Ray Hyman

They did everything in their power to shut us down weekly.

Ray Hyman and I were chosen to assess the government remote viewing program mainly because they wanted people who were already familiar with the work, but who they knew would take two different perspectives.

And I had already published work saying that I believed there was really something there based on the data, and Ray had basically built his career being a skeptic.

I found a certain consistent effect for remote viewing.

But then I went to see a Special Forces sergeant called Glenn Wheaton.

Ray Hyman had told me that Glenn was part of a secret early '80s paranormal military unit called Project Jedi.

We had a master sergeant that could stop the heart of a goat.

What, just by looking at it? Just by wanting the goat's heart to stop.

As well as doing this, I edit the Skeptic magazine.

We actually published, wait, before I was the editor, so in 2012, I think it was, we published a couple articles to the Skeptic magazine all about that long journey that parapsychology went on to a point where Ray Hyman, Richard Wiseman, Chris French were writing about essentially how parapsychology is kind of a dead end now.

We've studied it for long enough, and what we found is there's no there there.

You even talked about a couple times on this show how difficult it is to even set up some of these tests when you're testing psychics because there's so many variables.

I'm arguing, I don't think there's anything in advance.

And this is not an evidence that you could power it up.

I found an article that Dean Reardon actually co-authored about this particular story with a skeptic, Ray Hyman.

It's in Psychology Today.

Statistician Jessica Utts, probably the person that invented the pretzels and chip bread, argued that the, you know, the, the laboratory evidence showed a statistically significant effect and concluded that psychic functioning had been demonstrated.

Psychologist Ray Hyman disagreed that the evidence established paranormal perception and raised concerns about, you know, method- methodology, uh, interpretation, and whether the results were sufficiently convincing and independently replicated.

So let's make sure that I, I understand all this.

They, they weren't necessarily arguing about whether certain statistical results existed.

A set of techniques used by professional manipulators to get a subject to behave in a certain way or to think that the cold reader has some sort of special ability that allows him to mysteriously know things about the subject.

If you want further detail on these techniques, you could start by reading the full entry on cold reading in the Skeptics Dictionary, followed by Ray Hyman's classic article, Cold Reading, How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them.

If you're really serious about learning more on the topic, you might consider buying a copy of Ian Rowland's The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of the advice offered in these publications.