Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  Both camps—of passionate believers and equally passionate deniers—are surpassingly small. Most of us are likely in the middle. We don’t think much about a subject like psi research from day to day, and whatever opinion we hold is provisional. In other words, we would be interested in hearing out the evidence. The problem we encounter is the same one we see in our politics: When the media investigates a phenomenon like psi, or for that matter privatizing Social Security or forming a public health care system, they reach out to sources with diametrically opposed positions. That makes for higher drama, more colorful quotes, and, so the thinking goes, better radio or television.

  What it doesn’t bring us any closer to is the truth.

  In Seattle, I met a woman who has been looking at the totality of psi research as dispassionately as she can, under the circumstances. Jessica Utts is a statistician from the University of California who admits she has always had an open mind about psi research. Her father had conducted some informal studies with her when she was a kid, she told me, with some success. But later on, when she delved into the world of statistics, she realized just how little such a home experiment mattered. “It wasn’t science,” she told me, “and of course there was too small a sample size. We might have just gotten lucky. But it stayed with me, as a matter of curiosity.”

  Utts has since gone on to write mainstream textbooks in her field, including Seeing Through Statistics, a primer on the responsible and irresponsible uses of statistics. She is aware that numbers can be abused just like words can—to say anything we’d like. And she learned to be a skeptic.

  We spoke in a large cafeteria on the university campus. Students taking summer classes sat around us, out of earshot. Utts, a matronly looking woman with big eyes, a kind demeanor and a bob haircut, sipped a soda and told me about her first public foray into the paranormal.

  Someone had advanced the claim that fewer riders board trains that subsequently crash. He had conducted a statistical analysis he felt demonstrated this fact, and a TV station investigating his study called Utts to look over his handiwork. In short order, she found a crash crucial to his finding occurred on Labor Day, when the vast majority of people were off work. Once the Labor Day crash was factored out of his study, his evidence evaporated.

  Eventually, Utts applied her statistical expertise to the field of psi research. She found mixed results, which nonetheless topple the current mainstream view.

  According to Utts, research claiming people can influence the output of a random number generator isn’t convincing. Much of this research occurred at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, or PEAR, and Utts thinks these supposed mind–machine correlations don’t prove the ability of mind to affect matter. But remote viewing? Telepathy? She felt the body of research there was so compelling, both methodologically and statistically, that someone needed to speak up for the bedraggled community of psi researchers. And that’s how a statistician came to be one of the leading members of the Parapsychological Association.

  She knew involving herself could cause her trouble at work—and she wasn’t wrong. In fact, she told me, whenever her contract comes up for renewal she faces pretty much the same scenario: the panel that decides on merit increases splits its vote because, at any given time, two or three people in her department find their skin itches when they get a load of her Paranormal Taint. Her fate hanging in the balance, her name gets kicked upstairs for a review, and … she gets paid. My own estimation: her mainstream credentials—those textbooks—are so strong that her credibility can’t be denied. “Statistics,” says Utts, “when you know how to read them and you have a big enough database, don’t lie. I’m as convinced as I need to be that something is going on here. How it works, I don’t know. You’d have to talk to someone else about that. But if you look at the research, the numbers are there.”

  THE PHRASE “EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS require extraordinary evidence” was first coined by skeptic Marcello Truzzi, of whom we’ll hear more later. It was subsequently popularized by Carl Sagan. Regardless, the slogan is merely a pithy, modernized exaggeration of what the humanist philosopher David Hume declared roughly 250 years earlier about miracles. Hume famously argued that before we believe in a miracle, there should be so much evidence it occurred we’d be more foolish not to believe in it.

  In practical terms, this makes good sense. Any claim that might require scientists to double back and reverify earlier findings or assumptions is a potential time waster. Before they begin questioning the foundation on which current research stands, they should see evidence that the ground really has shifted under their feet. The argument put forth by skeptics is that psi is an extraordinary claim; thus an extraordinary amount of data is required to support it. As skeptic Ray Hyman put it, if psi exists, “the fundamental principles that have so successfully guided the progress of science from the days of Galileo and Newton to the present time must be drastically revised.”

