Rogo, Douglas Scott
Rogo, Douglas Scott (1950–1990)
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)Douglas Scott Rogo was born on February 1, 1950, in Los Angeles, to John and Winifred Rogo. He earned a B.A. at California State University at Northridge in 1972 and then did graduate work in the psychology of music.
Rogo became interested in psychical research and became a parapsychologist. Working with Raymond Bayless, Rogo showed that hundreds of telephone calls from deceased friends and relatives are received each year. Together they wrote the book Phone Calls From the Dead (1979), the result of a two-year investigation into phantom phone calls. The authors were surprised to find that a large number of people had received phone calls from friends and relatives who had died, and that in some cases the call was received before the recipient knew of the death of the caller. In other cases, the caller had been long deceased. Usually the calls were of short duration and did not register on the telephone company’s equipment. According to Tom and Lisa Butler, there were even “reports of calls coming through telephones that were not connected.”
Rogo was a visiting research consultant for the Psychical Research Foundation and director of research for the former Southern California Society for Psychical Research. In 1978, he became a consulting editor for Fate magazine. Rogo authored nearly thirty books, including Parapsychology: A Century of Enquiry (1976), In Search of the Unknown: The Odyssey of a Psychical Investigator (1976), Mind beyond the Body: The Mystery of ESP Projection (ed. 1978), The Poltergeist Experience: Investigations into Ghostly Phenomena (1979), and On the Track of the Poltergeist (1986). He was murdered, stabbed to death at his home in Northridge on August 14 or 15, 1990.
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