by Guy Lyon Playfair

When Barry Marshall swallowed a mouthful of bacteria back in the 1990s and gave himself severe pains in the tummy, showing that gastric disorders were not due to ‘stress’, too much curry or whatever, but a bug called Helicobacter pylori, he had a job at first getting anybody to believe him.

As Dr. James LeFanu comments on the belated award of a (shared) Nobel prize for medicine to this heroic Australian, who has probably brought more relief to more people than anyone alive:

“‘They’ would not hear of it because it was impossible for any bacteria to survive in so hostile an environment as the stomach.”

Noting that since the introduction of antibiotics to replace previous treatments that did nothing to eradicate the cause of stomach disorders, the relapse rate has plummeted from 100% to less than 1%, Dr. LeFanu observes:

“The main impediment to scientific progress is not lack of funding or new ideas, but incorrigibly closed minds.”

Source: Sunday Telegraph, August 9, 2005

Welcome to Skeptics Anonymous
by Guy Lyon Playfair

Organised skeptics tend to be pretty ignorant about the subjects they hope to debunk. L. David Leiter of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania was for several years ‘actively’ engaged with the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT) after being introduced to it by an old friend, a sometime CSICOP supporter who had left that organisation ‘in protest over specific non-professional behaviour on their part’. This, Leiter has found, is ‘a seemingly frequent complaint of former CSICOPers’.

Leiter is all for what he calls ordinary skepticism which ‘acts to refine and improve scientific enquiry’, but ‘organised skepticism’ struck him as something very different and rather alarming. Its adherents, he noted, tend to be people ‘whose mental processes are continually and rigidly out of balance, in the direction of disbelief’.

What particularly worried him was that organised skeptics tended to be pretty ignorant about the subjects they were hoping to debunk. Some would even deliberately avoid reading anything that was contrary to their views as if they were afraid of being contaminated. He had the impression that people joined PhACT ‘much as one might join any other support group, say, Alcoholics Anonymous’ in the hope of finding ‘comfort, consolation and support among their own kind’.

His most interesting finding was that all the hard-line skeptics he came to know personally (getting on quite well with some of them) admitted that they had had ‘an unfortunate experience with a faith-based philosophy, most often a conventional religion’ (His emphasis). They had lurched from one extreme to the other, embracing science as the ultimate non-faith- based philosophy but unfortunately doing so ‘with one thing no true scientists can afford to possess, a closed mind’.

PhACT members must have begun to suspect they had a fifth columnist in their midst when Leiter gave a talk entitled ‘Skeptical About Skeptics’ which received a review in the society’s newsletter that was ‘studded with ridicule’ of the kind he had come to expect. He duly made a formal reply which the editor refused to publish. He concluded that skeptics ‘can dish it out but they can’t take it’.

He eventually blew the whistle by ‘outing’ himself in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (Vol.16 No.1, 2002) with an article entitled “The Pathology of Organised Skepticism” which prompted a lengthy reply in PhACT’s newsletter from a disgruntled member named Amardeo Sarma entitled ‘Misguided Stigmatisation of “Organised Skepticism”‘. Once again, Leiter’s rejoinder was not published which, as he points out in a follow-up JSE essay (Vol. 18 No.4, 2004), it would have been had Sarma published his piece in the JSE where, he adds gleefully, it would have had a much wider readership.

Leiter subsequently found additional hard evidence for his two main conclusions: that extreme skeptics are often rebounding from exposure to a faith-based philosophy in their formative years and that they avoid reading anything that threatens to change their minds or at least broaden them a little.

One PhACT member with whom he remained on good terms admitted that he had been a ‘bible-believing Christian’ in his high school years but had subsequently become an avowed atheist who found much of Christian doctrine ‘preposterous’. Two other members admitted, on their society’s website message board, to having reacted to their strict religious upbringing in a similar way.

Even so, Leiter’s atheist friend was not opposed to free enquiry. He contributed generously to PhACT’s on-line lending library, offering books of his own for loan on a number of subjects other than skepticism including religion, parapsychology, UFOs and even creationism. Leiter asked him how many members had availed themselves of his offer of access to his private library. The answer was – ‘None’. His friend had come to suspect that some of his fellow skeptics ‘may actually have a phobia about reading material that is contrary to their own views’.

It is gratifying to know that skeptics, like reformed alcoholics, can be useful if only for keeping each other happy and protecting them from all those heretical ideas out there.

by Guy Lyon Playfair

Extract from a paper by Aristide Esser, et al. (International Journal of Parapsychology, 9 (1) 53-56, 1967), describing an experiment in telepathy between identical twins:

“In a physically isolated subject, we have observed physiological reactions at the precise moment at which another person, the agent, was actively stimulated. We show the complete record of Experiment No. 7 to demonstrate how obvious the plethysmographic reactions are.”

