First up, here is Gary Westfahl to give us some background on actress, writer, and psychic researcher with a PhD from the University of California, Thelma Moss, also known as Thelma Schnee:
She wrote screenplays for two episodes of Science Fiction Theatre: “The Negative Man” (story by Ivan TORS) (1955), “The Throwback” (1956); and for the movie The Colossus of New York (story by Willis Goldbeck) (1958).
She acted in “The Devil in Glencairn” (1951), episode of Lights Out and co-produced, with Paul Finder Moss, Ant City (documentary short) (1950).
Schnee ingested LSD as a participant in experimental therapy and wrote a book about her experiences, My Self and I (1962), using the pseudonym Constance A. Newland. Then, she may have recalled the conclusion of “The Negative Man”: having lost his improved senses, the hero resolved to go back to college so he could further research the mysteries of the human mind. And Schnee, now calling herself Thelma Moss, did exactly the same thing, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the Psychology Department of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also was given a position as a full-time professor. Further, while heading a facility dedicated to parapsychology, she chose to specialize in studying the very stuff of science fiction—psychic powers, ghosts, and astral projections recorded by Kirlian photography. Perhaps these investigations into occult matters represented her effort to reconnect with her late husband, though unlike the heroes of science fiction, she never achieved definitive proof of these phenomena, and while she was a well-respected researcher in the 1970s, her area of expertise is now relegated to the status of pseudoscience. Yet she still commands attention because she effectively gave up writing science fiction in order to prove that science fiction was true.
Read Mr. Westfahl’s complete article on Thelma Schnee here
Born Thelma Schnee, a native of Connecticut, she graduated from Carnegie Tech, and originally pursued a career in acting and in writing scripts for film and television. She was one of the earliest members of The Actors Studio; as a scriptwriter, her biggest success was the screenplay for the 1954 Alec Guinness film Father Brown.[2]
And finally, a link to her rare, hard-to-find book, Myself and I (1962) at Biblio.com.
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