In general professors are extremely poor about studying reports of paranormal phenomena, reports of extraordinary human abilities and reports of extraordinary human experiences. In the rare cases when a professor attempts to research such matters, he or she will typically use some incompetent search strategy. A professor will typically search for some topic using only a search of published scientific papers. That is not a very good strategy when searching for reports of the three types of things mentioned above, because most reports of such things do not end up in scientific papers, but appear in publications such as newspapers, books and periodicals.
It is not true that reports published in scientific papers are in general more reliable than reports published in newspapers, books and periodicals. I can think of endless reports I have read in newspapers and periodicals that met very good standards of evidence, by giving first-person accounts of experiences that occurred a short time ago, with named witnesses, named dates of observations and named places of observations. Conversely, scientific papers typically fail to follow good standards for reporting observations, because they tend to use a passive voice without mentioning specific observers, and they usually fail to specify exactly where and when an observation occurred. When reading some scientific paper, you may ask: who was the person who made some crucial hard-to-get-right observation that an entire paper hinges upon -- some professor who has used some fancy piece of equipment many times, or merely some newly admitted graduate student who may have been fumbling around when using the equipment the first time? We can't tell, because scientific papers are always using the passive voice, in a way that no specific observer is mentioned. For example, in scientific papers we do not read sentences such as, "On July 18, 2024 in Room 203 of the Cornell Neuroscience Lab, John Jacobsen tested the mice using a Morris water maze." Instead we read passive voice sentence such as "The mice were tested using the Morris water maze."
Let us look at some periodical accounts of out-of-body experiences, reports that were obtained using the search phrase "out-of-the-body experience." Before about 1975, this phrase was more popular than the term "out-of-body experience," which has become the more common phrase in the past several decades.
In the 1965 newspaper account here, TV personality Hughie Green says this about his experience in a car crash:
In the 1963 account here, a baron (Lord Ogmore) recalls an out-of-body experience:
The 1971 newspaper account below (which you can read here) discusses research by a South African researcher named J. C. Poynton. The terms "astral travel" and "astral projection" are terms for out-of-body experiences. Click on the image to read it better.
On page 62 of the January 26, 1934 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we have the account below of an out-of-body experience:
"A correspondent, Mrs. F. Shepherd, sends us an account
of the following out-of-the-body experience. ' I had had a severe shock,' she writes, ' when I
suddenly noticed that I was breathing in a strange way,
and with the last conscious breath I found myself slipping
out of the top of my head. I was an exact counterpart
of the body that lay upon the bed. I could see that it
had its eyes and mouth closed, and that I was connected
with it by some kind of cord. I tried in vain to make
myself known to the people in the room, who took no
notice of me whatever. My mind was very active; I
wished to recover the use of my body, and knew that in
order to enter it again I must get round to the foot end
of the figure. Movement was difficult in what appeared
to be a very heavy atmosphere, but eventually I reached
the right position ; whereupon I seemed to dissolve
into a quick-silver-like fluid and slipped into my body
by the toes. I advanced until I reached the centre of
the body where the cord was fixed, after which I was
my corporeal self once more.' "
In the 1977 article here, Joan Kron reports on research into out-of-body experiences. She states that she had several herself, stating this:
In the 1968 article here, we read of a large study of many people who had out-of-body experiences.
At the link here, we have a speaker claiming that when she asks her audience how many have had an out-of-body experience, she gets about one third of the audience raising their hands.
In 1968 there appeared the book Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Celia Green, the Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford University. Registered users at www.archive.org can read the book here. In 1966 an appeal had been made by radio for accounts of people who had such experiences. About 400 responses were received. Two questionnaires were sent to these people, and 326 replied to the first, with 251 to the second.
On page 22 we have these statistics: about 70% reported only one out-of-body experience, about 9 percent reported 2 such experiences, about 5% reported three such experiences, about 2% reported four such experiences, and about 21% reporting six or more such experiences. On page 24 we have a striking account by someone put in a glass cubicle in a hospital while suffering from a high fever. She reports being out of her body for 8 or 9 days, feeling no pain. She says, "I was no longer in my body but up in the corner of the cubicle watching the nurses flitting about."
On page 39 Green says, "Many subjects comment on their feelings of well-being and reality in their new position apart from their physical body, and there are no counter-instances, that is to say, no subjects remark on having felt incomplete, unsubstantial or unreal in their new position."
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