Posted on 10 March 2025, 7:59

While recently watching one of the many UFO (now UAP) documentaries on television, Gina, my wife, commented that it is going to take a good photograph of one of the alien occupants of those UFOs for most people to believe they are genuine and not optical illusions of some kind. I took issue with her and pointed out that a number of photographs have been obtained of materialized spirits and yet few people are aware of them and most of them dismiss them as bogus. 

Gina quickly added that the alien photos would have to be taken by someone very credible for anyone to believe they are not fakes, to which I pointed out that Sir William Crookes (bottom left photo), who took photos of the spirit entity called Katie King, was one of the most renowned scientists in the world during the latter part of the nineteenth century. He was credited with discovering the element thallium and inventing the radiometer, the spinthariscope, and the Crookes tube, a high-vacuum tube which contributed to the discovery of the X-ray. He was knighted for his scientific work and was the founder and editor of the publication, Chemical News and also served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1910 and received honorary degrees in law and science from Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge, Ireland, Cape of Good Hope, Sheffield, and Durham universities. He was highly respected and not someone to be easily duped or to fabricate strange stories. 

From December 1873 to late March 1874, Crookes studied Florence Cook, a teen-aged girl whose mediumship involved the materialization of a “spirit” calling herself Katie King, although saying her name had been Annie Owens Morgan in her earth life and that she was the daughter of buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan. She claimed that her appearances were part of her assignment from the other side to convince the world of the truth of Spiritualism.

Due to darkness and a materialization cabinet being required for condensation of the ectoplasm exuded by Florence Cook, the actual materialization of Katie King was not witnessed. What was seen was Florence Cook going into the cabinet and Katie King emerging while Cook remained in an altered state of consciousness in the cabinet. Debunkers claimed that Florence Cook was simply changing costumes in the cabinet. However, King and Cook were seen and photographed separately and although somewhat similar in appearance, there were distinct differences in height, hair color, and facial characteristics.

Rumors then circulated that Cook had arranged for her sister to wait outside and sneak in the house at an opportune time, playing the role of Katie King. A later rumor had it that Crookes was having an affair with the young medium and therefore collaborated with her in the hoax.

Among those observing Katie King was popular author and editor Florence Marryat (bottom right photo), who reported that even though Katie King warned Crookes that light could harm her and the medium, the sitters asked Katie at one sitting if they could turn up the gas light to better observe.  Katie consented but later said that it had caused much pain.  “She took up her station against the drawing-room wall, with her arms extended as if she were crucified,” Marryat wrote. “Then the gas-burners were turned on to their full extent in a room about sixteen feet square. The effect upon ‘Katie King’ was marvelous.  She looked like herself for the space of a second only, then she began gradually to melt away.  I can compare the dematerialization of her form to nothing but a wax doll melting before a hot fire.  First, the features became blurred and indistinct; they seemed to run into each other. The eyes sunk in the sockets, the nose disappeared, the frontal bone fell in.  Next the limbs appeared to give way under her, and she sank lower and lower on the carpet like a crumbling edifice.  At last there was nothing but her head left above the ground – then a heap of white drapery only, which disappeared with a whisk, as if a hand had pulled it after her – and we were left staring by the light of three gas burners at the spot on which ‘Katie King’ had stood.”

More than fleeting appearances 

It is not entirely clear how many experiments Crookes carried out with the young medium, but indications are that it was in the dozens over those four months and that that they were all not fleeting appearance. In one experiment, Crookes said that Katie King walked about the room for two hours. Marryat reported that Katie sat on her lap and talked with her. “…to imagine, I say, the Katie King of the last three years to be the result of imposture does more violence to one’s reason and common sense than to believe her to be what she herself affirms,” Crookes stated.

Photographs were taken by Crookes and others, but photography was still in its early stages at the time and they are not as sharp as one might expect today.  (Top right photo shows Florence Cook in trance on the floor while Katie King materialized; top left photo show Crookes with Katie King on the left and with Florence Cook on the right).

Marryat asked Katie if blood ran through her body and if she had a heart and lungs.  Katie responded that she had everything that Florrie (Cook) had.  On that same evening, Marryat observed Katie naked before her as Florrie Cook lay beside her on the floor.  When Marryat asked where her dress was, Katie said she had sent it on before her (to the other side)..  At another sitting Marryat and other sitters were given pieces of Katie’s dress, but when they got home they had all disappeared.

Wearied by the attacks and rumors from skeptical colleagues, while other witnesses cowered from testifying in his support, Crookes gave up psychical research and returned to orthodox science.  Although he maintained a private interest in psychical research, he spoke very little of the subject in public, often very guarded and occasionally indicating that the “psychic force” he had witnessed may not have been the work of spirits.  However, in a speech before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898, he said he had nothing to retract.  His writings in subsequent years indicate that he returned to a belief in spirits and, concomitantly, the survival of consciousness at death.  In a letter dated February 6, 1915 to physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, Crookes addressed a question by Lodge about a statement made years earlier.  “Respecting my alleged statement that I had never had a satisfactory proof that the dead can return and communicate you must bear in mind that the quotation is from a letter said to be written by me in 1874.  I do not remember much of my opinions at that date, but I have no doubt the statement was true at that early date.”
 

In 1916, Crookes stated that the phenomena he had observed during the early 1870s, “point to the existence of another order of human life continuous with this, and demonstrate the possibility in certain circumstances of communication between this world and the next.” In 1917, a year after his wife’s death, Crookes is said to have had a lively conversation with her at a London séance. He died in 1919 at age 86. 

