Michael A. Persinger was an American-Canadian professor of psychology at Laurentian University, a position he had held from 1971 until his death in 2018. His best-known hypotheses include the temporal lobes of the human brain as the central correlate for mystical experiences, subtle changes in geomagnetic activity as mediators of parapsychological phenomena, the tectonic strain within the Earth's crust as the source of luminous phenomena attributed to unidentified aerial obje…