Las Vegas space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow has announced an essay contest in which he is giving away nearly $1 million as the inaugural activity for his newly-founded organization, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS).
Bigelow is famous for his entrepreneurial endeavors in regards to paranormal research such as Skinwalker Ranch and government-contracted UFO research through Bigelow Aerospace’s Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) program. He founded the consciousness organization in June of last year. It’s part of Bigelow’s life-long goal to create a research organization dedicated to answering the question of what happens to us when we die? Do we survive death and, if so, what’s it like on the other side?
The essay contest is intended to raise public awareness “for the Survival of Human Consciousness topic and to stimulate research,” according to the competition’s webpage. The goal for applicants is to write an essay that summarizes “the best evidence available for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.” Bigelow will award the the top three essays, with first place receiving $500,000, and second and third places receiving $300,000 and 150,000, respectively.
According to the BICS website, competition entries are expected to employ a focus on scientific evidence and include both “objective and subjective supported documentation as gathered,” including older documented cases, photographic or electronic data, validated and authenticated human experiences, and other relevant literature and sources.
The deadline for entries is August 1, 2021. They will be judged by a panel of renowned experts, including forensic neurologist Christopher C. Green MD PhD; journalist and author Leslie Kean; Rice University Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought Jeffrey Kripal, PhD; theoretical physicist Harold Puthoff, PhD; University of California Irvine Professor of Statistics Jessica Utts PhD; and survival of consciousness expert Brian Weiss, MD. The winners of the competition will be announced on November 1, 2021.
If you are interested, you need five years of related experience and you are required to apply to write your essay by Feb. 28. More info at http://www.bigelowinstitute.org
That’s an interesting challenge, especially since objective and subjective evidence are included. The problem, at least up to this point, has been that mainstream science tends to see all supposed evidence of life after death as subjective, misinterpretation, or fraud or hoax. But with this panel of judges, who are attuned to consciousness research, the results should be interesting.
https://www.mysterywire.com/mysteries/bigelow-institute-for-consciousness-studies-bics/
I wonder why he doesn’t refer to lifetime work of such people as Michael Newton and the Newton Insitute, or Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia (Ihttps://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/fifty-years-of-research/)…………or maybe he already does know of them and is looking for new material?
I’m glad to see he is involving people in this subject, and also glad that there are lots of organizations now trying to give it “academic” validity. Here in Tucson there are several academic organizations (one is called the Windbridge Institute) that try to “prove” the validity of mediumship. (Unfortunately for me I find the Windbridge Institute hopelessly boring, because I don’t personally find that reducing the wholistic/quontum mystical experience of mediumship to scientific statistics effective, although I suppose it is for a lot of people).
Science tries hard to place these kinds of experiences into boxes, but it doesn’t work very well, IMO