The prefix tells the story. In the early 1980s, before the Great Renaming, before the alt. hierarchy, before the cultural explosion of Usenet that followed the UUCP expansion, there was the mod.* hierarchy: a small set of moderated newsgroups where a human editor reviewed and approved every post before it appeared. Moderation was not a mark of bureaucracy but of seriousness. A group willing to pay the cost of curation was a group that cared what it published. Mod.psi — the moderated newsgroup for psychic and paranormal discussion — was that kind of group.*
It was hosted at the University of Lowell in Massachusetts and moderated by Erich Rickheit. The archive recovered for the Good Work Library dates from January 1987, which places it in the final years of the mod. hierarchy; the Great Renaming would occur in 1987, reorganising Usenet into the big-eight hierarchies and giving the alt.* anarchists their own playground. What mod.psi produced in those early years was a small but sharply argued body of writing about the relationship between academic parapsychology and the spiritual traditions that had always claimed to demonstrate what parapsychologists were trying to study.*
The debate preserved here — between a pagan practitioner and a researcher affiliated with the parapsychological establishment — is not a debate between believers and skeptics. It is a debate between two kinds of believers, and the disagreement is methodological rather than experiential. Both parties take psychic phenomena seriously. What they disagree about is whether science has the right tools to study them.
The Mod.* Hierarchy and Early Usenet
The mod.* newsgroups were among Usenet's founding institutions. When Usenet began in 1979 as a network of Unix machines exchanging articles over UUCP connections, the question of quality control was immediate. The solution was moderation: a designated human being at a host institution who would read submitted posts and approve or reject them before distribution. Mod.psi operated within this framework, with the University of Lowell functioning as the institutional home and Erich Rickheit as the moderator responsible for the newsgroup's character.
The practical effect of moderation was selectivity. Unlike the open alt.* newsgroups that would later dominate paranormal discussion — alt.magick, alt.pagan, alt.religion.wicca, each of them unmoderated and consequently ranging freely across illumination and chaos — mod.psi published only what passed through a human filter. The posts it preserved tended to be longer, more carefully reasoned, and more structurally complete than comparable Usenet writing. They were, in the literal sense, edited.
The University of Lowell location was not incidental. New England in the 1980s was one of the centres of American parapsychological research. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, founded by Robert Jahn in 1979, was producing its first major publications on human-machine interaction and anomalous phenomena. Charles Honorton at the Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton was conducting the ganzfeld experiments that would become the most replicated and contested studies in parapsychological history. The American Society for Psychical Research in New York remained active. Mod.psi was posted to from within this institutional landscape.
The Parapsychological Research Context
By 1987, academic parapsychology had achieved a foothold in the American scientific establishment that it had not previously enjoyed and would not long maintain. The Parapsychological Association — founded in 1957 — had been affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1969. A number of American universities had active parapsychology programs or affiliated researchers. Robert Jahn's PEAR laboratory was operating within Princeton's engineering school, publishing in peer-reviewed venues including the Proceedings of the IEEE.
The post preserved here as "On the Science of Psi Research" represents this institutional moment. The author, writing from the address dean@mind — almost certainly affiliated with one of the major research laboratories — responds to common skeptical objections with the confidence of someone who has spent years defending the field at conferences. The post cites Honorton's 1985 meta-analysis of ganzfeld research, Jahn's 1982 Proceedings of the IEEE paper, and Jahn and Dunne's 1986 paper on quantum mechanics and consciousness. It distinguishes between popular entertainment and genuine experimental research, addresses the replication problem by comparison with biological and medical sciences, and defends the Parapsychological Association against characterization as a pseudoscientific body.
The argument is recognisably modern: it invokes meta-analysis, asks for consistent standards of replication across disciplines, and identifies the sociology of skepticism as a variable worth examining. Dean@mind was not a credulous enthusiast but a researcher defending a research program against what he considered uninformed dismissal.
The Practitioner's Counter-Argument
The deeper and more theologically original contribution to the mod.psi archive comes from Sunny Kirsten, writing from hoptoad.UUCP — the address associated with The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The WELL) in Sausalito, California. The WELL, founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, was one of the earliest online communities and a significant gathering point for the Bay Area's spiritual counterculture, including practitioners of the newly organised Neopagan movement.
Kirsten's argument is not a defence of parapsychological research. It is a refutation of its premises. Where the researcher's post argues that parapsychology is a legitimate science and should be judged by scientific standards, Kirsten argues that science is incapable, in principle, of studying psychic phenomena, because science is an atheistic belief system and psychic phenomena are spiritual. This is not anti-intellectualism. It is a systematic theological claim about what categories of inquiry are appropriate to what categories of phenomenon.
Kirsten's framework distinguishes four positions — witchcraft, occult arts, science, and psychic phenomena — along three axes: belief in the existence of God, belief in the human spirit as independent of God, and belief that spiritual actions (prayer, invocation) can affect the physical world. Witchcraft affirms all three. Science denies all three. Occult arts occupy an intermediate position — affirming divine existence and spiritual independence while rejecting spirit invocation. Psychic phenomena are defined as spiritual operations that the individual can perform through their own divine nature, without requiring God as intermediary or other humans as participants.
The result is a precise theological map of the early Neopagan landscape, produced in 1987 — years before most of the literature that would later codify these distinctions had been written. Kirsten was thinking in public, and thinking carefully.
A Methodological Impasse
The exchange preserved in mod.psi captures what became a persistent fault line in twentieth-century discussions of the paranormal. Parapsychological researchers wanted legitimacy within science. Practitioners wanted no such thing. For researchers like the author of the defence post, the goal was to demonstrate that psi phenomena were real by the standards that science recognised as valid. For practitioners like Kirsten, the very effort to subject spiritual phenomena to scientific testing was a category error — like using a ruler to measure the weight of a poem.
Neither position persuaded the other. The PEAR laboratory continued its work until 2007, when it was closed without having achieved mainstream scientific acceptance. The Neopagan movement continued to grow throughout the 1980s and 1990s without feeling any particular need for scientific validation. What mod.psi preserved is the moment of contact between these two projects, when they were still willing to argue with each other in the same moderated space.
Colophon
Mod.psi was a moderated Usenet newsgroup hosted at the University of Lowell, Massachusetts, and moderated by Erich Rickheit. It was part of the mod.* hierarchy, one of Usenet's earliest structures for edited discussion. The gems preserved in this archive date from January 1987, drawn from the UTZOO mirror collection covering Usenet 1981–1991. Three posts are archived: two by Sunny Kirsten of The WELL (one of which is preserved in its original fixed-width format and one in reflowed form, as both versions have archival value) and one by a parapsychological researcher writing as dean@mind.
Introduction written for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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