The Outdoor Protocol, and Getting It into Nature

The procedure that made the programme famous worked like this. A target site was drawn at random from a sealed pool of locations around the San Francisco peninsula, a bridge, a marina, a particular building, and an experimenter drove there and stayed for a set period. Meanwhile the viewer sat in a shielded room at the institute with a second experimenter who did not know the target, and described and sketched whatever came to mind.

Afterwards a judge who had not been present was given the set of transcripts and the set of sites and asked to pair them. Above-chance pairing was the published result. Nature accepted the paper in 1974 and printed an editorial note explaining the decision, citing the shielding and the blind judging while making clear it was not endorsing the conclusion, which remains one of the more unusual things that journal has done. Publication there mattered enormously to the programme's standing and to its funding, and it is the reason the subsequent criticism could be so specific: the protocol had been described in enough detail for someone else to find the hole in it. The pool of sites was assembled in advance by someone not otherwise involved, and the experimenter who travelled did not learn the destination until after leaving the building, both of which were deliberate features rather than afterthoughts.