That sounds fairly clear to me, but evidently not to everybody.

Extract from a paper by Susan Blackmore, et al. (Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 59 (831) 89-96, 1993):

“Similar studies… (Esser, Etter and Chamberlain, 1967) did not provide evidence of simultaneous responses in twins.”

This is an early example of what has now become a worrying trend, inspired, it seems, by Humpty Dumpty (“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean”) and by Orwell’s Newspeak, the purpose of which was “not so much to express meanings as to destroy them”. Thus if Esser and colleagues announce that they have obtained instrumentally recorded evidence for telepathy, in what Orwell might have called Skepspeak this becomes “[Esser and company] did not provide…”, etc.

The Enfield poltergeist case of 1977-1978 which Maurice Grosse and I investigated for more than a year has come in for some splendid Skepspeak lately. In a book you may have missed called The Ghost That Haunted Itself, author Jan-Andrew Henderson reveals that:

“Both [the Amityville and Enfield poltergeist cases] turned out to be fakes. The witnesses were misrepresented or had something to gain. ‘Evidence’ turned out to be manufactured. It’s hard to argue with that.”

It is indeed, as hard as would have been to argue with Humpty Dumpty, or Big Brother…

And here is the science magazine Focus wasting three pages of its June 2003 issue on “An A-to-Z of World Mysteries”. E is for the Enfield case, for which Caroline Green informs us “there was no concrete evidence and [the children’s mother] was accused of making it up.”

For the record: Yes there was; and no, she wasn’t and didn’t. The magazine did at least print Maurice Grosse’s robust record-straightening letter in its August 2003 issue.

The Times should know better than to sink to this level of Orwellian revisionism, but it seems it doesn’t. In its Public Agenda section for November 2nd, 2004 its readers were told that the girls involved in the Enfield case “now grown up, admitted that it was all a hoax.” They are indeed now grown up but neither of them has ever admitted anything other than Janet H’s statement on ITV’s News At Six (June 12th, 1980) to interviewer Rita Carter, on being asked if she or her sister had ever played any tricks. Her immediate and truthful reply was: Oh, yeah, once or twice, just to see if Mr Grosse and Mr Playfair would catch us. And they always did.

She made an almost identical statement on Radio France-Inter (June 17th, 1982) to interviewer Lynne Plummer, while in a more recent TV interview with presenter Jane Goldman, her first for more than twenty years, (Living TV, October 19th, 2004) she said it all again at greater length as did Janet’s sister in a signed statement written in 1987. Time for that particular coin to drop, I think.

Now for a real gem of Skepspeak deconstruction from David Myers, in his review of a book on intuition in the Daily Telegraph (January 11th, 2003): The book ends with a swift glance at the evidence for the reality of psychic phenomena such as telepathy – necessarily swift, since there isn’t any.

Finally, the latest from the irrepressible Susan Blackmore, writing in New Scientist (November 13th, 2004). Here is the letter I wrote to the editor of that magazine, who did not publish it:

“‘Throughout history many people have believed in a soul or spirit. Yet science has long known that this cannot be so’, Susan Blackmore opines. Really? Who is ‘science’ in this context? Could we have a reference?”

Remember the meteorites, powered flight, continental drift and of course space travel all were once claimed to be impossible or nonexistent.

To learn Skepspeak, all you have to do is forget all that outdated stuff about arguing logically on the basis of evidence, research, and experience. Ignore all that Platonic rubbish about seeking the truth through rational debate. Just state your particular prejudice as if it has already been engraved in stone and is not open to discussion.

Big Brother (and Humpty Dumpty) would be proud of you.

by Guy Lyon Playfair

Need a second income? Then why not become a Media Skeptic, one of those who pop up on our screens almost daily to assure us that “the paranormal” (or psi, as it is known in the trade) doesn’t exist? You don’t need any qualifications, though it helps if you have a degree in psychology, Just stick to these guidelines:

1.  Make it clear that psi (which includes telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and precognition) doesn’t exist, because it is impossible. It is “bad science” to claim that it does. You can quote such respectable authorities as the following:

– Professor Peter Atkins: “Serious scientists have got real things to think about – we don’t have time to waste on claims which we know both in our hearts and heads must be nonsense.” (“Counterblast”, BBC2, 23 April 1998).

– Dr. Susan Blackmore: “I think we have strange experiences we can’t explain and jump to the conclusion they’re paranormal.” (“Desert Island Discs”, BBC Radio 4, 3 May 1998).

