Have you been in a ganzfeld experiment?

 My new project is a book about ganzfeld experiments in psi research. I'm keen to avoid yet another telling of the debate over the various meta-analyses and instead want more about the people involved. As such I'm looking for anyone who's participated in a ganzfeld psi experiment, either as an experimenter or judge, sender or receiver. If you're happy to answer a few questions about it by email, then please drop me a line at in_the_ganzfeld@outlook.com

Many thanks in advance.

Andrew

The curious case of Charles Brewin and Frank Johnson

 On 9th November 1903, a civil war veteran and tailor, Charles Brewin walked out of his house in Burlington New Jersey and disappeared. Police searches extended all the way to New York after a hat and note with his name on it were found on a New Jersey ferry but were unsuccessful in solving the mystery.

About a year and a half later, a man named Frank Johnson arrived in Plainfield, Vermont from New York and found employment and lodgings. He was a quiet man, a churchgoer and entirely unremarkable.

Then on the 24th or 25th June 1907 a trolley conductor named Alfred Woolman was in Plainfield when he saw a man he recognised as Charles Brewin on his trolley car. But when he addressed him, the man insisted he was called Frank Johnson and knew nothing of any Charles Brewin, and swiftly left the trolley.

Woolman went to get Brewin’s brother and son and they returned to Plainfield where they found Brewin/Johnson again and tried to persuade him that he was Charles Brewin. But Frank was adamant and they failed to change his mind.

This encounter was described in a local paper where a friend of Frank Johnson, Dr Buchanan, took particular note of it. His father, Mr Buchanan was a chaplain in Burlington and he thought his father might know Charles Brewin. And then, on June 30th, he got a call from Johnson’s landlady Mrs Dunn to come at once: her tenant had woken up saying his name was Charles Brewin and he didn’t know where he was, apparently under the impression that he’d left Burlington the previous day.

He went at once, with his father, and found the gentleman in question pale and weak but otherwise fine, now answering to the name of Brewin and seemingly having no memory of the past four years. Brewin and Mr Buchanan did know each other and he was later reunited with his family and, initially, returned to Burlington. After a little over a week, he and his family moved back to Plainfield and returned to the job he’d held previously when he was Frank Johnson.

That was a brief summary of the case as described by James Hyslop in 1913, vol 7, no 4 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. There are some contemporary newspaper articles that paint a slightly different picture (ie, that Brewin’s memory returned while he was in hospital) but the number of witnesses Hyslop spoke to lends it the most credibility.

It’s a curious and fascinating case but why would a psychiatric case be written up in a psychical journal?

Hyslop had a theory that episodes like these (and he’d collected about five or six) weren’t the result of internal mental processes but external psychic influences. He went to great lengths to check those few details of Frank Johnson’s pre-1915 history. Each fact: former employees, pastors of churches he attended, even the existence of Johnson’s sister, Anne, for whom he had life insurance had no basis in reality, and did not even have parallels to Brewin’s life apart from them having the same date of birth (22nd February) albeit on different years.

Hyslop had hoped to use hypnosis to try and unlock the secrets of Brewin/Johnson’s missing years but Brewin’s doctor (not Dr Buchanan) wouldn’t allow it. As such, after Hyslop had exhausted his attempts at tracking down Frank Johnson’s life in New York, he finished his research and wrote up his findings.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect for me is the strange dreams he had while he was Frank Johnson. He would often tell his manager, Miss Mary Brown, about these dreams and she recalled that some of them had prophetic qualities.

Hyslop wrote “He [Brewin] frequently told of his dreams of this kind [ie, predictive], but Miss Brown and her niece could remember clearly only the two mentioned, and one more recalled a little later.” and he summarises two of these such dreams…

"On the morning of the fire in the dyeing establishment he told Miss Brown of a dream that he had the night previous.

This he told before the fire occurred. It was that she had a fire in the store and that she was almost burned to death. Such a fire did occur that day and Mr. Johnson rescued Miss Brown who would have otherwise been burned to death. Miss Brown showed me the scars on her arm caused by the fire."

And…

"At another time they had sent a fur coat home after repairing it. The owner complained that the lining was in tatters when it came back. Miss Brown and Mr. Johnson did not understand it, and the coat was brought back.

He then dreamed that he took the coat to New York, went up an elevator, saw a little short man, and was told by him that the skins for the lining were not the right kind.

He then said he would take the coat to New York, which he did the next day, and met the man he had seen in his dream and went through the scenes of the dream itself."

It’s an interesting question: What does a man who doesn’t exist dream about? I could be poetic and suggest that, with no past to dream about, Frank Johnson had to dream about the future, but the supporting evidence is scant. Two dreams in two years (in the third dream, Johnson described how his old boss had been injured and then a year later his business went bankrupt – not very compelling) would not be worth much were it not for Miss Brown mentioning that it frequently happened.

I’ve been trying to find a more recent case of a sustained second personality with no luck. If anyone knows of one, or if they know what the more modern terminology for a case like this is (“double consciousness” doesn’t seem to be in current usage) please leave a comment.

References:

Hyslop, J. (1913), A Case of Secondary Personality, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, v7, n4, p 201-229

“Lost Memory Has Returned,” The Paterson Morning Call, Tuesday, 2nd July 1907, p2

“Brewin is Back In Plainfield,” The Paterson Morning Call, Tuesday 9th July 1907, p1

newspapers found on Fulton Post Cards

I’m not sure but I think you need a US/Canadian IP to access this.

Remote viewing the Iranian Hostage Crisis 1979-81

 Background

The Iranian Hostage Crisis began on 4 November 1979 and was initially an anti-US demonstration in the Iranian capital of Tehran. Students, angry at the US agreeing to give medical treatment to the deposed and exiled Shah of Iran, occupied the grounds and buildings of the US Embassy, holding the staff there hostage.

This was not the first such demonstration in Iran that year and, although the US authorities were angry at the situation, it was assumed that it would only last a few days at most. However, when the Ayatollah Khomeni praised the actions of the students, it became something more important and the occupation continued, with 52 hostages being held for 444 days.

The remote viewing project, then called Grill Flame, began work on the hostage crisis within a month and continued to work on it for almost all of the time that Americans were in captivity: the last session is dated 13 January 1981 and the hostages were released one week later.

I wrote a book about the entire crisis called America’s Imaginary Hostage Crisis so if you’re interested in a deep dive into the data, then this is definitely recommended…

But for this blog, I’d like to assess the claims of success that you often see reported in articles or books.

The first is Joe’s recalling of the team being called into a special session on the day the occupation began.

