James Randi: debunking the king of the debunkers

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83. Thanks for the heads-up, Jackpine Radical! Spooks like the paranormal jazz...

CIA ESP

By Jeffrey Kluger
Discover Magazine|Monday, April 01, 1996

EXCERPT...

Unlike the Gaps of the 1990s, which concern themselves less with geopolitics and national security than with Stone Washed Denims® and Relaxed Fit Khakis®, the gaps of the 1950s were of a far more Serious Nature®. For the better part of a generation, concerned Americans listened to dark warnings of missile gaps, preparedness gaps, and troop gaps. Now, according to newly declassified documents, it seems the American intelligence community was also concerned with an entirely different kind of gap: a genuinely feared, utterly in earnest psychic gap. Over the last 20 years of the cold war, the United States, it was revealed last year, spent $20 million investigating extrasensory perception and other psychic phenomena in an effort to determine whether these forces of the paranormal world could somehow be put to use by espionage experts in the natural world.

SNIP...

Generally, the CIA’s ESP work involved selecting either a videotape or a photograph of a person, place, or thing, isolating individual volunteers in another room, and asking them to try to determine what the image was. In some trials a second volunteer was told to look at the image, concentrate, and try to transmit it to the receiver; in others the receivers were on their own. In all instances, Utts says, we were trying to discover whether the subjects could determine the correct image with a frequency greater than that which could be attributed to chance.

This question of whether the results of an experiment are caused by the phenomenon being investigated or by simple mathematical randomness is critical and is determined by what is known as the study’s statistical significance. To calculate statistical significance, investigators factor together a number of variables, including size of sample group, number of trials per subject, number of possible correct answers per trial, the speed of sound in a semiviscous medium, and Eddie Murray’s batting average during the 1983 season (.306 with 111 RBIs, hitting from both sides of the plate), and come up with a single numerical answer. If it’s lower than .05--meaning there is a less than 5 percent likelihood that you would see the results if chance alone were responsible--the study is deemed statistically significant; if it’s greater than .05, it’s not.

For Utts and the other ESP investigators, the overall statistical significance of the CIA’s studies seemed impressive. Over the first 15 years of the 20-year study, she says, 154 separate experiments were conducted consisting of 26,000 trials. During those experiments, subjects correctly identified the target image frequently enough that the statistical significance figure was a mere .00000000000000000001--meaning that you would expect to see those results only once in 1020 tries if the outcome was due solely to chance. If you trust your observed results, the studies lead to the conclusion that psychic abilities exist.

But can you trust your observed results? For centuries, traveling hucksters have mystified audiences with displays of telepathic abilities that turned out to be nothing more than psychic snake oil. In the American West, visiting clairvoyants would regularly ride into town and put on public shows in which they appeared to read the thoughts of complete strangers in the audience. Ultimately, sharp-eyed townsfolk began to pick up subtle cues that the volunteers the supposed seer called on weren’t strangers at all--when they addressed him as Dad, for example. This generally led to a quick tarring and feathering, and soon most of the available positions for traveling hucksters went unfilled. In the 1990s the possibility of extrasensory chicanery is no less great than in the 1890s, and some researchers believe that’s just what was going on in the CIA work.

SNIP...

Other trials struck Utts as equally convincing. In one experiment, the researchers dispatched a subject to drive around a site within 100 miles of the SRI building, while another subject, back at the lab, tried to determine where the car was. Almost immediately, the receiver began describing a landscape of rolling hills, with a propeller-like structure in the foreground used to produce energy. At that moment, it was later revealed, the volunteer transmitter had been passing the Rolling Hills Windmill Farm in northern California. In still another trial, the experimenters chose as their target image a top-secret underground intelligence facility in West Virginia. With little apparent trouble, two volunteers began describing the appearance and location of the complex, even identifying some of the code words used on the site.

CONTINUED...

http://discovermagazine.com/1996/apr/ciaesp738

PS: The world, as the great philosopher said, is more incredible than we can imagine. Thankfully, wot?