– Professor Richard Dawkins: “The paranormal is bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are fakes and charlatans.” (Sunday Mirror, 8 February 1998).

– Professor David Deutsch: “The evidence for the existence of telepathy is appalling…Telepathy simply does not exist.” (The Observer, 30 September 2001).

– Professor Nicholas Humphrey: “The idea that quantum physics explains the paranormal is an unnecessary idea, because there’s nothing to explain… We haven’t got any evidence.” (“Today”, BBC Radio 4, 2 October 2001).

– James Randi (a conjuror): “There is no firm evidence for the existence of telepathy, ESP or whatever we want to call it.” (ibid.)

2.  Explain, as patronisingly as you can, that although there is a lot of what might be mistaken for evidence for telepathy and other psi phenomena, it isn’t “real” evidence. Point out that “more careful researchers” have challenged it. Never mind who, where, on what grounds, or how convincingly. In skeptic-speak, challenging or questioning the evidence equals disproving it conclusively.

(In fact, as has been shown on numerous occasions, “more careful” psi researchers have questioned the sayings or writings of skeptical debunkers and torn them to pieces. Examples will be given on this website in due course.)

Avoid any actual discussion of the evidence for psi if you possibly can, but if you can’t avoid it, concentrate on the weakest or the craziest you can find, such as the latest alien abduction, crop circle, Californian channeller, pop astrologer or Bigfoot sighting.

3.  There are some researchers, such as J. B. Rhine, whose work is not so easy to dismiss. Neither Rhine’s personal integrity nor the reliability of his statistical methods have ever been seriously challenged, So what should you do? Simple. Explain that he “might have been hoodwinked” by all those clever magicians who were disguised as his laboratory subjects. There’s no evidence that he was, but it sounds good to suggest that he might have been, and of course nobody can disprove this. Read the classic of skeptical revisionist non-explanation, C.E.M. Hansel’s error-riddled book ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Reevaluation (New York: Prometheus, 1980) to see just how bizarre criticisms can be – Hansel even has one of Rhine’s card-guessers clambering up to the attic and peering through a non-existent trap door at the card! You can learn a lot from Hansel, a master of the mud-slinging school. Never mind if there is no evidence at all that such-and-such an individual misbehaved in any way. If you need some damning evidence and there isn’t any, just make some up.

4.  If you’re a magician, as many hard-line skeptics are, state that psi experiments are worthless unless they are supervised by a magician. You should give the impression that magicians are too smart to be fooled, which of course is not true. If it was, why would they pay each other such large sums of money for the secrets of their tricks?

If somebody mentions Uri Geller, claim that magicians can duplicate his entire repertoire. This is not true, but it sounds good. At least twenty professional magicians have stated that they cannot explain what they saw Uri do. One has even issued a public challenge (BBC Radio 5, 14 December 1993) to any of his colleagues who can repeat what he witnessed. No takers as yet.

Keep your fingers crossed and hope that nobody points out that Geller has pulled off one feat that few magicians, if any, have ever duplicated. He has become a millionaire.

5.  If somebody mentions all those distinguished scientists and academics from Crookes, Lodge, Richet, the Curies, Bergson, Jung, McDougall, William James and Lord Rayleigh to contemporaries like Brian Josephson, Bernard Carr and Donald West, point out as patronisingly as you can that an expert in one field is not necessarily an expert in another field, such as psi research.

Skeptics, on the other hand are by implication experts on everything.

6.  Don’t forget that old “desperate will to believe” argument, which applies to anybody who has ever reported positive results of a psi experiment. The implication should be that they have fiddled the data to make the results look positive, whereas “more careful” skeptics (more often than not Dr. Susan Blackmore or Dr. Richard Wiseman) have shown that in fact they are negative.

Avoid any suggestion that skeptics have a desperate will not to believe, as is clearly the case with some. In an exchange of letters with Henry Bauer, editor of the excellent Journal of Scientific Exploration, Kendrick Frazier, editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, has candidly admitted that (in Bauer’s words), “the magazine’s purpose is not to consider what the best evidence for anomalous claims might be but to argue against them”. (JSE, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989).

7.  Adopt the combine-harvester approach to reports of any kind of psi phenomenon, or indeed to any kind of inexplicable or anomalous one, and keep it simple, as in this pronouncement by authors Simon Hoggart and Mike Hutchinson, from their book Bizarre Beliefs:

“The terrible truth is that there are no ghosts, no poltergeists, and no hauntings. They are all mistaken, imaginary, or fakes.”

