Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [80]
Leon D. Harmon, who works with the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Case Western University in Ohio, was notified by a colleague at Bell Laboratories of the submission of the "remote-viewing" paper to the IEEE. The Bell employee invited him to be a referee of the paper. Time went by, and when Harmon again checked the situation he was informed that other referees had been selected, and that the paper was well on its way to publication. He was given an advance copy and exploded with anger. He was not alone. Barney Oliver, a member of the board of IEEE, threatened to resign if it was published. There was consternation among the IEEE associates, and finally the decision to publish was upheld, because it was just too late to cancel and because the general feeling was that such controversial research should not be suppressed just because it was unlikely to be correct. Harmon was given the right to reply to Targ and Puthoff's claims and did so.
Harmon's brief critique was very much to the point. He made the perceptive observation that less than 3 percent of the entire twenty-six page article dealt with the most important part of the subject—the experimental procedures and controls. There was, of course, good reason for this, though Harmon had no way of knowing this; it would be two years before the damning evidence came to light, and then only after careful and difficult probing. Harmon demolished the paper solely by pointing out that on the basis of the information available to the reader, there were countless ways that trickery could have been used to fool the experimenters. True, these methods were possible in view of the protocol used and the performance record of Targ and Puthoff in the Geller nonsense, but in this case the flaw lay not in the experiment itself but in the unbelievable judging procedure.
Two psychologists from New Zealand, Dick Kammann and David Marks, visited the Stanford Research Institute shortly thereafter and looked at the data a little harder than others had. They had already provoked Targ and Puthoff by criticizing the Geller tests, showing that standard magician's tricks could account for Geller's success. But Targ and Puthoff were anxious to bring them into the fold. It was T&P's undoing. (Dr. Kammann even had to place a phone call to Boyce Rensberger of the New York Times—while Harold Puthoff stood by as a witness—and retract a statement about the Targ and Puthoff work in order to keep their confidence.) Kammann and Marks's findings, submitted to Nature magazine, were published in August 1978. The "mind-reach" experiment collapsed into shambles.
Even before Kammann and Marks delivered the death blow, it was evident that the usual Targ and Puthoff methods had been applied to this research too. There were photographs accompanying the drawings that had been made. The reader might easily have assumed that these photographs were part of the test, since the represented angles corresponded closely to the drawings. It was quite obvious, from the excerpts published, that the "psychics" had intended some descriptions to match places other than those actually visited, but the judges had decided, and that was that. It was all swallowed whole after being lubricated with hindsight and hyperbole.
The judging procedure had been well designed—on paper, that is. Judges were given a list of the nine locations and a package of transcripts. Their job was to match the locations with the correct transcripts. It was done with great accuracy, and the case seemed proved. But when we find that three judges appointed by other officials at SRI failed to get good results with this matching procedure, we begin to get suspicious. Targ and Puthoff, however, found two who were sympathetic, and these two did just fine. Kammann and Marks, wondering about this difference in judging