5.5 KiB
| created | updated | title | aliases | category | tags | summary | born | location | |||||||||
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| 2026-05-15 | 2026-09-21 | Ray Hyman |
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Skeptics & Critics |
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University of Oregon psychologist and skeptic who evaluated Uri Geller for DARPA in 1973 and, for the 1995 AIR review, judged ten SAIC experiments too few to establish remote viewing. | 1928-06-23 | Chelsea, Massachusetts |
Ray Hyman is a psychologist and a prominent figure in the scientific skepticism movement. He was contracted by DARPA in 1973 to evaluate Uri Geller's purported psychic abilities at Stanford Research Institute. Along with George Lawrence and Robert Van de Castle, Hyman concluded that anyone who believed in Geller's powers was falling for the "ridiculous"1.
Hyman, along with Martin Gardner, joined forces in an anti-Geller crusade. He was critical of Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ's methodology, echoing Gardner's criticisms of J. B. Rhine's research, citing loose laboratory controls, skewing of data, and the influence of experimenter bias1.
In 1983, Hyman weighed in on the James Randi hoax against the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research, stating that Randi was "very upset by Geller’s using trickery to deceive scientists. He thought it was very immoral. And he felt that it was a prostitution of his beloved magic"1.
The 1995 Evaluation
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 (1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate). His report of September 11, 1995, took the ten Science Applications International Corporation 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
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
Footnotes
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Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎
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Hyman, Ray. "Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena," September 11, 1995, reproduced in the AIR report, pp. 3-41 to 3-75, and published in Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 10, no. 1, 1996, pp. 31-58. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB438/docs/doc_57.pdf ↩︎
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Hyman, Ray. "Evaluation of the Military's Twenty-Year Program on Psychic Spying," Skeptical Inquirer, March-April 1996, pp. 21-23. ↩︎
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"Psychic Spies: Cold War Whimsy or Secret Weapon?," ABC News Nightline, November 28, 1995, Radio TV Reports transcript for the CIA Public Affairs Staff, CIA-RDP99-01448R000402140001-7, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room. May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 60, no. 1, March 1996, pp. 3-23. ↩︎