CFI Blogs

Academia has long been a little suspicious of the Fortean world, and with some reason. There has always been so much woolly thinking, so many unprovable hypotheses, and so little truck with the scientific method on our side of the academic iron curtain that — setting aside the rationalists at CSICOP — aspiring scholars have chosen to stay well clear of our subject when it comes to selecting areas of study, and most especially when choosing a topic for that most important of academic hurdles, the PhD thesis - a critical decision that can heavily affect one's chances of securing employment thereafter.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Students of folklore, social studies and psychology have occasionally turned their attention to the sort of topics covered in Fortean Times. But even in these disciplines, the problems of securing funding, a supervisor and — above all — maximising the prospects of finding a job have deterred all but a few from pursuing serious study of Fortean topics, now matter how sceptical the writers’ viewpoint.

That this is a great shame goes pretty much without saying. Few able researchers in our field have the luxury of devoting three or more years to full–time work on any topic, or of utilising the sort of resources available in great universities and large academic libraries. But the problem works both ways. When was the last time you saw a truly academic work, much less an unpublished thesis, referenced in a book by a Fortean author?

Ignoring what’s going on in behind closed doors in those ivy towers of academia belittles and restricts us, and it’s certainly worth bearing in mind that more than a handful of interesting and important academic works on Fortean topics do exist and that these can all too easily slip under the radar of even the most dedicated Fortean. Academic books are generally published in editions of as few as 200 copies, practically all of which will find their way into major research libraries rarely visited by the public, and unpublished theses — the vast majority of PhD research remains unpublished — are practically never consulted, even by other academics.

Researchers face considerable difficulty, in fact, in discovering what MA, MSc and PhD theses even exist. Various academic databases do give details. The British Library, for example, must by law receive a copy of every PhD thesis completed in Britain, and it lists these in its integrated catalogue. Even here, though, finding an unpublished thesis is a matter of serendipity. There’s no catalogue that allows you to search for theses alone by topic or subject keyword, and the same holds true for our other great libraries. Cambridge University Library, for instance, holds 26,000 theses in its manuscript department, and maintains a separate card catalogue listing them for the benefit of those who can actually make it to Cambridge, but coverage of such works in Newton, its online catalogue, is patchy, especially for theses completed before 1970.

Rather more usefully, theses dating all the way back to 1716 for all British universities have been catalogued and are listed in the Index to Theses in Great Britain and Ireland. Unfortunately, this is a subscription–only site, rarely accessible outside major research libraries. Large reference libraries will also hold the old text version of the Index, but this suffers from the additional huge drawback that it is arranged both annually and by broad subject area. Searching for anything on a particular topic, say UFOs, without knowing author, title and discipline in advance is thus a hugely time–consuming prospect.

Most countries, incidentally, have equivalent indexes and equivalent sites that can be found with a bare minimum of searching. There’s one for Canadian theses, for instance, which is freely accessible and easily searchable by keyword. And some fairly simple searches turn up the odd online bibliography of Fortean dissertations. Some of these theses can be accessed electronically, at least from academic libraries; for others, one would have to turn to interlibrary loans.

Thing are slightly better in the US — but only slightly. An organisation called University Microfilms International has gathered together and filmed virtually all US PhD theses and many masters dissertations written since the Civil War — only a couple of dissenting institutions, such as Columbia, are not represented. And these theses are available, both to academics and the general public, via a freely–accessible website. They can be purchased, as unbound but perfectly legible printouts from microfilm, for a little over $40 a pop.

The great problem is that the UMI search system is, without question, one of the most frustrating I’ve ever come across. Again, everything’s fine if you actually know the author or title of the thesis you are searching for. If you don’t, UMI does allow general searches by keyword. But the system allows only searches by single keyword or by phrase and, worse, limits the number of hits it returns to a deeply arbitrary and frustrating 40. If you’re searching a popular keyword, you’ll almost always come up against the latter problem — the system simply displays the first 40 hits it comes up with and gives you no way to find out how many more are behind that first 40, or how to access them. The only way to find more is to hazard a guess at likely combinations of keywords. Searching, as I did a couple of years ago, for theses dealing with the policing of New York City, involved being fairly creative. Enter “New York City police” as a search string and you will only find theses that have that precise combination of words, in that order, in their titles. Theses entitled “New York City and its Police” or “Policing New York City” would not be turned up by that search, and would only be findable by creatively searching all likely word combinations.

