Randi Strikes Back

For those who have been with this blog since the beginning, I always thought it kind of an honor to those whom The Amazingly Fraudulent Randi took the time to single out and ridicule. It was actually a bit of a stated goal of mine to make it onto the News of the Scientific Woo Woo at some point, and I'm here to tell you all that I believe that is about to be recognized. Apparently I have made enough waves in the paranormal community at this point that Randi himself feels like I need to be knocked down a peg.

Yes, Randi himself sent me some hate mail a couple of days ago, and after going back and forth with him for a couple of days I've been informed that our e-mails(or his altered versions) are going up on his website and I shall be one of the features of his "newsletter". He even sent a couple of his minions after me when he got too tired to continue our discussion.

More on this to come as the day of my "calling out" by Randi approaches.

The Hunt for the Skinwalker Review

"The Hunt for the Skinwalker," for those who don't know, is a book about a Utah ranch that seems to have almost every paranormal occurrence all at once, and the scientists who have and are trying to study it. The book's written by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, with Kelleher being a PhD scientist who took the lead on the study of the ranch.

The research was funded by the National Institute for Discovery Science, a scientific organization set up to scientifically study phenomena which would probably otherwise go unexplored by the scientific community.

The book gives excellent background of the area and the history behind the phenomenon in that location. The bizarre phenomenon there seems to go back at least 15 generations in Ute history, and for all we know might have been going on long before that. In short, in Native American lore the phenomenon is attributed to "skinwalkers" who are witches who use their power for evil. This ranch is said to be "in the path of the skinwalkers" and, therefore, the members of the local tribe will not step foot on the property for any reason.

Having asked many people I know who are familiar with the skinwalker phenomenon whether it's real or not, I can report that almost to a person, each came back to me with stories and legitimate fear for their own lives. Many people who have attempted to research skinwalkers have terrifying tales which scared them off of the notion of any legitimate research.

The nature of the occurrences on this particular property take the shape of everything from frightening poltergeist behavior, to telepathic communications, to UFOs of almost every variety reported from around the world, to Bigfoot, bulletproof animals including an extremely large wolf, to cattle mutilations, and even unknown creatures stalking the grounds.

The former residents of the ranch regularly ran into some of the strangest encounters I've ever heard of. For example, one of the most common occurrences was an orange "window" which would open up in full view of the house, up in the sky. Once, while watching the window, a resident of the ranch saw what looked to him like another sky through the window. Shortly thereafter a triangular shaped craft flew through from the other "sky" into the sky over Utah.

This seems to speak to the possibility that this ranch is located in an area where cross over from other dimensions or travel through a wormhole might be a reality. Many, if not all, of the other phenomena might possibly be explained by that as well, as strange as it seems. However, much of the happenings on the ranch seem to fall along the trickster motif; occasionally seemingly random occurrences with no obvious motive. That doesn't mean the motive doesn't make sense to whatever does it, but it's hard to come up with a reason why, for instance, a 75 pound post digger would disappear from a job site and show up later in a tree.

One of the more interesting points which I think was made in the book is the obvious intelligence of the behavior of what is often called an "entity" in the book. When the NIDS team showed up on the ranch at first, the occurrences were in full swing and happening regularly. They came in with a central command trailer, high tech equipment and people stalking the grounds on regular rounds. It was not exactly a low key operation, and it seems to have been obvious to the "entity" that it was being stalked. Almost at once, the occurrences dropped to near zero, with just hints of activity and strange phenomena here and there. While the research team certainly witnessed some things which they can not explain in everyday terms, they were mostly unable to come out of their experience with lasting proof of what happened. In most cases, it seems like that's because whatever was going on there simply didn't want to be filmed or caught on camera.

All in all, I found the book to be a fascinating read which did not disappoint from my previous stance that if they book lived up to the hype it might just help solve the mystery behind much of the paranormal. With such a wide range of happenings in one place it would seem unlikely that they aren't tied in together in some fashion. How is probably up to the likes of the Vallee's of the world to explain(who is on the board of the NIDS), but maybe the answers are closer now than they were before the NIDS spent over a year at the ranch in Utah. If you're interested in attempting to explain bits and pieces of the paranormal I'd certainly recommend making this book a part of that research.

This story's a retelling of a story that broke a while back, but I saw a newspaper report on it recently and it's been in the back of my mind.

The California Aggie recently reported on a statistical study done on a previous US government remote viewing study. In short, the US government spent funding research into remote viewing and other paranormal subjects, and had a pile of data which they wanted statistically analyzed. They tapped the American Institutes for Research to find people to do the analysis. In the end, they settled on Jessica Utts, a respected statistician from UC Davis, and Ray Hyman, a skeptic professor of psychology from the University of Oregon.

The results of this study were actually quite convincing, and they more or less told this to congress, in writing, when asked to do so. Utts, for instance, reported that in 966 cases logged by the government research of attempted remote viewing, the correct target was identified 34% of the time. That's far beyond the probability of that occurring by chance, which Utts calculated at 0.000000000043.

