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News and Comment News and Comment An Unbeliever Among D The Faithful his past May, Cambridge Univer- jointly by the president of the Society sity appointed its first research for Psychical Research (Archie E. Roy) Tfellow in parapsychology. Nor- and three past presidents 0ohn Beloff, mally, you might not expect this to Arthur J. Ellison, and Alan Gauld). be a high-profile news item. But the "Dr. Humphrey," they wrote, post went to a skeptic, Nicholas Humphrey, and this turned an unus- ual academic appointment into a media event in Britain. The Times of London wasted no time in interviewing Humphrey, who was refreshingly forthright in his replies. "After a hundred years of experiments into the paranormal," he said, "they have come up with nothing convincing. I want to show not only that these things don't happen, but that they are logically impossible, that the paranormal is all in the mind." Nor did he give any ground to the spiritually minded. "Roman Catholi- cism without the paranormal would be nothing; it needs its miracles. But then who needs Catholicism? Praying has no paranormal benefits—statisti- cally, it is not going to help." "The most important work to be done in this area," he said, "is to expose the fallacies. This is not a game. A lot of people are putting around mislead- ing ideas, and others are being conned financially and intellectually." Almost immediately, ruffled feath- ers began afluttering in the dovecotes of academe. A letter to the Times was signed Inquirer Winter 1993 115 "appears to be lumping together all the concerned with research into the silliest nonsense and foolish supersti- physical sciences, and the dons there tions he (and we) dislike and calling were imperfectly sensible of the honor it parapsychology. We had hoped thus bestowed upon them. Hugh that the day was long past when Mellor, professor of philosophy, com- academics not noted for their wide plained that it would link the college experiences of psychical research with "spooks, ectoplasm, and card could feel free to dismiss it in a manner games." And as a body, they insisted that would damage their reputation that "the dubious terms 'psychical if applied to any other scientific research' and 'parapsychology' should discipline. Sadly we seem to have been not be used either in the title or in mistaken." the public advertisements." A day or two later, Times columnist Finally it was agreed to use the Bernard Levin devoted an article to money for research into "why some an attack on Humphrey, under the people could be induced to believe headline "Why do scientists become impossible things." unscientific when confronted with This shift of emphasis has upset evidence of the paranormal?" He many in the paranormal establish- criticized Humphrey for behaving "as ment who seem to see a researcher's though all mysteries, large and small, job as a search for evidence to support are either already solved or very their previous conclusions. It is all shortly will be." uncomfortably redolent of the SPR's Humphrey replied: "I recognize at early days, when its declared purpose least as well as Levin (possibly better) was to demonstrate the survival of the how far we are from understanding soul empirically. (Frederic Myers said the workings of the human mind. But, in his presidential address that the when faced by evidence of paranormal Society's very aim was to supply a powers, I, unlike Levin, am inclined "preamble to all religions.") to be more curious about their natural Since then, the ripples have spread. meaning than reverent about their In Edinburgh University, Charles supernatural one." Honorton said he found "several It all began when two members of misleading statements" about para- the Society for Psychical Research psychological research in the brief (SPR) left a grant of money, known comments that New Scientist made on as the Perrott and Warwick Fund. It the appointment. was given to Trinity College in In Cambridge itself, further com- Cambridge University to administer. plaints came from Brian Josephson It incorporated two bequests. One was (usually referred to simply as the that the money be used "absolutely inventor of the Josephson junction, for the purpose of psychical research." but in fact also a staunch publicist of The other was that phenomena should psi): "Since there are satisfactory be investigated when they seemed to rational reasons for belief in psi, such suggest "(a) the existence of supernat- as there now being good experimental ural powers of cognition or action in evidence for psi for which critics have human beings in their present life; or failed to find alternative explanations, (b) the persistence of the human mind investigating irrational ones seems after bodily death." beside the point." Trinity College in turn passed the None of this is likely to faze buck to Darwin College (also of