Skeptics of the supernatural and religion boldly declare themselves rational. We can test this assertion on their terms by looking closely at their claims about three specific issues.
First, telepathy or extra-sensory perception? Some might argue that they have no problem considering this a natural ability, but the hardline skeptics say that is not the case.
Second, we will examine some cases of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or flying saucers. Surely skeptics can make a strong case that all of the alleged incidences were matters of lay people misidentifying natural phenomena, you might think.
Finally, we will look at the assumption that there could not possibly be credible evidence of afterlife, either of the laboratory or logical kind.
In 1996, I had an opportunity to interview Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic who came to fame in the 1970s for allegedly bending spoons with his mind at a distance (manipulating material objects by thought is called telekinesis).
I have examined a fair number of so-called psychics and have been only rarely impressed, so I approached him as a skeptic.
To prepare, I read The Truth About Uri Geller, the expose by the stage magician and professional skeptic James “The Amazing” Randi. Calling Geller a fraud, Randi viewed him as “the most dangerous man in 50 years.” He quoted extensively from a blistering attack by Time and other supposedly objective sources.
He explained that Geller did not really bend spoons from afar; he would actually touch them in advance with a chemical that caused them to warp.
Randi also suggested a way to avoid letting Geller practice his “phony extra-sensory perception,” the so-called mind reading also known as telepathy. He said the Geller will ask people to draw a picture and then guesses what it is. While they are facing him and making the drawing, he watches how the top of the pencil moves and deduces what the figure looks like in that way, warned Randi.
When I met Geller and he proposed this, I stepped into the next room and turned my back, making a circle with an X in the middle, then put the paper in my pocket. There was no way he could have any rational idea of what I had drawn.
But when I returned to the hotel lobby, where we had been sitting and there was a lot of noise, he was distracted and said he was only getting a partial image. He drew a circle exactly the same size as I had, but said he knew there had been some other element and he was having trouble getting that clearly. So only a partial hit, but interesting.
That afternoon, I attended his lecture and sat at the back of the room. Geller told everyone to pull out a key they didn’t need to use or some other piece of metal. At no time did he touch the key I had brought for this, yet after a few moments, it bent by itself significantly.
A medical engineer, Eldon Bird, who introduced Geller, told me, “When you analyze the metal closely, it does not show the normal stress you expect with something that had been bent. It looks as if it had been made that way. Uri alters alloy memory. We obviously do not have a complete grasp of natural laws.” He called Randi “a scumbag and a liar.”
In Psychic Breakthroughs Today, Scott Rogo, responded to Randi’s Flim-Flam!, a critique of Geller’s ESP and telekinesis experiments at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., in 1972. Rogo summarized: “There was simply no way coincidence can explain some of the results.”
In a detailed critique, he showed that Randi, like many militant skeptics, is willing to leave out inconvenient facts and twist the truth in order to convince readers of his agenda. It would be difficult for any informed skeptic to defend Randi’s distortions of what actually took place at SRI, but that does not prevent them from being willfully ignorant and continuing to cite him as having exposed Geller.
So if Geller is so good at mind reading, why did he not guess exactly what I had drawn? Rogo, the late, highly-respected parapsychologist (someone who does scientific studies of so-called paranormal phenomena), told me that skills like telepathy are never perfect all the time. “It’s more like a bad electrical connection, which works well only intermittently,” he said. Something like trying to read a mind in a noisy hotel lobby could interfere, it seemed.
Geller has demonstrated his skill at another type of mind power, making millions locating oil and gas reserves, a quite hard-headed business, as I can attest from having interviewed leaders in the industry.
But Rogo also noted that there is evidence that some who have been tested and seem to have genuine psychic abilities have also tried to “improve their results” by cheating. That muddies the water, but it is not an excuse for fairly evaluating double-blind clinical studies.
Of course, hardcore skeptics insist that all so-called psychic powers are just tricks any stage magician can duplicate.
But how do they explain the many double-blind experiments that show that some people definitely can read others’ minds?
In Best Evidence, investigative reporter Michael Schmicker analyzed the research on ESP and precognition (anticipation of an event) at Duke University from 1928 to 1965 by J.B. Rhine.
