 It's Sunday, May 9th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grophy. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. Before we get to this week's interview, which is the first part of a recording that we did at the National Science Foundation last month when I interviewed the influential skeptic Ray Hyman. Well, I want to remind our listeners about the amazing meeting this July in Las Vegas. It is the largest event of its kind in the world, and Ray Hyman, along with figures like Paul Kurtz and James Randy, of course, will be participating for the first time ever in a panel discussion on the origins of the modern skeptical movement. And this is also going to include a video by Martin Gardner, other people involved. In addition, the amazing meeting this year has doubled the amount of workshops over last year, some amazing evening shows are planned, and a really fantastic list of confirmed speakers as part of the main program. So if you haven't yet registered, I invite you to go to randy.org and do so today. Now about this week's interview. The National Capital Area Skeptics, one of the oldest local skeptical organizations in the United States, presented an award to Ray Hyman last month, the Philip J. Class Award. The conversation that I had with him at the National Science Foundation, well, it went for over an hour, so we're dividing it up over two episodes here. And now a little about Ray Hyman. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon. He's taught at Stanford, Harvard, many other leading institutions. He's made his mark on parapsychology as something of an expert critic of the field. He's published a number of books, including The Elusive Quarry and The Nature of Psychological Inquiry. He's impacted parapsychology by investigating the claims of the Gansfeld and the Otto Gansfeld experiments, a number of other important column cases in the history of parapsychology. In addition to his work investigating parapsychology, he's also been a professional magician and mentalist, and that actually plays into his skepticism as you'll hear in our conversation. Here then is my conversation with Ray Hyman. I will turn it over to two of them and step back and listen to the discussion. Thank you. Thank you, Curtis, and congratulations, Ray, on the Philip J. Class Award. I think a good place to begin for the exploration of your impact on skepticism is how does a young psychology student get into this parapsychology racket? In other words, why you, not your colleagues, what interested you early on going 50 years ago to apply science to this burgeoning field? Actually, it goes back way beyond 60 years. I did my first professional magic show at age seven. What happened was my father, for my birthday, gave me a few magic tricks. I took him to school to show and tell, and I did the magic tricks, and the teacher said, thought it was cute, I guess. She said, would you want to do this for the parent-teachers association? I did, and they gave me $5. That was a long time ago, and that was a lot of money. I was able to get a top hat with that $5, and a printer printed a lot of cards for me, and he called me the Merry Mystic, because I lived on the Mystic River, apparently, so I was known as the Merry Mystic. I spread those cards all over the city of Everett, Massachusetts, that's where I was. Not a great city to be, but it's a good city to be from. I got hired by the library for their story hour, and it went off from there. It took off, so I got books out of the library when I could read, and I learned it was a guy named Houdini, and he was a great magician, and he was a skeptic. He went around exposing spiritualists. I never heard of them before, but it's something I had to do, because I'm a magician, right? A young magician, so I know, at least from age 16, I never got to tend to séance, but I was able to go to, they used to have, also the Boston area, there were spiritual churches, and they would have message readings, and you could come, and there would be someone stand at the podium visiting a spiritualist, or someone, and people would write their questions, and they would be collected in a box, and then put on a stage, and he'd reach in and take out one of the folded slips, and put it to his head, and answer the question. So, I remember one of the meetings I was at, I was 16, I'm sure, at that time, and I was 16, and about the next age to meet next closest would be about 60 to 70 years old. These were elderly people, mostly elderly women and some men, who were trying to reach the lost one. During this church service, where the minister used the Q&A Act to inspire belief and spirit communication. And some of these people were pretty awful in their technique, and I remember there was one man who was doing this, and he was old and he lost his touch, he had a blindfold on, and he would grab the thing and put it to his head, but first he opened it a little bit, and he couldn't see too well, so he would have looked it up, and it's pretty obvious. And I looked, I thought all these people are going to see this, and they'd be very upset, but everyone was looking everywhere except at him, no one was looking at this guy. And a lady sitting beside me, a nice little old lady, she was looking at the ceiling, and I said, look, look at this guy. She looked at me and then she looked behind her, but she would not look there. And I realized, even at that young age, that these people don't want to see this thing, even though they're being obviously being duped, they didn't want to see it. So I learned lessons like that as a kid. I went to a lot of those things. The next thing I did, though, they had a spiritualist development class. What that was, was you could go to this class and the lady guiding it, she was a spiritualist medium. She had her own contact with the spirit world, and they all had Indian names, hers was running water or something like that, I remember. And she assigned us each a spirit guide. And each meeting would open up where her spirit guide, running water, would come into the room from the back and come up the aisle and get on the stage and sit beside her, because this is an invisible person. But this person would come and she would run down and help because it was an old spirit