Award for respected researcher

by SIMON FORSYTH

     THE PRESTIGIOUS Myers Memorial Medal for outstanding contributions to psychical research was on 2004, on the 9th October, awarded by the SPR in London to Scottish SPR founder President Professor Archie E. Roy.

The Medal commemorates the work of Frederic W. H. Myers, one of the founding fathers of the SPR, whose classic work Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, first published in 1903, holds its place in the literature to this day.

This medal is not awarded on a yearly basis but only when a suitable candidate has been identified. Other recipients of this medal have been Professor Ian Stevenson, Professor Donald West, Dr. John Beloff and Dr. Alan Gauld.

Archie Roy has given classes on Psychical Research to extra mural students at Glasgow University for the best part of 30 years and continues to do so. During this time he has engendered an intellectual interest in all who attended these classes. More or less as a result of the interest shown, he founded the SSPR in 1987 in order that people be able to meet and discuss these events further.

He was President of the SPR from 1993 to 1995 and has been a Vice-President ever since. Some years ago he also helped to found PRISM (Psychical Research Involving Selected Mediums) which encourages, guides and funds research work with mediums. He has worked with Tricia Robertson on such research work, with two papers already published by the SPR and a third due for publication in January 2004.

In addition to such planned research work Prof. Roy has, over the past thirty years, investigated innumerable spontaneous cases of allegedly haunted places and haunted people.