(17) Husband and wife trouble in Belgium due to astrology and the Committee P.A.R.A.

In October 1986 I was a dinner guest at the Brussels home of Bessell and Pyrette Kok. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_Kok http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3735

I mentioned that I had been intrigued by the researches of the French husband and wife team of Michel and Francoise Gauquelin into the positions of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars in a person’s natal horoscope.

These had prompted H.Eysenck and D.Nias in their 1982 book Astrology:Science or Superstition? to say that we should acknowledge the birth of a new science.

I mentioned particularly the reception that the Gauquelins had met with from the Belgian Committee P.A.R.A., which is concerned with the investigation of anything outside the bounds of normal science, and their motto is "Nothing rejected a priori: Nothing accepted without the most rigorous investigation."

But, Eysenck and Nias reported, despite the fact that the Committee P.A.R.A.’s investigations appeared to have replicated and supported the claims of the Gauquelins, they then acted very curiously in seeming to suppress these findings.

To my surprise, Bessel said that his first wife, whom he had divorced five years earlier, had been a member of this Committee P.A.R.A.

He added that her obsession with astrology had been a major cause of his disenchantment with her.