meeting, obviously. She would help it up on the stage, you know. And pretty soon after a couple of meetings, other people were running to help the spirit up onto the stage, and they were all acting as if it's real. And I began feeling, boy, you know, I'm getting you feel like it's real, too. So I did stop right at that point. I love that. So you're actually drawing a really direct line from your background and interest and magic to your skepticism. And I love hearing the story about the spiritualist church. It tracks almost exactly James Randy's experience at age 14, where he stumbled in a spiritualist church in Toronto and saw the minister doing a Q&A act. And he was so enraged with the kind of righteous indignation that he marched right up to the pulpit and exposed the guy's magic tricks. Of course, he was arrested. And, you know, so at 14, at 16, in your case, it's that magic and skepticism connection. Do you think that's a necessary connection? In other words, there are all sorts of magicians out there who aren't motivated to go out and use their background and magic to advance critical thinking. There are even some magicians who believe. There are some famous magicians who supported the reality of Uri Gela. Being a magician isn't a necessary or sufficient condition to be a good skeptic. But in your case, it definitely fueled it. Well, and also in Randy's case, Randy gets credit and Randy actually sometimes talks as if it's because he's a magician. But Randy is more than that. Randy is a Renaissance type of person. He has other kinds of background. He's a very smart guy. And he has other talents. And it's not because he's a magician necessary that he's good at what he does. He has other talents as well. But you're explaining your interest in parapsychology through magic. You're saying maybe if you weren't into magic as a young psychology student at Boston University, you wouldn't have, or at Harvard eventually, or when you published your first paper 50 years ago, maybe you wouldn't have gone in that direction had you not the magic background. Oh, sure. I'm sure. That's very likely so. I'm sure. But I must admit that as far back as I can remember, and I remember, Seven is still pretty young, and it's a long time ago for me. I can't ever remember not being a skeptic. I do remember living in Italy for a while. I lived for 14 years in Italy. I was teaching at the University of Bologna. And I do remember having some thoughts that, you know, I missed out a lot in life. These people going to the pageant and the ceremonies at the churches and stuff like that. Something I missed out on. Maybe I missed something. So I did have that little pang of just a little bit that maybe I missed out on something, not having ever believed anything. I never can remember any moment in my life or ever believed in anything that I couldn't test by evidence. You're admitting that you basically started out as a skeptic. You never went through this period in your life where you earnestly believed, examined the evidence, and then changed your mind. No, you started out as a skeptic. I always was as far as I know. You published your first paper on parapsychology in 1957 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Most of your work as a skeptic, really resulting from that and all the other papers that you published, put you in this kind of no man's land as a skeptic between the, call them the knee jerk skeptics, the people who dismiss these claims out of hand, and the unduly credulous parapsychologists. You weren't in neither of those camps. I mean, you were seriously a skeptic, but you at least at the time considered the questions worth asking. And in an open-minded, fair-minded way, you looked at the evidence. You offered a kind of corrective to the skeptics community. Did you ever get much flack from skeptics for being too nice to the believers? Well, actually, I wasn't that nice a skeptic at the beginning. But that was your reputation as it developed. Best I can remember, I was like other skeptics when I first began. It was a lot of fun putting down those guys and showing that they were a bunch of idiots. And at some point, I did change. But I know it must have been fairly early, because when I wrote that paper in 1957, I actually was invited to do it by the editor of the William Wallace, who was the editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. There was a big controversy going on at that time over the work by Sol and Bateman on this psychic they had been testing for quite a while. At that time, this was considered the strongest evidence of parapsychology. A guy named Basil Shackleton, and later a lady named Mary Stewart. They just had these two subjects, but these people were consistent experiment they could produce the results, which was very unusual. And so this is the greatest evidence it was. And there was a big controversy over it at the time. And so the editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, he knew me as a statistician, as a magician, and as a psychologist. And he said, those are the three components that are just right for someone to be able to unravel what's going on here. But you didn't set out to debunk it. You want to look into the research? He asked me to do that, to try and settle the issue once and for all, because science had devoted two issues to it. And so I had always been a skeptic of parapsychology. I believe it was just a lot of bunk, and that they didn't do good experiments. And I trusted, because my mentors were Martin Gardner. He was my mentor, and I'm a good friend and person I trusted. And there was Randy at that time, even, and other people. All my information about what parapsychologists were doing was secondhand. I never really looked at their literature ever before that. But when I got this invitation, 57, I was asked to try to settle this big issue. I went back and read all Ryan's work, took me a while, and I read Solen Bateman's work and so on. And I was surprised. I was absolutely dumbfounded because they were doing better experiments than they were being, they were being criticized for the wrong thing. They kind of got a bad wrap among the skeptics. Yeah, they were better statisticians. They were better statisticians than they were given credit