The beginning of the crisis

In the early part of November 1979, I received a call at 4:00 A.M. asking me to report directly to the office [...] So, I arrived not knowing that the American Embassy located in Tehran, Iran, had been invaded by Iranian revolutionaries. It was still dark when all six permanent and part-time remote viewers joined the operations officer, Fred, in the office. He said it was going to sound like a strange request, but that a number of Americans had been taken hostage in a location overseas, and they needed our help in identifying them. He then threw a pile of a more than a hundred photographs onto the tabletop—tell us which are the hostages and which are not. He left the room and left us to the problem.

McMoneagle, Joseph. The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy: The Remarkable Life of U.S. Government Remote Viewer 001 . Crossroad Press. Kindle Edition. 

Occasionally he recounts this story in talks and presentations, sometimes with the addition that he got it 100% correct.

The story is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, the US authorities knew exactly who was on the US embassy compound at the time the Iranians took over. Indeed, embassy staff in Tehran were calling Washington to keep the US government informed as the Iranians were arriving. Secondly, as mentioned before, this had happened before (in February 1979 the US  Embassy had been occupied in an almost identical event) so the initial reaction to the actions of the students was not one of panic. The US authorities were confident that, after the students had been given some publicity, the Iranian police would move in and clear the compound.

So there’s no reason for an early morning session as described. It doesn’t exist in the declassified articles, nor is it included in lists of sessions or summaries of notable events. So it was either totally unofficial, not even sanctioned by the Grill Flame management, or it didn’t happen at all.

Operation Eagle Claw

Often in articles regarding Grill Flame and the hostage crisis, their role in the operation to rescue the hostages is mentioned. This military plan called Operation Eagle Claw took place in late April 1980, at a time when all of the hostages were still held in the embassy compound.

On 23 April, the remote viewing team were ordered to leave the Fort Meade site, where they were based, and move into three rooms booked in the Best Western Motel. For the next two days they’d run a grueling series of sessions targeted at different parts of the Embassy: twenty sessions in under forty hours.

The army operation taking place in Iran at this time ended in tragedy. Faulty equipment meant the mission was aborted and then, as they were about to return, a sandstorm whipped up and in the ensuing confusion, a helicopter crashed into a plane and eight servicemen died while the rest retreated back to safety.

During the session at the motel, two remote viewers reported seeing something violent. On 24 April at 4pm, Fern described a “quick raid” while describing the Deputy Chief Mission Residence (area I).

“[..] Report the activity as two o’clock in the morning.”

“It’s one of complete mayhem.”

“Tell me what makes you say that.”

“I don’t know.”

“Report the raw imagery to me.”

“People scurrying. Guards scurrying from their cots.”

“Go on.”

“Just a quick impression of a very foreboding quick action.”

“All right. Move in time again one more hour in the future. Three o’clock in the morning. Three o’clock in the morning.”

“I can’t get rid of this imagery of a quick raid.”

Endersby, “America’s Imaginary Hostage Crisis” p98, Kindle

And the second example is often credited to Nancy Stern although it was actually Hartleigh Trent who conducted session CCC84. In her book “Phenomenon” Annie Jacobson writes:

Declassified documents indicate that on April 24, 1980, Nancy S. was conducting Remote Viewing (RV) Session CCC84 when she broke down. The tasker noted, “Admin note 0300 Hours in Iran,” or at 3:00 a.m. local time, Nancy S. reported she was having trouble getting the target she’d been sent to, which was a building in Tehran code-named India. Instead, she said she saw “an attacking force of some kind.” She apologized and stated that perhaps she was “hallucinating.” What she saw was “weird and illogical” but “very vivid, horrible. Like a bad dream…” Her descripion was of “Big chest, big big gorillas. Great big chest beating gorilla leading these apes… they had tiny 9 inch long rockets, hundreds of them.” She apologized again and said she’d “never lost control like this before.” 

Putting to one side any confusion between Nancy or Hartleigh, the fact is that the remote viewing sessions had twice described violent or disturbing scenes. But this was because they weren’t blind to the target, nor to the aims of Operation Eagle Claw. They’d been fully briefed on the topic and so it is not surprising that scenes of armed exchanges would be reported. It’s worth noting, however, that the US forces retreated long before any chance at engaging with enemy troops could take place.

The news about the tragic end of Operation Eagle Claw broke during two sessions being run simultaneously. Both were cut short as the remote viewing team were brought together to watch the TV news. According to McMoneagle, Nancy was deeply upset at this and, in fact, she soon left the team and would never complete another remote viewing session.

Richard Queen

The next most famous claim concerns Keith Harary’s description of a session he undertook in July 1980.

I received an urgent morning call asking me to report to SRI. I met with a tall, expressionless man who served me a cup of hot coffee before we retired to the white room and got to work.

"We have a person who needs a description," the monitor said, offering me not a clue. Though I hardly understood the process, the question triggered a cascade of impressions about a person in a debilitated state of health. "He seems to be suffering from nausea," I said. "One side of his body seems damaged or hurt." I wondered whether the person I was describing might be some business person or a head of state.

"Where will he be in the next few days?" the monitor asked, again without inflection. I suddenly felt the sensation of sitting on an airplane that was taking off.

"On an airplane," I said.

The target turned out to be the hostage Richard Queen, held by Iranian militants and now desperately ill with multiple sclerosis that affected his nerves on one side. In part due to my input, I was later informed by contacts at SRI, President Carter dispatched a plane to bring Queen home.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/articles/200411/confessions-star-psychic

Keith Harary was working for SRI in July 1980 and he had recently run a number of sessions against the Hostage Crisis. But SRI work focused on the hostages is largely missing from the declassified archives. Any contemporary notes from this particular session targeting Richard Queen are absent, possibly because it wasn’t part of the Grill Flame Project. The first time it is mentioned is in 1983, in an overview of the Grill Flame project when it is listed among a number of “successful viewings for the DoD/intelligence community”. But there are no further details. And Harary himself has issues with how psychic his vision had been.

“Were my impressions psychic? The hostages had been flooding the news for months.

Reports about Queen's health problems, including the issue of "a lame shoulder," had been in the news as well. I don't know whether such reports infiltrated my unconscious without my realizing it, but it would make sense to consider that possibility before the paranormal alternative.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/articles/200411/confessions-star-psychic

Conclusion

Ultimately, the efforts of the remote viewing team were not well-received and a report written after the crisis was over stated:

“Comparison of the reports with returnee debriefings revealed a very low correlation between actual hostage locations/ conditions and inferences drawn from Grill Reporting. Only seven reports could be positively correlated with actual location or condition. Approximately 59

reports revealed a possible or partial correlation.

