The 1986 Reopening, from Inside the Same Society

A century later the Society for Psychical Research published a long re-examination by Vernon Harrison, a former president of the Royal Photographic Society and a specialist in questioned documents who had spent a career on forgery detection for a security printer. His paper, titled with deliberate provocation after Zola, argued that Hodgson's central technique was unsound: he was not trained in document examination, he compared hands impressionistically, he treated similarities as proof of identity while disregarding differences, and the Mahatma letters showed characteristics of fluent natural writing rather than of imitation.

Harrison also argued that the report's structure betrayed a conclusion reached early, with evidence marshalled toward it and alternatives left unexplored. He did not claim the letters were genuinely from Tibetan masters, and was explicit about that; his claim was that Hodgson had not shown what he said he had shown. The society published the critique and left the original report in its archive without withdrawal, which is the right handling and leaves a reader with two documents rather than a verdict. Theosophical writers treat Harrison as vindication and go further than he did; sceptical writers note that a critique of one investigation is not evidence for the claim it examined. Both observations are correct.