Parapsychology Research

The End of Parapsychology?: article

C.E.M. Hansel, ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Re-evaluation. NY: Prometheus Books.

David Marks & Richard Kammann, The Psychology of the Psychic. NY: Prometheus Books.

John Hasted, The Metal-Benders. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

John Taylor, Science and the Supernatural. London : Dutton.

For those of us who try somewhat bemusedly to follow the twisting fortunes of parapsychology – or the paranormal, or psychical research, call it what you will – each of these books makes for fascinating reading. Two of them are by professional psychologists who are strongly sceptical of paranormal claims (Marks & Kammann, and Hansel); one is by a physicist true-believer (Hasted), and one is by a mathematician believer-turned-heretic (Taylor). One would not expect much uniformity of opinion or tone there, and indeed there is little except in one regard: each book encourages us to cast a retrospective glance back at the mid-Seventies, which in future years will surely be seen as the Golden Age of the psychics and their academic fellow-travellers. Since then, as all four books variously attest, it has been downhill all the way. So far has the process of erosion gone that we may be witnessing the first stages of the disintegration of parapsychology as a topic of serious scientific investigation.

How can it be that things have come to this pass? Had I been reviewing these books a few years ago I would have been thought eccentric to prophesy such a future.** In the middle Seventies, we recall, the craze of the moment was metal-bending. Keys and even stout bars were proving putty in the hands of people who had never suspected for a moment that they possessed any psychic power. Uri Geller, the young Israeli who had first started the craze, was widely believed to have survived, in 1972-3, a rigorous examination of his powers under laboratory conditions at Stanford. In 1975 Geller appeared on British television and dumbfounded John Taylor, a professor of King’s College London with his feats of fork bending. Taylor, a public figure of some notoriety who has combined the higher mathematics with a spell as ‘counsellor’ for a glossy magazine, was bowled over by the results of tests he carried out on a number of ‘psychic’ children who were quickly styled the Gellerini. Without bothering to consult with magicians or even with those more familiar with the wiles of adolescents than he obviously was, Taylor rushed into print with a coffee-table bestseller, Superminds.    

In the United States the psi frontiers seemed to be expanding limitlessly in every direction: dream telepathy, psychokinesis in cockroaches, automated ESP machines. Much government money was being spent, its ready flow assured by reports of formidable Russian ladies who could push matchboxes off tables by willpower. Even the hard sciences were ready for a flirtation with psi. Books like Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) were encouraging the belief that the theoretical physicist and the naked fakir are both groping towards the same insights. Arthur Koestler has put this view lucidly: ‘it is not an exaggeration to say that there is an esoteric, “mentalist” trend running through the fantastic world of quantum mechanics – which ranges from veiled hints to frankly mystical statements.’ To be fair to Koestler, he has also warned of the dangers of forcing a shot-gun marriage between psi events and speculative physics. Yet this did not dampen the feeling that that physicists, at least those of more imaginative stamp, were no longer so hostile to parapsychology as they used to be.

Of course, even then there were a few dissenting voices. C.E.M. Hansel’s was probably the most persuasive of these, in the first edition of the book under review which now appears much revised and enlarged. Not only was he prepared to say boldly that certain telepathy subjects could have cheated and that even the experimenters might have doctored the results; he also described exactly how, in certain key experiments, such trickery might have been accomplished. On their first appearance such attitudes were first execrated and later on simply ignored. It is now apparent, however, that the questions we need to face up to today are the same questions reframed that Hansel first began asking in 1966. Can ESP be explained by sensory leakage or unconscious cuing of the subject? Is deliberate, cold fraud more common than hitherto supposed? Have high-ranking academic investigators proved childishly gullible at the hands of psychic tricksters? Can wishful thinking, hallucination, group or auto-suggestion, stage magic, sloppy observation, poor experimental design, professional ambition and plain money-grubbing better account for what are at best fleeting effects, rather than hypotheses which upend four centuries of scientific development? On the answers that are now being obtained, telepathy may be going the way of phrenology, and precognition may join the phlogiston theory on the rubbish-heap of science.

