Publishing in Nature in 1974 was the high point of the programme's scientific standing and, in the long run, the source of its most damaging criticism, because a paper in that journal is read by people equipped to check it. The editors took the unusual step of printing an accompanying note explaining why they had accepted a paper on so unlikely a subject, citing the quality of the shielding and the blind judging rather than any confidence in the conclusion.
In 1978 the same journal published a response from David Marks and Richard Kammann, who had obtained transcripts and found that they contained extraneous material, references to the previous day's target, remarks about the order of sessions, and similar traces, which would let a judge reconstruct the correct sequence without needing any information about the sites at all. When Marks and Kammann re-judged transcripts with such cues removed, the effect vanished.
Puthoff and Targ disputed the account, arguing the edited transcripts had been degraded and that later series avoided the problem. No agreed resolution followed. When the whole programme was reviewed in 1995, the reviewer sympathetic to psi and the reviewer hostile to it both treated the cueing question as the central methodological issue that the early SRI work had never fully closed.