Ayer era milagro: Werner Keller’s Look at Parapsychology and the Unexplained
Werner Keller, best known for The Bible as History, is a master at bringing science to life. In Ayer era milagro ("yesterday it was a miracle") he leads his readers into a field of research as fascinating as any: parapsychology, and the claim that its findings call our physical picture of the world into question.
Author: Werner Keller (1909–1980)
Title: Ayer era milagro (Spanish translation, 1976)
Format: Spanish hardcover
Scope: Popular book on parapsychology and unexplained phenomena
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/8402039502 (ASIN 8402039502)
Mysterious Faculties
Keller writes about the discovery of mysterious faculties in human beings and tackles questions that trouble the scientific world, trying to answer many that have found no explanation at all. Most of his material consists of anecdotes without historical importance and little-known examples, events from the past for which he seeks explanations that match the descriptions of eyewitnesses at the time.
Hallucinations, Delusions and History
Some cases are explained as collective hallucinations and others as delusions. Others are connected with important historical events, and Keller mentions many well-known philosophers and researchers along the way. He tries to give a scientific view and to explain human psychology, aiming to offer an objective, coherent account of effects and circumstances that are anything but explainable.
The Author
Werner Keller (1909–1980) was a German journalist and non-fiction writer who became famous worldwide with Und die Bibel hat doch recht (1955), published in English as The Bible as History, which set the discoveries of archaeology beside the biblical narrative. He went on to write popular histories of the Etruscans and of the ancient world, always with the same aim: to make specialist research exciting for ordinary readers. That journalist’s instinct, for a good story and a striking example, is also what drives this book.
The Original Book
The German original, Was gestern noch als Wunder galt: Die Entdeckung geheimnisvoller Kräfte des Menschen ("What was considered a miracle yesterday: the discovery of mysterious human powers"), was published by Droemer Knaur in 1973, a time of intense public interest in telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis. The Spanish translation’s shorter title, Ayer era milagro, keeps the book’s central idea: that phenomena once attributed to the supernatural might one day be explained by science.
Parapsychology in Context
Keller wrote at a high point of parapsychology as an academic field. From the 1930s, researchers such as J.B. Rhine at Duke University had run card-guessing experiments to test extrasensory perception, and university institutes in Europe and the United States studied apparitions and poltergeists. Since then, however, the scientific consensus has hardened: positive results have generally failed to survive stricter controls and attempts at replication, and many famous cases have been explained as fraud, coincidence or errors of perception.
How to Read It Today
Read now, the book is most interesting as a document of its time and as a collection of curious stories, rather than as a guide to established science. Keller’s own approach, offering psychological explanations such as collective hallucination for many cases, makes it more sceptical than much of the literature of the period. Readers who want the other side of the debate could pair it with a modern sceptical work, such as Richard Wiseman’s Paranormality.
The Reviewer’s View
The original review praised Keller’s storytelling and his effort to stay scientific, while noting that many cases are minor anecdotes. That remains a fair verdict.
Who Is It For?
This is a book for readers curious about the borderland between science and the paranormal, written by a journalist with a gift for storytelling rather than by a scientist. I have not found an English edition; the Spanish hardcover is out of print and available second-hand on amazon.es.
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