The Psychic Mafia
By M. Lamar Keene
As told to Allen Spraggett
Originally published by St. Martin’s Press, Inc. in 1976, and reprinted by Dell Publishing Co. (1977, ISBN 0-440-16849-X)
Retyped by The Anonymous Typist, who has added many valuable erudite and sardonic remarks, for your better enjoyment. It was available on the internet as plain text (0.3 Mb) file. It has been adapted to reflect the text of the Dell edition, with lots of typing (OCR) and printing errors removed.
This valuable document has been e-mailed between 1994 and 2011 to almost 400 recipients. Some of those have made handsome pdfs from it. These have been on and off available and here you can download one that dates from before 2015. Here is another source
On the internet you can find the original version of the text file here, already since April 2010. However the links there to the different parts don’t work too well, better use 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. A short discussion blog is here.
Wherever you find that file (here, or in any of the named links), you may make it available to others, in any manner you wish, as long as the book is out of print, but you may not ask money for it, and you must impose the same conditions on anyone that obtains it from you.
You can of course try to buy the book secondhand. I saw an offer of the hardcover 1976 or 1977 edition advertised for a mere 419.89 euro. The book was republished by Prometheus Books (1997 ISBN 1-57392-161-0), but that is also out of print, and sold secondhand for crazy prices. I saw 341 euro. It has a foreword by Ray Hyman and the same glossy photographs as the earlier edition. At the time of writing (2026) several sellers had several offers below 100 euro.
Of course these printed versions do not have the sardonic comments of the Anonymous Typist (I repeat, not me).
For a long time William V. Rauscher (1932-2024) has been claiming the copyright of this book (without printing it), possibly basing his claim on the foreword in the book. Allen Spraggett (1932-2022) is deceased as well.
Jan Willem Nienhuys
Wikipedia: Morris Lamar Keene (10 August 1936 – 11 June 1996), was a spirit medium in Tampa, Florida and at Camp Chesterfield Indiana, where he was known as the “Prince of the Spiritualists”. He is best known for his 1976 book The Psychic Mafia, in which he coined the term “true believer syndrome.”
A series of BBC Podcasts ‘Fake Psychic’ aired in 2022, written and researched by Vicky Baker, with a surprising ending:
0. Introducing Fake Psychic (4 min)
1. The Showman (32 min)
2. Eyes Wide Open (43 min)
3. True Believers (44 min)
4. The Cathedral (50 min)
5. The Devil’s Carousel (45 min)
6. Afterlife (49 min)
Here a review of the Prometheus reprint.
Chapter 3 tells about the investigation by Andrija Puharich and Tom O’Neil (misspelled as O’Neill). Their Psychic Observer report of 1960 can be read here.
