Skeptical psychologist Ray Hyman reviewed Honorton's pooled ganzfeld results in the early 1980s and identified a list of methodological concerns, including inadequate randomisation procedures, the possibility of sensory cues leaking between sender and receiver rooms, and selective reporting of successful studies. Rather than simply talking past each other, Hyman and Honorton produced a formal 1986 joint communique, agreeing that the accumulated data showed an effect too consistent to attribute to chance or to selective publication alone, while continuing to disagree over whether that effect reflected psi or some subtler, uncontrolled artifact, and jointly specifying the tighter randomisation and automation standards any future study would need to meet before either side would treat it as decisive.
Honorton's subsequent autoganzfeld series, run with computer-controlled randomisation and target selection built to satisfy the 1986 standards, again reported an above-chance hit rate. Since then, larger and more rigorously pre-registered replications, including a well-powered multi-lab series conducted in the 2000s, have produced mixed and generally weaker results, and no outcome has been accepted by both sides as meeting the bar the 1986 communique itself set. The ganzfeld therefore stands, uniquely among psi protocols, as a case where both proponents and critics agree on what a decisive result would look like and simply have not agreed that one has yet arrived.