However, these same reports often included erroneous data. Sixteen reports contained inconclusive data making correlation highly subjective. Eight reports were noted as being poor from an administrative/ procedural standpoint and therefore being of no value. One hundred and twelve reports were found to be entirely incorrect.”

https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00788R001000340002-3

So, how much of the data produced by Grill Flame was used operationally? None. The  entire project had been for training purposes, something that the remote viewers were not aware of. But by now, despite the results, Grill Flame had other projects to work on and it seems that simply being involved in the Hostage Crisis had raised its profile and secured its funding for another few years, at least.

Best writing in parapsychology

Recently, two papers in the field of parapsychology have impressed me with their clarity of writing and depth of research, applied to an interesting subject. One was Charman, R., Hume, S. (2018) “The Case of Colonel Henderson and The Apparition of Captain Hinchcliffe Revisited – A Crisis Apparition?” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol 82, No. 1, pp 28-42. The other was Schooler, J.W., Baumgart, S (2018) “Entertaining Without Endorsing: The Case for the Scientific Investigation of Anomalous Cognition,” Psychology of Consciousness: Theory Research and Practice, American Psychological Association

Reading these made me want to write about other articles on parapsychology that I thought had reached similar levels of high quality. So here’s my list, with links where possible.


Akers, C. (1984) "Methodological criticisms of parapsychology."Advances in Parapsychological Research, vol. 4, ed. Krippner, S. McFarland

This is an extensive review of the state of parapsychology to date by focusing on fifty-four of the most oft-cited experiments, as taken from Wolman Handbook of Parapsychology. It’s an invaluable resource for anyone interested in post-WW2 parapsychology since it talks about papers that are still referenced today, detailing critiques and defences that were well-known then but have since been forgotten.


Bierman DJ, Spottiswoode JP, Bijl A (2016) Testing for Questionable Research Practices in a Meta-Analysis: An Example from Experimental Parapsychology. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0153049. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153049 1

Similarly to Akers, this paper examines some of the more famous parapsychological results to see if it withstands current criticisms. In this case, the focus was on the Ganzfeld database, and concluded that Questionable Research Practices may have inflated the reported findings, they could not account for all of the effect being measured.


Coelho, C., Tierney, I., Lamont, P. (2008) “Contacts by Distressed Individuals to UK Parapsychology and Anomalous Experience Academic Research Units – A Retrospective Survey Looking to the Future,” European Journal of Parapsychology, Volume 23.1, pp 31-59

This fascinating paper looks at a largely ignored aspect of academic research into parapsychology: coming into contact with people who are genuinely distressed by the paranormal phenomena they seem to be subject to. By contacting a parapsychology unit, some people sought to explain their diagnoses, while others were trying to postpone approaching the mental health care services. The paper discusses preferred strategies in these circumstances.


Collins, H.M, Pinch, J.T. (1982) “Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science,” London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

This book is remarkable for its story about a largely forgotten episode in parapsychology: the sudden rise of spoon-bending in the early 1970s, especially regarding children. The book contains a detailed description of the authors’ attempts at investigating this phenomena at Bath University, as well as the influence of Uri Geller on science and popular culture in a wider sense.


Drake, J. (2015) “Ghosts, Elves, & the Man from Mars: 2 Decades (Skeptically) Investigating the Paranormal”

This talk by Jerry Drake is a real eye-opener. First, for the insight he brings to the subjects he looks into, and secondly as an introduction to Jerry Drake who, I must admit, I’d never heard of before I saw this video. My favourite part must be the explanation of the haunting at Faust Hotel in Texas, that begins at 54:50.


Fortean Studies, volumes 1-7, John Brown Publishing, 1994-2001

These books are collections of papers written in a more thorough, academic manner than the ones published in the magazine Fortean Times, and they are full of fascinating cases explained in often minute detail. The author, Mike Dash contributes two lengthy articles (The Devil’s Hoofmarks, in volume one and The Vanishing Lighthousemen of Eilan Mor in volume four) which were major influences on me as an example of how to do proper research using first-hand documents. But every other article is worthy of anyone’s attention, ranging from Princess Diana conspiracy theories to UFO sightings in the 1910s.


Koehler, J.J, (1993) “The Influence of Prior Beliefs on Scientific Judgments of Evidence Quality,” Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes,” 56, pp28-55

The opening sentence reads “This paper is concerned with the influence of scientists' prior beliefs on their judgements of evidence quality” and that pretty much sums it up. It makes sobering reading for skeptics of the paranormal, demonstrating that they are far more extreme than proponents in how they judge the quality of experiments with results that agree/disagree with their pre-existing views.


Lamont , P, Wiseman , R. (2001), “The rise and fall of the Indian rope trick,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research , vol 65 , no. 3, pp. 175-193

Peter Lamont is the only person to have two entries on this list with this study into the myth of the Indian Rope Trick. As I grew up in the 1970s, the idea of the rope trick being a genuine thing (be it conjuring trick or paranormal feat) was so ingrained that it never occurred to that the truth would be more nuanced. Dr Lamont continued to work on this topic, publishing it as a book with the same name in 2005


Ogbourne, D., (2012) “Encyclopedia of Optography: The Shutter of Death”

The idea behind Optography (that the last thing seen before someone dies remains as an image on the retina) is one that had long intrigued me, but I thought had never been taken that seriously by anyone so I didn’t bother researching it. Luckily, Derek Ogbourne did the work that I was too lazy to do and put together a considerable body of work on the subject.

Fewer train reservations before disasters

In 1956, E.W. Cox wrote an article for the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in which he looked for evidence of precognition of fatal train crashes (10 fatalities or more) in the numbers of reservations bought for that particular train, with the hypothesis that any form of precognition would be visible in a drop in reservations for that train on that day.

I do not have a copy of the original paper by E.W.Cox, but I did find a page on the internet which had his data, as well as an examination of his methods. The page is currently (25th Aug '15) unavailable, but I have put a link at the bottom of this article.

He examined the data in two ways: one was to look at the data day by day. In this, he compared the reservations for the crash day with the previous seven days. The second way was to compare the crash day reservations with the same day on the previous four weeks.

His measure of success was if the number of reservations was the lowest of all the other days. This he called a hit, and its chances of success are calculated as 1 in 8 for the daily data and 1 in 5 for the weekly data.

He did this for 28 crashes.

For the monthly data, he found ten days when the lowest number of reservations fell on the day of the crash. In other words, ten hits out of twenty-eight trials, with a 1/5 chance of success. This is statistically significant at p=0.04, z=1.76 (one-tailed) or odds of 1 in 25.

For the daily data, there are nine hits for the twenty-eight days, with a 1/8 success rate. This gives use p=0.005, z=2.54 (one-tailed) or odds of 1 in 185.

