One Dataset, Two Reviewers, Two Reports

The Central Intelligence Agency, deciding whether to continue funding, commissioned an independent evaluation and made a choice that turned out to be the most valuable thing about the exercise: it appointed two reviewers with opposite priors and published both. Jessica Utts is a statistician who had written previously and sympathetically about the psi literature. Ray Hyman is a psychologist who had spent twenty years as its most technically engaged critic. They received the same body of material, principally the laboratory work conducted under contract during the programme's later years.

Utts concluded that the statistical effect was established beyond reasonable doubt, that it had been replicated at independent laboratories, that its size was comparable to effects accepted as real elsewhere in applied psychology, and that the appropriate next step was to investigate mechanism rather than existence. Hyman accepted that the effects were statistically reliable and not attributable to chance, and concluded that the studies shared design features capable of producing exactly such effects without any anomalous transfer of information. Neither reviewer had access to the operational files in full, a limitation both noted in their reports.