Dr. Jan W. Vandersande completed his undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, his M.Sc. in physics at Cornell in 1969, and Ph.D. in physics at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa while studying the thermal properties of diamonds. He then was an Associate Professor at Witwatersrand and Cornell. He has published more than 80 scientific articles.
In his book Life After Death: Some of the Best Evidence, Jan discusses physical mediumship, exploring some of the best and most interesting cases of various physical phenomena while also reporting on his own observations of some genuine physical mediums.
Jan has a physical mediumship circle that after a few years has been getting table levitation for up to 1-2 minutes and several feet high. Also chimes hanging from the ceiling ring several times during the sitting.
Jan and his wife Marlene sat regularly with Mickey and Sara Wolf in the 1970s. In their first sitting with Mickey and Sara they experienced trance mediumship, direct voice, and trumpets flying around the dark room. The trumpet, with luminous spots on it, flew around the totally dark room quite rapidly, up to the ceiling then to the walls and then slow down and gently touch each of the sitters (usually between four and eight) on the knee or on the head. Ectoplasmic spirit children played musical toys that had been placed in the center of the circle and also unwrapped presents that were in the center of the circle. Then the children would touch the sitters who could feel the small fingers and hands.
Jan has seen ectoplasm in a transparent form at a sitting with Mickey and Sara and their medium friends Max and Kitty Gordon. With the red light on Brian, Sara’s guide (the usual master of ceremonies), told us to open the curtains to the cabinet where they sat. We could all see the three mediums in trance sitting in the cabinet. Then ectoplasm started pouring out of Kitty’s nose and started to form a gauze-like sheet. One of the sitters was then told to pick up the end of the ectoplasm on the floor, hold it high (about 5-6 feet) and then pull it partly across the room (about 4-6 feet) while it was still attached to Kitty’s nose. The ectoplasm was slightly transparent.
Materialization, especially full body materializations of relatives of sitters at séances, is the most impressive evidence of survival after death. Unfortunately there were and are very few mediums who could or can produce full materializations, especially in red light. Jan in his lecture on materialization will present the séance results of several materialization mediums, who lived during the 20th century. He will show photographs of ectoplasm and materializations which he believes are totally genuine. There will be special emphasis on Alex Harris, Minnie Harrison and an unknown Johannesburg medium. Jan knew sitters who sat with those mediums so can present direct details of what happened at those séances.