The data are as follows:

(It's worth noting that Cox could not get all the data he needed, so when he had a gap, he inserted the average number for that set of data. I've highlighted those figures in brown. Figures in yellow are the lowest figures for that particular journey.)

However, as the psuedo-scepticisme article points out, the data sample is too small to support a binomial distribution. Taking the rule of thumb that np>=5 (n=number of trials, p=probability of success) there aren't enough data points to justify a binomial sample. In the case of the daily data np equals 28 * 0.125 = 3.5. Additionally, Cox allowed tied hits to stand, suggesting to me that the binomial method wasn't the right one to use.

I decided to take a look at the data myself, but this time I looked at whether the reservations for a particular day were significantly above or below the average for that set of weeks or days. I thought that this would be a more sensitive measure of success, especially given that some of the hits were by a margin of three or less reservations in difference.

I found that for the daily data, the day of the crash was significantly below the average (ie, fewer sales) seven times. This is the highest figure for this category, which supports the idea that precognition lead people to make fewer reservations on that day. However, there were also three occasions where the sales of reservations was significantly above the average. This makes it comparable to D-4 when there were five below average and one above.

On the weekly data, the day of the crash had seven occasions when it was significantly below average and four times above. This is actually worse than D-28 which also had seven below average but only two occasions when it was above. In fact, using Cox's original method, D-28 has ten hits out of twenty-eight, just like the day of the crash does.

I'm no statistician, so I encourage anyone to look at the spreadsheet I used, and perhaps suggest improvements. This can be downloaded here.

https://www.mediafire.com/?mwnxfrztogdt836

References:

Cox, W. E. (1956). "Precognition: An analysis. II. Subliminal precognition." Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 50, 99–109. as cited in the article “Précognition subliminale lors d’accidents de train : relecture critique d’une recherche de W.E. Cox” http://www.pseudo-scepticisme.com/Precognition-subliminale-lors-d.html

How to make a legend

An article in the Spring 1995 edition of The Psi Researcher describes how, in the 1950s, a group of psychical researchers got caught up in popularising an almost-certainly fictional local legend.

Tony Cornell (the author of the article) and three friends went to the Ferry Boat Inn in St Ives, Huntingtonshire, on the 17 March 1953, having heard that a ghost of a lady in white appears there every year on that date: the story being that one of the flagstones on the floor of the pub is over her grave.

They set up a Ouija board on a table in the bar, and began trying to contact the spirit, to the mild amusement of the few regulars who were in the bar at the time. During this seance, they contacted a woman called Juliet, who was hanged in 1050 because she loved a man called Thomas. As closing time approached, the psychical researchers asked Juliet if she would appear if they held another seance later that evening. She said yes and, so it was, that at 11pm another seance was begun back at their hotel.

They got more details, such as her surname (Tewslie) and that she was a Norman. She died when she was nineteen and that Thomas (whose surname was Zoul) was twenty-one at the time. Thomas finally died when he was fifty-two.

And there it would have ended. The information was vague and generic and Tony writes that he had immediate doubts about Tewslie being a Norman name. This little episode was forgotten and would’ve stayed that way had the owner of the Ferry Boat Inn not contacted Tony in January of the following year suggesting another seance.

Tony agreed, and news of this began to appear in the local press. He started getting calls from journalists, and he found himself being misquoted as the media milked the story for all it was worth. Even The Daily Mail carried the story on the 16 March.

On the 17th, the psychical researchers arrived at a pub already full of journalists and photographers, and a steady stream of customers kept arriving. At 11pm, the pub emptied out and the seance could begin in peace (although the reporters were still present and many people stayed outside and tried to watch through the windows). The local vicar arrived, claiming the legend was bunkum. All of this must have made contacting the dead a bit more difficult than usual, since it wasn’t until 12.35am that the Ouija board spelt out “I am Juliet” and the seance could begin.

Now a couple of details changed. Her death was 552 years ago, not nine hundred as before. Juliet spelt her surname as “Tewsley” this time and, considering that the seance included a stranger in the group, Tony wonders if this new spelling was due to someone pushing the glass who was unaware of the previous spelling.

The researchers asked if the river came up to this spot in her time, and she said yes, and it was 10 metres across (but metres didn’t exist until 1797). Juliet then said she would try and materialise, but nothing happened. They packed up and went home at 2am, having brought in a great deal of business for the pub, but achieved little else.

After this, the story spread through Reuters and Associated Press around the world. The local vicar wrote up a history of Juliet and Thomas based on the transcripts of the two seances with more details added, and then explained that there’s no evidence either person existed.

Tony writes that similar investigations occurred in 1955 and 1956 without him, and he comments that since then the legend has appeared in books, with one author calling it “probabaly the longest established ghost in any English hostelry.” The same book (Haunted Pubs in Britain and Ireland by Marc Alexander) also describes how the landlord of the Ferry Boat Inn had expressed a wish that he has something like the Loch Ness Monster to bring in customers, and then a customer told him about the White Lady. Tony remarks that, if accurate, this explains a lot.

Other writers have added to the story, with details about dogs not liking the bar, doors that open and close and old-fashioned music that only women can hear. By the time Guy Lyon Playfair writes about it in 1985, Juliet’s surname has a new spelling: Tousley.

As part of his initial investigation, Tony investigated the names that came through and also asked local people if they knew about the legend. Regarding the names, Juliet didn’t really exist in England until the 16th century. The surname has a Celtic root “Tew” but Tony came to the conclusion that “Juliet Tewslie” couldn’t possibly be a Norman name.

Thomas is also rare for Norman times, becoming more common in the medieval era, but Zoul is a Norman name, derived from Zouch.

When he questioned local people, none of the elder inhabitants had ever heard of the story and the person who’d apparently told the landlord, Dr Hurst, said he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it. Tony was unable to find anyone who’d heard of it before 1953.

As for the messages of unverifiable details, questionable names and a few historical inaccuracies, Tony concludes that they were answered by the people who’d asked them: the researchers: “The suggestion that there was the ghost of a woman at the Inn was enough for those who applied their minds to the question to produce unconsciously a dramatic sketch about Juliet and Thomas, which has been added to by all and sundry ever since.”

Tony wrote in 1995 that he’d recently returned to the pub and that it had been carpeted, apart from the flagstone that apparently was over the woman’s grave. Whether that’s still the case, I don’t know. One thing is noteworthy: searching for the pub on the internet, there are many sites that don’t mention the ghost at all. Maybe, now that St Patrick’s Day is more popular in England, there’s no need for a ghost to increase business on 17 March.