  For the moment, without accepting or rejecting Hyman’s claim that psi undermines our understanding of physics, let’s just understand that this is the calling to which skeptics claim to respond. And so they have insisted, for decades, that parapsychologists must employ tighter and tighter controls on their studies—to eliminate obvious possibilities like fraud, and more subtle ones, like sensory leakage, in which the receiver in a telepathy study becomes aware of the target. In response, parapsychologists have increased the rigor of their methodology. But no matter what lengths they have gone to in order to satisfy the skeptics, the skeptics have yet to be satisfied. And during a period in the late 1970s and early ’80s, this back-and-forth between the skeptical community and parapsychologists was so robust that it became a subject of study all its own.

  Using the conflict between skeptics and parapsychologists as a lens, sociologists began research into how science is conducted, not in its idealized form, but in reality. Sociologist Trevor Pinch subsequently identified a group of “scientific vigilantes,” people who did not always hold scientific degrees but nonetheless appointed themselves to guard the borders of “true” science.

  The sociologists involved never took a side on the issue of psi itself. But in mediating the debate, they described the skeptics as an unruly and largely unscientific bunch. I recently interviewed Pinch, one of the most prolific authors on the subject, and he told me his findings surprised him. Initially he suspected the accusations leveled by skeptics were correct: parapsychologists, as they were known, were somehow self-deceived, employing shoddy controls on their experiments or committing outright fraud.

  What he found was the exact opposite: psi researchers took the skeptics seriously, conducting experiments according to methodology that at least kept pace with the most rigorous of the psychological sciences. When they produced positive results, the skeptics claimed the controls needed to be tighter still. Then tighter. “It was hard not to feel bad for the parapsychologists, really,” says Pinch now. “These were qualified, sincere researchers doing serious work, and they always had to deal with this group of people that were essentially engaged in a lot of name-calling.”

  Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Mayer, in her book Extraordinary Knowing, tells her own story of discovery. She started looking at parapsychological research after a psychic correctly predicted where her daughter’s lost harp could be found. She didn’t believe in psychics. She had in fact learned during her own university education that parapsychology was bunk. And so she set out on a personal mission: to prove to herself that psi is hogwash. “I began discovering mountains of research and a vast relevant literature I hadn’t known existed,” she writes. “As astonished as I was by the sheer quantity, I was equally astonished by the high caliber. Much of the research not only met but far exceeded ordinary standards of rigorous mainstream science.”

  By way of comparison, she found the Skeptical Inquirer, one of the foremost skeptical journals, to read like a “fundamentalist religious tract.” Like Pinch, she had quickly reached a surprising conclusion
: professional skeptics accused the parapsychologists of practicing “pseudoscience,” essentially a kind of fraud, in which psi researchers claim to be scientific but don’t employ the scientific method. They just didn’t seem able to support the charge.

  The pseudoscience claim is often made of psi. But is there any data to support it? Well, in 2003, French sociologist M. C. Mousseau compared ten markers of good science with the work of parapsychologists. Her aim was to see whether psi researchers really are practicing pseudoscience.

  She defined a real scientist as one who gathers or uses quantitative data, seeks empirical confirmation or disconfirmation, looks for correlations, relies on logic, proposes and tries new hypotheses, admits gaps in the current database, and is consistent with scientific work in other fields. She then reviewed the work in four “fringe” journals studying the paranormal and found them to be rigorously consistent in employing the methods of good science. In fact, when comparing the “fringe” journals to mainstream journals in physics, psychology, and optics, she found “no qualitative difference” between them. The fringe journals published fewer experiments, which she attributes to the relatively small number of practicing parapsychologists. (I saw just that, firsthand, in Seattle.) They do, however, publish a comparable amount of empirical data—and also question their own findings with an admirable openness. In fact, while parapsychologists regularly publish “null” results—studies in which no evidence of psi is found—the mainstream journals Mousseau studied published nothing but confirmatory data. In sum, then, when skeptics accuse parapsychologists of practicing pseudoscience, they are either lying; uneducated about what the parapsychologists are doing; uneducated about standard scientific practice; or, as I’m about to argue, engaged in a prolonged bout of self-deceit.

