Gary E. Schwartz is an American psychologist, author, parapsychologist[1][2] and professor at the University of Arizona and the director of its Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health.
[4][5] His mediumship experiments have been described as flawed by critics who have argued that they failed to use adequate precautions against fraud and sensory leakage, relied on non-standardized, untested dependent variables and unaccounted for researcher degrees of freedom.
His VERITAS research project, which concluded in 2008, was created primarily to test the hypothesis that the consciousness (or identity) of a person survives physical death.
[12] Gary Schwartz is viewed as a leader of counter-Establishment using his academic career to enable “the happy fantasies of pseudoscience and the paranormal.”[8]: 309-310 Among his hundreds of academic papers is a 3-part series entitled “God, Synchronicity, and Postmaterialist Psychology”[13][14][15] published in the journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice by the American Psychological Association, where Schwartz describes eleven coincidences that he found so “increasingly improbable,” he figured God must have been signaling him that souls of dead people collaborate with the divine to orchestrate personally meaningful synchronicities.
[non-primary source needed][17] Christian Battista, Nicolas Gauvrit and Etienne LeBel have suggested that Schwartz's data from mediumship experiments is unreliable as there are serious methodological flaws including biased sample sizes and unaccounted for researcher degrees of freedom.