Rush, J(oseph) H(arold) (1911-)

Physicist and science writer who also studied aspects of parapsychology. He was born on April 17, 1911, at Mount Calm, Texas. He studied at the University of Texas (B.A., 1940; M.A., 1941) and Duke University (Ph.D., 1950). He worked as a physicist and teacher of physics through the 1940s, including work on the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, prior to becoming a physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 1962. He has published a number of papers on astronomy and physics and is author of The Dawn of Life (1958). He was in Boulder at the end of the 1960s when the Condon Committee on UFOs was established and he was invited to participate on it.

Rush's interest in parapsychology dates to the mid-1930s when he discovered some of the early texts on the subject by J. B. Rhine. His acceptance of parapsychology came in part because of his early experiences of clairvoyance and precognition. He became a charter member of the Parapsychology Association. In the field of parapsychology, he has studied and written about the associative aspects of psi phenomena and the functioning of psi with ordinary sensorimotor activities. He has emerged as a sympathetic critic of the field and claimed that much of parapsychology had been wasted by scientists using inadequate methodologies.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Edge, H. L., J. Morris, J. Palmer, and J. H. Rush. Foundations of Parapsychology: Exploring the Boundaries of Human Capabilities. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

Pleasants, Helene, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology. New York: Helix Press, 1964.

Rush, J. H. The Dawn of Life. New York: Doubleday, 1958.

——. "Parapsychology: Some Personal Observations." In Men and Women of Parapsychology. Edited by R. Pilkington. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1987.

——. "A Reciprocal Distance GESP Test with Drawings." Journal of Parapsychology (1949).

——. "Some Considerations as to a Physical Basis of Extrasensory Perception." Journal of Parapsychology (1943).