An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning
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Plain English Summary
When the CIA asked a statistician to review twenty years of government-funded psychic spying research, the results were striking. Across over 1,200 remote viewing sessions at two labs, people consistently scored well above chance at describing distant targets they couldn't see. Experienced viewers hit especially impressive numbers, and four independent labs all landed in the same success range. The kicker? Even the assigned skeptic agreed the statistics were solid -- they just disagreed about what the numbers meant. Utts concluded psychic ability meets the same evidence bar we'd accept for anything else, and it was time to ask "how does it work?"
Abstract
Research on psychic functioning, conducted over a two decade period, is examined to determine whether or not the phenomenon has been scientifically established. A secondary question is whether or not it is useful for government purposes. The primary work examined in this report was government sponsored research conducted at Stanford Research Institute, later known as SRI International, and at Science Applications International Corporation, known as SAIC.
Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.
The magnitude of psychic functioning exhibited appears to be in the range between what social scientists call a small and medium effect. That means that it is reliable enough to be replicated in properly conducted experiments, with sufficient trials to achieve the long-run statistical results needed for replicability.
A number of other patterns have been found, suggestive of how to conduct more productive experiments and applied psychic functioning. For instance, it doesn't appear that a sender is needed. Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite well. Recent experiments suggest that if there is a psychic sense then it works much like our other five senses, by detecting change. Given that physicists are currently grappling with an understanding of time, it may be that a psychic sense exists that scans the future for major change, much as our eyes scan the environment for visual change or our ears allow us to respond to sudden changes in sound.
It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.
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- Remote Viewing as Applied to Futures Studies — Lee, James H (2008)
- The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review — Cardeña, Etzel (2018)
- Parapsychological Phenomena as Examples of Generalized Nonlocal Correlations—A Theoretical Framework — Walach, Harald (2014)
- Appreciating Statistics — Utts, Jessica (2016)
- The Capricious, Actively Evasive, Unsustainable Nature of Psi: A Summary and Hypotheses — Kennedy, J.E (2003)
- Anomalous Cognition: An Umbrella Review of the Meta-Analytic Evidence — Tressoldi, Patrizio (2021)
- Apparent Association Between Effect Size in Free Response Anomalous Cognition Experiments and Local Sidereal Time — Spottiswoode, S. James P (1997)
Cites
- Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer — Bem, Daryl J (1994)
- A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research — Puthoff, Harold E (1976)
- Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding — Targ, Russell (1974)
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📋 Cite this paper
Utts, Jessica (1996). An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{utts_1996_assessment,
title = {An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning},
author = {Utts, Jessica},
year = {1996},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}