Michael Shermer
The contributions by James Alcock, Ray Hyman, and Christopher C. French, in this volume are so comprehensive and conclusive that I have little to add in the way of skeptical commentary, with one exception. In reading Dean Radin’s
“A Brief History of Science and Psychic Phenomena,” one is struck by the sheer force of chronological enumeration of the numerous experiments, studies, insti-tutes, organizations, and research programs purporting to prove the existence of psi. The devil is in the details, however, which when examined prove otherwise—
that psi is a chimera. Radin’s brief mention of the U.S. government’s Stargate pro-gram is emblematic.
In 1970 the C.I.A. began a systematic program in the study of remote viewing and other forms of ESP and psi. This was the age of paranormal proliferation.
When I was a graduate student in experimental psychology during this time I saw on television the Israeli “psychic” Uri Geller bend cutlery and reproduce drawings using, so he said, psychic powers alone. For awhile I kept an open mind to the possibility that such phenomena could be real, until I saw James “the Amazing” Randi on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, where Randi used magic tricks to replicate Geller’s effects. (As Randi once remarked, “If Geller is bending spoons with psychic power he’s doing it the hard way.”) Randi bent spoons, duplicated drawings, levitated tables, and even performed a psychic surgery.
When asked about Geller’s ability to pass the tests of professional scientists,
An earlier version of this chapter was published in eSkeptic, April 26, 2005.
Randi explained that scientists are not trained to detect trickery and intentional deception, the very art of magic.
I always assumed, however, that the paranormal was the province of the cul-tural fringes. Then, in 1995, just as Skeptic magazine really started to take off in popularity and began consuming most of my waking hours, the story broke that for the previous quarter century the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in con-junction with the U.S. Army had invested $20 million in a highly secret psychic spy program called Stargate (also Grill Flame and Scanate). Stargate was a Cold War project intended to close the “psi gap” (the psychic equivalent of the missile gap) between the United States and Soviet Union. The Soviets were training psychic spies, so we would as well. The story of Stargate was recently featured in a film based on the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, by British investigative journalist Jon Ronson (2004). This is a Looking Glass-like story of what the CIA—
operating through something called Psychological Operations (PsyOps)—was researching: invisibility, levitation, telekinesis, walking through walls, and even killing goats just by staring at them (the ultimate goal was killing enemy soldiers telepathically). In one project, psychic spies attempted to use “remote viewing”
to identify the location of missile silos, submarines, POWs, and MIAs from a small room in a run-down Maryland building. If these skills could be honed and combined, it was believed, perhaps military officials could zap remotely viewed enemy missiles in their silos.
Initially, the Stargate story received broad media attention—including a special investigation by ABC’s Nightline—and made minor celebrities out of a few of the psychic spies, such as Ed Dames and Joe McMoneagle. As regular guests on Art Bell’s pro-paranormal radio talk show Coast-to-Coast, the former spies spun tales that, had they not been documented elsewhere, would have seemed like the ramblings of paranoid delusionists. For example, Ronson con-nects some of the bizarre torture techniques used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, with similar techniques employed during the FBI siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. FBI agents blasted the Branch Davidians all night with such obnoxious sounds as screaming rabbits, crying seagulls, dentist drills, and (I’m not making this up) Nancy Sinatra’s song
“These Boots Are Made for Walking.” The U.S. military employed the same technique on Iraqi prisoners of war, replacing Sinatra’s ballad with the theme song from the PBS children’s television series Barney and Friends—a tune many parents concur does become torturous with repetition.
One of Ronson’s sources, none other than Uri Geller, led him to one Major General Albert Stubblebine III, who directed the psychic spy network from his office in Arlington, Virginia. Stubblebine thought that with enough practice he could learn to walk through walls, a belief encouraged by Lt. Col. Jim Channon, a Vietnam vet whose post-war experiences at such new age Mecca’s as the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, led him to found the “first earth battalion” of
“warrior monks” and “Jedi knights.” These warriors, according to Channon, would transform the nature of war by entering hostile lands with “sparkly eyes,”
marching to the mantra of “aum,” and presenting the enemy with “automatic
hugs” (all brilliantly exhibited by George Clooney’s character in the film version of The Men Who Stare at Goats). Disillusioned by the ugly carnage of modern war, Channon envisioned a battalion armory of machines that would produce “dis-cordant sounds” (Nancy and Barney?) and “psycho-electric” guns that would shoot “positive energy” at enemy soldiers.
As entertaining as all this is, can anyone actually levitate, turn invisible, walk through walls, or remote view a hidden object? No. Under controlled conditions remote viewers have never succeeded in finding a hidden target with greater accu-racy than random guessing. The occasional successes you hear about are due either to chance or suspect experimental conditions, such as when the person who subjectively assesses whether the remote viewer’s narrative description seems to match the target already knows the target location and its characteristics.
When both the experimenter and the remote viewer are blinded to the target, my analysis of the literature indicates that psychic powers vanish.
Herein lies an important lesson that I have learned in many years of paranor-mal investigations: What people remember rarely corresponds to what actually happened. Case in point: A man named Guy Savelli told Ronson that he had seen soldiers kill goats by staring at them, and that he himself had done so as well. But as the details of the story unfold we discover that Savelli is recalling, years later, what he remembers about a particular “experiment” with 30 numbered goats.
Savelli randomly chose goat number 16 and gave it his best death stare. But he couldn’t concentrate that day, so he quit the experiment, only to be told later that goat number 17 had subsequently died. End of story. No autopsy or explanation of the cause of death. No information about how much time had elapsed between the staring episode and death; the conditions of the room into which the 30 goats had been placed (temperature, humidity, ventilation, etc.), how long the goats were in the room, and so forth. When asked for corroborating evidence of this extraordinary claim, Savelli triumphantly produced a videotape of another experiment where someone else supposedly stopped the heart of a goat. But the tape showed only a goat whose heart rate dropped from 65 to 55 beats per minute.
That was the extent of the empirical evidence of goat killing, and as someone who has spent decades in the same fruitless pursuit of phantom goats, I conclude that the evidence for the paranormal in general doesn’t get much better than this.
They shoot horses, don’t they?
REFERENCE
Ronson, J. (2004). The men who stare at goats. London: Picador/Pan Macmillan.