“Rhine suspected that ESP was not a supernatural phenomenon, but rather an unknown but natural phenomenon ultimately understandable under the laws of classical physics,” wrote Schmicker. “Consequently, it could be studied in the laboratory like any other natural phenomenon.”
A typical Rhine experiment had a “sender” look at a card in a deck and then concentrate on the symbol on the card, while a “receiver” tried to guess what he was thinking. The odds of being correct by chance should average five out of 25 cards. Rhine continually improved his protocols to address skeptics’ criticisms.
In one case, Hubert Pearce, a divinity school student, was the sender and Rhine’s assistant was the receiver. “Out of 1,850 cards guessed, Pearce recorded 558 correct hits,” wrote Schmicker. “The odds against guessing that many right cards was an astronomical 22 billion-to-one. Even more spectacular—though less important from a scientific proof standpoint because it was accomplished only once—was Pearce succeeding on one occasion in getting 25 straight hits in a row. The odds against such a feat? One in 300 quadrillion.”
The Fear of ESP
In 1997, there was every reason to believe the publication of The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin, Ph.D., would stir significant debate among scientists about phenomena like ESP. Radin was a former Bell Laboratories engineer who directed experiments at the Consciousness Research Laboratory of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Brian Josephson, a Cambridge University professor of physics and Nobel laureate, reviewed the book, saying that its “evidence...is overwhelming.”
Larry Dossey, M.D., the author of bestselling books on the effect of the mind on the body, called Radin “the Einstein of parapsychology.”
Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., the well-regarded British author of Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, commented that “the book shows that we are at a turning point in our understanding of our minds and of nature.”
So how did the intellectual establishment receive the book? With almost complete silence. Ironically, one of Radin’s chapters meticulously documented the mainstream media bias against parapsychology. One did not have to be psychic to have predicted the reaction.
The only appraisal in a major publication appeared in the British scientific journal Nature, which dismissed Radin’s argument because of what the reviewer claimed was a statistical error. The editor refused to publish Radin’s response that pointed out that the criticism was demonstrably incorrect. It was only printed after an eight-month-long campaign by readers and after the editor had left.
As Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed, those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.”
Those who publish the magazines for militant skeptics, Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic, also revealed their bias. The former, published by what is now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), simply did not mention the book at all (their former name was the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal or CSICOP, which said a little too much about their attitude towards those who disagreed).
Skeptic is published by the Skeptics Society and took a more sophisticated approach. In a few paragraphs it admitted the book was “one of the finest compilations of what we know about ESP and Psi” (another name for psychic phenomena). But then it dismissed this as “miniscule.” It later published an interview with a well-known former British parapsychologist, Susan Blackmore, in which she conceded that “Dean Radin’s experiments look…good.” But she comforted readers by saying that she had no intention of actually investigating them.
Crichton’s Change of Mind
Michael Crichton, the late novelist who earned a medical degree from Harvard, wrote Travels, a nonfiction report on his journeys around the world. Some of his experiences made his rethink his conventional scientific thinking about the supernatural.
In the appendix, he reported receiving an invitation he to address a chapter of what was then known as CSICOP, since his bestselling novels usually centered on scientific speculation. To acquaint himself with the group, he began reading its literature.
“I was disturbed by the intemperate tone of many of the writers I admired,” he wrote. “I began to sense there was more at stake than the dispassionate assessment of questionable data. I began to see science as battling for supremacy against perceived threats from other modes of perception.”
In the talk he prepared, provided in the appendix, he laid out the reasons for being open-minded, starting with a list of medical procedures many people have had, which lack double-blind clinical studies to support them. He also reminded the audience that scientific research has been filled with fraud, so condemning an entire field like parapsychology because of such allegations would be unfair. He quoted the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck that scientific truth does not triumph by “convincing its opponents…but rather because its opponents eventually die.”
Crichton cited Marcello Truzzi, a former editor of Skeptical Inquirer who later wrote the book The Blue Sense, documenting cases of psychics helping detectives solve crimes: “Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, open-mindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe.”
Once CSICOP understood that Crichton was going to tell them something they did not want to hear, he was disinvited.