for. In fact, they're more sophisticated than the critics were in the statistics part of it. They were, they could do some good experiments, they did some bad experiments, but it was better than what, what I had been led to believe. But even by my friends I trusted. Turns out that the friends I trusted and the sources I trusted would pick the bad experiments and ignored that they didn't know the whole thing. And the good experiments in parapsychology actually were pretty sophisticated. There was things wrong with it, but you were going to attack it, you had to attack it at a more sophisticated level. And not just dismiss it out of hand as a bunch of... That's right. Because they were trying to be scientific, unlike Riegel and the astrologists and all that. These people were trying to produce evidence according to scientific standards. They were trying to use the best statistics, the best experimental controls and so on. So I felt at that time that they should be handled at that level. And I got into what I now think was a mistake. I got into this belief that only people who had carefully read their best studies and had the statistical know-how and the experimental know-how had to switch them back around to be fair critic. So you, in other words, at that time, you've changed your mind, but at that time you argued that leave the criticism of this parapsychology research to other researchers in the statisticians or psychologists, and the armchair skeptics should stay out of it. That was your line then. And the bad consequence of that belief system was that I only knew myself and perhaps later Jim Alcock and maybe later Richard Wiseman, there are no other people who have the background to criticize it. Now, who know the area, what they actually, these parapsychologists actually are doing, and who have the statistical and the experimental know-how to do it. So every time that someone wanted a critic, they would call me, because once you become known as an expert critic, that's how you become an expert. Everyone now comes to you. And every time a newspaper, a TV station, anyone who's going to do something, they always call me. And I say, no, I don't want to get involved with it. They say, well, who should we, and I would think, well, I can't think of anyone else who has, so I'd better do it. Because of your position at the time that only a few qualified people could do it. Exactly. And unfortunately, even though I find it boring, I don't like reading or paying attention to it, because parapsychology research is the most boring thing there is in the world, believe me. It's just a bunch of guesses, lots of data, and you do statistical testing. And if it has any connection to the paranormal, I don't know what the connection would be. So it's just doubt. Well, you're bringing up a couple of things just then. One, this expert position that you and a couple of others were in, and you said other skeptics were not qualified to engage in criticism. You've changed your mind on that. The other thing you just brought up is the notion of parapsychology being boring. Well, a lot of science is actually boring. A lot of, I'll do respect, we're at the National Science Foundation, but a lot of research is on very small questions. But when you put it all together, it helps flesh out our understanding of the picture of reality. So I'm not sure if a criticism of parapsychology is that it's boring. The implications of it are in fact very exciting. If we could prove that minds exist outside the body or that minds can, in some extra sensory sort of way, communicate or survive death, that's anything but boring. It's the big questions. Well, there's a lot of stuff you just brought up, which is important to make out. First of all, science is not boring because it's dealing with very specific questions. And these questions arise in what Kuhn called normal science. In doing science, you have a framework, and you're testing a theory. You have a hypothesis to come out of that framework. And each experiment sometimes can challenge, bring results that challenge the framework. It makes it interesting, but you know exactly what's going on. But you're saying in parapsychology that doesn't exist. They don't have a framework. They don't have any. They don't have a subject matter. They just have data. And if it has any collection to the paranormal, over 150 years, I've never seen them make any show any connection. It's hits or misses. You don't draw a direct line to paranormal or parapsychological belief from all the hits and misses. I don't know. I don't know how anyone's ever demonstrated any connection or how getting results that are sometimes people guessing better than chance under some conditions, how that relates to anything paranormal or anything else. It could be thousands of reasons why you get differences from chance. Most of it is because data mining and stuff like that, you know. But there's been never any tie over theory. They have what we call it, even parapsychologists, many of them recognize it. They don't have a positive theory of sight. When they do their research, they have people guess or they do other things. What they have is you have sets of alternatives and then you have what should be expected by chance. And they don't have any rational, they don't have a positive theory about what they should be there, what the pattern of the result should be. So what happens is what's called a patchwork quilt fallacy that they fall into, which other scientists don't do because scientists who have a very specific hypothesis and there's got to be a specific pattern they're predicting. Parapsychologists, if you get something that's different from chance and you can't explain it by, right away, you can't explain it by some mundane, as they call it, mundane theory about the world in terms of ordinary science, then they say aha, parapsychology. So it's a negative definition of it. As a result, because it's negative, unlike other scientific testing and stuff like that, there's no way for them to be wrong. If anything happens that's above chance, even though it's not what they predicted, it's still sigh because they have no way of telling you what's not sigh. Yeah, you're raising a couple things there. What in philosophy of science