What is an average OBE like?

The previous case collections were made by researchers who believed implicitly in the astral projection interpretation of the OBE. A properly analyzed case collection can provide a rich source of information about what the OBE is like. The collections used here include those by Hart, Green, Poynton and Blackmore and the analysis is made by Blackmore [Bla82].

Hornell Hart, a professor of sociology at Duke University in North Carolina, collected together cases of what he called 'ESP projection' [Har54]. He required that the person not only have an OBE, but also acquire veridical information, as though from the OB location. This excludes many OBEs in which the information gained was wrong or could not be checked. He also rated the cases. The best possible case would gain a score of 1.0, but in fact the highest score given was .90. No higher scores were gained because the cases show a curious mixture of correct and incorrect vision which seems to be common in the OBE.

Through this research, one assumption is crucial, that ESP projection is a single phenomenon which might have any or all of Hart's eight features. Rogo [Rog78b] and Tart [Tar74a] have both suggested that several different types of experience may have been lumped together under the label 'OBE.' It could be that astral projection, traveling clairvoyance, and apparitions are quite different and need different interpretations, or other distinctions might be more relevant. The reason Hart gave why the non- evidential cases should be excluded is far from satisfactory: if there was no evidence of ESP they did not count in his analysis. Hart was ruling out the majority of cases on the basis of a very shaky criterion.

Perhaps the most thorough, and certainly the best-known case collection was carried out by Celia Green of the Institute of Psychophysical Research [Gre68a]. Her definition of an OBE was an experience, defined as follows, '... one in which the objects of perception are apparently organized in such a way that the observer seems to himself to be observing them from a point of view which is not coincident with his physical body.' J. C. Poynton [Poy75], like Green, advertised in the press, and circulated a questionnaire privately, and on the whole Poynton's results, although less detailed, are similar to Green's. Susan Blackmore [Bla82] has analyzed the cases collected by the SPR and by herself.