It is a sign of the times that both ESP and Parapsychology and, even more trenchantly, The Psychology of the Psychic deal extensively with experimenter and subject fraud. Now fraud in science, from the Piltdown Man to Sir Cyril Burt, is an unsavoury topic. Though it is probably much more common than we like to think, especially in the form of the massaging of data to produce positive results, in mainstream science it's rarely of crucial significance. For normal science is cumulative, progressive and, within limits, self-correcting. The more unexpected a reported finding is, the more rapidly will attempts be made to reproduce It; and if it was in fact fraudulent it will usually be soon exposed. In the most recent case I've heard of, one which has been dubbed "the great cancer hoax" and involved the alleged complex forging of biochemical evidence by a Cornell graduate student, the passage of less than eighteen months sufficed to uncover the truth.

Things are quite otherwise in parapsychology, where revelations of fraud are potentially disastrous. Why should this be? It's because even when positive results are claimed the success cannot be repeated freely and can never be confirmed to everyone’s satisfaction — especially sceptics’ satisfaction. How fundamental a difficulty exists in this unfortunate fact makes a pretty problem for the philosophers of science: the parapsychologists have lived with it for decades and have (so far) survived. The consequence, however, is that very much weight has come to be placed on certain classical experiments which are taken to be beyond criticism in their procedure and the honesty of all the parties involved. Such findings are then cited, year in and year out, as giving the bedrock evidence for the reality of psi events. This is why any undercutting of the narrow evidential base can bring the whole inverted pyramid of supposition and the speculation erected on top of it toppling down. And yet examples of fraud run like a dark thread through the century of experimental psychic research. For example, one series of tests, the Smith-Blackburn experiments of 1882-92, were accepted for nearly thirty years as having supplied incontestable proof of ESP under hypnosis.  But in 1908 and again in 1911 one of the subjects, Blackburn, explained fully how codes had been employed and how easily the investigators (who were the cream of British academia) had been fooled. Blackburn took evident sardonic pleasure in pointing out how “two youths with a week's preparation, could deceive trained and careful observers ... under the most stringent conditions their ingenuity could devise”. There is one extra twist to this sorry story which Hansel does not mention in his account of it. An historian, Trevor Hall, who has examined the surviving records, has shown that they betray evidence of having been altered by an unknown hand to ‘improve’ results that were false anyway!

In more recent days the doyen of psi research, J. B. Rhine, whose own honesty has never been questioned (though his judgment has, often) has himself given details of no fewer than twelve cases of suspicious conduct by workers in his laboratory, including four of demonstrable fraud. In the summer of 1974 even Rhine's successor as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology, Dr W. J. Levy, was obliged to resign. He had been caught by his own co-workers faking the record in an experiment supposedly proving that chicks and even fertile eggs can, by psychokinesis, keep a heating lamp in their cage turned on. And four years later, in May 1978, came an even more devastating revelation. It took the form of a staid paper by a statistician, Betty Marwick, on the raw data of Dr S. G. Soal’s (1959-1975) experiments into telepathy. These studies had long been of classical authority and indeed they earned Soal the seal of approval from conventional psychology in the form of a Doctorate of Science from London University. But now Marwick, following up earlier allegations in 1960 and 1974, proved beyond question that Soal’s results in some series had been very cleverly faked by post-test alterations to the score sheets. No real defence has been made of Soal, and there can be none. The whole of his work must be consigned to the round file. One of the most attractive features of Hansel's book is the way in which he handles these revelations. The temptation to say "I told you so!" must have been extreme, but to his credit he resists it.

