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* CPYRGHT Approved For Release 2000/08/09 : end (correct). An airport building also was drawn, and shown to have a large rectangular overhang (correct). The traveler had taken an unplanned one-day side trip to an offshore island and at the time of the experiment had just disembarked from a plane at a small island airport as described by the subject 4000 km away. The sole discrepancy was that the subject’s drawing showed a Quonset-hut type of building in place of the rectangular structure. The above description was chosen as an example to illustrate a major point observed a number of times throughout the program to be described. Contrary to what may be expected, a subject’s description does not necessarily portray what may reasonably be expected to be correct (an educated or “safe” guess), but often runs counter even to the subject’s own expectations. We wish to stress again that a result such as the above is not unusual. The remaining submissions in this experiment pro- vided further examples of excelient correspondences between target and response. (A target period of poolside relaxation was identified; a drive through a tropical forest at the base of a truncated volcano was described as a drive through a jungle below a large bare table mountain; a hotel-room target descrip- tion, including such details as rug color, was correct; and so on.) So as to determine whether such matches were simply fortuitous—that is, could reasonably be expected on the basis of chance alone—Dr, Puthoff was asked after he had returned to blind match the twelve descriptions to his seven target locations. On the basis of this conservative evaluation proce- dure, which vastly underestimates the statistical significance of the individual descriptions, five correct matches were ob- tained. ‘Chis number of matches is significant at p = 0.02 by exact binomial calculation.” The observation of such unexpectedly high-quality descrip- tions early in our program led to a large-scale study of the phenomenon at SRI under secure double-blind conditions (i.e., target unknown to experimenters as well as subjects), with independent random target selection and blind judging. The results, presented in Sections III and IV, provide strong evi- dence for the robustness of this phenomenon whereby a human perceptual modality of extreme sensitivity can detect complex remote stimuli. II. BACKGROUND Although we are approaching the study of these phenomena as physicists, it is not yet possible to separate ourselves entirely from the language of the nineteenth century when the labora- tory study of the paranormal was begun. Consequently, we continue to use terms such as “paranormal,” “telepathy,” and the like. However, we intend only to indicate a process of information transfer under conditions generally accepted as secure against such transfer and with no prejudice or occult assumptions as to the mechanisms involved, As in any other scientific pursuit, the purpose is to collect the observables that result from experiments and to try to determine the functional relationships between these observables and the laws of physics as they are currently understood. 2 The probability of a correct daily match by chance for any given transcript is p = 4. Therefore, the probability of at least five correct matches by chance out of twelve tries can be calculated from pes 12! ne = 0.02. asqa2- DIT, Approved For Release 2000/08/09 : CIA-RDPSCUU Ps Rbodetb SAND IC -- B pie 5 =-( a e PUTHOFF AND TARG: PERCEPTUAL CHANNEL FOR INFORMATION TRANSFER i a ONT} ) P t ' ROGUEDD u Fi 331 Organized research into so-called psychic functioning began roughly in the time of J. J. Thomson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Sir William Crookes, all of whom took part in the founding of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882 in England. Crookes, for example, carried out his principal investigations with D. D. Home, a Scotsman who grew up in America and returned to England in 1855 [3]. According to the notebooks and published reports of Crookes, Home had demonstrated the ability to cause objects to move without touching them. We should note in passing that, Home, unlike most subjects, worked only in the light and spoke out in the strongest pos- sible terms against the darkened seance rooms popular at the time [5]. Sir William Crookes was a pioneer in the study of electrical discharge in gases and in the development of vacuum tubes, some types of which still bear his name. Although everything Crookes said about electron beams and plasmas was accepted, nothing he said about the achievements of D. D. Home ever achieved that status. Many of his colleagues, who had not observed the experiments with Home, stated publicly that they thought Crookes had been deceived, to which Crookes angrily responded: ; Will not my critics give me credit for some amount of common sense? Do they not imagine that the obvious precautions, which occur to them as soon as they sit down to pick holes in my experiments, have occurred to me also in the course of my pro- longed and patient investigation? The answer to this, as to all other objections is, prove it to be an error, by showing where the error lies, or if a trick, by showing how the trick is per- formed. Try the experiment fully and fairly. If then fraud be found, expose it; if it be a truth, proclaim it. This is the only scientific procedure, and it is that I propose steadily to pursue {3]. In the United States, scientific interest in the paranormal was centered in the universities. In 1912, John Coover [6] was established in the endowed Chair of Psychical Research at Stanford University. In the 1920's, Harvard University set up research programs with George Estabrooks and L. T. Troland , [7], [8]. It was in this framework that, in 1930, William McDougall invited Dr. J. B. Rhine and Dr. Louisa Rhine to join the Psychology Department at Duke University [9]. For more than 30 years, significant work was carried out at Rhine’s Duke University Laboratory. To examine the existence of paranormal perception, he used the now-famous ESP cards containing a boldly printed picture of a star, cross, square, circle, or wavy lines. Subjects were asked to name the order of these cards in a freshly shuffled deck of twenty-five such cards. To test for telepathy, an experimenter would look at the cards one at a time, and a subject suitably separated from the sender would attempt to determine which card was being viewed. Dr. J. B. Rhine together with Dr. J. G. Pratt carried out thousands of experiments of this type under widely varying conditions [10]. The statistical results from these experiments indicated that some individuals did indeed possess a paranor- mal perceptual ability in that it was possible to obtain an arbitrarily high degree of improbability by continued testing of a gifted subject. The work of Rhine has been challenged on many grounds, however, including accusations of improper handling of statis- tics, error, and fraud. With regard to the statistics, the general consensus of statisticians today is that if fault is to be found in Rhine’s work, it would have to be on other than statistical othe accusations of fraud, the