A Claim That Resists Being Tested Blind

Psychometry has proven difficult to test rigorously for a structural reason: a genuinely blind trial requires an object with a verifiable, independently documented history that neither the reader nor anyone communicating with the reader could infer from context, appearance, or ordinary cues, and most demonstrations, historical and modern, fall short of that standard.

Buchanan's and Denton's own experiments were not blind in this sense: Denton's sister often had background context about the type of specimen involved, and successes were recorded and publicised more consistently than failures. Where psychometry has been evaluated under tighter, blinded conditions, using genuinely unknown objects judged by an outside party against the true facts, it has not produced results exceeding chance. Its persistence as a working technique among some police-consulting psychics has been studied by researchers comparing psychic-assisted and non-assisted case outcomes, generally finding no advantage for the psychic-assisted cases and describing the apparent hits as a mix of cold reading, vague statements later fitted to facts, and selective reporting of the occasional coincidental accuracy. No study meeting ordinary standards of blinding and independent verification has demonstrated psychometry as a genuine perceptual channel.