The 1995 AIR Review of Remote Viewing

The Central Intelligence Agency, deciding whether to continue funding, commissioned an independent evaluation and made a choice that turned out to be the most valuable thing about the exercise: it appointed two reviewers with opposite priors and published both. Jessica Utts is a statistician who had written previously and sympathetically about the psi literature. Ray Hyman is a psychologist who had spent twenty years as its most technically engaged critic. They received the same body of material, principally the laboratory work conducted under contract during the programme's later years.

Utts concluded that the statistical effect was established beyond reasonable doubt, that it had been replicated at independent laboratories, that its size was comparable to effects accepted as real elsewhere in applied psychology, and that the appropriate next step was to investigate mechanism rather than existence. Hyman accepted that the effects were statistically reliable and not attributable to chance, and concluded that the studies shared design features capable of producing exactly such effects without any anomalous transfer of information. Neither reviewer had access to the operational files in full, a limitation both noted in their reports.

The disagreement is not statistical and pretending otherwise obscures what is interesting about it. Both reviewers agree that the data show a regularity that chance does not explain. The split occurs at the next step, and it is a question about inference rather than arithmetic. Utts's position is that when an effect has appeared repeatedly, across laboratories and investigators, at a consistent magnitude, the burden shifts: to keep attributing it to an unspecified flaw is to protect a conclusion from evidence.

Hyman's position is that all the studies in the pool descend from a small number of related protocols developed by the same people, so replication across laboratories does not mean independence of design, and a shared design flaw yields a consistent effect indistinguishable from a consistent phenomenon. Hyman also made the concession his critics rarely quote, writing that the effects were too consistent to dismiss and that he could not name the specific flaw responsible. Utts made the concession her supporters rarely quote, that the work had produced no understanding of mechanism and nothing usable. Both reports were republished in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1996 with short replies. Neither author has changed position since.