References:

Cornell, T. “The Making of a Legend,” The Psi Researcher, no 16, Spring 1995

The Arizona Experiments

About half a year ago I had a discussion about The Arizona Experiments on an internet forum. Since then, the forum has closed but I kept my notes on the topic and I decided it was worth writing about again.

The Arizona Experiments were a series of ten trials designed to test the precognitive dreams of a man called Chris Robinson. They were conducted in Arizona by Dr Gary Schwartz of Arizona University. Over the course of eleven days and ten nights, Chris Robinson would write down his impressions of his dreams. In the following morning, he and Gary Schwartz would get a phone call from a third party who chose a location at random from a possible pool of twenty local destinations.

Gary receives the call in the morning telling him the location of that day's target

The results, as summarized in the published paper, were

“The primary pattern of themes of information per day matched its respective location as well as associated events for the day. The patterns of evidence indicate that selective attention and perceptual priming were insufficient to explain the complete set of findings. The data can be interpreted as consistent with CR‟s hypothesis that the presence of spiritual mediation can sometimes be inferred from the appearance of highly improbable and organized patterns of significant events in real life.” (Schwartz, 2011)

This experiment was originally carried out in August 2001 and submitted for publication in 2003 to the Journal for the Society of Psychical Research, but was rejected due to methodological flaws. This caused a (very) minor fuss on the internet at the time, to the effect that the SPR had been taken over by skeptics. Eventually it found an outlet in the pages of the Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies some ten years after the experiment was carried out.

The majority of the paper describes the ten trials in some detail, as well as the similarities between the notes made overnight and the locations themselves. For example:

“On Day 4, the primary themes were “suns, mirrors, LCDs, telescopes, Mount Olympus (after his 35mm camera), airplanes, hangers, and a pitched propeller).

CR was taken to Kitt Peak National Laboratory (at the top of a huge mountain) to the world‟s largest Solar Telescope.

CR and PE ate lunch at a nearby airport restaurant with hangers that had a large pitched propeller in front. None of the other nine locations had this unique pattern of themes.”

[...]

On Day 7, the primary themes included “dust, dust everywhere, including on the floor in a building, a court room, and a train robbery.”

CR was taken to Old Tucson, a western theme park that is also used as a movie set. There is dust “everywhere” at Old Tucson, including a room purposely designed with a completely dusty floor.
A large train has been used in more than 100 movies involving train robberies.

Old Tucson includes a courtroom. None of the other nine locations contained this precise pattern of themes.” (Schwartz, 2011)

I found some of Chris Robinson’s videos that he made of the actual visits to a few of the sites. Watching them gives a little more idea about how Gary and Chris went about matching Chris’ notes to the locations.

For example, at the Old Tucson studio (day seven), the fundamental theme is “dust”, so they go around looking for dusty things, even going so far as to ask people if they’ve seen any dusty rooms. This is why they find unique examples of Chris' descriptors during the day: because they are highly motivated and actively looking for them. So when the paper says they didn't find that particular combination of descriptors on any other day, is that really because they weren't there or because they weren't looking?

About the Kitt Peak Observatory (on day four), Chris says he didn't dream on that particular night, so he relied on the notes he made in London. In the video there are two full ring binders of notes beside Chris in his room, which I assume are his notes. So the amount of data not represented in the paper is pretty substantial. Also, Chris has plenty of ways he can interpret these images and Gary Schwartz, too, is not immune to similar leaps of logic.

For example, one of the primary themes listed in Chris' notes for this day is "Pitch". This is mentioned in the footage in Chris' room, it is mentioned again in the car and finally Gary links the clue of "pitch" to the angle of the telescope. In the published paper, "pitch" does not appear. Instead it is now "pitched propeller". Also "dish" is missing from the paper and "LCD" has been added.

A number of descriptors not reported in the published paper

Also, in the video there's a close up of the page of Chris' notes that reads “Olympus – Greek – Mountain Screens – Screen Pictures” etc, and you can just about see the writing on the other side of the page. At the top of the page, it's possible to read “4th August”. But the Kitt Peak trial was carried out on the 5th of August. They are using notes that were actually meant for a different day.

This shot from a TV documentary shows a page from Day 4, which was held on August 5th.

But the words "4 August" can be seen written at the top of the previous page. 

In other words, these notes were supposed to relate to a different day.

And looking at the video, other notes for the Kitt Peak Observatory were “Ring – Diamond – Screens – TV – Projector – Not 4 Sale” and “Cake – cream.” These are all absent from the paper.

In Chris Robinson's hour-long video of the events of this day Gary asks Chris what the key words are, not in the hotel before he found out the target for that day, but in the car as they're driving along the road, after he knows the target location. Chris, too, may not be completely blind to the target by now since he was next to Gary when he got the call to find out the location, and also Gary Schwartz had already looked for the correct route on a map while sitting beside Chris. According to the long video they key words are "pitch, sun, mirror, Mount Olympus, screens, dish."

Day four is the only day when we have enough footage and knowledge of the actual prediction to make a meaningful comparison to what was written up for publication and what actually occurred. Given the disparity between the two accounts of that day, I suspect that other days have had a similar amount of interpretation. Far from being evidence of psychic functioning, I prefer the theory that, given two large sets of data (Chris’ notes and that day’s target) correspondences are bound to be found.

References:

Schwartz, G. (2011) “Exploratory Blinded Field Experiment Evaluating Purported Precognitive Dreams in a Highly Skilled Subject: Possible Spiritual Mediation?” Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Vol 34, Number 1, pgs 3-20.

Roll, M. (2003) "More Censorship: Gary Schwartz's Experiments with Dream Detective Chris Robinson," http://www.cfpf.org.uk/ 21 December 2003

Chris Robinson's footage of the Arizona Experiment, day four

Chris Robinson's footage of the Arizona Experiment, day seven

Coming soon...

Coming soon on ebook:

America's Imaginary Hostage Crisis

“All right, #8.5, the time is now 1400 hours. Your mission for today is to find John Graves. I want you to focus on John Graves. I want you to identify his location, any other hostages at this location, and describe the physical security. I want you now to relax. Focus your attention on John Graves.”

On the 4th of November 1979, a group of Iranian students invaded and occupied the US Embassy in Tehran.

Six thousand miles away, a newly-trained team of military psychics was given the task of remotely viewing the Embassy grounds.

They gave vivid descriptions of the lives of the hostages: the fear, the depression, the illnesses of those kept captive.

But how accurate were they? For the first time ever, these declassified reports are looked at in detail and compared to the real events.

This is the story of two hostage crises, played out on opposite sides of the world.

