Answering the Critics in Print, and a Second Career at Virginia

In 1940 Pratt was the lead author of Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, a volume written with Rhine, Charles Stuart, Burke Smith and Joseph Greenwood which did something unusual for a contested field: it collected the published objections to the Duke work, stated each one in the critic's own terms, and then answered it. Contemporary skeptics did not accept the answers, but the book set a convention in parapsychology that a defence should begin by restating the attack accurately, and it is still cited for that reason. Pratt later left Duke for the division of parapsychology at the University of Virginia, where Ian Stevenson was building a very different research programme around reported memories of previous lives.

There Pratt ran long series with the Czech subject Pavel Stepanek, who was tested for years by multiple investigators in several countries, and who produced a persistent though small effect on a task involving hidden cards in sealed envelopes. The Stepanek work is now discussed chiefly as an example of how a single co-operative subject can sustain an entire research programme, and of how difficult it is to interpret a result that only one person in the world produces. Pratt himself was consistent to the end that the case for psi rested on accumulated small effects and never on any one dramatic sitting.