by Eric Wargo
There was a news flash over the radio about the railroad accident, without any details. I knew my brother-in-law had been on the train, though he had never taken the train before. I was on a plane within an hour, and had taken charge of his home and four children before the sun went down. My sister was a terminal cancer patient in a hospital at the time. She died the next day. My wife and I have since adopted and raised their children. 1
Kurt was not the only Vonnegut to sense this looming upheaval in their lives—“my wife got the signals too.” He told Vaughan that starting about two weeks before the tragedy, Jane Vonnegut “kept coming up with the odd notion: ‘The refugees are coming, the refugees are coming.’” 2 And indeed, adding four newly orphaned boys to their own three children must have felt to the Vonneguts like running a refugee camp. Years later, in her own memoir about the aftermath of the tragedy, Jane remembered how even “allowing for some fantastic Einsteinian time warp, that was close enough to simultaneous for me to think that something really weird had been going on here. I had not yet heard of Jung’s word synchronicity .” 3 (Put a mental asterisk by that last word. One of several ready go-tos in our culture’s grab-bag of explanations for anomalous happenings is Carl Jung’s “acausal connecting principle”; we’ll be examining that concept with a critical eye later in this book.)
Vonnegut’s out-of-nowhere urge to call his brother-in-law—and perhaps even his 1972 correspondence with Vaughan about the event—was undoubtedly in the back of his mind when he penned his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions . In that book, the death of a 108-year-old woman sparks an odd, fleeting thought in the head of a man nine miles away, whose family she had cleaned laundry for when he was a little boy:
Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.
Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dwayne: “Oh my, oh my.” 4
For half a century, the study of psychic experience was dominated by the concept of telepathy, the term first coined by psychologist Frederic W. H. Myers in 1882. Again, it meant a kind of communication between minds that could even, at least in a limited way, transcend time, and that manifested most often in times of crisis or trauma. The Victorian era was a time of growing cultural backlash against the reductive mechanism of Enlightenment science, which the sociologist Max Weber accused of having “disenchanted” the world and stripped human life of higher meaning and hope (Nietzsche’s “death of God,” etc.). 5 Among other things, the Newtonian, mechanistic, billiard-ball universe hadn’t made room for any kind of knowing that could not be explained by some measurable energy carrying information across space (e.g., as light or sound waves). Information was physical, just as mind was physical, and if it could not be explained by physical principles, it was supernatural—and thus belief in it, no matter how widespread, amounted to superstition. Myers, like many thinkers of the time, challenged this Enlightenment view, but his theory of telepathy was still very much rooted in ideas and metaphors drawn from the science and technology of his day, especially then-new advances in telecommunications (the telegraph) and physics (radiation). His work—and his brilliant, “sciencey” neologism—was a strategic effort to rescue a vast domain of common human experience, “the psychical” (or what we would now call the paranormal), from the Enlightenment’s dustbin of rejected, delegitimized human experiences. 6
Besides collecting accounts of spontaneous cases of psychical phenomena and studying spiritualist mediums at work, SPR researchers also conducted telepathy experiments, for instance having participants make guesses about drawings or objects being viewed and “sent” by a partner nearby or at another location. But while such experiments often yielded interesting results, the subjective way results were assessed made them fall short of the standards being established in the relatively young field of scientific psychology.
In the early 1930s, two botanists at Duke University, Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife Louisa E. Rhine, began studying psychical phenomena with a new degree of experimental rigor, initially under the guidance of psychologist William McDougall. The Rhines’ aim was to turn the study of psychical functioning, whatever it was, however it worked, into a real, quantitative science. As part of their overhaul-slash-facelift of psychical research, the Rhines renamed the field parapsychology ; and to dispel the musty taint of Victorian drawing room séances, they gave a shiny new scientific name to their object of study: extrasensory perception , or ESP. The Rhines’ initial research results were promising enough that in 1935 the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory was founded under J. B. Rhine’s leadership.
To facilitate quantification and replication, Rhine used Zener cards in his experiments—decks of 25 cards, each showing one of five different symbols: a circle, a square, a star, a plus sign, or a group of three wavy lines. A typical protocol would involve one of a pair of student participants, the “sender,” looking one by one at cards that had been drawn from shuffled decks, while another participant behind a screen or in another room would attempt to state which of the symbols had been drawn. (These are known as “forced choice” tasks—in contrast to the “free response” tasks involving drawings or verbal descriptions.) It was quickly discovered that some of the best test subjects performed just as well at “card guessing” when the target cards had not already been seen by anyone else. Ever rigorous about terms, the Rhines were careful to distinguish this separate skill of clairvoyance , or seeing things that were hidden or at a distance in space, from telepathy as such, although confusion over the boundaries between these two forms of ESP persisted in parapsychology for decades and is still the norm among laypeople.