is called the demarcation problem, what science and what isn't. You're saying parapsychology is not science because it doesn't play by the other rules of science. And you're also saying that a lot of the evidence that people use in parapsychology to argue for its claims is kind of an argument from ignorance. It's saying I don't know how to explain this. Therefore, I know the explanation is paranormal, supernatural, something like that. And so you say it's out of the bounds of science, but for 50 years you've in a fair-minded way looked into it. You've garnered this reputation being open-minded. You haven't found any evidence to support it. It sounds like you're suggesting maybe that wasn't the right approach. Well, you've got a lot of things you attributed to me now. I don't disagree with it, but I didn't say it so far. I haven't said those things yet. You said them. And we only have an hour and five minutes to see if I'm right. Okay. Yes, I did change my mind about a lot of things because up to 1950 was a big challenge where I took the Gansfeld experiments. Again, I was challenged. I was asked to evaluate for two different things for the IEEE. They, for some reason, broke their rules and they actually published a long article by Robert John, pro-parapsychology, and that created a fewer, so they decided to balance it with me. And so I was asked to do a tutorial on parapsychology for the IEEE journal, something they don't usually deal with in that kind of a journal. And then I was also asked at another time, there was a hundredth anniversary of the founding of Society for Psychical Research. In 1982 was the hundredth anniversary and they held at Cambridge, England, and they invited me to come as a skeptic to talk. So in both cases, I said, okay, this is a good time for me to evaluate the status of parapsychology. My first foray into doing this was back in 1957. Now it's 1988. Yeah, now it's 1982. Once and for all, maybe I should, but I can't, there's so much, so many papers by then in parapsychology, it was impossible for me to sit down and read them all. And then also I didn't want to take a sample of papers because in any field, the majority of papers are mediocre at best. We evaluate the field in terms of the very top, the best output. So I wanted to be fair, and I went around and asked every major parapsychologist I could, I said, could you tell me what is the best evidence you have now, the best program in parapsychology, very best. And unanimously, almost unanimously, they said, this Gansfeld experiments. So I then asked Charles Arlington, who published the first Gansfeld experiment, if he could help me, I was interested in evaluating them. And he was very excited to have an outsider, you know, to look into their, what they could say, their best research. And he said he would help me get every paper, even the unpublished ones. And ultimately, after three months, he sent me, I was teaching at Stanford at the time. I had their spoof chair for that year. And I received a stack of 600 pages. Half of them, consisting of what he counted as 42 separate Gansfeld experiments. That's an issue we won't get into now. But how you count what's an experiment, what's not, it can be a big issue. But there were fewer reports than that, but they covered, he called, he counted as 42 separate experiments. And most of them were significant. And this is what I had to evaluate. It took me ultimately three months, my first go around, actually, ultimately, it took up three years of my life, most of my professional life to go into this big battle, which culminated in a 1985 issue of the Journal of the Parapsychological Association. And he devoted the whole issue to this debate between Moniton and myself. I had something like 50 pages, a plus, of my critique of that Gansfeld literature. And Moniton hadn't given a year to go over that and make his reply. And he had a long reply there. I thought his reply was, in many ways, stupid, and he didn't like my thing in the first place, obviously. So I asked, and the Parapsychological Association agreed, if I could respond to his response. So I wrote another, something like 85 page response to it all. That never got published for an interesting reason. I happened to meet with Moniton. He was now going over my thing to write his rebuttal to my new rebuttal, okay? And he was almost in tears. He said, you said so many bad things about me and this thing here. And I said, I didn't say anything bad about you. I just cited all the ways you were wrong, especially in response to me. You just made up things which aren't there. And so we had this first little animosity. But then we began talking, I realized as we talked more and more, two things struck me. One is that he was agreeing to a lot of my major points. For example, I was surprised he was agreeing, yes, by itself those experiments don't prove anything until we can replicate them. Already, it was a big concession. That's a big breakthrough for a parapsychologist to admit. And he made some other admissions. And the other thing I realized is that we were fighting over what we were fighting over. We're nitty gritty of individual experiments. Did they do it right? Did they use the right statistical tests in this case and so on? These were details that no one, but he and I, were privy to because we both had spent gone through this. There were, at that time when that issue came out of the journal Parapsychology, all the parapsychological world was saying, oh boy, Arnoton has demolished Hyman. He really showed him up. The skeptics were saying, Hyman has demolished Arnoton. None of these people on either side had actually read the same articles. Neither camp could actually know because they were steeped in the research. None of the parapsychologists would take Arnoton's word for what he was saying about these experiments. The skeptics were taking my word. So I knew that no one's ever gonna accept, you know, no one's ever gonna go through all the work of seeing what we were fighting over, who was right or wrong on that issue. But the other thing I realized is that, hey, he's willing to admit that those experiments by themselves don't demonstrate the existence of Cy. They have to be independently replicated. Even though they were supposedly