D Scott Rogo

Biography

He wrote or co-wrote 20 books and more than 100 magazine and journal articles, 7 books were reprinted in 2005 by Anomalist Books, Leaving the body was reprinted in 2008 by Simon & Schuster. Rogo was active at the Psychical Research Foundation (formerly at Durham, North Carolina) and at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Born in Los Angeles, California and educated at the University of Cincinnati and San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge; he graduated summa cum laude from the latter institution in 1972. (His B.A. was in music; Rogo played the oboe and the English horn, and for two years played professionally with the San Diego Symphony and other ensembles.) Rogo served as a consulting editor for Fate Magazine for which he wrote a regular column; he advocated greater involvement by both researchers and skeptics in parapsychological research.

Rogo was open minded on the question of survival of consciousness after death, he wrote that he was "favourable to the survival notion" he was however skeptical about some of the phenomena involved in psychical research as he believed they could be psychological experiences. He is most well known for his book written with Raymond Bayless titled Phone Calls From The Dead (1979) in which they describe an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which people report that they receive simple, brief, and usually single-occurrence telephone calls from spirits of deceased relatives, friends, or strangers.

In his book The Haunted Universe (1977) Rogo hypothesized that strange phenomena such as flying saucers and Bigfoot are really psychic projections that are produced by the minds of the observers themselves.

Death

Rogo was last seen alive on August 14, 1990. He was found stabbed to death in his home by police on August 16. There were no signs of a struggle although a number of Rogo's personal items were missing and his wallet was empty. The police later arrested a 29-year-old Hispanic man, John Battista. After an initial mistrial, he was tried and convicted of Rogo's murder in 1992. After lengthy appeals, his conviction was later overturned, due to prosecutorial misconduct, in 1996. His killer is still unknown and the case remains open.

Reception

In his memory, the Parapsychology Foundation established The D. Scott Rogo Award for Parapsychological Literature in 1992 to benefit authors working on manuscripts pertaining to parapsychology. The parapsychologist George P. Hansen wrote: "Scott was also a leading authority on the history of psychical research. In this I would estimate that there are only three or four people in the world who might be considered to be in his league. The breadth of his historical knowledge of the field was unsurpassed."

Rosemary Guiley has written "within the parapsychology establishment, Rogo was often faulted for poor scholarship, which, critics said, led to erroneous conclusions." The parapsychologist Douglas Stokes wrote that Rogo's Phone Calls From The Dead "was widely criticized in the parapsychological community for its generally sloppy and credulous nature."

Science writer Terence Hines has written Rogo was a proponent of pseudoscience as he had advocated a nonfalsifiable hypothesis in parapsychology.

Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell has heavily criticized Rogo for being "credulous". In his book Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry Into Wondrous Phenomena, Rogo declared various cases to be evidence for genuine miracles. However, Nickell found possible naturalistic explanations that Rogo had ignored.