8.  You can get away with the most massive whoppers, especially on TV, if you manage to sound as if you know what you’re talking about when you don’t. A perfect example was provided by the narrator of Channel 4’s “Secrets of the Psychics” (24 August 1997), which included examples of all the guidelines listed here:

“With one exception, all practising mediums were exposed as frauds or confessed.”

The narrator forgot to mention who the one exception was. Among mediums who never confessed to anything and were not exposed as frauds were D. D. Home, Lenora Piper, Mrs Willett, Eileen Garrett, Rudi Schneider, Franek Kluski, the half-dozen members of the Cross Correspondence team, Stefan Ossowiecki, Pamela Curran and Chico Xavier.

9.  It is a good idea to pretend that you are an honest, open-minded seeker after the truth but be careful not to go too far, as Professor Richard Dawkins did in his Richard Dimbleby Lecture (BBC1, 12 November 1996):

“The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we don’t understand, are healthy and to be fostered. It’s the same appetite which drives the best of true science.”

There could not be a clearer summary of what drives the great majority of parapsychologists.

10.  Finally, you can always win some popular sympathy with the good old “dangers of dabbling in the occult” ploy. Suggest that actually doing any research into psi phenomena or other anomalies can only lead to another Jonestown massacre, Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, or Third Reich.

Put all this sound advice into practice, and you’ll be media superstars, my son and daughter.

by Guy Lyon Playfair

With the publication of Paul H. Smith’s Reading the Enemy’s Mind (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2005) we can now read the whole story of the U.S. military intelligence programme of ‘remote viewing’ that began in California in the early seventies and came to an inglorious end in 1995 with the disbanding of the remnants of the last operational unit in Fort Meade, Maryland. It is an excellent book, as compellingly readable as it is authoritative, yet some aspects of the story it tells are very sad.

The saddest is the fact that what should have been a ground-breaking programme – the first of its kind anywhere to be funded with public money – that revolutionised the business of intelligence gathering was allowed to deteriorate as it did. Another is the way in which the skeptical community did its best to scupper it right from the start, or even before the start, with what Smith describes as “an invasion of skeptics” in 1972/3 at the (then) Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International. Chief invader Ray Hyman displayed some rather uncertain powers of observation, referring to the “incredible sloppiness” of the experiments he witnessed there with the ‘blue-eyed’ Uri Geller (black-eyed, actually), but forgetting to mention that the only experiments he and his colleagues were able to see were some that they set up themselves.

Some twenty years later, after what became known as Star Gate had been bounced from one funder to another ending up where it started, with the CIA, that agency commissioned a report from the ostensibly impartial American Institutes of Research (AIR) which sought the opinions of statistician Jessica Utts, a genuine expert who concluded that “psychic functioning has been well established”, and Ray Hyman, who concluded that it hadn’t. One of Paul Smith’s most startling revelations is that out of the three to four thousand remote viewing sessions carried out by some two dozen viewers over the years, the AIR team based its findings on “approximately forty sessions conducted in 1994 and 1995 by three demoralised viewers” (p.449).

It was the third time Hyman had been involved with what appears to be a report guaranteed to come up with negative findings. He was a co-signatory of CSICOP begging letter that included: “Belief in paranormal phenomena is still growing, and the dangers to our society are real… The Defense Department may be spending millions of tax dollars on developing ‘psychic arms’… Please help us in the battle against the irrational.”

Smith notes (p. 372) that a phrase from Paul Kurtz’s The Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology turns up almost verbatim in the National Research Council’s 1988 report which was compiled by, among others, Hyman and George Lawrence, two of the original ‘skeptical invaders’ at SRI. How objective can you get?

Why, you may well be wondering, did the U.S. military and intelligence communities behave in such a paradoxical manner, first setting up a radically new and forward-looking programme several of whose participants received medals, suggesting that they had done something right (one, Joseph McMoneagle, being awarded the prestigious Legion of Merit for “producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source”) and then doing its best to destroy it? The answer is simple: it all depended on those involved, whether as recruiters, trainers, supervisors or viewers.

Several of these – in the early days, probably all of them including the original CIA funders – were strong believers in psi, their positive approach clearly affecting the performance of novice viewers. Ingo Swann, for example, who trained most of the best viewers, was already a well tested veteran of psi research when a series of chance encounters got him together in the early 1970s with SRI physicist Harold Puthoff, while McMoneagle’s interest in psi began with an exceptionally powerful near death experience that seems to have unlocked remarkable abilities.

