Obituary: Alan Vaughan: 1936-2001 - Obituary

Journal of Parapsychology, The, June, 2001 by Stephan A. Schwartz

Alan Vaughan, Ph.D., 64, died at peace in his Santa Monica, California, home Sunday, April 8, at 7:15 a.m., after a long illness. Vaughan was an unusual man, known for both his intellect and his intuitive abilities. He openly celebrated the part of himself that was psychic, participating in several dozen studies in human consciousness, as well as writing or coauthoring five books, including the classics Dream Telepathy and Patterns of Prophecy. For many years he has been listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful predictor in the world. One of the best known of his predictions was a letter he wrote, while in Germany in 1968, warning of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy-several weeks before Sirhan Sirhan actually committed the murder.

Vaughan was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1936, and educated in the city's public schools, augmented by the Great Books of the western World as assembled by Mortimer Adler, because his parents were deeply involved in the national study network built around the book series. Vaughan went on to the University of Akron, where he took a BA in Classical Studies, and then to Rutgers for graduate work. Illness forced him to leave before he completed this graduate degree. He would later be awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the International Institute of Integral Human Studies in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army to avoid the draft and was seconded to Army Intelligence, where he learned Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey, California. He was shipped to Frankfurt, Germany, to participate in the secret monitoring the United States was carrying out against the Soviet Union, through the now famous Berlin tunnel. While in the country, he taught himself German, adding that language to the Latin, Greek, Russian, and French he already knew.

While in Europe, Vaughan married his first wife, Iris. They were amicably divorced in the early 1970s, and there were no children.

After his military service, Vaughan moved to New York City and worked as a cartoon editor for the National Enquirer and science textbook editor for American Book Company. He found his life work in 1967 when Eileen Garrett, founder of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City-herself one of the most intensively studied psychics in modern times-funded a research grant for his studies in precognition and prophecy. In May of that year, Vaughan and his wife moved to London, where he compiled research for his book Patterns of Prophecy, notably at the College of Psychic Studies where he also began to work with his own abilities. Vaughan also studied the famous Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset, the principal psychic working with Professor William Tenaeff at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. A short while later, Professor Hans Bender, Director of the Institute for Parapsychology, invited Vaughan to work with him in Freiberg, Germany.

Next to predicting, Vaughan was probably best known for his work with dreams. In 1971, he was asked by Montague Ullman, M.D., psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and noted researcher in dream analysis, to become a participant in several studies of dream ESP that Ullman was conducting with psychologist Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. The work was carried out at the Dream Laboratory of the Maimonides Medical Center in New York, where Ullman was on staff. In 1973, these studies became the basis for Dream Telepathy, which Vaughan cowrote with the two researchers. It has become one of the best-known research books on dreams ever written.

While in New York, Vaughan also worked with Gertrude Schmeidler, a professor in the Department of Psychology of the City College of the City University of New York, and one of the pioneers of scientific parapsychology. Schmeidler had had a long-time interest in exploring whether there was a measurable psychic connection implicit in the teacher/student or researcher/subject relationship. Assisted by one of her students, Jane Goldberg, she pursued the idea with Vaughan and some students he was teaching. Schmeidler and Goldberg conducted a study with significant results, suggesting that the students seemed to be telepathically linked to Vaughan. When he correctly identified a target, the students were more likely to do so as well. And, when he missed the correct target or accurately described a different target, his students tended to do the same.

In 1968, when he was in New York, Vaughan was asked by Jim Bolen, publisher and editor of the as yet unpublished San Francisco-based magazine, Psychic, to become the East Coast editor, a post he shared with Stephan A. Schwartz throughout the short life of the first national glossy magazine to address this area of human life. It began a friendship that in 1977 would become a working relationship when Vaughan was asked to join the ongoing research in applied Remote Viewing being carried out by The Mobius Society, a Los Angeles-based research laboratory studying extraordinary human performance, of which Schwartz was research director. These experiments began with the discovery of a previously unknown wreck off Catalina Island, using a submarine, that was the subject of a national television documentary.