The real science behind Debunked

Callum Ferris, the narrator of Debunked, makes his living taking apart claims of the paranormal. He has a spreadsheet. It has colour-coded tabs. He has watched, in a professional capacity, forty-one people greet on cue for strangers pretending to be their dead husbands.

So when I gave him something to investigate, I didn’t want ghosts or tarot. I wanted the strangest parts of his story to be the parts he couldn’t wave away, because they actually happened. Serious institutions spent serious money, over decades, asking whether the mind can reach beyond the body. Here are four strands of real research that run through the book, and what became of them.

The rocket scientist at Princeton

Robert Jahn was not anybody’s idea of a mystic. He was a plasma physicist and an expert on electric propulsion for spacecraft, and his 1968 textbook on the subject became a standard reference in the field. In 1971 he was made Dean of Engineering at Princeton University.

The story goes that a student asked him to supervise a project on psychokinesis, the idea that the mind can influence physical things, which other staff wouldn’t take on. She wanted to repeat experiments by Helmut Schmidt, a German-born physicist who, at Boeing’s research laboratories in the late 1960s, had built a random number generator driven by radioactive decay and tested whether people could predict or influence it. Schmidt reported scores of just under 52 per cent, where chance would give 50.

Jahn helped her design the project properly. What she found, and the papers she’d gathered, were enough to make him want to test the question himself, with engineering standards. In 1979 he set up the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, known as PEAR, and ran it with a colleague, Brenda Dunne.

Its question was simple and slightly mad: can a person’s intention change the behaviour of a machine?

Most of the experiments used random event generators, electronic devices that produce an unpredictable stream of ones and zeros, a coin toss done by circuitry. Volunteers sat in front of them and tried, by intention alone, to push the results high or low. The lab also ran experiments in remote perception, in which one person tried to describe a place another person was visiting.

Over millions of trials, PEAR reported a tiny effect in the machine experiments, roughly one extra head in every thousand tosses. Tiny, but if it were real it would matter enormously. It would mean the mind could reach out and nudge the physical world.

The trouble is that it didn’t hold up. A large attempt to repeat the results with two German research groups, published in 2000, failed to reproduce them. A physicist at York University in Canada, Stanley Jeffers, ran similar experiments and got chance results. And critics noted that one regular participant, thought to be a member of staff, accounted for about half of the lab’s overall effect.

PEAR closed in February 2007, after nearly thirty years. Jahn and Dunne carried on the work independently.

The eggs

One of the PEAR researchers, Roger Nelson, took the idea worldwide.

If one person sitting in front of one machine could produce a tiny effect, what would happen if millions of people were all focused on the same thing at once? In August 1998 the Global Consciousness Project began collecting data from random number generators running in different parts of the world. The team called them eggs.

Each egg is a small device that turns electronic noise into random numbers. Every second it produces a trial of 200 random bits, which should average out at 100, and every five minutes it sends its data to a server. By 2004 there were between sixty-five and seventy eggs, from Fiji to South Africa, quietly counting.

The idea was that when huge numbers of people are pulled in the same direction at once, by a disaster or a celebration, the eggs might drift away from randomness together. Before each event the project registered which stretch of data it would look at, then checked. New Year’s Eve. Religious festivals. Typhoons. Across more than five hundred tests, it reported odds against chance of more than a trillion to one.

Its most famous result comes from 11 September 2001, when the network showed a large deviation around the time of the attacks. Critics replied that choosing a slightly shorter or longer stretch of time would have made it vanish. Small choices like that, made by people who know what they’re hoping to find, are where effects like this tend to come from. The formal experiment ended in 2015.

The government psychics

From the 1970s until 1995, the United States paid people to see things at a distance.

It began with research at the Stanford Research Institute in California, where two physicists, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, tested people who claimed they could describe distant places they had never seen. One was Ingo Swann, an artist, who developed a method called coordinate remote viewing: give the viewer a set of map coordinates and nothing else, and ask what’s there. Another was Pat Price, a former police officer from Burbank, California, best remembered for his sketches of cranes and gantries.

The work grew into a small Army intelligence unit at Fort Meade in Maryland, operating out of old wooden barracks and later known as the Stargate Project. At its height it had more than twenty remote viewers. Over its lifetime it cost around $20 million.

In 1995 an outside review was ordered, and its two experts disagreed. The statistician Jessica Utts concluded that the laboratory results showed something real. The psychologist Ray Hyman said that hadn’t been shown, and that the results hadn’t been independently repeated. The review’s verdict was the one that mattered: remote viewing had never been shown to be of use in intelligence work. The programme closed that year, and in 2017 the CIA put its files online, where anyone can read them.

The one with the best evidence

The fourth strand is the one Callum can’t argue with at all, because nobody serious does.

The placebo effect is real. People given a pill with nothing in it often feel better. It’s why drug trials compare the real drug against a dummy pill: the dummy works too, and the drug only counts if it does better.

The strangest version is this. In 2010, a team at Harvard Medical School led by Ted Kaptchuk gave eighty people with irritable bowel syndrome either nothing at all or pills that were openly labelled as placebo. Patients were told plainly that the pills were inert, like sugar pills, and that placebo pills had been shown to help people with their condition. The ones taking pills they knew to be fake reported significantly more improvement than the ones given nothing.

That’s the mind changing the body, measured and published. It’s less dramatic than moving a machine with your thoughts. It’s also true.

What a sceptic sees

Put the four side by side and a pattern shows up. It’s the one Callum lives by.

The effects get smaller as the experiments get better. Schmidt reported nearly two extra hits in every hundred. PEAR, with far more trials and tighter controls, reported about one in a thousand. The independent labs that tried to repeat PEAR found nothing at all.

Tiny effects can still look overwhelming on paper. With enough trials, almost any small bias becomes statistically significant: a slightly faulty machine, a participant who knows how it works, a decision about which data to count. Millions of trials don’t protect you from those. They magnify them.

And experiments that find nothing tend not to get written up, which leaves the record looking more impressive than the research was. Scientists call it the file drawer problem.

None of that proves the researchers were wrong, and some of them were careful, serious people who gave their careers to this. But it’s why a sceptic wants an effect that turns up every time anyone looks, in anyone’s hands. It’s why the placebo effect gets a pass that the eggs don’t.

Where the book comes in

Debunked invents the people and the danger. Not the research.

Callum starts where any sceptic would, with studies like these and the holes in them, and he’d be the first to point the holes out. He knows about the participant who carried half an effect. He knows how much the choice of a window of time can change a result. He has a spreadsheet for this.

Then his grandmother, an hour before she dies, opens her eyes and says something she had no way of knowing.

“There’s your grandfather,” she said. “In his good jumper.”

And then the deaths start: fringe consciousness researchers, one after another. What Callum finds, following them, is an operation that took the strangest science of the last century and turned it into a trading edge, and people prepared to kill to keep it.

A sceptic who can’t explain something has a problem. He has to keep looking.