the best research in the future. So I said, look, I'll withdraw my latest thing, and maybe we can do a joint article on what we agreed. And so we went back and forth, and we did publish this joint communique, which said what we thought should be the case, what would be necessary in order to replicate these experiments. Of course, the follow-up from that was that, in fact, this was published in the 1950, unusual for the Psychological Journal to do, in 1950, about the time, the Psych Bulletin published a big article by Daryl Bem, a major social psychologist who became a friend of Arnoton's. You said 1950? No. No, 1990, I'm sorry. Yeah, okay. Well, there's a lot we're talking about, yeah. No, I mean, different than a different world anyways. But your joint communique. Our joint communique, we agreed on what should be done. Subsequently, Arnoton then finished a series of experiments, which he called the Autogonso experiment, which he said met all the criteria we set out, and they had replicated the original Gonso database. It didn't replicate at all. And I now realize that we're living different worlds. The notion of replicability is weird, to say the least. And by the way, the next issue, I think we're the next issue, I assume, one of the next issues of the Psychological Bulletin, it's going through this, I'm sorry, I'll over again. They're publishing a long article by some contemporary parapsychologists showing that the Gonso data, the latest Gonso data, replicate the original, the Gonso and the original ones. And they do what was called meta-analysis, which is another word for voodoo, okay? And so this being published in the Psychological Bulletin, but they asked me to comment on it, and it is the worst stuff I've ever seen. I mean, at this point, I, you know, after 50 something years, I lost my patience. This is BS, okay? Well, in fact, that gets to the question where possibly I was putting words in your mouth who knows, but where the implication of what you're saying sounds to me like it's all a fool's errand. Having a few experts really look at the parapsychology research, you never really engage with the parapsychologists. They have their camp that believe their leaders, the skeptics, without knowing the research, have their kind of skeptic heroes that they just believe in, you know, without being steeped in the research. And so are you suggesting that that's not the best approach when responding to these sorts of claims? Well, it's not as simple as that. And what happened to me was I decided I had this epiphany, and epiphany is not the word that you should use in my context, but I'll call it an epiphany anyways. It wasn't all of a sudden, though. It was gradual. It dawned on me, beginning with that joint communique, it dawned on me that I had made a terrible mistake in one sense. I had focused on the flaws and the statistical shortcomings of what parapsychologists were doing. And I was showing that that was my goal at that time, was showing that because all those flaws, they can't use it as evidence for anything until they clean up their act. I realized that's wrong. At some point, I realized that was a wrong approach. The main reason, I won't give you all the reasons, but the main reason it's a wrong approach is because focusing on the flaws in their experiments switched the burden of proof from them. Remember, they're the one that should be trying to prove something, not me. But they immediately, the whole 1985 issue of journal of parapsychology, that debate between Arton and myself is focusing on flaws. Did this experiment have these flaws? Or did these statistical flaws? And if they did have these flaws, did these flaws make a difference? And I think that was the wrong mistake because everyone was focusing on that. And that's not the issue. Whether they have flaws or not, the issue is, can they independently replicate those? And they cannot. And that's something you don't need to be a fancy statistician or study their literature in detail or being a good experimentalist. All you have to realize is that it's a necessary thing. Regardless of what you think science is or is not, and a lot of people make their living by writing books, philosophers of science, they're called themselves and historians of science. They write books on what is science, what is science, and stuff like that. Regardless of that, a necessary condition for something to be science, not a sufficient, necessary condition is that you've got to have something, you've got to have a subject matter. And science, since the early days of Galileo, Newton, and so on, has survived and done so well because it only deals with data that can be independently replicated. That's how you know there's something there. But parapsychology doesn't have a there, doesn't have something there. They can't replicate. And even some of the major parapsychologists today are claiming that, in fact, parapsychology cannot produce the kind of evidence that science requires. So they want to lower the bar. They still believe in parapsychology. They're jumping a gun. Yeah. You're taking the words out of my mouth, but that's why you're here. That's my psych towers. Yeah. Don't tell the skeptic audience. No, that's fine. Okay. No, that's fine. I'm glad you did that. But these parapsychologists say that, look, we cannot produce an independently replicable experiment. But they don't say, that means we don't have anything. Instead, they go, they have two things they say. That's the nature of psi. Psi is an actual property of it. It's the kind of phenomenon that as you're getting close in on it, it plays tricks on you and it goes off some other direction. This is taking us back to the ancient Greek gods, where things happen because of the whim of these zoos and stuff like that. So that's where they're going, as far as I can tell. They also throw in some quantum mechanics, of course. But anything that's a mystery, they throw in. They take that all grist to their meal. And they also, these parapsychologists who admit that they cannot produce scientific evidence, they say two things. One is that, well, that shows that there really is something there because it literally avoids being scientific. But also, they say that there's something wrong with science, not