Still, once you’ve mastered these basic tricks, there are actually a good number of interesting–looking academic works about. A large proportion, I’d guess, involve the study of spiritualism, the occult, and the folklore of Fortean phenomena, these being the most academically respectable of topics. But there are others, albeit practically always with a cultural or social twist. Probably the most unexpected discovery I made, in a spare half hour of fairly random searching, was this, from UMI:

Eric Cheezum: Discovering Chessie: Waterfront, regional identity, and the Chesapeake Bay sea monster, 1960-2000. University of South Carolina PhD, 2007.

Here, though, is an equally fortuitous assembly of other academic theses in our field, to encourage all of you to make further investigations of your own. It’s far from comprehensive, but it certainly does indicate the sort of riches awaiting anyone prepared to look beyond the obvious when it comes to good, scholarly sources of information… and, I repeat, how many of these have any of you ever seen referenced, anywhere?

Maureen Bradley. Specters of war: An analysis of ghost stories and other stories of the occult set in the American Civil War. University of Hawaii at Manoa MA, 1994.

Philip S. Cho. Ritual and the occult in Chinese medicine and religious healing: The development of zhuyou exorcism. University of Pennsylvania PhD, 2005.

Timothy Correll. 'Away with the fairies': Wise folk, healing, and the Otherworld in Irish oral narrative and belief. University of California at Los Angeles PhD, 2003.

Anne Cross. A Confederacy of Faith and Fact: UFO Research and the Search for Other Worlds. Yale University PhD, 2000.

Patricia Cross. A Social Psychological Investigation of UFO Sighters. Carleton University PhD, 1992.

Duncan Day. Psychological correlates of the UFO abduction experience: the role of beliefs and indirect suggestions on abduction accounts obtained during hypnosis. Concordia University (Canada) PhD, 1998.

Hector Falcon. The occult roots of Nazi racial policy: Some theological and policy considerations. Regent University MA, 1994.

Lasse Hertel. An application of speech processing techniques to recordings of purported bigfoot vocalizations to estimate physical parameters. University of Wyoming MS dissertation, 1979.

David Hinson. Comparing stories of extraterrestrials with stories of fairies. University of North Carolina MLA, 2003.

Adrian Iwachiw. Places of power: sacred sites, Gaia's pilgrims, and the politics of landscape. An interpretive study of the geographics of New Age and contemporary earth spirituality, with reference to Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona. York University (Canada) PhD, 1997.

Suzanne Kaufman. Miracles, medicine and the spectacle of Lourdes: Popular religion and modernity in Fin-de-Siecle France. State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick PhD, 1996.

Minor Latham. The Elizabethan Fairies: the Fairies of Folkore and the Fairies of Shakespeare. Columbia University Phd, 1930.

Paul McCarthy. Politicking and Paradigm Shifting: James E McDonald and the UFO Case Study. University of Hawaii at Manoa PhD 1975.

Tracesandra McDonald. Witchcraft and Occult Crime Within a Contemporary Canadian Context. University of Ottawa PhD, 1999.

Linda Milligan. The UFO Debate: A Study of Contemporary Legend (2 vols). Ohio State University PhD, 1988.

Julie Parnell. Personality Characteristics of the MMPI, 16PF, and ACL of Persons Who Claim UFO Experiences. University of Wyoming PhD, 1986.

Cynthia Schrager. Both sides of the veil: Psychology, the occult and American realism. University of California, Berkeley, PhD, 1995.

Michael Schutz. Organizational Goals and Support—seeking Behavior: A Comparative Study of Social Movement Organizations in the UFO (Flying Saucer) Field. Northwestern University PhD, 1973.

Barry Sparkes. Playing with the devil: Adolescent involvement with the occult, black magic, witchcraft and the satanic to manage feelings of despair. University of Massachusetts at Amherst PhD, 1989.

Tammy Stone–Gordon. 'Fifty-cent sybils': Occult workers and the symbolic marketplace in the urban United States, 1850-1930 (California, Missouri, Massachusetts, New York City, Illinois). Michigan State University PhD, 1998.