Although only a very small percentage of RV reports has been made public, the rest never having been openly evaluated by Hyman or anybody else, a few major successes have been admitted, such as the location in Africa of a crashed Soviet aeroplane and the capture of runaway U.S. customs official Charles Jordan, the latter being confirmed by a customs official and the former by no less than President Carter. You will find no mention of these successes in any of the skeptics’ reports.

If one was to listen to a bunch of first-grade piano students fumbling through Chopsticks with wrong notes in every bar while upstairs and out of earshot a talented youngster was giving a faultless performance, without the music, of Chopin’s Barcarolle, you would be wrong to conclude that there was no real evidence that anybody could play the piano properly, let alone brillliantly. Which is in effect what the skeptical invaders did, as they always do. What has been lost as a result can only be imagined.

Remote viewing may not have been the intelligence panacea it was hoped to be, but the programme did show that just about anybody can be trained to become clairvoyant to some degree, an important discovery in itself.

So much for the bad news. The good news is that many of the remote viewing veterans are still very much around. To catch up with them, go to Smith’s website RV Viewer and that of the International Remote Viewers Association.

by Guy Lyon Playfair

“I’d love to publish it. If it’s watertight evidence I’d publish it as fast as I possibly could.”

This surprising statement was made in the first of two parts of the BBC World Service series “Discovery: Who Runs your World?” in which the question was “Who decides which scientific research project gets funding?”

Why was it surprising? Because it was part of an answer to presenter Geoff Watts’s question “would a paper on telepathy stand a chance of getting into the journal Nature?” and the speaker was – yes, the editor in chief of that journal, Philip Campbell.

He did add that “…by God, I’d get it reviewed, and you may say ‘well, there you go, you’re going to suppress it almost by definition'”, but he also pointed out that as editor he felt he had the right to overrule his peer reviewers – a right that could of course be exercised to suppress an article recommended by reviewers. Still, it was an encouraging noise to be heard from the editor of a journal that over the years has not exactly encouraged any form of psi research. Remember John Maddox’s famous editorial in 1981 following the publication of Rupert Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life? It was headed “A Book for Burning?”

Mr. Campbell has much lost time to make up for. The number of articles on telepathy or anything like it published since the journal was founded in 1858 can just about be counted on the toes of the three-toed sloth. There was Professor (later Sir William) Barrett’s brief account of his experiences with the notorious Creery sisters (Vol. 24, p.212, 1881) which followed George Henslow’s brief note on “Thought-Reading” (ibid, pp.164-5) in which he put forward the interesting suggestion that the term was misleading and the phenomenon might be renamed “will-imparting”. (The word telepathy was not coined until the following year, but mesmerists had been demonstrating will-imparting ever since the Marquis de Puys Gur’s classic experiments with Victor Race in 1784).

More than half a century later there was the late Arthur Oram’s account of his own experiments in card guessing (Vol. 157, p.556, 1946). The only reference he cites in his brief letter, which was just six half-column inches long, was a book by J.B. Rhine, suggesting that nothing relevant had appeared in Nature.

Both his and Barrett’s pieces would almost certainly have been rejected today as “self-reported and unsupported anecdotes”, although nobody who knew Arthur, a longtime SPR member who died earlier this year would doubt his integrity for a moment. However, there it was, sandwiched between letters on “Planck’s Radiation Formula” and “The Establishment of Beneficial Insects in Trinidad”. Those were the days when telepathy was treated just like any other field of human inquiry.

We had to wait until 1974 for the first full-length peer-reviewed paper on telepathy, Puthoff and Targ’s “Information transfer under conditions of sensory shielding” (Vol. 252, pp.602-7) which presented the highly positive results of their tests with Uri Geller, Pat Price and other unnamed subjects.

And that, as far as I have been able to discover, is it. (I’d be grateful to any reader who can let me know of any articles I missed). A subject of interest to the majority of the population, according to most recent surveys, and fully accepted by an increasing number of scientists has simply been ignored or else rubbished as in David Marks’s lengthy tirade “Investigating the Paranormal” (Vol. 320, pp.119-24, 1986) which was aptly described in a letter from Ian Stevenson (Vol.322, p.680, 1986) as “misleading simplification”.

Where were the reports from the likes of Charles Richet, Sir Oliver Lodge, Ren Warcollier, Gustave Geley, Eugene Osty, J.B. Rhine, J.G. Pratt, Milan Ryzl, Charles Honorton and Adrian Parker, Ian Stevenson and Rupert Sheldrake, to name but twelve?

Telepathy, at least until now, has been taboo to the editors of Nature. Let us hope that Bob Dylan was right and that the times are indeed a-changing. While browsing through the issue of Nature that contained Arthur Oram’s letter I found this line in a review of a book by Henri Bergson: “Most philosophers are right in what they assert and wrong in what they deny.”