The Secret Life of Uri Geller: a review

This documentary, shown on BBC2 21 July 2013, described how the psychic and entertainer Uri Geller, had had connections to various secret services since the 1970s.

A lot of the programme is confusing. It appears to be a number of interviews with people describing events that they cannot prove, or they make references to events that they're not allowed to talk about. A documentary about a subject that no one's willing to talk about is a frustrating one.

And the reason I call it confusing is because I can't tell if the maker is a supporter of psi, but is just generally ill-informed, or is a debunker of psi and has placed little mistakes throughout the programme as clue. Or, indeed, was unconcerned if it was true or not, and was just presenting a story.

For example, the soundtrack mostly works to undermine the narrative. Music from shows like The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, Dr Who (and even Monty Python!) plays in the background as people describe their experiences. Similarly, some of the captions are a little strange: Dr Kit Green is shown talking from “an undisclosed location” as if to breathlessly emphasise how secret this all is.

Some of these examples of secrecy are peculiar, for example Russell Targ's refusal to show the programme-makers the report they submitted to the CIA about Uri Geller. This report was declassified a long time ago.

The claims made for the research into remote viewing are not challenged. Targ describes Pat Price's success rate as “seven matches out of nine” for an experiment, but the original report shows six.

And these early experiments were beset by methodological issues. For example, the judges went (separately) to each location in turn to judge the session notes, and they were told to stand at a specified place at each location. Who chose this place is never made clear, and there's the risk that if it was chosen by someone who knew the targets and the contents of Price's session notes, they could have chosen the places based on that.

Another error is amongst some quick cuts meant to give an impression of the kind of successes the remote viewing project had. One of the sketches is matched with a round brick building. Except that this wasn't the target at all: it should've been the Louisiana Superdome, and that should be obvious from the written report. The meaning behind this juxtaposition of genuine RV session notes and fictional target makes no sense to me. Was this the documentary-maker's post-modern way of saying the truth isn't important: we write our own stories that we can believe?

The problem trying to find documented evidence of the kinds of claims in this documentary is that often the claim is of a nature that wouldn't be documented in the first place, such as the CIA's suspicions that Geller was just a magician sent by Mossad to fool the CIA into thinking that psychic powers existed.

Geller was never told that the SRI work was being financed by the CIA (although if he was genuinely psychic, I'm sure he would've known about it anyway) and on 22 June 1974 an internal memo stated that the parapsychology work at SRI would only continue if certain conditions were met. One of those conditions was that Uri Geller should not be involved.

I don't doubt that there are people in the military – as in all walks of life – who believe in psychic powers and want to use them to their advantage. And I wouldn't at all be surprised if, in the days after 9-11, someone tried to contact those remote viewers again. But did psychics really have a long history of successes during the government program? You won't find out by watching this show.

Chess from the dead

Between 1985 and 1993 Victor Korchnoi played a game of chess by mail against a psychic medium, Richard Rollans, who was apparently receiving his moves from the deceased chess player Geza Maroczy. The game lasted for 47 moves and ended with Korchnoi winning. There are a number of aspects to this game which are highlighted as evidence of after-death communications, but I shall focus on the discussion of Maroczy's playing style.

Geza Maroczy from Wikipedia

The game began in June 1985, with Rollans as white and Korchnoi as black. The first seven moves of both players are book play: they followed the standard opening of the French Defence, Winawer variation.

While this particular opening was known during his lifetime, Maroczy himself never played it, although he knew and used other variations of the French Defence. Interestingly, Korchnoi had played this uncommon opening as black only a few months earlier, against Ljubujevic, and Korchnoi lost.

Korchnoi commented during the game that "His play is old-fashioned. But... I am not sure I will win," and chess commentator Helmut Metz wrote that Korchnoi's opponent "controlled the end-game like the old masters from the first half of the century.”

But both Korchnoi's and Metz's comments were made when they knew of the supernatural source of "Maroczy"s moves, and are possibly over keen to see Maroczy's style in their interpretation. For example, Metz did liken the end game to the tactics of the old masters, but he also commends "Maroczy" twice for adopting newer styles of play during the game!

List of moves, from Neppe 2007

In a paper published in the JSPR in 2007, Neppe describe Maroczy's playing standard as being that of an high expert/low master, and he interpreted that as being a reasonable level for a Grand Master who'd been dead (and, one assumes, not regularly studying chess) for some decades. He also wrote at some length about how the moves couldn't have come from a computer.

One of the moves that Maroczy made was not on the list of suggestions by Sigma Chess 6.0 nor Fritz 9, the programs that Neppe was using to analyse the game and, therefore, unlikely to have been suggested by a computer. The move in question, 12. Bb5, is considered (along with Maroczy's move ten) to be the weakest move of the game.

I wanted to know how the game would be interpreted by someone who wasn't aware of the supernatural surroundings of the match, and by someone who was a little more knowledgeable of the game than myself. I went to a local chess club and there I asked a Chess Master who specialised in game analysis. I wanted to keep the spiritualist side of the game from him, and instead I asked if it was possible to detect a large age difference in the ages of two people playing. I considered this to be a suitable question, since most of the comments on the game have been about how Maroczy's style seemed “old fashioned” or particularly redolent of the 1930s.

He said it was impossible. He went on to say that some people think you can make those kind of judgements from the moves in a chess game, but it was like reading tea leaves, and people tended to read into things whatever they wanted to. Later, reading a book about machines that could play chess, I saw a quote from the Irish chess player C. H. O'D. Alexander,

“You cannot easily tell a computer from a human player by the style of its game. One sees exactly the characteristics the layman would least expect. The computer is not mechanically accurate and dull, but wild, ingenious and undisciplined.”

And of course, I wrote about my experiences playing 1K ZX Chess, when suddenly this extremely simple program pushed its queen into the centre of the board in what seemed to me like quite a dramatic and adventurous move. So, the idea that the style of chess can give you clues to the nature of the player seems to be on shaky ground.

References:

Eisenbeiss, W., Hassler, D. (2006), "An Assessment Of Ostensible Communications With A Deceased Grandmaster As Evidence For Survival", Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol 70.2, No. 883, pp 65-82

Neppe, V.M., (2007), “A Detailed Analysis of an Important Chess Game: Revisiting Maroczy versus Korchnoi”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol 71.3, No. 888, pp 129-147

http://web.archive.org/web/20010728194306/http://www.rochadekuppenheim.de/meko/meko1a/m12.htm

Maroczy's use of the French Defence
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?page=1&pid=10004&playercomp=white&eco=C00-C19&title=Geza%20Maroczy%20playing%20the%20French%20Defense%20as%20White&eresult=

Karpov vs Mephisto 1983
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1068349

Ljubujevic vs Korchnoi, March 1985
http://chesstempo.com/gamedb/game/2323993

Hitech vs Denker 1988
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/26/nyregion/for-first-time-a-chess-computer-outwits-grandmaster-in-tournament.html

The Honorton meta-analysis of Ganzfeld experiments 1985

Following from my post about the 1999 ganzfeld meta-analysis of Milton and Wiseman, I thought I'd write about another meta-analysis of the same type of experiments. In 1985 Charles Honorton wrote a meta-analysis of ganzfeld experiments from 1974-1982.

