Karlis Osis
Karlis Osis (December 26, 1917 – December 26, 1997) was a Latvian-born parapsychologist who studied deathbed experiences and life after death. He was born in Riga, Latvia, and died in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. His early work in the 1940s was inspired by William F. Barrett’s Death Bed Visions.
With Erlendur Haraldsson, Osis carried out a four-year study that sent hundreds of questionnaires to doctors and nurses in the United States and northern India about what dying patients reported. They found that culture and religion shaped these experiences, with Indian patients more likely than Americans to see a personification of death.
In 1976, he repeated a similar study with 877 doctors in the United States to see if brain factors like fever or brain diseases affected near-death reports. He concluded that the “sick brain” idea did not explain the experiences, and he noted that the research suggested a diminished fear of death as a practical takeaway.
Osis became director of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York in 1957 and served as its president in 1961. He also worked with the American Society for Psychical Research starting in 1962. In 1971, he and Haraldsson co-authored the book At the Hour of Death.
In the 1970s, Osis conducted out-of-body experience (OBE) experiments with the psychic Alex Tanous, asking Tanous to identify distant targets while in an OBE. Some trials showed hits, but critics argued the experiments were not well controlled and that results could be due to chance. He also ran shielded-chamber and pendulum experiments, which were criticized as poorly documented or inconclusive. Skeptics noted that much of the data came from secondhand reports and that cultural expectations could bias the findings.
Despite the debate, Osis believed his work helped reduce fear of death, even as many scientists questioned the methods and conclusions.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:03 (CET).