This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Alan Gauld's study of the founders of psychical research recovers a specific, documented moment, the 1882 founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London by a group of scholars and scientists who set out to investigate claimed paranormal phenomena using the same evidentiary standards their own academic disciplines already required of them, rather than either dismissing the claims outright or accepting them on faith.
That founding moment matters for a psi phenomenon entry because it marks when psychical research became an organized, documented discipline with its own case collection methods, its own journals and its own internal disputes over evidence, distinct from the older, looser tradition of spiritualist testimony it grew out of.
A psi phenomenon entry therefore tries to distinguish a phenomenon's documented experimental and case study history, gathered under a stated method a reader can check, from looser popular report, since that distinction is exactly the one the discipline's own founders set out to draw and later researchers have kept testing ever since. That same discipline, with its own peer reviewed journals and its own professional societies, continues investigating claimed psychic phenomena today under standards its nineteenth century founders would still recognize.