Participants in the Rhines’ lab tended to correctly guess more than the 20 percent that chance would dictate, but not by much, and participants’ scores tended to drop as they became bored with the tasks—a widely seen phenomenon in parapsychology experiments known as the “decline effect.” But over time, and after hundreds of experiments with large numbers of subjects, the support for telepathy and clairvoyance became substantial, at least statistically speaking. Nowadays we would say that the significance was high, while the effect size was low—an important distinction in all experimental research.
Initially it did not occur to the Rhines to study precognition—for instance by staggering the “sender’s” looking at the card and the “receiver’s” response in time. The mental model of thoughts being transmitted through space implied the same sort of simultaneity that would govern communication by telegraph or radio. Nevertheless, the Rhines and other researchers studying telepathy and clairvoyance found that participants in their experiments were sometimes able to guess cards or other targets before they were selected, without any apparent possibility of the subject predicting the result through ordinary inference. In this way, precognition emerged as a potentially separate, even more causally outrageous, third member of the ESP trinity. 7
An Anomalous Anomaly
A serendipitous early experimental display of seeming precognition occurred in the context of a series of experiments conducted in 1939 by an English psychologist named Whately Carington. Carington wished to depart from the boring Zener card tasks that were yielding significant but unexciting results in the Rhines’ protocols. Instead he reverted to an older method in telepathy research, using drawings as targets, but devised a scoring system that used independent judges and greater quantitative rigor than earlier drawing experiments had used.
On ten successive nights, Carington or his wife made a drawing of the first object named on a randomly selected page of a dictionary and hung the picture overnight on the wall of his office, which was curtained and closed to view by anyone outside. Meanwhile, from the comfort of their homes, 250 participants made drawings, on each night, of what they thought he had hung on the wall and then mailed their d
ated drawings to Carington. He repeated this ten-day experiment four more times, with some variations, for a total of 50 separate target drawings. Independent judges then scored the subjects’ drawings—2,200 in all—based on how closely they resembled the target on display when the response was made.
The results were perplexing. For any given trial, the number of “hits” did not rise much above chance—which would be expected by anyone skeptical of the whole enterprise. Yet surprisingly, many of the drawings did match target drawings in the larger 10-target set for a given experiment. People seemed to be making “displaced hits” either into the past or, more impossibly, into the future. 8
This seemed interesting, yet skeptical alarm bells will go off for any scientist, and Carington’s immediate thought was that this could simply reflect coincidence, the law of large numbers at work. It is never kosher to adjust your hypothesis after the experiment, and talking about “displaced hits” sounds like shifting the goalposts to produce a positive result. So Carington ran an additional experiment to compare with the results of the first series: He created a separate set of 50 drawings of randomly produced nouns, the same way he had created the original targets, and used this new set of drawings as a control group in a new analysis of the original results with a brand-new, naïve set of judges.
The new judges found no more matches between the subjects’ drawings in the five original experiments and any of the control drawings than would be expected by chance. These results seemed to confirm Carington’s sense that some kind of ESP had indeed been operative in the original experiments. It really seemed as though the test subjects had been affected or influenced by the set of target drawings in their particular experiment, but in some cases even before the target drawing had been made or the noun selected from the dictionary. It suggested that (as Louisa Rhine later put it in her discussion of Carington’s work) “to ESP, time is not the barrier it is in the world of sense perception.” 9
For Carington in 1940, when he reported on his drawing experiments in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , precognition was an anomalous anomaly, but it was not anomalous enough to challenge the prevailing model, inherited from the Victorians, that somehow information traveled through space and could somehow be received by individuals outside the ordinary sensory channels. Gradually, however, parapsychological researchers got more comfortable with the time- and mind-bending possibility that people can somehow gain information about future events, and designed experiments specifically to explore this bizarre realm of human psychology.
