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By Root 1051 0

interpretation that would, for example, justify our concluding that Soal consciously cheated in his research.... I am the person who suggested that Soal might have become his own subject on some occasions when preparing the lists of random numbers on the record sheets before the sittings were held. This explanation would require that he used precognition when inserting digits into the columns of numbers he was copying down, unconsciously choosing numbers that would score hits on the calls the subject would make later. For me, this "experimenter psi" explanation makes more sense, psychologically, than saying that Soal consciously falsified for his own records.

What Professor Pratt is trying to tell us, folks is that S. G. Soal had powers of precognition that allowed him to unconsciously predict the numbers that Shackleton was going to call the next day, and that he unconsciously inserted these predicted numbers into the list! Pratt adds that "we cannot sit in judgement of Soal regarding his behaviour, motives and character."

Oh, yes, we can. And we did. Guilty as charged.

As Walter Levy, Targ and Puthoff, Soal, and other "biggies" among the parascientists began to crumble one by one, journalists found it more difficult to find heroes to extol. Michael Brown, writing in the magazine Atlantic Monthly in 1978, found only one exciting person left in the cast—a scientist from the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, named Helmut Schmidt. It seemed that his experiments were the only ones being done in a properly controlled fashion, and his results seemed to be promising. He was working with highly sophisticated hardware and basic goals. The only problems were that (1) his experiments had not been monitored by outside observers, (2) the experiments had not been properly replicated, and (3) at least one set of results was so bizarre in its implications that even battle-scarred parascientists were loath to discuss the conclusions, especially since they depended entirely upon the quantum mechanics theory of psi that had been refuted by John Wheeler.

I met Schmidt at a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in New York. He is an Ichabod Crane type, very much the scientist in his demeanor, properly baggy and charmingly vague. I liked him instantly and consider him to be honest. But I believe him to be a naïve man who has embraced the basic tenet of the paranormal: Any absolute contradiction is evidence of profundity. He spoke at the meeting, calling his talk "Is There a PK Effect?" Happily, it was a question and not a conclusion.

Schmidt spoke of experiments in which a random generator, operating on several levels of randomness at high speed, was used to perform as an electronic "coin-flipper," producing a "head" or a "tail" (or a "yes"-"no," "red"-"green," "plus"-"minus") signal randomly. Subjects were asked to try to influence the generator to produce, for example, more "heads" than "tails"—and it seemed they were able to.

Certain mathematical procedures are involved in such experiments. If you were to flip a fair coin repeatedly and get a result at variance with the half-and-half "heads"-"tails" ratio, you would have to apply simple statistical rules to this outcome to find out if it were significant beyond chance. In essence, 100 tosses must produce 60 "heads" to be deemed significantly beyond chance. That's 10 percent above expectation. But in 50,000 flips, a margin of only 224 "heads" (.45 percent) more than the 50-percent figure is just as significant, and in a million throws 0.1 percent would be acclaimed. Of course, we are assuming perfectly fair tosses and recording methods.

In Dr. Schmidt's experiments, all results were automatically recorded and total, immediate feedback was given to the subject, who thus knew at all times how he or she was doing. The number of experimental "runs" was decided upon in advance. At first, he reported, he got no results, because, he said, he just didn't believe hard enough. What he did notice were small, almost-obscured, negative results when he used