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.