with parapsychology. Science, we have to change. In fact, Bob John and Brenda Dunn, his co-worker, have written an article called Change the Rules. In other words, they want science to change. And it reminds me of when I was on the Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alder, they came to Eugene because they wanted me to set up a test of a dowser and also had me do some pond reading on that program. But when we tested the dowser, he was a very nice guy and he knew he was coming into the Lions then, but he cooperated and he failed completely on everything we did. And Alan Alder, who's a very nice guy, took me aside and said, Ray, I'm very concerned. This guy is just, he's a nice guy and he's bungling everything. You know, we have to say that, but we have to, how can we say without hurting him too much? And I remember we got in the van after we were testing out the fairgrounds in Eugene because he had to find a place that was independent of interference. So we went all over Eugene and we went to the fairgrounds. And that was where the thousand went and said, this is a safe place to be tested. So that's where we tested them. And so we're going back in a van back to the University of Oregon where we were doing most of the interviewing. And Alan again asking this dowser, he said, you know, look, you were so sure about what you could do. You're absolutely sure you can produce this and do exactly, find these targets just as you said you could. And you missed everything up. How do you account for that? So the dowser said, well, I don't blame Professor Hyman. He, he treated me well. He did everything. Everything was fair that way. Everything was done fairly. Everyone was nice. You were nice and so on. All I can say is that the problem is that science hasn't caught up with us yet. And since then, this is what I think the parapsychologists are now seeing who admit that by the way, it's only half the parapsychologists. The other half of parapsychologists are just the opposite saying that we have now established the reality of scientifically, scientifically beyond any reasonable doubt. So you have these two camps now in parapsychology and they're fighting with each other. You're they don't fight with that. They don't even agree. I wish I could get them. I spoke at there was a meeting in two years, three years ago in the University of British Columbia. They had two Nobel Prize winners and some other people that had this forum on parapsychology, but they had me there as well. And the idea was to examine the current state of parapsychology and why this was in the program and why scientists are not accepting the evidence even when it's there. They beg the question already. So that's one camp, but this other camp that says there's not going to be evidence the way science scientists want there to be because those those criteria are too stringent to its science is too demanding. The comments you made just a minute ago when you're I think talking about changing approaches where originally expert critics like yourself would criticize the research methods right and say here's a failing or there's a failing. You're now saying maybe that was a fool's errand that right now anyone an armchair skeptic could say just repeat it just that it's repeatable and then they don't have to be statisticians or experts that does seem to be a shift of approaches. Okay okay to simplify okay we'll accept it that level but the point I wanted to make I was trying to make was that at this meeting with the two Nobel Prize winners by the way as well there's quite quite some procedures people there Richard Wiseman was there and I was there. My goal was there was to I wanted to bring these two camps to parapsychology confront one another and say okay how do you handle this because Jessica Utz was there and Dean Raiden was there they're on the side of people say we have established the reality of side beyond a reasonable doubt right and we've done it by the hardest of hard scientific procedures and then there's this other camp of people and I quoted them I had them I had listed them they weren't only Bob John was there so they had one of them there who said that no we don't have we can't repeat anything we don't have according to scientific evidence we don't have anything I wanted to bring them together and say well how do you account for this this was the whole point of my talk I got no response whatsoever there's no no no response from the parapsychologists and I still is not fine so they don't acknowledge one another they don't but they don't even talk about this and I can't get them to come I can't how come these other guys are saying that there's nothing there they don't they won't respond and I don't know what's going on it is it's weird these people I don't think they live in a different world at first they did my experience with my me parapsychologists I'm very impressed with them they're very nice people they were trained and have a PhD in something or other they know their science they're well read you consider them sincere they're not trying to pull one over and that's until you I'll give you one story and I'll mention his name because I don't mind being sued now in Charlie Tart was a major parapsychologist for a while I don't know if you ever heard it was Targ and it's also Tart T-A-R-T well when I was at Sanford Percy Diaconis was somehow a friend of Charlie Tart's but he was a friend of mine and he's a he's a statistician he's also a famous magician he said may it be good to get together with Charlie Tart he said he's up there and he lives right next to Berkeley and everybody taught at UC Davis and so we went and visited him he spent had a nice day he was a nice host he ran me through some of his sci experiments there and we discussed things and he told me how we had more in common than word extremists on both sides you know he said you know we are to stay together and be good friends and stuff like that when I left and went back to Eugene I left Stanford and then back to Eugene suddenly I get this note from Charlie Tart saying you you were on his program he says you think I don't know about it you're on this program in Canada TV show and you criticize my work and since we're friends you have no right to do that