The Evidence Record and Institutional History of Parapsychology

No parapsychological claim has produced a result that has both replicated reliably across independent laboratories and survived close methodological scrutiny, which is the field's central and most consistent finding after more than a century of testing. J. B. Rhine's original 1930s Duke card-guessing results, which introduced the term extrasensory perception to wide use, were not reproduced under matched conditions by outside laboratories, including a large 1936 Princeton series that found no effect across more than 25,000 trials. The ganzfeld telepathy protocol produced the field's most durable statistical debate: in a 1986 joint communique, the psi researcher Charles Honorton and the skeptical psychologist Ray Hyman agreed that pooled ganzfeld results exceeded what chance or selective reporting alone could explain, while still disagreeing over whether that pattern demonstrated a genuine psychic effect.

The United States government funded a parapsychology programme, run through SRI International and later SAIC under the name Star Gate, testing remote viewing for intelligence purposes from 1972 to 1995. When the CIA commissioned an outside evaluation in 1995, the two reviewers split: statistician Jessica Utts concluded the statistical evidence indicated a genuine anomalous effect, while psychologist Ray Hyman concluded the results were not methodologically reliable; both agreed the programme's output had no operational intelligence value, and it was shut down. The field's standing weakened further after 2011, when psychologist Daryl Bem published nine experiments reporting evidence for precognition; independent pre-registered replication attempts found no effect, and the episode became a touchstone case in psychology's replication crisis.