The Conversion of a Skeptic
Because of the rigorous enforcement of editorial orthodoxy, Radin’s book initially sold only 10,000 copies and did not stir any serious discussion in the scientific community.
Radin understood the fear his challenge generated because he started as a disbeliever in “psychic phenomena” himself. He graduated magna cum laude in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before getting his Master’s at the University of Illinois, Champaign, where he earned his Ph.D. in educational psychology.
He began his career doing industrial psychology and technical research for Bell in 1979 and kept hearing from computer scientists about people who had “black thumbs” that caused high-tech equipment near them to malfunction. Radin investigated whether circuits could be susceptible to mental influence and was intrigued to find a correlation.
In 1985, his work had drawn the attention of SRI. Originally established at Stanford University with U.S. government funding in the early 1970s, it became an independent institution by the late 1970s.
SRI was reviled by militant skeptics because of its experiments for government intelligence agencies to determine whether information could be picked up by the mind about a distant object (documented in Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewer: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies). But it continued to be funded because it operated under solid scientific protocols.
During a one-year sabbatical, Radin joined SRI’s Cognitive Sciences Program to do classified work. There, he had access to worldwide research on psi effects.
“I learned that not only U.S. intelligence agencies, but the Chinese and Soviets, found these things quite useful,” Radin wrote. “I had no idea that remote viewing could be that good on real-life targets.”
From 1981 to 1985, five reviews of the evidence for the efficacy of ESP, remote viewing, and telekinesis were undertaken by government agencies, including the respected Congressional Research Service and the National Research Council. They all came to positive conclusions.
Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology who was the chairman of what was then CSICOP’s parapsychology subcommittee, wrote that “the effects cannot…be dismissed as due to chance.” He recommended further research.
But the scientists and those funding them agreed that after thousands of replications of some phenomena, there was no point in continuing to simply prove their existence. They decided to concentrate on understanding how the effects worked and what the applications might be.
At SRI, Radin witnessed “how casually these world-class viewers could perform miracles in the laboratory. My initial skepticism had been beaten down and left me either having to accept the some of this was real, or just reject the whole thing as too uncomfortable.” He found researchers in the field to be “accomplished, critical-minded people with impressive credentials who were thinking the unthinkable—and only because the cloak of security protected their reputations.”
After SRI, Radin spent three years at the psychology department at Princeton University collaborating on studies with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. PEAR was one of the few parapsychology labs to have a university affiliation. By 1987, its 335 remote viewing trials had produced results that Radin wrote were 100 billion to one against chance. He found protocols very strict, counter to the charges skeptics made.
Radin collaborated with a Princeton colleague, Roger Nelson, on a “meta-analysis” of many studies with random number generators (RNGs), circuits which repeatedly flip “electronic coins.” Clinical subjects had to guess the results in advance. In 832 projects run by 68 researchers from 1959 to 1987, they calculated the overall results to be a trillion to one against chance.
Radin went on to the University of Edinburgh, where “ganzfield” studies had been done by Charles Honorton. This is a sensory-deprivation technique in which the “sender” of an image hears continuous “white noise” (static) through headphones, an effort to screen out distractions. His tests were done in steel-walled, sound-proofed, and electromagnetically-shielded rooms, with computers controlling procedures and professional state magicians checking to be sure there was no cheating.
In 1982, Honorton had done a meta-analysis of all known ganzfield studies to that time. Hyman challenged his conclusions and asked to independently confirm them. He did, in 1985: the odds of chance producing these results were 10 billion to one.
Taking a Gamble
In 1993, Radin was hired to direct the Consciousness Research Lab. It was the perfect place to study whether external geophysical factors could influence the outcomes in gambling. The results might also be affected by telekinesis or telepathy. He was able to get records from one casino covering four years of slot machines, roulette, keno, craps, and blackjack.
He discovered that gambling on or near days of the full moon and avoiding doing so around the new moon increased the payout to players by two percent.
By the time The Conscious Universe was published, Radin had written 73 well-received scientific papers, been awarded numerous honors, twice served as president of the Parapsychological Association, and was slated to teach a new course on psi phenomena to meet student demand at UNLV.