unless you first check with me first that's science works yeah but but anyways I didn't remember talking about his work even on his program so I called the producer of the show and she was very nice she was very she went through a lot she said I went through not only did I go over the show but I went through the outtakes we never mentioned Charles Tartar's work and she wrote him a letter saying that I didn't hear anything you'd think he wanted to think you know he'd apologize something like that a month after that he got another letter saying you did it again he says you think I'm not aware of this but I have friends that live in Italy and you are an Italian television and you criticize my work again well that the whole show in Italy was on reggela and I don't never mentioned Tartar's work and I again contacted the people in Italy they were very nice they went over it and they said there's no no mention of anyone by the name of Charles Tartar in the program so I wrote to uh and also I had the the producer in Italy wrote to Charles Tartar and said we didn't mention your work at all next time I saw Charles Tartar I was attending a parapsychological association meeting they they invited me every once in a while to show that they don't have any horns and so I was attending the meeting and Tartar was there and every time I walked walked up to him I was gonna say hello something like that he would turn his back and leave me they had a big party they were holding and I was in the room at this party parapsychological party he walked in the room he saw me he turned around made a big it wasn't and just suddenly he made a big show he turned his back and marched out and I said okay do that that's fine I don't know what's going on but I found also that's just one example when I meet parapsychologists I'm impressed with them they're they're nice people they're they are uh well-read they seem to be fair minded so and the more I get to know them and deep and deep and suddenly peculiar things begin coming out uh and that's just one example well I've met skeptics for whom that also applies yeah okay yeah we're all peculiar in some way I by the way I always point out that in my mind skeptics are mutants we are not the brain we were not as a psychologist everything I know about human evolution and psychology uh it's not normal to be a skeptic we're an aberration right yeah I'm mutant I would call us mute uh so we we are we are actually not normal people because it's not typical to be a skeptic it's very very difficult very unusual thing to be a skeptic about anything so that was the first part of my conversation with ray hyman who is the recipient this year of the philip j class award conferred by the national capital area skeptics and now in this week's installment of the honest liar we hear about how ray hyman once joined a channeler on the radio here's ray's cohort in that adventure jamie ian swiss turn your radio off uh but not yet it was january 7th 1990 and ray hyman was visiting the washington dc area to address the national capital area skeptics or encas on the subject of why are we fooled ray is a psychology professor now emeritus from the university of oregon an author an expert critic of parapsychology a former professional magician and a founding member of the committee for the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal formerly known as psychop and now rather less known simply as csi ray was being trailed by a tv crew that weekend from cbs's 48 hours for the duration of his visit to dc because they were doing a feature about parapsychology and had chosen to focus on ray to represent the skeptics viewpoint so along with my friends chip and grace denman my co-founders of national capital area skeptics in 1987 we had a fun and breathless weekend traveling around the washington dc area and the southern maryland suburbs where the denmans and i lived at the time that sunday we began the morning with a taping of a radio talk show then in the afternoon ray gave his public presentation for encas and then on the same evening ray chip and myself were slated to appear together on q 107 fm we reported to the studio that evening where we were also met by the 48 hours crew who were shooting all of ray's radio appearances that weekend including another one the following morning as we waited and chatted with the radio show's producer we learned that we were to be following an on-air visit from a channeler you remember channeling right this is where a spirit medium of a sort allegedly speaks with the voice of a spirit or perhaps it's better to say a spirit speaks through the voice of the medium although a practice that has come and gone through literally millennia you may recall that it experienced a fattish urge of popularity in the new age 1970s thanks to charlie mclean's effusive endorsement of jz night who claimed to channel the spirit of ramtha the spirit of a 35 thousand year old warrior pardon me just a moment okay channeling's a nutty idea but not all that much nuttier than the likes of john edward and countless predatory hucksters like him who claimed to hear spirit voices in their heads while sparing us the cheap theatrics of bad accents and phony ancient language that comes with channeling if you consult james randy's encyclopedia of claims frauds and hoaxes of the occult and supernatural and look up channeling the entry concludes with my personal definition channeling is just like bad ventriloquism they talk funny but their lips move this reference is one of the proudest literary achievements of my career okay so back at the radio station there's a channeler on the air now along with the host the channeler a woman claims to be channeling the spirit of a sixth century irishman she's talking into a microphone with a spirit voice so she claims of a sixth century irishman now how do i know it's really the voice of a sixth century irish spirit does it speak gaelic hell no what's going on in the studio now is something like a bad money python sketch because the spirit doesn't just speak in plain old everyday english you can tell that this woman is totally possessed with the actual spirit of a sixth century irishman because she uses thee and thou as personal pronouns that's right it's now turned into an