Nevertheless, there is one acutely significant aspect of the Soal affair for which Hansel can be criticised for not having brought out more fully. This is the gulf between Soal’s public and private image. In the first edition of his book, even Hansel the arch-critic offered us a picture of Soal as “a careful and critical investigator” who at worst was guilty of weaknesses in the protocol of his experiments. Only in the obituaries published since his death do we get the kind of biographical information which gives us a very different picture to that of Soal as a cold and dispassionate researcher. Soal, it turns out, was a spiritualist; had become one just after the First World War in the hope of obtaining messages from his brother reported killed in action. Soal received many mediumistic communications which he found convincing and inexplicable — even after his brother turned up alive! Soal then put the messages down to group telepathy. He himself was prone to auto-hypnosis and trance states. An associate has described how one evening she found "a perspiring Soal in a dissociated state engaged in scribbling on a sheet of paper". It is not unlikely that the telepathy-test data message took place on some such occasion. With Soal it may literally have been a case of his left hand not knowing what his right was doing. The general point here, and it has wide application, is that the sanitised research papers in parapsychology journals rarely give us the gritty facts we need to assess their value properly. In the old journalists' cliché, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. They also demand, often, extraordinary sleuthing work; very seldom, unfortunately, do they receive it. Some other much publicised work which is interesting because it is, I would guess, still in transit on the voyage from initial awed acceptance to final rejection is that of Helmut Schmidt. Though his experimental designs have many variations — too many, grumble his critics — in a typical set up subjects sat at a console and attempted to predict, by pressing a button, which of four lamps would next light up. The sequence of illumination was not established in advance. Instead it was decided randomly by a device using a radioactive source which emits electrons at (according to current theory) entirely unpredictable intervals. When an electron arrived it triggered an oscillator which was moving rapidly through the four choices of lamp, passing each choice every microsecond; the electron therefore caused just one position to be selected at random. There were various interlocks to prevent cheating and a permanent record of all choices was kept on punched tape. Using three preselected subjects Schmidt reported 0% more hits than the probability theory allows over some sixty thousand trials; the odds against chance here exceed 500 million to one. He inferred that this result was explicable in only two ways: either the subjects knew by precognition which light before the circuit had decided it; or they were able by psychokinesis to force the circuit to accord with their choice.  

Back in 1966 Hansel ended the first edition of the present book with a plea for a totally automated ESP test to eliminate finally all experimenter bias and recording error, and ideally the Schmidt machines do meet that call. Ironic, then, that Hansel has become Schmidt's bitterest critic. In the drily impersonal way which is very much his trademark, he points out that Schmidt worked for a time in the same laboratory as the discredited Levy; that he may have used the same apparatus, and that Levy publicly admitted to faking his results by tampering with the tape print out. Quite apart from these dark charges, he criticises Schmidt’s reliance on machinery to preserve the integrity of his experiment. Subjects were unsupervised and left to their own devices in a closet with the console, the latter being connected to the rest of the electronics by a thirty-foot cable. Hansel offers a diagram showing how anyone, inside or out, could easily have shorted the cable to earth to produce an excess or deficiency of hits (it must he remembered that over thousands of trials the bias in the scores is so small that just a few seconds of interference in each run would give gigantic odds against chance). The real force of these allegations remain problematic, though Schmidt died without dealing convincingly with his critics. His work has never been replicated. On the evidence now coming in (and Marks and Kammann, who are psychologists at the University of Otago, NZ, are a mine of information here) it is clearer than it has ever been that parapsychology, despite a certain gloss of academic respectability, is not “normal” science but a pathological variant. That is to say, it's not one where the phenomena being studied gradually coalesce into larger and more inclusive chunks of evidence from which general principles can be deduced. Instead, in the case of the paranormal, we find an endless turnover of wonders, with new ones constantly coming into relief and old ex-wonders quietly fading into obscurity. Anyone with a taste for it can easily make up a list of the half-forgotten miracles of the last few decades: hypnotic regression to previous incarnations à la Bridey Murphy; thoughtography (or mental images apparently appearing on unexposed film); taping the voices of the dead; dream telepathy; emotion-sensitive plants; pyramid power. Few if any of these ex-wonders were finally crushingly exposed, for it is hard to prove categorically that something does not exist. Science has never proved that Apollo is not a real being; Greek gods ceased to influence human affairs only when the vast majority of people declined to take  any further interest in the question of whether they exist or not. Similarly, claims of paranormality can be said to have ‘failed’ only when no one can be persuaded to look at them any more. Uri Geller’s claims have now reached that terminal stage. He has upped the ante from mere key bending to wild tales about psychic control by UFOs, but to no avail: the fickle public has responded by yawning in his face. And ex-wonders are never resuscitated.

