage of any supposed psychic ability over normal subjects. He was highly critical of mediumship which he considered the result of credulity and deception. This led to a dispute with Thomas Welton Stanford a wealthy spiritualist and brother of the university's founder, who had helped fund the psychical research programme at Stanford.

Publications

Formal Discipline From the Standpoint of Experimental Psychology (1916) Experiments in Psychical Research at Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford University Press, 1917).