on-air renaissance festival just without the jousting well some jousting was yet to come i guess so it was kind of like a renfest but with even less historical accuracy i hear you skeptics laughing how could anything be less historically accurate than your local renaissance fair well because the renfairs are loosely based emphasis on the word loosely on elizabethan england and you know what that's just around the time that the pronouns thee and thou first came into use in old english about 800 years later than our sixth century irishman spirit supposedly was old enough to drink his first pint of mead now the host actually has a brain in his head he thinks the channeler is ridiculous however the radio producer is busy explaining to me with all the self-importance that anyone in media with a small job and a big ego can muster how she worked so hard to insist to the host that he had to be absolutely completely fair to the channeler by concealing his point of view and not in any way revealing his rational judgment to the public he was pretending to serve and speak truth to but in the bizarre world of contemporary media a man of the world speaking actual truth as he sees it just can't possibly be doing the right thing now can he we stand and listen to this babbling producer with tight smiles all around because we want to get to the microphones ourselves she goes back to her important job but now we start working on the 48 hours producer at first he can't really believe that anyone takes the talking channeler seriously i mean it's just too ridiculous isn't it well yeah it is except no it isn't because now people are phoning into the show in order to talk to the spirit oh yeah and they're not just talking to the spirit they're asking for life advice the 48 hours producer thinks that the channeler is so embarrassingly ludicrous that he doesn't even want to turn on his cameras to shoot how can anyone take this seriously he asks me as if the answer was obvious by this time i am all but jumping up and down it doesn't matter if you take it seriously you're doing a story on parapsychology obviously somebody's taking this lunatic seriously watch look they're going to be taking phone calls don't you have a responsibility to show it you don't even need to comment on it you can just show it let it speak for itself just show it but no it's just too ridiculous for him so now we're in the studio then they add ray to the panel that's the host ray hyman the channeler and the spirit uh the last two are sharing a microphone and so ray hyman as the paragon of intellectual restraint for which he is renowned the soft spoken genteel academic with the steely inner intellectual underbelly of the terminator poses his gentle but determinately rational questions how would we know if this was a sixth century irishman it might be a sixth century irishman but isn't there some burden of proof that rests with the channeler shouldn't we be presented with some supporting evidence before we are convinced what might the spirit be able to tell us about sixth century ireland for example needless to say no substantive answers are forthcoming by now i am sitting in the studio about to go on the calls are stacking up and the next caller is picked up by the host he is a professional pilot an airline pilot he asks to speak with the channeler or uh with the spirit and he explains that he is up for another job opportunity and he's not quite sure what to do doth thou ancient irish spirit have any freaking advice for me what what wt f f f f f f before we ever even had text messaging and did i mention that 48 hours is never going to show any of this now following this bit of tragic comedy the host offers me a spot at the dais at long last i have a microphone before me and what do you think he asks me what do i think first of all let me ask you this let's say for the moment it is a sixth century irishman let's just stipulate that for a moment the caller is a pilot for crying out loud a pilot what the hell does a sixth century irishman know about airplanes he's never even seen one he's certainly never been in one what does he know about career advice for you what at which point i kind of decide to go for broke and offer the listeners some sincere heartfelt advice about their lives since that's what they seem to be calling in for you want some advice here's some advice for you it's sunday night it's nine o'clock go out get out of the house get something to eat go to a movie hell rent some porn because anything will be better than what you are doing right now listening to the show which is wasting your life you want some advice turn your radio off now turn your radios off i believe it remains one of my finest moments on live radio the producer maybe would disagree afterwards ray actually complimented me on my restraint and signed a copy of his book to me with an inscription to that effect i guess the fact that i didn't rip the old irishman's microphone out of the console and choke him with the cable did show some kind of restraint but ray has always been a model of a strained rationality for me and eventually 48 hours aired and there was no footage of the channeler and ray got a few moments to put in a word for rationalism but we had all received a firsthand lesson in how the media so often treats these subjects and what its notion of fair play and balanced reportage often amounts to when it comes to presenting stories about pseudoscientific claims sometimes more often than not perhaps the best advice might just to be to turn your radio off this is jaymean swiss and i am the honest liar thank you for listening to this episode of for good reason for updates throughout the week find me on twitter and on facebook if you want to get involved with an online conversation about today's episode join the discussion at for good reason dot org views expressed on the show aren't necessarily the views of the james randy educational foundation you can send your questions or comments into info at for good reason dot org for good reason is produced by thomas donnelly and recorded from st louis missouri our music is composed for us by m a award-nominated gary stockdale contributors to today's show included jaymean swiss and christina stevens i'm your host dj growthy