Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [82]
Finally, in the "Summary of Experiments" section of a paper that Targ and Puthoff presented at a prestigious conference in Geneva, this time on quantum physics and parapsychology, one startling episode involving a "remote-viewing" test is described. It is referred to as "the first experiment" in a "series of experiments," and Harold Puthoff is described as "the experimenter" who also conducted the "pre-experimental" process with the subjects. I quote these words and phrases to emphasize that it is an experiment, and it was important enough to be a feature of their talk at this meeting. But nowhere in the description is there any mention of the fact that walkie-talkies were used on both ends of the experiment! If the experiment employed the same techniques that Targ and Puthoff have used in the past—cueing and prompting the subjects as in a child's game of "hot-and-cold"—it is easy to see why it was a success. But why did Puthoff not mention the walkie-talkies? Surely that should have been part of a scientific paper. When Puthoff was asked about this, he denied the use of the walkie-talkies! He wrote:
Preposterous! If we used walkie-talkies during experiments, it would be easy to cue a subject into a correct response—and that's as obvious to us as to anyone else! Although we have used walkie-talkies occasionally in training, we have never, never, never—not even once—used a walkie-talkie during an experiment... not even to say "we're at our site".... Not even an unused walkie-talkie is carried by members of the outbound team. What more can I say?
But Puthoff has forgotten, perhaps, that he specifically wrote later, in the book Mind Reach, that he did use walkie-talkies during this important experiment, and he even used the same illustration for the account in that book as he used in the Geneva paper! But by the time the episode was printed in Mind Reach, it was treated as an almost experiment—a mere whim of the moment. Previously it had been touted as a major and highly significant scientific breakthrough!
What more can you say, Dr. Puthoff? Well, you could begin by apologizing to your colleagues at SRI, who have been embarrassed by your unscientific behavior. You could apologize to the editors of the scientific journals and to the journalists who believed you when you delivered all that poppycock to them. And you might think of how to apologize to a generation that, largely because of your highly colored and hyperbolized accounts of the "non-experiments" you sold to them as miracles of the avant garde, got so screwed up in their heads that they may never be able to deal with a rational thought again.
Father Damian Fandal of the University of Dallas recommends these two rules for academics in trouble: (1) Hide, and (2) If they find you, lie!
In closing the discussion of Targ and Puthoff, I must note that they have made use of an affiliation with another parapsychologist, Charles Tart of the University of California at Davis. He has been brought into several of their projects to add a certain gloss to the proceedings, since he has a reputation as one of the most honest and dedicated workers in parapsychology. I cannot find any indication that Tart has ever misreported data or denied honest criticism. But, as we shall see, he is susceptible to the usual pitfalls. One of his most widely known books, a work that has been through many printings and is used in colleges around the world as a textbook, is Learning to Use Extrasensory Perception. It deals