For instance in the 1960s, as part of a research program studying sleepers’ ability to obtain dream impressions of paintings being viewed concurrently by another subject in a separate room (“dream telepathy”), psychologist Stanley Krippner, psychiatrist Montague Ullman, and parapsychologist Charles Honorton at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City ran two experiments with an experienced psychic “sensitive” to test whether he could dream of situations based on pictures randomly generated after the dream. In one of the experiments, over a series of eight nights, the subject scored five (of the possible eight) direct hits, again according to independent judges. It was experimental support (however modest) for Dunnean dream precognition. 10
Then, beginning in the early 1970s, two laser physicists at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, conducted a government-funded research program into “remote viewing”—a less occult-sounding version of clairvoyance. In the early experiments, a psychic would be asked to describe or draw the scene at some randomly selected geographical location that was unknown to him or her, right as it was being visited by one of the experimenters; the psychic then would be taken to the site afterward as a form of feedback. On one notable early trial, star psychic subject Pat Price provided a detailed, accurate description of the Redwood City Marina several minutes before the experimenters (Puthoff and another associate) actually arrived at the location. 11 Targ and Puthoff then ran a series of experiments with another remote viewer, Hella Hammid, in which the target was selected and then visited by an experimenter after the subject had completed her viewing of the site; each of her four transcribed descriptions was matched correctly against the actual target by three independent (blind) judges. 12
Beginning in the mid-1970s, a modified version of remote viewing that used geographical coordinates as targets was deployed as an intelligence-gathering tool, first by SRI psychics under the supervision of the CIA and later in the Defense Department–funded Star Gate program. The latter boasted a number of stunning successes including locating lost planes and providing intelligence on new weapons developments in the Soviet Union. These have now been described in several excellent histories and memoirs of the program, so I will not attempt to summarize this interesting chapter in ESP research. 13 But in some notable cases, Star Gate psychics were able to accurately describe an event in advance of its occurrence, again suggesting that remote viewing could be precognitive. 14 For instance during a Friday afternoon remote viewing session at Fort Meade, Maryland, in May 1987, a Star Gate remote viewer named Paul Smith elaborately described what seemed like an “accidental on purpose” missile strike on a warship somewhere near a desert country. His impressions made no sense given what he and the assigning officer knew of then-current geopolitics, and the notes from the session were filed away. The following Monday, newspaper headlines carried stories of the deadly “accidental” Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf. 15 The looseness about chronology in remote viewing was similar to what had been observed in earlier telepathy and clairvoyance experiments, leading to much speculation about how remote viewing might really work and its relationship, if any, to time. 16
Over the span of two decades, from the mid 1970s until the mid 1990s, remote viewing experiments at SRI and at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC, which took over the SRI research program in 1989) produced substantial support for psychic functioning. 17 University of California-Davis statistician Jessica Utts assessed the results of this research in a report commissioned by Congress. She argued that they greatly exceeded what would be expected by chance and could not be accounted for by methodological problems or fraud. 18 Utts has continued to defend these findings and the scientific study of ESP more generally. In her Presidential Address to the 2016 annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, Utts stated: “The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without looking at the data!” 19
Between 1976 and 1999, another laboratory, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, conducted a large research program investigating “precognitive remote perception,” involving subjects recording their impressions of geographical targets that would later be visited by an experimenter or in some cases had been visited in the past. The researchers, Brenda Dunne and PEAR Director Robert Jahn, conducted 653 trials of this type with 72 individuals. All the trials were labeled “precognitive” because the target for a given trial was always selected at random after the trial ended even if the target had already been visited. Over a third of the trials were “hits,” as determined by independent judges, and the odds against chance of this success rate were determined to be 33 million to one. Participants were equally accurate no matter how far into the future (or past) they “viewed”—ranging from hours to weeks. 20
In 1989, Charles Honorton and Diane C. Ferrari conducted a meta-analysis of 309 precognition experiments that had used forced-choice (e.g., Zener card) tasks by 62 investigators, involving over 50,000 participants, that had been conducted between 1935 and 1987. 21 They determined that 30 percent of the studies reached statistical significance, which may not sound like much, but only five percent would be expected from chance alone. With such a large number of experiments and trials (over two million), the ov
erall significance of the meta-analysis was astronomical: on the order of ten septillion (10 25 ) to one. For the “file drawer effect” (leaving negative results unpublished) to negate that significance, there would have had to be 46 unpublished negative studies for each published study. 22 Those who cite this study often point out that while the overall effect size was small, it was comparable to or greater than major decisive studies in medicine, such as the study leading to the recommendation of using aspirin to help prevent heart attacks. 23
There’s a big problem, though. Despite years of searching, no researcher has ever detected any electromagnetic energy carrying ESP information across space, such as between participants in a Zener card telepathy task or between a remote viewer and some distant site or target object. Researchers in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. often used Faraday cages, which shield against most forms of electromagnetic radiation, and also conducted tests between land and submarines (since seawater also shields against such radiation) and found that psychic abilities did not diminish as a function either of distance or of shielding—suggesting strongly that whatever is happening to produce the consistent positive experimental results, there is no physical transmission of information, at least not as we ordinarily understand it. 24 And as we will see later, even the evocative quantum-physical concept of entanglement , often indexed in popular books on ESP, cannot explain a transmission of information across space that would be necessary to explain telepathy or clairvoyance. As far as anyone knows, there is no meaningful quantum entanglement between separate individuals’ bodies, or between a person’s brain and a distant object or a picture in an envelope. This lack of an obvious physical mechanism has been one of the major impediments to making psi (the Rhines’ neutral term for the principle underlying ESP) believable or even palatable to scientists outside the small field of parapsychology: Despite what the data purport to show, there is no physical way it ought to be possible.