And a final Thought for the Day from an unexpected source, U.S. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (quoted in Scientific American, Sept. 2005, p. 19). He was discussing the state of intelligence, but his words would not have been out of place at a meeting of either psi researchers or sceptics:

“There are known unknowns, that is to say, we know that there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know that we don’t know.”

by Guy Lyon Playfair

Startling revelations concerning the U.S. Government-sponsored Project Star Gate remote viewing programme are contained in a recent book, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Master Spy by Joseph McMoneagle – military remote viewer No. 001 – who by his retirement from the Army in 1984 had taken part in more than 1,500 intelligence tasks, receiving the Legion of Merit for his leading part in “a unique intelligence project that is revolutionizing the intelligence community”.

The “unique project” involved the use of Army personnel who were in effect trained to demonstrate clairvoyance on demand, sitting in their rundown hut in Fort Meade, Maryland or the rather more comfortable premises of SRI International in California, mentally travelling all over the world in search of terrorists, kidnap victims, hostages. crashed military aircraft, secret Soviet bases and much else besides.

There is more that we may never know about this pioneer programme of applied psi functioning. Dr Harold Puthoff, who was closely involved in setting up the project at SRI, has said in a televised interview that “at its height it was being used on almost every major security issue” and that there existed “file cabinets full of data that probably won’t be declassified in our lifetime”. (“Natural Mystery”, Channel 5 (UK), 24 July 2000).

Some data, at least, have been made public. The successful location of a crashed Soviet aircraft in Zaire was announced by no less than President Carter. McMoneagle gives full details of several cases from the search for kidnap victims General Dozier, Col. Higgins and CIA agent William Buckley to the spotting of a secret Soviet submarine and the prediction of the Skylab landing date and site.

There can be no doubt that McMoneagle and his fellow remote viewers proved again and again that people can be trained to demonstrate clairvoyance and put it to practical use in real-life situations, sometimes obtaining information that cannot be obtained by any other means. So, if Star Gate was such a success, how come it was scrapped? Not only that, but why did the CIA go to such lengths to claim that the project had never been of much use anyway? For this is exactly what they did. Back in 1986, the National Research Council had issued a report: Enhancing Human Performance, by David Goslin, who concluded that “little or no support was found for the usefulness of many other techniques such as… remote viewing”.

Eh? Did he look for such support in the right places, one wonders? As McMoneagle now reveals, no, he didn’t. He explains: “We were under direct orders during the 1986 study not to talk to the members of the NRC.blue-ribbon panel, and we didn’t. Not only did they not talk with us, they were denied access to any of the project’s remote viewing materials or historical files from 1979 through that study in 1986.”

In 1995, the CIA asked the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to set up another blue-ribbon panel to review work done since 1986, the president of AIR then being none other than David Goslin. He and his colleagues, who included the prominent skeptic Ray Hyman, duly announced that, among other things, remote viewing “failed to produce actionable intelligence”.

Now comes McMoneagle’s stun-grenade. The authors of the NRC and AIR reports did not have the necessary security clearances to do what they had been asked to do. “So, no one in either blue-panel review group has ever seen the information they claim to have had access to.” They did not see the remote viewers’ reports, they did not get any feedback from the people those reports were sent to, and they interviewed only a handful of newcomers to the Project. The AIR team did not even talk to McMoneagle although he offered his cooperation on several occasions. They seem to have gone out of their way to avoid anybody who actually knew anything about Star Gate. So much for Skeptical Inquiry in action.

One can only speculate as to why the CIA was so determined to rubbish a project they had known all about ever since they helped set it up. They must have known perfectly well what skilled viewers could deliver, which on at least one admitted occasion was good enough for the president. Yet they wanted the public to believe that it had all been a waste of time.

McMoneagle’s opinions are, perhaps, more valuable than those of the NRC and AIR teams (with the honorable exception of statistician Jessica Utts, who did her best to set the record straight in The Journal of Scientific Exploration (Vol. 10, No. 1, 1996), which also has valuable contributions from Star Gate veterans Harold Puthoff, Russell Targ and Edwin May. These three knew as much about Star Gate as anybody involved in it, and so naturally were not invited to be panel members.

McMoneagle’s verdict on the use of psi for intelligence gathering: “I can emphatically state that it works, it’s here, and it will continue to be reinvented from time to time until it becomes part of the established, historically accepted background. Wishing it can’t, won’t, doesn’t make it go away.”

