Who Was John Beloff? (1920-2006)

Autobiography

One of the temptations that a biographer must resist is the use of hindsight to give a spurious continuity to the life in question and thereby ignoring the part played by sheer chance. Parapsychology is such a deviant pursuit in our society that it is nevertheless proper to inquire how someone gets drawn into it. Perhaps the two most common explanations, in this connection, are the following. The individual in question may at some stage of his or her life have had intimations of the paranormal so impressive or disturbing that thereafter the topic became a consuming passion. Alternatively, and less dramatically, an interest in the paranormal may have been so strongly embedded in that person's family background and traditions that the seeds were sown from an early age.

Neither explanation, however, fits my particular case. Never at any time, alas, have I been favoured with one of those inexplicable incidents which so many people I have met can recall from their past and which have played their part in the lives of so many of my fellow parapsychologists (Pilkington 1987). Indeed, I wonder sometimes whether I might not be specially deprived in this respect. Am I, perhaps, tone deaf to the promptings of my psyche? Has my right hemisphere - that half of the brain that is said to mediate our intuitions and our psychic functioning- become atrophied from neglect? I do not know, but I remain a stranger to such experiences. Still less can the answer be found in my family background. My family were all, without exception, stolidly impervious to what my friend, Stanley Krippner, has so aptly called the "song of the siren" (Krippner 1977). A much simpler, if less charitable, explanation in my case is my lack of success in any of the conventional pursuits. Deviants, after all, are generally misfits.

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