But after returning from his book promotion tour, he was told by the provost that he was to close the lab and leave the university. Radin told me that the provost’s contradictory explanations for the action suggested that the book’s high profile had embarrassed his colleagues by their affiliation with what they regarded as pseudo-science.
Radin went on to work on practical applications of psi for a variety of nonprofit, business, and educational organizations in California. He is currently a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, on the adjunct faculty of psychology at Sonoma State University, and on the distinguished consulting faculty at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco.
Radin has written several other books since 1997 and is co-editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.
But as one learns from the Wiki entry about him, Radin’s critics continue to snipe at his details, carefully ignoring his responses and the massive weight of the worldwide clinical evidence.
Honorton analyzed how skeptical criticisms of parapsychology changed over the years: initially, they asserted any “hits” were due to chance; then they blamed experimental design flaws or incompetence of researchers.
In his first book, Radin looked at the efforts of three prominent skeptical psychologists to prove these viewpoints:
*James Kennedy, now retired, tried to replicate Rhine’s ESP card experiments at Duke University. He insisted his results were “entirely negative,” but by Radin’s calculation, their outcome was 10 million to one.
*Susan Blackmore, quoted above, claims to have left parapsychology because she was unable to replicate some experiments. But in her doctoral dissertation, Radin noted, she reported five statistically significant tests out of 19, a result that is 500 to one against chance.
*Ray Hyman (who had recognized impressive results in some experiments) reviewed 24 telepathy tests and claimed that 13 of these had insignificant results. But Radin points out that when the results of these are combined, they produce a result that is statistically significant.
In 1998, Hyman gave a speech, with Radin in the audience, in which he went through his criticisms of The Conscious Universe. He raised questions on technical issues, such as whether Radin had calculated “confidence limits” and “variance” correctly.
Afterwards, Radin had dinner with Hyman and went through the list, showing that he had accounted for the criticisms and pointing out that others had confirmed there were no flaws in the experiments that he had cited.
When I was writing an article for a mainstream magazine on the subject, I asked CSI and the Skeptics Society who could best give their response to Radin. Both referred me to Hyman, though he is only considered an expert on ganzfield studies. Hyman did not return repeated calls, despite my referrals, because I think he knew Radin would refute each of his points.
The Impact of Close-Mindedness
Only 6% of the members of the elite National Academy of Sciences believe that “psychic” phenomena like ESP exist, although 57% of college professors do. It could be argued the NAS members, the gatekeepers of conventional wisdom, are simply more brilliant and credentialed—or more close-minded (perhaps a bit of both).
Radin argues that the refusal to dispassionately look at the evidence is harmful: “Overlooking fundamental properties is much more serious than it sounds. Many basic scientific models and experimental techniques are anchored on assumptions that the fundamentals are in fact fundamental.”
For example, the RNG experiments provide evidence that quantum theory may not be complete. Psychics’ descriptions of the subatomic state at the beginning of the 20th century sound much like the later quark model of physics and superstring theory.
Radin says there are potentially important practical uses for psi: medicine could use it in diagnosis, business could avoid losses, police could more easily recreate crime scenes, and the military could communicate with submarines beyond the reach of current technology.
Even the American Medical Association has come around, after doing its own clinical studies, to accept that practices like acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine work, even though they violate Western theories.
But not the militant skeptics, who in their journals continue to rage against everything from chiropractic to magnetic healing.
So what does all this have to do with God? Simply this: if skeptics of the supernatural refuse to fairly examine the evidence for ESP, which may be just a natural phenomenon, how can they pretend to be objective about anything more clearly paranormal?
Even a confirmed atheist like Sigmund Freud was willing to accept mind-reading as a reality, based on his own experiences with patients:
I have had good reason for asserting that everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people…I must suggest…the objective possibility of thought-transference and therefore also of telepathy…If I had my life to do over again, I would devote myself to psychical research rather than psychoanalysis.
Skeptics’ close-mindedness, even to the point of distorting the evidence in their arguments, is worth remembering when they denounce phenomena more difficult to examine.
We will next see what the reaction to the most controversial phenomena of all, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), tells us about how intellectually honest confirmed skeptics are willing to be.
And the topic has great relevance to the question of our place in the universe and the meaning of life.