  Chris Carter’s Parapsychology and the Skeptics neatly captures the history of the schism between the two camps. That said, for the purposes of this book, the situation can be assessed with a few telling war stories, many of which include James Randi. Often called the godfather of skepticism, Randi has been a fount of both entertainment and valuable lessons in critical thinking. Think of him as a loud, small, gray-haired, and angry Velma from Scooby-Doo—always eager to pull the sheet off the supposed ghost and reveal the huckster within. He has successfully debunked psychic surgeons and faith healers. But far too often, he mixes his good work with bad, undermining the movement he purports to lead.

  Does telepathy exist? Randi would say there is no valid evidence for it. But the truth is far more complicated. There is in fact good evidence to suggest psi is real. But as yet, there is no scientific consensus. What the ongoing furor over psi demonstrates, however, is that even rationalists can come to look like believers—motivated less by the data in front of them than by the worldviews closest to their hearts.

  The foundation for the modern skeptical movement was laid by CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP was founded by humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz in 1976, when Kurtz asked fellow skeptic Marcello Truzzi to join him as co-chairman. Truzzi published his own privately circulated newsletter at the time, The Zetetic, which served as a forum for skeptics and proponents of anomalous phenomena to engage in an ongoing dialogue. In contrast, Kurtz’s own publication, The Humanist, seemed too shrill by half—tossing religious claims and well-controlled psi experiments into the same large dust bin. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Truzzi was removed as editor of the group’s new publication and left CSICOP shortly after joining it, convinced the board was more interested in promoting a polemical agenda than engaging in real inquiry.

  Over the years, though he remained a skeptic, Truzzi thought the researchers turning up positive data for psi were on the whole ethical and practicing science. But “the problem with CSICOP is that it has made debunking more important than impartial inquiry,” he later wrote. He even began using the term pseudoskeptics to describe the attitude of the worst offenders on CSICOP’s board.

  Things might have quieted down with Truzzi gone. But the internal purging grew bloodier. Dennis Rawlins, an astronomer enlisted into CSICOP, was the next to find his head on the chopping block. In a 1981 Fate magazine essay, Rawlins portrayed CSICOP as a gang of fanatics. And according to Rawlins’s article, they began revealing themselves behind the scenes, in 1975, as CSICOP was forming.

  The controversy started when prominent French psychologists Michel and Francoise Gauquelin presented evidence for what they dubbed the “Mars effect,” which claimed a disproportionate number of European sports champions had been born with Mars rising in their astrological signs. Kurtz published a pair of damning essays on the subject in the Humanist, which mishandled some of the statistical fine points along the way. The Gauquelins, in turn, threatened legal action.

  Kurtz struck a deal with the neo-astrologers. Their data would be submitted for a new analysis under terms agreeable to both parties. Whatever the result, Kurtz would publish the findings. According to Rawlins, he warned Kurtz that the terms of the new test would probably still yield evidence for a Mars effect. But Kurtz blew him off. And the new analysis, just as Rawlins feared, turned out in favor of the neo-astrologers. Rawlins felt not the least bit convinced the Mars effect was real. (There was an anomaly, he felt, in the sample the statistics were based on.) But he did feel a rationalist organization should keep the agreements it makes.

  Kurtz?

  Not so much.

  According to Rawlins, Kurtz and CSICOP engaged in a massive cover-up of the study to which they had agreed. They didn’t publish the findings for two years, and when they did the result was a kind of statistical hash—attempting to explain away the Gauquelins’ apparent success. Stunned, Rawlins went into overdrive, alerting other key members of CSICOP. But he found that the organization was being steered along a strictly political path: His objections were based in sound science; problem was, sound science just didn’t make CSICOP look good.

  Rawlins felt pressured to keep quiet, and Kurtz was in a panic over Rawlins’s dissent. “I’ll do anything to avoid trouble,” he said, according to Rawlins.

