In 1929, Arthur Ford was credited with revealing the secret code that Harry Houdini said he would transfer to his wife if he survived death. After that, Ford was considered the greatest American medium of the twentieth century, and he attained extensive public recognition again in 1967 when he delivered a message from the deceased son of Bishop James Pike. One biographer averred that he was “subjected to every test a highly developed science of psychical research could devise and passed them all” (Ford and Ellison 1971, 162).
The focus of this article is a 1964 séance that Ford conducted with an Ohio couple who lost their only son in the explosion of a U.S. Air Force refueling tanker at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska. The séance was recorded and transcribed, as were many of Ford’s séances, and Allen Spraggett devoted about four pages to the event in his biography of Ford (Spraggett 1973). The parents were so impressed with Ford’s revelations that the father stated, “Our lives were changed from that time on.”The father concluded his letter by saying, “There is no way that Arthur Ford could have obtained most of this material and it couldn’t be mental telepathy because some of the things we did not know at the time of the sitting.”