Abstracts from the Journal of Parapsychology, March 1996

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THE AMERICAN INSTITUTES FOR RESEARCH REVIEW OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE'S
STAR GATE PROGRAM: A COMMENTARY

By Edwin C. May

Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, 330 Cowper Street, Suite 200, Palo Alto, CA
94301

ABSTRACT: As a result of a Congressionally Directed Activity, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted an evaluation of a 24Ðyear,
governmentÐsponsored program to investigate ESP and its potential use within
the intelligence community. The American Institutes for Research (AIR) was
contracted to conduct the review of both research and operations. Their
September 29, 1995 final report was released to the public November 28,
1995. As a result of AIR's assessment, the CIA concluded that a
statistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the laboratory but
that there was no case in which ESP had provided data that had ever been
used to guide intelligence operations. This paper is a critical review of
AIR's methodology and conclusions. It will be shown that there is compelling
evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage
before the evaluation had begun. This was accomplished by limiting the
research and operations data sets to exclude positive findings, by
purposefully not interviewing historically significant participants, by
ignoring previous extensive Department of Defense program reviews, and by
using the questionable National Research Council's investigation of
parapsychology as the starting point for their review. Although there may
have been political and administrative justification for the CIA not to
accept the government's inÐhouse program for the operational use of
anomalous cognition, these external considerations appeared to drive the
outcome of the evaluation. As a result, they have come to the wrong
conclusion with regard to the use of anomalous cognition in intelligence
operations and have significantly underestimated the robustness of the basic
phenomenon.
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CLIENTS' INFLUENCE IN THE SELECTION OF ELEMENTS OF A PSYCHIC READING

By Chris A. Roe

Psychology Division, Nene College, Northampton NN2 7AL, England

ABSTRACT: This study tests the suggestion that clients of psychic readers
may be able to remotely influence the reader's choice of elements for their
reading in a manner analogous to other DMILS effects. TwentyÐseven subjects
were recruited to act as clients in an "assessment of a psychic claimant,"
and they received readings transmitted via a computer linkup. However, there
was no claimant. Instead, reading elements were selected from a pool of 75
items. Each reading of 20 statements consisted of half selected in real time
via a live REG (the experimental items) and half using a preselected list
derived using random number tables (control items). Subjects rated each
element for accuracy. REGÐselected items were rated by subjects as more
accurate than control items, although the difference was not significant (t
= Ð1.333, p = .097, oneÐtailed). "Success" in item selection was not related
to belief or attitude variables. As predicted, feeling types were superior
to perceiving types at the task, but not significantly so (U = 23.5, p =
.12, oneÐtailed). Other predictions based on Jungian personality types were
not supported. It is suggested that although the study failed to elicit
effects that achieved conventional significance, the effect sizes reported
are of a reasonable magnitude for REGÐbased studies. Further work is
recommended.
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WHAT MAKES A GOOD PSI TARGET?
THREE STUDIES OF FORCEDÐCHOICE ESP VARYING TARGET EMOTIONALITY AND
COMPLEXITY

By Caroline A. Watt

Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square,
Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, Scotland

ABSTRACT: Three experiments studied performance on a 24Ðtrial forcedÐchoice
psi task with 12 emotionally unpleasant and 12 neutral targets. The
emotional targets consisted of 8 simple black and white line drawings and 4
colorful and more complex pictures; the neutral targets consisted of 12
identical line drawings of a rectangle. Participants made a binary choice as
to whether each target was emotional or neutral and the main target
variables under study were emotional versus neutral and simple versus
complex. Experiment 1 had a GESP design and 48 novice participants.
Experiment 2 had a clairvoyance design and 14 experienced participants who
had taken part in Experiment 1 and who had then undergone training in
techniques reputed to enhance psi performance. Experiment 3 had a
clairvoyance design and 75 novice participants. In all three studies
participants showed no difference in scoring between emotional and neutral
targets once participants' preference for calling "neutral" more often than
"emotional" was taken into account. Participants scored nonsignificantly
higher for complex as compared to simple emotional targets in Experiments 1
and 2, but Experiment 3 found the opposite trend. Exploratory analyses using
participants' individual emotionality ratings of the targets also found
little difference in ESP scoring comparing the most to the least emotional
targets. Finally, these laboratory findings were related to the study of
spontaneous cases.
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