"The composite (Stouffer) Z score for the 28 studies is 6.6 (p < 10^ -9), and 43% of the studies were independently significant at the 5% level."

This Stouffer (unweighted) z of 6.6 is the one most commonly quoted in articles commenting on Honorton's findings. But as we saw with Milton and Wiseman's paper, choices regarding statistical measure and inclusion criteria can alter this figure quite radically.

The ganzfeld experiments have enough different aspects that, like the sliders on a graphic equalizer, you can adjust to get the desired result. It illustrates a sort of Heisenberg's Principle for statistics, where the more someone knows about a particular subject, the less able they are to quantify it with any accuracy. And I should emphasise that this is the point I am trying to make: the subjective element of meta-analyses can be considerable.

The Inclusion Criteria

Honorton based his figures on a sub-set of 28 experiments taken from the 42 experiments discussed in Hyman's 1985 paper. Among these 42 experiments, a number of different scoring systems were used. This, claimed Hyman, could lead to a problem where an experiment that initially used one method of scoring later found that a different method gave a better result, and reported that instead. As Stanford (1984) summarized:

“For whatever reason, many ganzfeld researchers have, historically speaking, seemed very unsure of what method to use to evaluate overall ESP performance. Many have used at least two, and sometimes more, methods of analysis. This common failure to settle, on logical, a priori grounds, upon a single method of analysis makes it difficult to decide whether ESP has occurred in any study where multiple analyses have been used with divergent outcomes.”

Honorton agreed with Hyman that the issue of multiple analysis was a problem, and so he decided to conduct his meta-analysis using only one scoring method. Namely, the Direct Hit method, which was the most common.

However, did this really address the issue? The experiment that Hyman used to illustrate the problem (York, 1980 which used Order Ranking as its main measure of success and Direct Hit as a secondary one, but only reported the statistically significant Direct Hit results) is still included in the database. So I think the problem still remains, especially when you consider that the Direct Hit score can be derived from the data for other measures such as Binary Hits, Sum Of Ranks or Z-score Ratings, so it may be too much of a temptation for an experimenter to report a significant or more positive result on this scale alongside the other measures. Honorton included any experiment that reported Direct Hits, whether they were the primary measure or not.

Honorton's choice of Direct Hits may make sense at first glance since it includes the results from the majority of experiments (ie, 28 out of 42). However, it does not include the majority of the data (835 trials out of 2,567) and it is worth looking at the data that Honorton removed.

As a whole, the missing 14 experiments contain 1,612 trails with a Stouffer z of -0.01 (ie, fractionally below chance). Eleven of the fourteen reported results in a numerical form, the other three simply said the experiment was unsuccessful so in my calculations, a z-score of zero was awarded.

If we combine these fourteen with Honorton's database, the unweighted z-score falls from 6.6 to 5.2.

Statistical issues

The Milton and Wiseman meta-analysis was criticised for using a method of combining scores that did not take into account the size of each experiment. Since Honorton uses the same method, it seems valid to apply the same adjustment here. Once we use a weighted z-score, the result drops to 2.72 (odds of around 1 in 303).

So with these two really quite uncontroversial decisions (include all data, and choose a more appropriate statistical measure) the result has fallen quite dramatically.

And once you have a certain amount of knowledge about the database, it's very easy to find more ways to push the result down even further. Now, I should reiterate that this isn't about the evidence for psi per se, but it does indicate that there is no single correct answer.

Methodological issues

A set of results from Cambridge were famously criticised by Blackmore (as well as Parker & Wiklund and C.E.M. Hansel) and as a result were removed by Jessica Utss in her analyses of the ganzfeld data (Utts, 1999, 2010). So if you take the example of Utts and remove the data from Cambridge then the weighted z-score falls even further, down to 2.18 (odds of around 1 in 69).

Small scale experiments

In calculating each z-score, a binomial distribution is used. Since this is not applicable to experiments with small numbers of trials (Wikipedia suggests trials multiplied by chance probability (mostly 0.25 in this case) is less than 5, so I'll use that) we can remove all experiments with less that 20 trials. This reduces the weighted z-score to 2.09 (1 in 54)

[note: changed the wording of the above paragraph after some comments indicated it wasn't clear. Hope it is now. I can't get blogspot to deal with even the simplest algebraic symbols]

In fact, it would be quite simple to write up a meta-analysis using these criteria as if they were perfectly sensible choices made by an impartial observer before any calculations were attempted. The truth is that sometimes I would try excluding a class of experiments, only to find that it pushed the result up again. I simply ignored that, and tried something else. In fact, this exercise has made me far more skeptical of meta-analyses than I am of the existence of ESP.

Towards non-significance

So, what hoops would a skeptic need to jump through in order to reduce the results to chance (or near chance)? Despite such a considerable drop so far, it is actually quite difficult to get the result down much more.

It is necessary to include all the experiments up until 1984 (ie, up to the year before the publication of Honorton's meta-analysis) and then take out two experiments by Honorton and Terry which had been criticised on methodological grounds by Kennedy.

This puts the weighted z-score at 1.78 (1 in 27) although the unweighted z-score is now, for once, lower than the weighted at 0.61 (approximately 1 in 4) so a really cheeky skeptic could reinstate the statistical measure they'd abandoned at the start because it inflated the score!

