Every Closely Watched Case, Explained or Unreplicated

The pattern across macro-PK's history is consistent: claims investigated informally or under conditions the practitioner could partly control have often seemed impressive, while claims investigated under conditions designed specifically to rule out physical trickery have either produced nothing or revealed the method.

The medium D. D. Home's reported levitations in the 1860s and 1870s were witnessed by scientists including William Crookes and were never definitively exposed as fraud, but Home also never performed for skeptical investigators under fully controlled conditions of his own accord, and no comparably strong levitation claim has since been produced under laboratory control. Uri Geller's spoon-bending, by contrast, was directly reproduced using ordinary sleight of hand by magician James Randi, who demonstrated the same effects under the same loose conditions Geller preferred and showed that tighter control, such as keeping the utensils away from Geller's hands until the moment of the demonstration, eliminated the effect entirely.

Laboratory PK research largely abandoned macro-scale claims by the mid-twentieth century in favour of statistically measured micro-PK, precisely because no macro-scale claim had produced an effect that survived proper controls, leaving large-scale psychokinesis, on the historical record, either unreplicated under rigorous conditions or explained by ordinary physical method.