  Even more telling, when Rawlins confronted James Randi, he asked him why all the chicanery was in order. Why not simply print the study everyone agreed to and move on?

  Writes Rawlins, “The reply was ever the same: We can’t let the mystics rejoice.”

  This isn’t even a remotely scientific motivation, and it reveals the extent to which CSICOP was more devoted to spreading a worldview, like religious leaders, than practicing scientific methods. Randi even spoke to Rawlins in language that likened CSICOP to a cult. “Drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis,” Rawlins says he chided him, referring to the Jonestown, Guyana, “massacre” in 1978, in which nine hundred cult members killed themselves by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.

  After Rawlins forced this debacle to a head, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal voted to discontinue any further scientific investigations. From that point forward, they have been literally just a debunking and propaganda society. But their methods, and their unofficial mantra—We can’t let the mystics rejoice—too often seem to describe the modern skeptical movement. For decades, in fact, the CSICOP crowd has been the public face of skepticism—names like Philip Klass, James McGaha, and of course James Randi popping up on our TV screens whenever something needs explaining.

  The trouble for those of us who come in contact with a paranormal claim in the media is that this overzealous gang of self-proclaimed rationalists dominates one-half of the conversation. They are usually contextualized as the people who coldly appraise the data. But the skeptic, too, comes in bearing a bias that can render her or him just as untrustworthy as any street-corner psychic. In fact, in the wake of Rawlins’s charges, other analyses appeared that backed up his account. The most damning was that of another former CSICOP fellow, Richard Kammann, who argued that the same psychological dynamic that accounts for irrational belief was operating in the skeptics by
his side: “A process of subjective validation took over,” he writes, “which I have outlined in The Psychology of the Psychic to account for the existence of false beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. The model says that once a belief or expectation is found, especially one that resolves uncomfortable uncertainty, it biases the observer to notice new information that confirms the belief, and to discount evidence to the contrary. This self-perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and builds up an overconfidence in which the arguments of opponents are seen as too fragmentary to undo the adopted belief.”

  Right out of the gate, it seems, the skeptical movement had run into the barriers inside their own heads. And don’t worry, we’ll get to the psychics a bit later on that very same score. But for now, I want to travel a bit deeper into the skeptical rabbit hole.

  In the early 1970s the famous Israeli magician-cum-paranormalist Uri Geller was winning frenzied headlines. He made numerous media appearances, seemingly bending spoons with the power of his mind and perceiving information at a distance. Subsequent research into his abilities conducted and filmed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) yielded mixed results. He could not bend spoons under controlled conditions. He did score far above chance in remote viewing experiments. James Randi subsequently investigated, and in his 1982 book Flim-Flam!, he argues that films made of the Geller experiments were not shot, as had been claimed, by famous Life war photographer Zev Pressman. The films credit Pressman as cameraman without his knowledge or permission, claimed Randi. Even more alarming, Pressman supposedly told others at SRI that the successful Geller tests were conducted after he had gone home for the day. In sum, writes Randi, “[Pressman] knew nothing about most of what appeared under his name, and he disagreed with the part that he did know about”—namely, that Geller displayed any psychic functioning at all.

  These would have been damning facts—if they were true. Pressman’s own account was subsequently captured by writer Guy Lyon Playfair: “The ‘revelations’ [Randi] attributes to me are pure fiction.” According to writer Jonathan Margolis, Pressman maintained that the videos were authentic throughout his life. Randi further quotes a physicist named Arthur Hebard accusing the SRI scientists of lying about positive results of paranormal experiments he himself had witnessed. But, well, he also denied Randi’s statements. He told Paul H. Smith, the remote viewing Texan I met when I first arrived in Seattle, that he never would have accused anyone of lying. (Smith further explains that Hebard’s account of what happened at the experiment better matches the parapsychologists’ report than it does Randi’s.) We are left, then, not only questioning Geller but also his chief critic. Randi, however, is far from the only skeptic whose motivations require investigation.