No one knows the bitter truth of that better than John Taylor, whose Science and the Supernatural is a complete recantation of Superminds. Rarely have we heard a more sorrowful, morning-after note. The Gellerini have departed: we hear no more of child psychic stars and sealed tubes. ‘I have spent many, many hours working with subjects,’ he now reports.  ‘There is nothing paranormal about spoon-bending.’ The tail of the paranormal remains unsalted. ‘We have searched for the supernatural and not found it. In the main, only poor experimentation, shoddy theory and human gullibility have been encountered.’ But we have to say this for Professor Taylor: no one has been more adept at getting people to pay handsomely to watch him conducting his education in public.

There must be some lively confrontations at London University these days. It would be interesting to know what John Hasted, a physicist colleague of Taylor’s at Birkbeck College, thinks of the latter’s about-face. Half of The Metal-Benders is a collection of weird anecdotes and half a description of rigorous tests on the few remaining Gellerini. He claims that these are able to bend metal strips for him inside weighed glass tubes hermetically sealed by a glassblower. It is certainly hard to know what to make of some of Hasted’s evidence, for example his solemn description of a day’s tests with a boy of thirteen who was given a plastic egg sealed with tape containing three metal crystals. Within a few minutes, ‘all of it in my field of vision’ the rattling ceased and the crystals were found to have been replaced with a one pound note! Halsted concedes that it might appear that ‘a mischievous boy had been playing tricks all day’ (well, it had crossed my mind), but he did not take the basic precaution of having even one witness, let alone a magician, present. Some other happenings, such as the teleportation of a turkey liver out of a plastic bag on to a table before three witnesses (whose opinions are not recorded), simply defy rational discussion.

We can be pretty sure that Hasted’s book will be the swan-song of metal-bending, for reasons given by Hasted himself. ‘It is an endangered talent, at risk of dying out in the world. The supply of new metal-benders is not keeping abreast of the weakening of the powers of the old ones.’ He puts this down to the ‘ridicule of sceptics’, but the cynic will find it more plausible that most benders have been exposed or have grown bored with their trickery. Critics of it never could get positive results; soon even its supporters won’t be able to either. Then they will be able to say only that ‘there were giants in those days’; that once upon a time they got amazing results.

In one way or another, therefore, the appearance of each of these books is a mark of the new and aggressive scepticism that is now abroad. True, anyone passing his eye over the groaning ‘occult’ shelves of a general bookshop will find it hard to detect any decline in the public appetite for the mystical, the psychic and the inexplicable. Probably it will indeed be some time before the market-place is affected. It should be borne in mind, though, that even the most extreme fringe beliefs – astrology, numerology and so on – are parasitical on mainstream science. Above all else they crave scientific respectability; and because until very recently orthodoxy has through pride or distaste simply waited for the new nonsense to go away, it has seemed that silence has given consent. For example, the evidence mustered by von Daniken for his ‘ancient astronaut’ theory cannot withstand a moment’s attention from a real archaeologist: it was partly because no one took the trouble to make an authoritative case against him that his books sold by the millions. When the effort was finally made the ‘Chariots’ fell into dust at once. Goaded past endurance by the rapid spread of dubious and unchallenged psychic claims, orthodoxy has begun to hit back. Already it has shown itself to be not ineffectual.

AFTERWORD

It's astonishing how little has changed in the world of parapsychology since this piece appeared in Quadrant in 1983. Of the people mentioned in this article, J.B. Rhine, Richard Kammann, Helmut Schmidt,  John Taylor, John Hasted, S.G. Soal, Cyril Burt, James Randi and CEM Hansel are dead. No one does spoon-bending any more: it has been replaced by newer ‘miracles’. Uri Geller has retired from the psychic circuit, though he pops up in the tabloids from time to time when he succeeds briefly in getting his name in the papers again. Though there is nothing left of his reputation, he lives in affluent comfort in England despite suffering some serious financial reversals due to failed legal actions.  

Occasionally claims still surface that telepathy, clairvoyance, etc have been demonstrated under laboratory conditions, but they never appear to be replicable. The Randi Prize of one million dollars for anyone who could demonstrate any paranormal skill under test conditions was available for many years. More than a thousand people applied to take it; not one passed. The Prize was terminated in 2015, apparently because time-wasters were taking up too much of the resources of the organisers.