For comparison's sake, she did an analysis of aspirin treatment for prevention of heart disease. Those results showed that there was likely to have been prevention is about 25% of cases, with the probability of that occurring by chance at about 0.0003.

As Utts puts it, it's really quite convincing:

"The evidence for [remote viewing] is much stronger than [aspirin preventing heart attacks] and yet we have people taking aspirin everyday to try to prevent heart attacks," Utts said. "People aren't willing to either look at this evidence or aren't willing to believe it when they see it."

She put in her report to congress the following:

"Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud."

So, I guess this brings up the age old question, which I hate to bring up being a scientist, of why doesn't mainstream science recognize this kind of work? I will actually put forward that it's not actually science that won't accept it, although part of the problem lies there. It's really society as a whole that won't, which, obviously, trickles down into the scientific community. I think we probably need to stop asking why science won't accept the results, when there's scientists doing the actual research and then verifying it, and start asking why society won't accept it.

I've been personally interested in the Skinwalker Ranch case for a while now, and posted about it before. If the stories are true, and I will admit that to my knowledge there hasn't been enough proof put out to completely convince me, the ranch in Utah may be the center of a phenomenon which could shed light on a lot of the paranormal world.

The occurrences there speak to a wide range of paranormal happenings from UFOs to orbs to cattle mutilation to spontaneous combustion to multiple dimensions to possessions and everything in between. I'm still trying to sit down and read the book, but in the meantime I found a great article on it with a bunch of excerpts and stories from the book.

Recently I posted an article about Randi's Million Dollar Challenge and how the money might not even be real and got a comment from JaneDoughnut(who has a pretty cool blog) which mirrors something that I've heard countless times over the years. Namely, that the JREF challenge does a good job helping prove that most paranormal phenomena are definitively not real.

So, I thought I'd post a link to, and some excerpts from, a multiple part, quite thorough, investigation into the challenge and how it's virtually impossible to even enter, much less win the(possibly non-existent) million dollar prize from author Michael Prescott. All of the quoted material below comes directly from Randi's own FAQ on the challenge, and are some of my personal favorites from a pretty ridiculous piece of writing, in my humble opinion.

Possibly the main reason that no one has even managed to win the prize is that you can't enter if your phenomenon is among many of the most common types of paranormal phenomenon:

There are some claims that are far too implausible to warrant any serious examination, such as the "Breatharian" claims in which the applicant states that he can survive without food or water. Science conclusively tells us all we need to know about such matters, and the JREF feels no obligation to engage applicants in such delusions....

Other claims, such as "Crop Circles" and UFO's are rejected because they have been definitively proven to be the result of hoaxes or mass hysteria. Claims involving "Cloud-Busting", for example, are rejected because Science (along with keen observation) tells us conclusively that clouds will move and disperse despite the efforts of humankind to move them according to their wishes. The phenomenon behind Oujia boards, for example, is attributed to ideomotor reflexes, and not to anything paranormal.

....

Claims of psychic healing border on the miraculous, and the JREF declines to investigate them...

....

Of course, when confronted with a particularly incredible claim like "remote viewing" (the current version of "clairvoyance") we can easily stop short and ask ourselves just why we are involved with such obvious nonsense.

...

The JREF will also not waste its time (or jeopardize the applicant's safety and well being) with claims from applicants who exhibit clear signs of paranoid delusions, schizophrenia or other mental illness, feeling strongly that it is their moral responsibility to avoid the furthering of such delusions in the minds of those who may be in need of immediate psychiatric attention. What this means is that it is OK for you to be deluded, as the JREF feels many applicants may well be, but it is not OK for the JREF to support your illness.

...

While you may be neither mistaken nor a cheater, the JREF will always assume that you are one or the other.

...

Many people who claim to have paranormal powers are, sadly, suffering from an advanced state of delusion. That isn't to say that you are, but it's a hypothesis that may be raised during the application process. So, be prepared for this in advance, especially if your claim is extremely remote by reasonable standards.

It goes on and on from there. It's not hard to pull amusing quotes from it. Until I read his FAQ last year I would have never thought that a former magician was qualified to diagnose people with schizophrenia, for instance, but, apparently he is. I think what this investigation, the lack of a real, tangible prize, and the quotes above from Randi's own FAQ prove is that the challenge is, in fact, just an excuse to debunk phenomena which may or may not be real without even raising so much as a finger.

It seems to me, in the end, all of the time and energy spent investigating Randi is far more than he's put into investigating the paranormal...and one of those certainly seems to be fake to me. Given a choice between Randi and his challenge and the paranormal, guess which one I think is more real?

Back in November I wrote about PEAR closing down. Unfortunately, I guess it's time for them to shut down the laboratory now.

Dean Radin has a nice closing statement on some of the things that PEAR accomplished.