One of the scientists who lambasted Crookes for not debunking Cook and medium D. D. Home was Dr. Julian Ochorowicz, professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of Warsaw and one of the founders of the Polish Psychological Institute in Warsaw.  After he began investigating psychical phenomena and photographed materializations coming from the medium Stanislawa Tomczyk, he changed his views. “I found I had done a great wrong to men who had proclaimed new truths at the risk of their positions,” he confessed. “When I remember that I branded as a fool that fearless investigator, Crookes, the inventor of the radiometer, because he had the courage to assert the reality of psychic phenomena and to subject them to scientific tests, and when I also recollect that I used to read his articles thereon in the same stupid style, regarding him as crazy, I am ashamed, both of myself and others, and I cry from the very bottom of my heart. ‘Father, I have sinned against the Light.’”

Photographing Phantoms

Dr. Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, dedicated his 1923 book, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, to Crookes and Frederic W. H. Myers, another pioneer of psychical research.  Like Ochorowicz, Richet initially scoffed at Crookes’ findings.  “…the idolatry of current ideas was so dominant at that time that no pains were taken either to verify or to refute Crookes’s statements,” Richet wrote.  “Men were content to ridicule them, and I avow with shame that I was among the willfully blind.  Instead of admiring the heroism of a recognized man of science who dare then in 1872 to say that there really are phantoms that can be photographed and whose heartbeats can be heard, I laughed.  This courage had, however, no immediate or considerable effect; it is only today that Crookes’s work is really understood.  It is still the foundation of objective metapsychics, a block of granite that no criticism has been able to touch.”  Richet observed and photographed a “spirit” known at Bien Boa.

Nevertheless, the debunkers stick tightly to the stories about Cook’s sister sneaking into and out of the house – not just once but many times – and Crookes having a romantic interest in Cook.  As for Marryat seeing Katie King dematerialize and sink into the floor, the debunkers ignore her since she was not a scientist. The photos taken by Crookes, though a seemingly honorable and reputable scientist, are not convincing. Moreover, the fact that Richet also saw and photographed Bien Boa, must, they claim, also be bogus.

Wikipedia praises Crookes’ career in science, even mentioning that his discovery of the Crookes Tube “changed the whole of chemistry and physics.” However, Wikipedia also offers that he had poor eyesight and therefore cannot be trusted in what he claims to have seen among the spiritualists.  They say nothing about the others who reported seeing the same thing as Crookes.  Wikipedia relies on a psychologist who wasn’t even born when Crookes died, to say that he was gullible when it came to so-called spiritual matters.  They further point out that he had grieved the loss of a brother a few years earlier and this probably added to his “will to believe” in such an obvious hoax.   

I asked AI (ChatGPT) what Katie King was.  The reply, in part: “Katie King was a spirit who allegedly materialized during séances in the 19th Century…[Crookes] conducted extensive experiments with Florence Cook in 1874 and took a series of photographs that, at the time, were said to show the materialization of Katie King….Crookes himself seemed convinced that what he observed and photographed was genuine…He stated that he had seen Katie King in full physical form and believe her to be a materialized spirit..  However, skeptics have argued that the materialization of Katie King was likely a trick, possibly involving clever use of the medium’s clothing or a hidden assistant…….Despite the controversies, the story of Katie King remains one of the most famous cases of spirit materialization in the history of spiritualism, with debates still ongoing about whether the events were genuine or the result of deception.”

But AI makes no mention of the experiments by Richet, Ochorowicz, and a dozen or more other credible scientists who reported much the same thing as Crookes. Shouldn’t the cumulative evidence be factored in?  Were each and every one of those esteemed scientists duped over and over again? 

And so I maintain that photos of alien beings, even if taken by credible people, will be dismissed as likely fakes.  It all exceeds the boggle threshold of the vast majority of people.

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

When photographs of spirits are reproducible in the laboratory, by any scientist who wishes to conduct the experiment, then and only then will science admit the fact of the photographs. The meaning of them, of course, will remain in dispute due to the naturalist explanations to which science is ideologically wedded. The mere fact that spiritualist phenomena occur in this world does not require that one postulate another world or an afterlife. Rather, it requires only that one acknowledge that this world and this life are much more interesting, much more complex and mysterious, than previously thought.

Newton

Mike – good article. I agree with you. No photograph will ever be seen as absolute proof of something. From inception as a technique, it is always been subject to manipulation. Today no photograph of any kind can be accepted ultimately as proof of anything. Advances made in Photoshop and AI have demonstrated that you can fake anything in a photograph. They are no longer trustworthy.

Michael

I think we are used to seeing pictures of William Crookes as an old man, but when he was first involved with Florence Cook he was a 39 year-old relatively young man. - AOD

Hi Mike,  Thank you again for the last few blogs to do with ‘’ The return to God’,’’ Victor and Wendy Zammit’’ and numerous letters from the very erudite subscribers who offer so many observations and answers on the whole subject matter of Spirituality. I find the nuances interesting and certainly thought provoking but at times confusing. I’m grateful for the education and sometimes wish for simple answers. For me it’s not the belief in an Afterlife that I have an issue with . I’m a believer. What I’d really like to understand is the whole business of disparity. Why do some have so much and others zilch. To clarify I’m not just talking of wealth. I’m a capitalist and believe in Meritocracy. I’m more concerned with why some people are born and just exist with no future and others have the proverbial silver spoon and go thro’ life unaffected by the afflictions of the poor and wretched.  Is this a divine punishment ?  It just seems that we are taught that God is merciful , Compassionate and just and yet thro’ no fault we can perceive so many people have very punishing lives of continual tragedy,. illness and heartbreak.  I’ve just bought Jordan Peterson’s latest tome’’ We who wrestle with God’’ Perhaps I’ll get some answers. However if any of your faithful have some thoughts I’ll be happy to receive them .Jordan’s book looks intimidating.
Andrew