The Committees, and the Habit of Agreeing with the Other Side

Hyman has sat on most of the formal reviews the subject has had in the United States. He was among the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976; he served on the National Research Council committee that reviewed parapsychology and other performance-enhancement claims for the U.S. Army in 1988; and in 1995 he was one of the two reviewers, alongside the statistician Jessica Utts, commissioned to evaluate two decades of government-funded remote viewing. His pattern across all of them is consistent and is what distinguishes him from a debunker.

In the 1986 ganzfeld communique he conceded that the pooled effect was not explicable by chance or by the file drawer alone. In the 1995 review he agreed with Utts that the remote viewing effects were statistically reliable, and then argued that reliability is not the question, because a consistent methodological flaw produces a consistent effect. He has said in print that the psi literature deserves the same statistical scrutiny as any other and that it usually gets worse scrutiny, from both its defenders and its attackers. Parapsychologists have called that framing unfalsifiable, since any positive result can be assigned to an unidentified flaw. That objection is a real one and remains unanswered.