The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death is a book written by Gary Schwartz and bestselling author William L. Simon, with a foreword by Deepak Chopra.

The book, published in 2003, reviews several experiments which aimed to investigate the possibility of life after death through the use of psychic mediums.

The substance of the book and the studies it describes was generally claimed by the media as scientific evidence of life after death.

[3] The controversial conclusion drawn from the studies is that there is good evidence that consciousness persists after death.

Thereafter, the second medium, Laurie Campbell, whom Susy Smith had never met, attempted to contact the same deceased persons and took notes.

Thereafter, Laurie, and three others (including Gary Schwartz) were brought together and videotaped in an attempt to correlate drawings with deceased persons.

It consisted of five mediums: John Edward, Suzane Northrop, Laurie Campbell, George Anderson, and Anne Gehman.

This potentially allowed mediums to pick up on verbal and non-verbal cues of the sitters despite the thin screen.

[5] In an attempt to establish a control for these results, 68 undergraduate students were later presented with the statements, which were rephrased as questions, along with a picture of each sitter.

[7] The first phase of these experiments implemented the “silent-sitter” method, in which the sitters are expected to remain completely silent.

[7] As in the previous experiments, the sitter themself was tasked to rate the correctness of the statements made by the medium.

Instead, he includes a list of alleged hits by John Edward that he describes as “dazzle shots.”[5] There was initial positive reception upon release of the book and the results it detailed, primarily from the mediumship community and the media at large.

[10] Widespread critiques of Schwartz’s experimental methodology and analysis of results were noted in several subsequently published articles by, among others, Ray Hyman, Richard Wiseman, and James Randi.

[11] In general, it was thought that the opportunity for mediums to implement cold reading techniques was ubiquitous, despite the design of the studies.