If the AIR team had really wanted to evaluate remote viewing, they might have been better off watching television. McMoneagle has now taken part in 22 live remote viewings, of which he reckons 17 were successful. The first of these, in 1995, was made by an exceptionally sympathetic team, LMNO Productions, and was shown on the ABC special “Put to the Test”. Yes, television does occasionally get it right.

British viewers saw him in action in the 1996 series “The Paranormal World of Paul McKenna”, in which he was only partially successful thanks to confusion with the protocol, for which hardline skeptic Dr Richard Wiseman was responsible.

One of McMoneagle’s most successful demonstrations was in front of those who attended a meeting at the Rhine Research Center. The ubiquitous Wiseman was again involved in changing the protocol to suit his requirements, which did not prevent 29 out of the 30 members of the audience matching McMoneagle’s drawing to the correct target out of a pool of five possible targets. Of this demonstration, shown on the Discovery channel, McMoneagle notes drily that “Richard has refused to discuss it since”.

“There is so much proof for the existence of psi,” he concludes, “it’s foolish to continue spending time, money, and effort ‘proving it’ to the satisfaction of idiots’.”

See The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Master Spy, by Joseph McMoneagle, Hampton Roads, 2002. Crossroad Press; A Panta Rei Press Digital Edition edition, 2014.

by Guy Lyon Playfair

The paper ‘Using Neuroimaging to Resolve the Psi Debate’ by Samuel T. Moulton and Stephen M. Kosslyn (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20 (1), 2008) must have brought tidings of great joy to sceptics. Not only do the Harvard University psychologists claim their findings to be ‘the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena’, but add that if they are sufficiently replicated, ‘the case will become increasingly strong, with such certainty as is allowed in science, that psi does not exist.’

They reach these conclusions after a lengthy series of telepathy/clairvoyance tests in which sixteen closely bonded pairs (parent/child, brother/sister, twin, roommate) took part. One of each pair was put in a magnetic resonance imaging machine, enabling the researchers to see the brain at work as it dealt with incoming stimuli, while the other was taken to another room, shown a picture and asked to transmit it mentally to the one in the machine, who was shown the same picture plus a control one, and asked to guess which one had supposedly been sent by psi by pressing a button.

Results were almost exactly at the 50% chance level (1842 correct guesses out of 3687, or 49.9%). The authors found no differences at all in the brain scans made when guesses were right or wrong. Hence their conclusions quoted above.

They do concede that there is evidence for what many believe to be psi, and cite one of Louisa Rhine’s spontaneous cases in which a mother woke at 4 am feeling her son was calling to her for help, and learned later that he had been shot at exactly that time.

Ah, they say, but this is only anecdotal evidence, which is known to be beset by ‘cognitive bias’, ‘availability error’, ‘confirmation bias’, ‘illusion of control’ and ‘bias blind spot’. One or more of these ‘may explain apparently paranormal evidence that people report’. In any case, ‘the positive evidence that has been reported is merely ‘anomalous’,’ and ‘despite widespread public belief in [psi] phenomena and over 75 years of experimentation, there is no compelling evidence that psi exists.’

Having thus dismissed all human testimony because of its ‘inherent uninterpretability’ (an attitude fortunately not adopted in courts of law), the authors reveal their own set of biases by giving a shamefully sloppy and tendentious account of previous lab experiments. Researchers from Myers to Honorton and Sheldrake who have reported positive results are mentioned briefly in passing without readers being given much idea of what they actually did. Meta-analyses are dismissed with a wave of the hand because of their ‘instability’. No mention of the frequently replicated decline or sheep-goat effects. More inexcusably, no mention either of at least five MRI studies (Standish, Achterberg, Kozak et al.)* that did find evidence for psi. So why didn’t Moulton and Kosslyn?

The obvious answer: there wasn’t any in their experiments. Or if there was, the signal was lost in the noise as receivers were asked to make 240 guesses over a 90-minute period. They could not possibly have reached the relaxed state essential for telepathic reception in an hour and a half of non-stop guessing and button pressing.

It seems from the authors’ general tone that this was the result they wanted and expected, and although they concede that ‘absence of proof is not proof of absence’ the title of their paper strongly implies that the psi debate has been solved. One negative result has cancelled more than a century of positive ones.

No serious psi researcher would ever claim to have proved psi to exist. Proof, in 21st century science, is confined to mathematics. Elsewhere, there are only probabilities, and as all those meta-analyses have shown, despite their alleged and undefined ‘instabilities’, the probability that all published (by definition no longer anecdotal) case histories and controlled lab experiments can be explained by chance alone is microscopic to the point of invisibility.

The real debate is between those on whose research these findings are soundly based and those who list spurious reasons to reject that research en bloc. If articles like this one continue to be published, the debate will go on for ever.

