vault backup: 2026-09-22 17:42:28

10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ray Hyman.md

@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ A memorandum from the Under Secretary of the Army's office to Gale of July 17, 1
 
 In 1995 the [[American Institutes for Research]], under contract to the CIA, engaged Hyman and the statistician [[Jessica Utts]] to review the research of the [[STARGATE PROJECT|Star Gate program]] ([[1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate]]). His report of September 11, 1995, took the ten [[Science Applications International Corporation|SAIC]] experiments as "the only ones for which we have adequate documentation," agreed with Utts that they "were free of the methodological weaknesses that plagued the early SRI research" and that "the effect sizes reported in the SAIC experiments are too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes," and then answered no to three questions: whether the effects established anomalous cognition, whether "the possibility of methodological flaws" had been "completely eliminated," and whether the results were consistent with other laboratories. "Ten experiments, especially from one laboratory," he wrote, "is far too few to establish reliable relationships in almost any area of inquiry." He compared the field's negatively defined anomaly with the discovery of Neptune from the perturbations of Uranus, and told anyone relying on operational hits to read [[David Marks]] and [[Richard Kammann]] on subjective validation. Of operations he recorded [[Edwin May]]'s estimate that "approximately 20 percent of the information supplied by a viewer is accurate": "If May is correct, then 80% of all the information supplied by this talented viewer will be erroneous."[^2]
 
-Writing in the *Skeptical Inquirer* in 1996, he said the CIA "abandoned this program in the late 1970s because it showed no promise," that under the DIA it "consisted of three components," one tracking foreign work, an operations program of "six, and later three, psychics on the government payroll," and the laboratory research at SRI and SAIC; that "because of some controversies within the program, a Senate committee decided to transfer the program from the DIA back to the CIA"; that "May helped identify the ten best studies for Utts and me to evaluate"; and that the panel "all agreed that any scientifically meaningful evaluation of these operational psychic intelligence uses was impossible." He ended: "It is premature to draw any conclusions. We will simply have to wait and see. If history is a guide, then this will be a long wait, indeed."[^3]
+Writing in the *[[Skeptical Inquirer]]* in 1996, he said the CIA "abandoned this program in the late 1970s because it showed no promise," that under the DIA it "consisted of three components," one tracking foreign work, an operations program of "six, and later three, psychics on the government payroll," and the laboratory research at SRI and SAIC; that "because of some controversies within the program, a Senate committee decided to transfer the program from the DIA back to the CIA"; that "May helped identify the ten best studies for Utts and me to evaluate"; and that the panel "all agreed that any scientifically meaningful evaluation of these operational psychic intelligence uses was impossible." He ended: "It is premature to draw any conclusions. We will simply have to wait and see. If history is a guide, then this will be a long wait, indeed."[^3]
 
 On *Nightline* on November 28, 1995, he said: "My considered judgment, if someone pushed me hard right now, I'd have to say the odds are 99 to 1 that there's nothing to remote viewing." Edwin May's commentary of 1996 traced "a thread of bias" from the visit to SRI (1973 or 1974, the accounts differ) at which Hyman, George Lawrence of ARPA, and Robert Van de Castle were refused access to an experiment in progress, and *Time* quoted Hyman on the tests' "incredible sloppiness," through Lawrence's commissioning of the [[National Research Council]] study in 1985 with Hyman leading its parapsychology section, to the AIR review under [[David Goslin]], who had administered the NRC report.[^4]