Award given to Professor Archie E Roy, founder of the SSPR

The prestigious Myers Memorial Medal for outstanding contributions to psychical research was this year , on the 9th October, awarded by the SPR in London to our own founding President 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 would be able to meet and discuss these events further.

With Archie as founding President the society has flourished and attracts many knowledgeable speakers to its programme of lectures and enjoys a lively audience of 80 or more at every monthly lecture in Glasgow University.

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 Archie has, over the past thirty years, investigated innumerable spontaneous cases of allegedly haunted places and haunted people.

Archie is an Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University and someone who is still producing text books on this subject while continuing his research in celestial mechanics with Dr Bonnie Steves at Glasgow Caledonian University, where he is a visiting professor..

Coupled with this are his writing skills as a novelist, an author of five works of fiction. He has also published two well-received books on the paranormal, “A Sense of Something Strange” and “Archives of the Mind.” He has also finished a first draft of his third, entitled “The Eager Dead”

As someone with such a record who is still engaged in experimental and theoretical psychical research, he is truly a very worthy recipient of the Myers Memorial Medal and all of us in the SSPR applaud this well deserved honour which has been conferred on him.