D. Scott Rogo

Douglas Scott "D. Scott" Rogo (February 1, 1950 – August 1990) was an American writer and parapsychology researcher. He began publishing on psychical research as a teenager, studied music at San Fernando Valley State College (graduating in 1972), and worked for a time as a professional English horn player. He was a research consultant at the Psychical Research Foundation in North Carolina, a visiting researcher at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, and a consulting editor for Fate magazine from 1978, where he wrote a regular column.

Writing on the paranormal

Rogo's most widely read book was Phone Calls From the Dead (1979, with Raymond Bayless), which examined reports of brief calls allegedly received from spirits. His books on the wider anomalous field included The Haunted Universe (1977), which Wikipedia summarizes as proposing that UFOs and Bigfoot are psychic projections from observers' minds, and The Poltergeist Experience (1979). His UFO-related work came in 1980, when he edited UFO Abductions: True Cases of Alien Kidnappings for New American Library and co-wrote The Tujunga Canyon Contacts with ufologist Ann Druffel.

The Tujunga Canyon Contacts follows five women linked by personal relationships who lived in or near Tujunga Canyon, northeast of Los Angeles, and reported contact experiences over more than two decades. Its publisher, Anomalist Books, says the case details first revealed there were later echoed in hundreds of subsequent abduction reports. Berthold Schwarz praised it in the Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies with the words "Great Work!" The anthology UFO Abductions appeared early in the abduction literature, organized into waking encounters, time-lapse cases, and psychic abductions. Its reception was muted, and at least one reviewer read Rogo as treating the reported abductions as largely psychological.

Death and the investigation

Rogo was last seen alive by a bartender on August 14, 1990, the same day he spoke to his publisher and volunteered on an AIDS hotline. Police found him stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home on August 16, after a neighbour reported a sprinkler left running. There was no sign of a struggle, his wallet was empty, and some valuables were missing, but his manuscripts and book collection were untouched. Investigators did not believe the killing was connected to his paranormal work.

John Battista, then 29, was arrested after forensic analysis linked a glass at the scene to him. He was convicted of second-degree murder in January 1992 and sentenced to 15 years, but the conviction was overturned in 1996 because of prosecutorial misconduct. As of the most recent accounts consulted, the killer had not been definitively identified and the case remained open.

Reception and assessment

Rogo drew sharp criticism from skeptics and from parts of the parapsychology community. Douglas Stokes described Phone Calls From the Dead in 1997 as widely criticised for being "generally sloppy and credulous", though the Psi Encyclopedia notes that this judgement rested largely on a single flawed review from 1979. Joe Nickell (1993) faulted Miracles (1982) for accepting cases as genuine while overlooking natural explanations, and Terence Hines argued that Rogo advanced an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Rodger Anderson (1981) offered a more nuanced critique.

His colleagues defended him after his death. Jerome Clark wrote in 1990 that "no one who knew him ever deemed him credulous", and George Hansen and Keith Harary, writing in 1991, praised his scholarship and command of the history of psychical research. Assessments of his UFO and abduction writing are therefore mixed: he is remembered as a prolific, historically minded writer whose conclusions were often judged too credulous by critics, and his 1980 anthology drew only limited attention at the time.

For the abduction field, Rogo's importance lies mainly in timing. UFO Abductions and The Tujunga Canyon Contacts were published during the late-1970s and early-1980s "abduction epidemic", before the work of Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs set the dominant framework. Credibility is marked contested because the reception of his work is divided, not because any specific claim has been shown false.