References:
BLACKMORE, S., (1987) "A Report of a Visit to Carl Sargent's Laboratory", Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 54, pp 186-198
HANSEL, C.E.M, (1985) "The Search for a Demonstration of ESP", "A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology", ed. Paul Kurtz, pp97-128
HONORTON, C., (1985) "Meta-Analysis of Psi Ganzfeld Resarch: A Response to Hyman", Journal of Parapsychology 49, pp 51-91
HYMAN, R., (1985) “The Ganzfeld Psi Experiment: A Critical Appraisal”, Journal of Parapsychology 49, pp 3-50
KENNEDY, J.E., (1979) “Methodological Problems in Free-Response ESP Experiments”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol 73, pp 1-15
MURRAY, A. L., (2011) “The Validity Of The Meta-Analytic Method In Addressing The Issue Of Psi Replicability", Journal of Parapsychology, vol 75:2
PARKER, A., WIKLUND, N. (1987) “The ganzfeld experiments: towards an assessment”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 54, pp 261-265
STANFORD, R.G., (1984) “Recent Ganzfeld-ESP Research: A Survey and Critical Analysis”, Advances in Parapsychology 4, pp 83-111
UTTS, J. (1999) " The Significance of Statistics in Mind-Matter Research", Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp.615-638
UTTS, J. (2010) "The Strength of Evidence Versus the Power of Belief: Are We All Bayesians?"
http://videolectures.net/icots2010_utts_awab/
YORK, M. (1977). “The defense mechanism test (DMT) as an indicator of psychic performance as measured by a free-response clairvoyance test using a ganzfeld technique”, Research in parapsychology, 1976, pp. 48-49

Software used for statistics was Meta-Analysis 5.3 by Ralf Schwarzer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
http://easycalculation.com/statistics/p-value-for-z-score.php

Koehler's influence on my prior beliefs

Perhaps the most important paper on parapsychology in recent years did not appear in a parapsychology journal and it did not concern itself with communicating information via telepathy or influencing random number generators. Instead, it investigated the role of prior beliefs when evaluating new (especially contrary) evidence.

The paper confirmed a number of previous investigations into how people considered the result when deciding on the quality of a scientific paper, but it specifically focused part of its investigation on ESP, and the views of parapsychologists and skeptics.

Koehler made a mailing list of scientists from addresses taken from parapyschological and skeptical organisations and "each scientist was asked to evaluate a hypothetical (but representative) ESP study that either agreed or disagreed with his or her prior beliefs." The hypothetical study in question was a ganzfeld experiment.

The questionnaire and one set of study materials were sent to 195 parapsychologists and 131 skeptics, with a similar return-rate for both (38% and 30% respectively). The quality of the report ("good" or "bad") and the results ("positive" or "negative") varied across four types of reports and additionally some parapsychologist were sent two further types of reports: high or low quality, with no results.

Quality varied according to things like method of randomisation, means of separating the sender and the receiver, and use of blind judges. Respondents completed nine questions using a seven-point scale, and then some open questions deigned to encourage written discussion, and lastly a survey of demographics.

The study found that, as predicted, scientists gave favourable ratings to those experiments whose results reflected their beliefs. Skeptics had a greater tendency to do so, to a marginally significant degree (p less than 0.10)

In the open questions the comments were separated and graded as positive/ neutral/ negative so the percentage of each category given to the high or low quality studies could be measured.

It was found that most comments were negative and high quality studies did not receive significantly fewer negative comments than low quality one. Also, skeptics were less critical of the high quality study than the low quality one. Parapsychologists were equally critical of both in their written responses. This finding seems odd, considering how much skeptics' views were influenced by the results but it could be that, once they'd given a low mark on the 1-7 scale, they were not able to justify their grade in detail.

Koehler's work is one of three scientific papers (the other two are Ioannidis (2005) and the Ignobel-winning Kruger, Dunning (2009)) that made me stop and reconsider my own methods of approaching evidence, and also the methods of those sources that I trusted. It was these that convinced me to use sources as close to first-hand as possible, despite the inconvenience, and to reduce my reliance on commentaries written long after the event. Such commentaries can be useful (after all, I write some myself) but as a beginning of research, not an end.

References:
Ioannidis J.P.A., (2005) "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." PLoS Med 2(8): e124
Koehler, J.J., (1993) "The influence of Prior Beliefs on Scientific Judgments of Evidence Quality" Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, Vol. 56, p. 28
Kruger, Dunning, (2009) "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," Psychology, 2009, 1, 30-46

Martian for Beginners

In France, March 1894, a woman named Mme Mirbel went to see a medium to try and contact her deceased son. A circle of several people sat, contact was made, and the usual assurances of peace in the afterlife were given by the son, as well as a spirit of a doctor called Raspail who gave Mme Mirbel medical advice on the eye condition she had.

Some months later, in November, she went back for a second seance. This time there was no Dr Raspail (perhaps sulking since Mme Mirbel had not followed his advice) and to everyone's great surprise it was revealed that the son had been reincarnated, and now lived on Mars and spoke no French. Instead, he spoke through the medium in a stream of intelligible noises which, apparently, was the Martian language.

Writing about this in "From India to the Planet Mars", Theodore Flournoy describes the events because he knew the medium well and had been present at both seances, as well as seances that followed. The language uttered by the medium, Hélène Smith (a pseudonym given by Flournoy. Her real name was Catherine-Élise Müller) appeared to be consistent, with the same words, prefixes and suffixes being used.

Over time, it became more sophisticated until some Martian handwriting was produced by the medium in August 1897. Despite his friendship with the medium and his belief in telepathy, he had doubts about this case.

A sample of Martian handwriting

It soon became clear that, despite the different vocabulary, Martian followed the rules of French grammar almost exactly. Flournoy writes of his examination of written Martian:

"It is not always easy to represent a language and its pronunciation by means of the typographical characters of another. Happily the Martian, in spite of its strange appearance and the fifty millions of leagues which separate us from the red planet, is in reality so near neighbor to French that there is scarcely any difficulty in this case." (p 210)

A translation of the same handwriting shown above

Also, the spirits from Mars seemed quite ignorant of those subjects that people asked of them, such as the canals on Mars, and about the snow seen at the poles. Instead, they preferred to talk about the social structure of Martian life.

Müller was born in Switzerland, and although she professed a dislike of learning languages she had studied German. Flournoy notes that she had a multi-lingual father and posits that her talent for languages may have been hereditary, subliminally rising to the surface when in a trance.

In October 1898, having convinced himself that Martian was just French in fancy clothes, he told Müller about his findings (oddly, he had first told one of Müller's spirit guides about his doubts during a seance when the medium was in a trance. The spirit guide insisted that Martian was genuine). She refused to accept his reasoning, saying that science was not infallible and since no one had been to Mars, she couldn't be disproved.

But shortly after this, a new identity from Mars appeared in her seances, this time with the promise of a new language. Additionally, Fournoy noticed a slight change in Martian that focused on those aspects that he had discussed with her earlier. But by now Fournoy had grown quite tired of Martian, and he closes the chapter before any example of this new language had been given.


References
Flournoy, T., (1900) "From India to The Planet Mars, a Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia", translated by D.B. Vermilye, Harper and Brothers Publishers
Engles, H., (2008) "Understanding The Glossolalia Of Hélène Smith, The Famous Spiritist Medium", Psychiatries dans l’histoire, J. Arveiller (dir.), Caen, PUC, p. 141-148