Humphrey, whose standing is secure Cambridge). Darwin College is largely among his professional peers. He is 116 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 17 a distinguished theoretical psychol- Skeptics tried to warn that these ogist and a leading authority on the reports weren't all they might seem evolution of the brain, and he has held (Si, News and Comment, Winter reading and research posts at both 1985-86). But promoters of parapsy- Oxford and Cambridge. In 1981 he chology have tried to use talk of a "psi was chosen to give the BBC's Bron- gap" to persuade the U.S. government owski lecture, and in 1987 he wrote to do research on extrasensory per- and presented the comprehensive 90- ception (ESP). Now a former inves- minute television documentary "Is tigator for Anderson has admitted Anybody There?"—a searching inves- that he made up tales of psychic tigation of paranormal claims. research to win a $10 bar bet. He has held fellowships in the Ron McRae, author of Mind Wars, United States and Germany and was wrote in the June 1992 issue of the awarded the Glaxo Science Writers' irreverent magazine Spy that after Prize in 1980 and the Martin Luther becoming "convinced that many jour- King Memorial Prize in 1985. nalists lied, and that many journalists On the very day of the Times who didn't lie weren't very scrupulous interview this past May, Humphrey's about confirming the truth of what latest book appeared: A History of the their sources told them," he bet a Mind. In it, he sets out to define the friend that there were no limits to mind-body problem, and to solve it. what people would believe. Daniel Dennett (author of Conscious- After learning that the CIA was ness Regained) has described the book spending $100,000 to study Soviet as "brilliant, unsettling, and beauti- experiments on ESP and that the Navy fully written. Nobody else brings was paying the Stanford Research such an astonishing range of knowl- Institute to study professional psy- edge to bear on these issues." chics, McRae wrote, "I invented my It may not be 100-percent certain own psychic-research projects, and that well be hearing a lot more of Nick Anderson, convinced that I had Humphrey, but that's surely the way remarkable sources in the Pentagon to bet. printed my tale of a 'psychic task force' that was working to 'perfect —Lewis Jones psychotechtronic weapons that will work through extrasensory percep- Lewis ]ones is a writer in London. tion—like long-distance telepathic hypnosis to enslave enemy leaders.' "A month later," McRae continued, "Anderson described the 'hyperspatial Former Jack Anderson howitzer, which supposedly could transmit a nuclear explosion in the Researcher Says 'Psi Gap'Nevad a desert to the gates of the Stories Were a Hoax Kremlin with the speed of thought.' " McRae said he won the bar bet, and later went on to concoct at least one ince 1981, syndicated columnist other psychic contraption: a satellite- Jack Anderson has periodically deployed dowsing rod (SADDOR), S told his readers about psychic which was a Y-shaped rod sent into research financed by the Pentagon and orbit that allowed psychics to hunt for efforts by the Soviet Union to push enemy missiles and submarines. for a breakthrough in psychic warfare. Anderson, in his introduction to Winter 1993 117 McRae's psychic-warfare book, pub- today's special effects films is poised lished in 1984 by St. Martin's Press, to thrust all our old ideas about called McRae "one of the best inves- "photographic evidence" into the tigators in the business." dustbin of history. McRae, writing in Spy, argued that Until about 1990, flying an actor Mind Wars "was generally accurate, in a movie studio meant taking enor- apart from the sections on SADDOR mous pains to hide wires. Wire tech- and a few other items." He doesn't say nology had remained unchanged for what those "few other items" were. decades. Disney's Son of Flubber, a After seeing similar cases in which black-and-white comedy from the anonymous sources were willing to fifties, featured a convincing high verify information that McRae says he school basketball game in which knew to be untrue, "the difference players could fly. The filmmakers between my reporting and that of pulled off dozens of flawless flying most other reporters, I concluded, was shots—but first they had to establish that I published firsthand fabrications, that this was the big homecoming while the ones they published were game. That gave them an excuse to secondhand." decorate the gymnasium set with McRae said that after recovering thousands of strips of crepe paper, from a bout with depression he is back which hung vertically from the ceiling. in journalism "reporting on matters The paper strips provided vertical of banking and finance, and I never "noise" that made spotting the wires quote an anonymous source." impossible.
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