Asking Seventeen Thousand People One Question

The committee's reasoning was sound and, for its date, unusual. Reports of seeing an absent person at the moment of that person's death were the society's central category of evidence, and the obvious objection was coincidence: in a large population, apparitions and deaths will sometimes fall on the same day. Answering that objection requires two numbers, how often people have such experiences at all and how often they coincide with a death, and nobody had either. So the committee went and collected them. Volunteers put a single standard question to people they could reach: had the respondent ever, when believing themselves completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice, which so far as they could discover was not due to any external physical cause.

Roughly seventeen thousand answers came back. About one in ten was affirmative. The committee then worked through the affirmative cases, isolating those in which the figure was recognised and the person concerned had died within twelve hours, and compared the resulting rate against the national death rate. Collecting seventeen thousand responses by hand, through volunteers with no funding and no postal survey apparatus, took the committee roughly five years.