Nobel prizewinner Brian Josephson did an interview with New Scientist recently that was really quite interesting. Many people know that he won a Nobel Prize for his work in superconductivity as a 22 year old. What many of those same people don't know is that he's been an ardent supporter of the paranormal as simply unexplained phenomenon by science as well. Here's a couple of quotes from the interview:

You have become an advocate for unconventional ideas. How did that happen?

I went to a conference where the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste was talking for the first time about his discovery that water has a "memory" of compounds that were once dissolved in it - which might explain how homeopathy works. His findings provoked irrationally strong reactions from scientists and I was struck by how badly he was treated. To an extent, I realised that the way science is done by consensus could get things completely wrong. I feel that it's important to try and correct the errors that scientists are making.
What errors are these?

I call it "pathological disbelief". The statement "even if it were true I wouldn't believe it" seems to sum up this attitude. People have this idea that when something can't be reproduced every time, it isn't a real phenomenon. It is like a religious creed where you have to conform to the "correct" position. This leads to editors blocking the publication of important papers in academic journals. Even the physics preprint archive blocks some papers on certain topics, or by certain authors.

...

You draw the line in a very different place to most scientists when it comes to hard-to-prove phenomena such as telepathy and cold fusion.

Can I take you up on something? These things are not hard to prove, they're just hard to get accepted. The evidence for these phenomena would normally lead to them being accepted, but they have an additional barrier in that they are "unacceptable" and often unpublishable. Some people are extraordinarily hard to convince. In particular, people who work in an area in which the phenomena are highly reproducible cannot envisage situations such as cold fusion where - as in many areas of materials science - things are not that reproducible. They take the illegitimate step from "hard to reproduce" to "non-existent". Science is often presented as an objective pursuit, but the history of science tells you that this is far from being the case.

...

I take it that means you pay a price for speaking out about things like cold fusion, telepathy and the paranormal.

Yes. If you say you accept the reality of the paranormal then this automatically affects your reputation. It's assumed that if a person believes in this kind of thing then his views are not worth considering. It has led to certain people being very prejudiced against me and assuming that there's something wrong with anything I do. I don't have the kind of support network that researchers usually have. But since I can do my research on the mathematics of the brain by myself this is less of a problem than it otherwise would be, though it slows down progress considerably.

Why do you speak out about these things when you know it causes difficulties for your own research career?

They are important for various reasons. For example, cold fusion may contribute significantly to solving the problem of generating clean energy. Had it not been ridiculed back in 1989, we'd probably all now be using energy generated by cold fusion. So it's really important to speed up the process. I reckon that cold fusion will be accepted in the next year or so.

I've heard him talk on the subject of the paranormal before, and I think he manages to sum up many of my beliefs very succinctly. While it's true that quite a few people in the mainstream of science are unable to accept many phenomena as "possible", it's also just as true that many scientists actually enjoy exploring the boundaries. I think these are the scientists that generally get ignored when people begin bashing science.

As another Nobel prizewinner, Percy Williams Bridgman, once famously said, "There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea."

An international online survey of the paranormal is getting a huge response just six weeks in. So far over 2,000 people have participated, with 96% of them claiming to have had at least one paranormal experience in their lifetimes. While the data may be skewed by the fact that people who've never had a paranormal experience are probably less likely to participate, a gallup poll also concluded that three quarters of Americans believe in at least one "paranormal" subject.

This survey is trying to put some numbers and statistics onto paranormal experiences such as premonitions, out-of-body and near-death episodes, telepathy and apparitions. If you'd like to participate you can do so by filling out the survey at this link.

There's a guest article at The Daily Grail from Colm Kelleher, co-author of "Hunt for the Skinwalker" which is basically an excerpt from the book.

“It’s still moving” he was muttering. All of a sudden he yelled. “Its got me”, “its saying: “we are watching you” he continued, his voice rising a couple of octaves. Then there was silence. I continued trying to take increasingly longer exposures to try to catch whatever he was talking about. Every time I looked up from my camera to see if I could see what was causing him such intense anxiety, I could see nothing except the dark shadows of the tree line directly in front of me. The feeling in the pasture was very spooky, a chilling desolate feeling. Then he said:”its getting smaller”. Then: “its gone”. He kept muttering “Jesus Christ” “Jesus Christ”. He repeated the same phrase over and over again. His voice betrayed that he was very freaked out.

I asked him what had happened. It was obvious that he was still shaken. “Something big was in the trees just in front of us, it blotted out all the stars through the binoculars,” he declared. “It took control of my mind”. “It told me it was watching us”. He sounded very confused and bewildered. This guy was a Ph.D level physicist. He had spent time on the famous NASA Voyager missions, when the celebrated remote Voyager probes had mapped the surfaces of Saturn and Jupiter for the first time in history. This guy was not prone to sudden nervous breakdowns. But now, he was almost babbling. He definitely had not met anything like this before in his academic career. As team leader, I was concerned.

Be sure to check out he rest of this article, it's certainly interesting. The book's been on my "things to read" list for a while, but I've heard it's a great book.

For those who aren't familiar with the story of the ranch, there's an entry on it here.