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

V
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 Hans.Eysenck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Eysenck and David Nias https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidnias/?originalSubdomain=uk in their 1982 book Astrology:Science or Superstition? https://www.amazon.es/Astrology-Superstition-H-J-Eysenck/dp/0851172148 to say that we should acknowledge the birth of a new science.

(I should mention that when I met David in the early 1990s at a London backgammon club he told me that when he discovered that the birth times in France, where much of the data had been recorded, were based on the recollections of the parents and often sent in several weeks afterwards he told me, "... that was when I began to have my doubts.")

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 

"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.

Michel Gauquelin also divorced his first wife, Francoise, and remarried.

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btw, re David Nias, permit me to mention that I had made other references to the claims of Michel and Francoise Gauquelin about the influence of Mars in the natal horoscopes of outstanding sports champions.

In the 1980s I had purchased a book Astrology: Science or Superstition? by Hans Eysenck and D. Nias. I was familiar with Eysenck´s name but had not heard of his co-author. The book surveyed Astrology and concluded that the only statistical basis for it lay with the work of the Gauquelins.

But not everybody was convinced. And in 1991 Michel Gauquelin committed suicide.

In September 1993 I attended a EuroSkeptics conference at Keele University where I spoke with several prominent skeptics, including the very founder of CSICOP - The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal -  Paul Kurtz. I began to appreciate the case against the Gauquelins´ work might be stronger than I had supposed and also that a defector from CSICOP, Denis Rawlins, had perhaps not been as unfairly treated by the committee as he had made out and that he may not have been such an outstanding champion of truth after all.

Members spoke of his irrational presentation of counter arguments and said that his protestations that he had been denied a fair hearing smacked of paranoia.  

I also there purchased a copy of the proceedings of the EuroSkeptics conference held two years earlier in Amsterdam.  These contained many pages devoted to an examination of the Mars Effect, as it had come to be known, and the Gauquelins appeared to have been given every chance to prove themselves.  

The jury, however, was still out.  

In the second half of 1993 I attended the Double Five Backgammon club in London on a number of occasions. One evening I overheard somebody mention someone who had come to the club before; David Nias.  

I pricked up my ears and mentioned the co-author of a book I possessed of that very name, and it was confirmed that this was probably the chap. Indeed it was. I was to subsequently meet him, and we became friends. See his comments above.  

...   ...   ...

And, funnily enough, in December 1994, I was staying in the house in West Hampstead of a fellow aficianado of the Double Five, Murray Sharp, when a postcard arrived from overseas addressed to a woman called Nias.  

We mentioned this to David and he was incredulous because he said one of his ancestors had invented the name, only a few generations back, by taking it from some Pacific island. Nias - Wikipedia

And that there were nowadays only about nine families in the world bearing it.