Carl Sargent

British parapsychologist and fantasy game designer (1952–2018)
the parapsychologist and fantasy game designer

Carl Lynwood Sargent (11 December 1952 – 12 September 2018) was a British parapsychologist and author of several roleplaying game based products and novels, who used the pen name Keith Martin to write Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

Sargent was schooled in South Wales and the West of England. He then attended Churchill College, Cambridge, majoring in the natural sciences, and graduated with honours in psychology in 1974. He received a PhD in 1979 for a work which bore on parapsychology, and went on to undertake post doctoral research in parapsychology at the Psychological Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Sargent was the first parapsychologist to obtain a Cambridge doctorate. He taught psychology at the same university. Many of his experiments were made using students from the science and geography departments opposite the Psychology department on the Downing Site, paying £2 3 per experiment; the main task would be to guess the colour or value of the next card to be chosen.

Sargent held a PhD in psychology (or experimental parapsychology), which he earned in 1979. He performed numerous ganzfeld experiments, designed to draw out psi abilities, at the University of Cambridge. His published works in this field include Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal, co authored with Hans Eysenck. The book received a positive review in the New Scientist by John Beloff who described it as "an introduction to parapsychology that one can put into the hands of an inquiring student without embarrassment." In their book Sargent and Eysenck argued that the experiments of William Crookes with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home were evidence for supernatural powers. Sargent wrote a negative review of Ruth Brandon's The Spiritualists, a book which claimed Home and other spiritualist mediums were fraudulent. R. W. Morrell commenting in the New Scientist on the review wrote "Carl Sargent would have us believe that D. D. Home was not caught out as a fraud. Sadly for Dr Sargent, though, he was", Morrell concluded that Sargent had displayed a personal gullibility.

Sargent's ganzfeld experiments have been criticized for being open to error and fraud. Susan Blackmore, who visited Sargent's laboratory in Cambridge, detected several errors and failures to follow the protocol during an experiment. Sargent would later leave the field of parapsychology altogether. Writing for Skeptical Inquirer Blackmore states that Sargent "deliberately violated his own protocols and in one trial had almost certainly cheated." Psychologists reading Daryl Bem's review in Psychological Bulletin would "not have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved" Sargent and Chuck Honortons. When Blackmore confronted Sargent, he told her "it wouldn't matter if some experiments were unreliable because, after all, we know that psi exists".