The Cue in the Transcripts

David Marks and Richard Kammann obtained copies of the transcripts and noticed something the design had not accounted for. The judging task is a matching task, and matching is easier if you know the order. The transcripts contained incidental material that revealed sequence: references to the previous day's session, remarks about how many had been done, dates, the experimenter's comments. A judge who could establish the running order, and who knew the order in which the sites had been visited, could pair the sets correctly while learning nothing whatever about any site. Marks and Kammann tested this directly by re-judging transcripts from which such references had been removed, and reported that the above-chance matching disappeared. Their paper appeared in Nature in 1978. It is worth being clear about what it did and did not allege: no fraud, no hallucination, no dishonesty of any kind, only an unnoticed channel in a judging procedure.

Targ and Puthoff answered that the edited transcripts had been stripped of legitimate content along with the cues, and that later series avoided the problem. The exchange never converged. The 1995 government review, whose two reviewers agreed on almost nothing else, both treated cueing as the question the early SRI work had failed to close.