The third in an intriguing series, “Operation Star Gate: U.S Intelligence and Psychic Spies“, written by D. Trull, Enigma Editor of ParaScope.com, this section features a doctor who discredits parapsychology. However, the next article in this series discusses the evidence that was found using remote viewing that could not have been found any other way!

3. “Parapsychology Has No Foundation”

Dr. Raymond Hyman, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, is the other expert asked for an opinion on the Star Gate program.

While Dr. Hyman agrees with Dr. Utts that the test results do appear significantly higher than random chance would allow, and there are no obvious flaws in testing technique, he contends that Star Gate has proven nothing and that psychic phenomena have yet to earn a place in the scientific world.

The entire field of study known as parapsychology, Hyman asserts, has no cumulative foundation to build its findings upon. The discoveries of one generation of its students are gradually found to be bogus or inconclusive, leaving those who follow to start with a clean slate each time. This is fundamentally different from established science, where replicability of all known phenomena is a sacred hallmark. Hyman calls parapsychology “unique among the sciences in relying solely on significant departures from a chance baseline to establish the presence of its alleged phenomenon.”

It is partly for this reason that Hyman discounts the effect sizes that Utts submitted as proof. An effect size reflects not a known property, but a measure of deviation from a known property. Furthermore, Hyman maintains that taking the average of a series of effect sizes results in a meaningless aggregation of numbers from which no real conclusions can be drawn. He points out that such figures can be shifted around to support a variety of different viewpoints with ease.

Hyman finds the testing methods to be sound and believes that the findings may represent a scientific anomaly. (He does object to the use of only one judge, familiar with the individual viewers, conducting all of the judging, rather than using a double-blind system.)

Nonetheless, a phenomenon’s lack of an explanation constitutes only a null hypothesis, which is a necessary condition for establishing scientific fact, but not a sufficient condition.

Even in the best of circumstances, Hyman would not accept Star Gate as proof that psychic ability exists, because science does not accept new findings on the basis of one study conducted by one organization with no outside verification. Compounding matters is the cloak of government secrecy which isolated the affair during most of its existence — a far cry from the open community spirit found on the frontiers of pure science.

Predictably, Hyman agrees with Utts that while Star Gate presents no useful applications for military intelligence, its findings are promising enough to merit continued research of another form.

The next step is to develop measurement methods for paranormal phenomena which define their occurrence in positive terms, rather than by their deviance from the expected norm. “Without such a theory,” Hyman writes, “we might just as well argue that what has been demonstrated is a set of effects — each one of which [may] be the result of an entirely different cause.”

Next: Anecdotal evidence suggests a number of scientifically unexplainable incidents.

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