* For a summary, see R.A.Charman (2006). ‘Direct brain to brain communication – further evidence from EEG and fMRI studies.’ Paranormal Review October, 3-9.

In these articles, longtime skeptic-watcher Guy Lyon Playfair takes a skeptical look at some of their activities. His books include: This House is Haunted, Twin Telepathy, The Flying Cow: Exploring the Psychic World of Brazil, and If This Be Magic: The Forgotten Power of Hypnosis.

Part 1: Good Skeptic Ian Wilson on Nostradamus
by Guy Lyon Playfair

There can be few whose writings have been quoted, misquoted, debunked and even faked so often and so long after their death as those of the French physician, astrologer and prophet Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), better known by his Latinised surname of Nostradamus.

Whenever there is a momentous event such as the death of President Kennedy or Princess Diana or the destruction of the World Trade Center, we can be sure that one of his numerous supposedly precognitive quatrains will be resurrected as evidence that he saw it all coming nearly 500 years ago.

There are all kinds of problems facing the critic who attempts to come up with a fair and balanced assessment of this enigmatic prognosticator. His ‘prophecies’ tended to avoid specific names, places and dates, and a sceptical critic can reasonably claim that he made so many of them (942, no less) that sooner or later one of them would be bound to correspond to something that happened somewhere or other even centuries later.

Then there is the question of primary sources, which is what professional historians like to work with. These are not always easy to find in this case. The most important sources are the annual almanacs Nostradamus published until shortly before his death, some of which only exist today in single copies scattered around several European libraries or in inaccessible private hands. These have to be distinguished from the many fake almanacs that appeared under his name even during his lifetime, and continued to appear well after it.

There are also the horoscopes he did for his wealthy patrons, some still unpublished, and who knows what might yet emerge from the attic of the former home of some member of the 16th century great and good? There were several of them who were sufficiently convinced by Nostradamus’ abilities to contribute to his considerable fortune.

To make sense of the Nostradamian muddle calls for the skills of a proper historian who approaches the subject with an open mind and knows how to separate wheat from chaff after trawling through the available primary sources. Ian Wilson, an Oxford graduate in Modern History, has done this very convincingly in his Nostradamus – The Evidence (2002). He makes his position clear in his Preface:

“Books about Nostradamus are mostly written by so-called ‘Nostradamians’ convinced that [he] had a genuine prophetic gift. Or by born-again sceptics like James Randi utterly determined to rubbish that idea. I belong to neither camp.”

His own book came to be written after his publisher wrote, a few days after the events of September 11th, 2001, complaining that he couldn’t find ‘a book on Nostradamus which looks objectively at the man, his times, his books, his prophecies and the psychology of why his prophecies are still rolled out (witness the last few days…)’ and asked if this was ‘something that might attract you?’

His initial reaction was a firm ‘No’, as he was reluctant to enter what he considered ‘crank territory’. But a commission is something only very rich authors can afford to ignore, so Wilson embarked on ‘a highly intensive period of getting to know Nostradamus’ with a wide-open mind. What he discovered was proof of Kepler’s claim, in his Tertius Interveniens (1610) that ‘the diligent hen will find the golden kernel in the rotting dunghill’ and should not ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’.

Wilson has little time for much of the Nostradamian dunghill which is a pile of misquotations, false associations, unwarranted assumptions and wild speculations, yet he also gives Randi’s venture into historical and literary criticism, The Mask of Nostradamus (1990) fairly short shrift. For example, Randi’s claim, on the basis of an anonymous article he supposedly found in the New York Public Library, that no copy of the 1555 Prophecies exists, is ‘blown to smithereens’ by the fact that at least two copies have survived, in libraries in Vienna and Albi. A photo of the title page of the Albi copy on page 81 of Wilson’s book settles that argument. Wilson gives other examples of how Randi’s ‘supposedly myth-busting’ book introduced ‘myths entirely of his own making’.

He also gives examples of well-sourced ‘golden kernel’ prophecies that unquestionably did come true, such as those of the death of King Henri II in a jousting contest, the Great Fire of London (1666) and perhaps most persuasively of all, those contained in the lengthy and detailed horoscope that Nostradamus did for mining magnate Hans Rosenberger. Wilson rates this as ‘uncannily accurate’ even down to such details as his prediction that his client’s miners would meet a ghost in the mine which would scare them stiff which, Rosenberger confirmed, indeed they did.

This is sceptical investigation as it should be, and it reminds us that while there are plenty of bad sceptics around, there are also good ones with no axes to grind who reach their conclusions only after careful examination of the evidence.

See Part 2 Below: