 It's Sunday, May 16th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grothe. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international non-profit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. This week we continue the broadcast of the interview I conducted with Ray Hyman, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon, about as many decades as a widely respected expert critic of parapsychology. This interview was conducted last month for the occasion of Professor Hyman receiving the 2010 Philip J. Klass Award for Outstanding Contributions in Promoting Critical Thinking and Scientific Understanding, conferred to him by the National Capital Area Skeptics, a DC area local skeptics organization. And it was conducted at the National Science Foundation. So our interview picks up right where it left off last week. Maybe we'll finish up by exploring how we got to be skeptics, right? I find that an interesting question. But you mentioned Uri Geller, and you've spoken in the media about Uri Geller, and you've done research into dousing and other parapsychology claims, like individual statements, as opposed to being an expert critic of parapsychology research. Those are kind of two halves of your career. And I draw a distinction between those two kinds of efforts. Is one more compelling or interesting to you than the other? Is one kind of skepticism more important to you than the other? That's a leading question, but yes. Yeah, I've always found parapsychology dull. I find it very dull and not interested in it at all. And I find that the fun part of skepticism is dealing with Uri Geller and the mediums who talk to the dead, and the douses who find, not only find water, but they can find the gold and chendlies number nine, depending on what they put in their dousing rod or the pendulum. I find all that part fast. That to me is a fun part. The parapsychology part is not fun. I got stuck into it, unfortunately. They always come to me, the time I put into it, to me, it's just wasted for me. I prefer to do other things. Do you regret it? Do you regret the 50 years of expert criticism? Not really regret, but I regret it if I think about it in the sense that all the things I could have done professionally and otherwise, that just took up a lot of my time. It's boring, as you said, and I just don't find it fun. And it sounds like you're more interested in the psychology of belief questions than the parapsychology questions. So rather than the evidence of Psi, you're interested more in why people believe this stuff, despite the lack of evidence. That's right. Yeah. And so if you had it all to do over again, would that be more of a focus for you? You never know, but yes. You never know, but yes, I like that answer. I want to have some time for audience questions, but I want to ask you about the last 35 years of the movement. And from your vantage, you see that there's grown up around the world, not just the United States, but really around the world, a worldwide skeptics movement. When you and Martin Gardner and Randy and Paul Kurtz and others founded PsiCOP, you didn't sit in some back room with some plan to create a worldwide movement. You were just thinkers coming together, and you wanted to offer criticism of these prevailing beliefs, correct? Well, there are many creation stories about the founding of the movement. We're going to go into some of them at the X-Tam. That's amazing, yes. I'll just announce for our listeners that for the first time in the history of Tam, we're going to have a panel on the history, the origins of the skeptics movement featuring Ray and Paul Kurtz and Randy and Ken Fraser and hopefully Martin Gardner by video. Those are interesting questions, but I'm asking you about really the movement aspect of it. Was there a plan for there to be a movement around these ideas and ideals? What happened wasn't that well-organized, obviously, but what happened as far as I'm concerned was the key things that led to the current skeptics movement were Martin Gardner, his fads and fallacies in the name of science. That's the thing we all look towards. One of the sacred texts. Exactly. Good way of putting it. Then there was Alice Cooper and Ray Geller had a big hand in it. The reason with Alice Cooper, by the way, Geller has a hand in it because in 1972, I get a call from the criminal Austin Kibble, who was then head of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same group that brought you the internet. That's the group that was founded by President Kennedy to be the Buck Rogers Flash Gordon part of the Defense Department, to look in the futuristic things. I got a call from him and I was grading papers at the University of Oregon. I got a call from him in 1982, December, saying, Ray, could you drop whatever you're doing and go down to Stanford Research Institute where they have a psychic in captivity who they're studying. And that was Ray Geller. That happened to be Ray Geller. So I went down here, of course, and it was the most bizarre thing I've ever saw. And then as a result of my report, they knew they weren't going to get any money from the Defense Department. So they took Geller on the road and they went to New York and promulgated him in front of New York Time Magazine. And Time Magazine got Randy to pretend that he was a reporter and sit in when Geller did his demo for them. And that's when Randy saw... When Geller left the room, Randy apparently replicated a lot of what Geller did and showed it was a fraud. But anyways, as a result of that, in 1972, Time Magazine had an article called The Magician and the Think Tank. And they pointed out how Randy had... Here is this psychic. So the first written public... Geller Garden's Country was a expose by Time Magazine. And this was before Psycop. This is 72. Oh, yeah. This was before 72, yeah. But you were all connected even then. No, no, no, what happened... Geller was the one who should get the credit for connecting us. What happened was, as a result of this, I didn't know Randy that well at the time. He knew of him and he knew of me because we're both disciples of Martin Gardner. But I was out here in Oregon and so as a result of this article, I'm in it and Randy's in it. We are the two key people who were exposing Geller at that time. Randy then was traveling with Alice Cooper. I knew nothing, but I don't know... The rock star Alice Cooper, Randy, was part of his show. Yeah, I thought Alice Cooper was a she when he called me about it. Anyways, he was traveling with Alice Cooper and Alice Cooper, I don't know if you know about it. I didn't know much about it. I didn't know much about modern music. I stopped with Beethoven and anything after that is too much for me. But anyway, I get a call from Randy. He's part of the show. Randy was traveling as a mad dentist and then later he becomes a mad magician and he cuts off Alice's head and a guillotine and he dances around the stage, and ends the show apparently with the blood dripping from Alice's head. And then everything goes black and then there's a long pause and then there's a resurrection scene and Alice comes back from life. And that's how they end the show. And Randy was a big feature of it, of course. So Randy was traveling with the show and they came to Portland and I get this call from Randy when he's in Portland. He says, Ray, you've got to come up here. Alice Cooper wants to see you. He wants you to look at the show and explain to him why he's got these problems with his fans. He's got very young teenagers like him and college students like him, but high school students have nothing to do with him. And so he figured if... So Randy told him about me as a psychologist and stuff like that and he thought that somehow I could come up and watch the show and explain to him and all that. And so this sound all already weird. I didn't know what Alice Cooper was even who or she or he was. And then he said, also... But he didn't mention that con. The other reason he wanted to talk to me. So I went up there, I met Alice Cooper and it turned out to be a he. At least I think it was a he. Yeah. Actually, he's a pretty nice guy. He's a very conservative guy, I was surprised, you know, politically and he had his nose bent and it turned out he had fallen and he used to run marathons and he'd fallen at the end of a marathon and so he knew... So when he found out I had run in marathons he became good friends because, you know, we were staying talk on marathoning and everything else. But in all of this, you know, I went, I was on the stage, they put earphones in me, so unfortunately I was on the side and between every act Alice would come to me when they had a blackout, come over. He acted like he was drunk, he was falling down. He was about to fall over. He actually was addicted to beer and he was addicted to drugs. Everyone else in his crew went to bug, there was smoke, all kinds of stuff. But he only drank beer, a Coors beer. And he would come to me, he would straighten up between the acts when the lights went off. He'd run over to me and explain to me what's going on. He said, now, wait, we're at this next act, you're going to see the kids are going to throw things at me. You know, they're going to be mad at me because I'm going to insult their parents and he would explain everything that I did. He didn't need my advice on that. But the other thing is, in between all this, Randy took me aside and said, you know, Ray, we got to do something about the Surrogala business and general the public's interest and all this crazy stuff. And so he said, let's form an organization called Surr. That was his name for it. You know, S-R-I, he took the initials, S-R-I-M-A-S-I-R, Surr, and he meant by that, sanity in research. That was the first suggestion or anything. So he, we called Martin Gardner, so he, Martin Gardner and I found our group that's called Surr, we called it and we changed it to some other names and we started that in 1972. We had a big meeting at Martin's house, big group, the three of us. That was it. Then, sometime later, I don't know how we heard about it, but Marcello Tritzi, who I knew nothing about, we didn't know anything about it, contacted us and said, look, we heard about our group and he liked to join if he could and he could help us out, you know, he's a good administrator, he's willing to do all the Scott work for us and the one thing that Martin, Randy and I did not have, we did have no administrative disabilities, we didn't have to run anything, we just had a good idea of people. We spent all the time just thinking of ideas, what to do, but we were able to... And Tritzi as an academic wanted to help provide some structure to the group. Exactly, and we said, that's what we need. So we said, okay, and so Tritzi became part of our group at Paul Kurtz in 1976, at some conference, I don't know what it was, and at that time Kurtz was running the Humanist magazine and he had also been running articles including by myself, on critical of paranormal stuff. So... So Psycop was originally kind of a subcommittee of the American Humanist Association or something? Well, no, we tried to make it clear that we weren't going to be connected and that's been the point of friction ever since. What happened was that he, without asking Martin, Randy or myself, Marcello volunteered to put us together with Kurtz and his group and we informed this big group called Psycop and so we had a big meeting in 1976 and that's how it all started. So the reason I asked the movement question is that in recent years you've been speaking out more suggesting to audiences that some of the approaches of the expert critics of parapsychology, some of your approaches may have been misguided. Again, don't want to put words in your mouth but you've suggested that, conversations we've had, maybe that some of the previous approaches to criticizing parapsychology there could be a better way to do it. So the reason I asked the movement question is that here's a young, we have so many new generations of people who hold you up and Randy and Gardner and others as skeptic heroes, as role models and they want to emulate your approach. They want to do what you've done and kind of continue to carry on the torch. If you're saying it might not have been the best way to go about it, well what do you have to say to them who say, I want to in a fair-minded way look at parapsychology research and see if it's up to scientific standards. Well in 1986 I wrote this article called Proper Criticism and it's been the most repeatedly published article I've ever written. Every skeptics group in the world has republished it, it's been republished again, it's now going to be republished in a commemorative issue of the skeptical movement by the British Journal of the Sceptic and Swabsman published in books and stuff like that. And all it is, my article on Proper Criticism is just a list of platitudes that you should know. Some don't attack the person, attack the problem and be reasonable and be fair, be sensible. That's about it. It's a bunch of little platitudes like that. Yet it's been the most published thing. Everyone reads it, everyone praises it and no one follows it including myself. But what I'm trying to zone in on is if the approaches that the skeptics movement or leading skeptics have taken in the past if it might not be the ideal way, what's the alternative? In other words, what's next for the skeptics movement? If you're suggesting the answer is not for expert critics to invest 50 years and whole academic careers in a fair-minded way looking at the parapsychological research, well, what's the alternative? Well, first of all, I don't know. But I do have ideas. One thing I'm going to correct now is the chance to do it. Curtis is introducing me. By the way, there's some wrong stuff also. People get information on me off the web when they wrote about me in this pamphlet that you have to program and so on. Some of it's true. Some of it is not quite true. He said I'm on the executive council. I was on, right from the beginning I was on the executive council, but I think for the last five years I've not been on the executive council and I've had nothing to do with psychop, not deliberately, I think it's because we have some... Some strategic differences, maybe. Well, now I'm sure it's that. They have differences with me. I don't have differences with them, but okay. But to me, the skeptics movement, one of the big things we had was allocation of resources. I've always been saying you got to live within your resources. Not because I'm a Republican, I'm not. I'm a Democrat. But I do think we ought to use our limited resources. At that time when we started psychop we did have limited resources. We ought to use them wisely and most effectively. I thought we got the most bang for the buck by focusing on not trying to get to everyone in the world but focusing on opinion makers, journalists and teachers, educators. If we could influence those people and help them, the biggest audience. The other thing I thought was we were doing the most was with the skeptical inquire. We were reaching the most. However, Kurtz and the other powers there somehow were more, and you used the term I thought it was great, edifice complex. Quoting me in front of an audience, great thing to say, but yes, I've cheekily introduced Paul Kurtz a number of times as our man with an edifice complex wants to build an organization. So they keep multiplying these centers all over the world. They're very expensive. They have to raise money and so on. So they're always raising fundraising and so on. That's become more with the skeptics. The skeptics movement since it's developed psychop has focused more on things like building centers spreading out and also fighting among themselves within skeptics. We've done nothing about trying to do the outreach which is where we can do the most. That's one thing I have disagreed with the people right from the beginning. One likes to build buildings and raise money and the other likes to do something as effective and so that's just a difference of opinion. I think your criticism about building buildings, that's well taken. People get that, but drawing another distinction, you're saying rather than skeptics being geared up to engage the parapsychologist and look at the research and really dig in. Rather than that, the agenda should be an outreach or public education mission. Opinion leaders, journalists, teachers that's what you've done surely, your public appearances, your appearances in the media, but you've also spent the last 50 years doing the hard research or at least looking at the research to see if it's up to snuff. I'm just trying to pin you down on this. Are you suggesting that that should be less of a priority for the skeptics movement than this public education, this public outreach? I don't know how to answer that because I would say my focus is not paranormal or anything like that. Ultimately, what I'm most concerned about is giving people the tools to think and to be good, better thinkers. So it's a further focus. The education system, we've not done a good job of that. I think we can do better. To me, skepticism and the skeptical movement dealing with the parapsychology is just a good forum to work on those kinds of problems. If we can do it there, then we can do it elsewhere as well. It's going to involve science. It's going to involve knowledge of thinking or critical thinking. It's going to involve the things we have in psychology of it all as well. We've got to realize that what human limitations are and what it is that is pushing people in this direction. So my feeling is that we've got to do more in that direction. Skepticism is just one tool for that. Please join me in thanking Ray Hyman for this fun conversation. Thank you. I'd like to spend a few minutes now on questions and since this is being recorded I may paraphrase your question. You'll have to tell me if I got it wrong so that it can be recorded. Question right back there. Professor Hyman, two questions. I wonder if you would comment or be willing to comment on the parents split between Marcello Truzzi and Psycop and the other subjective interest would be Dr. Sports after life experiments and his new project there in Arizona. That's a lot to comment on. Truzzi is a complicated fellow. He came from a circus background. His father was one of the top considered universally by those who know as probably the second greatest juggler, circus juggler in the world in history. And he was born actually in Russia because his father was with the European circus. Eventually his father ended up with the Ringland brothers Barnard and Bailey and that's why Truzzi grew up and went to school in Florida because where the Ringland brothers have their camp and their school. He got that interesting background and then he became a sociologist at Eastern Michigan University and he's a person of tremendous breadth knowledge and everything but also he was a person who was dedicated to being in the middle wherever he can and his idea was and we split on a lot of things his idea was to be fair you got to give all size equal time and I likened his approach to and he never liked this for some reason I likened his approach to saying look we have a plate of food here we know it's certified not having any bacteria or any dangerous organisms and stuff like that and here we have a plate of food here that we know is just leaking with all kinds of terrible dangerous substances in it his approach to the best thing to eat is to mix it to 50-50 and his approach also was you got to give equal time to all size and he's amazing the other side has an awful lot of scientific evidence everything behind it and so I never could understand that we always split on that kind of thing the guy had I shouldn't speak with him because he's dead he was an interesting guy he was a fascinating guy in many ways but he also reveled in being friends with everyone and he one time I remember an American AAA S meetings in San Francisco and while there he said Ray why don't you come with me I'm going to take you to dinner over to this guy's house who happened to be the fellow who ran the churches of the devil Satanist churches Temple Asset maybe or Anton LeVe Okay so we went to Anton LeVe's house for dinner and Anton LeVe unfortunately had a black panther roaming his house as well and I went to get the bathrooms I was really wondering where was his panther so what you're saying is what led to the split was just this disagreement let me give you an example Anton LeVe is typical Triton said to him a good friend because they both had loved circus music and had some sort of similar backgrounds but LeVe was very proud of the fact that he had all these people in the church of Satan he always suck as he called them in front of us among other things he sold sexual objects he sold these inflatable dolls to them and he made a big living he was bragging about all that I found it kind of off-putting and Triton was always presented himself and that's why he broke with Randy over moral issues and Randy did the project alpha Triton attacked him very viciously saying that this was unethical to do to go into a scientist laboratory and waste his money by pretending that you got psychic powers for our listeners project alpha is when Randy conspired to have two young magicians pose as psychic claimants at Washington University and then kind of expose the fraud in a real gotcha moment and the reason Randy did this was because Randy always had been told that when he said you ought to have a magician when you design your experiments you're going to test a regala or some other psychic the scientists always say of the parapsychologists who are scientists say we don't need a magician we're scientists we know how to control things they can't pull anything like that on us so in order to show that they can pull things like that Randy did that project alpha and it worked but Triton's total reaction was this was unethical unethical thing to do and unethical person so that's why I did big fight well Triton felt he was the only honest skeptic honest broker in his whole skeptical business I Randy and other people were biased skeptics and the other there was a belief was on the other side and the only person who was the fair person was my cell Triton he openly said these things and we were at a meeting once at the Naval research laboratory here Bethesda they held a meeting because Senator Claiborne Pell was very upset with the report I had made for the government on parapsychology he said it was unfair and they shouldn't have had Hyman do it they should have someone else do it because Hyman is a known disbeliever or something like that so Pell got the office of congressional research which I don't know still exists but he got them to carry on a special meeting and they had several parapsychologists Jim Alcock and myself there and Machella was there and at this meeting Machella stood up and said well look you have Hyman and Alcock over there but they're not the fair people I'm the only neutral guy here in this room here and he had its representatives obviously this was startled me because every parapsychologist always assumes and openly thinks that Machella was on your side all the skeptics thought Machella was an enemy so but Machella thought he was the only neutral person he thought he was the one person in the middle I want to try to get some other questions any right here I'm curious your thoughts on James Randy's approach with the million dollar challenge do you see that as a good way to investigate or what are your thoughts I have never been a fan of waving ten thousand dollar check and then I'll tell you a million dollar check I don't think that's a good approach to me but I understand the approach that Randy and the public probably to the public appeals more it's a put up a shut up type of thing but it makes no sense to me as a scientist it doesn't prove anything one way or the other but I just have to say it's not my approach but I can't mock it question right here I'm so fascinated by the fact that you've worked with federal entities on these issues could you give us some reflection about where the hopeful ways might be to help penetrate the pseudo scientific approaches of the federal government I give the example the fact that FDA still allows homeopathy we've got some strange new light device that's now been FDA approved we've got that agency I come from we're using the polygraph right and left and a lot of these other things is very dubious science how can we help the federal government to think more rationally about this I'm not sure how to do that because the government agencies is a big bureaucracy with all kinds of little pockets in it what I found was that there are pockets that do all kinds of weird stuff but the other pockets don't know about it and there are also real good skeptics in the area as well the military, the CIA I know and some of the other agencies that I've had some direct contact with and it's what you have is that one side doesn't know what the other side is doing one of the things I found was that if you had if I could get access and if they had a centralized database where I could check how many thing parapsychological things are going on there's no way I could find out I don't think the president could find out because what I find was that many of the people doing weird stuff parapsychological work or something like that like in the Navy I found that you only find these by accident a lot of things that are called parapsychological that are parapsychological work go under different names, they use code names they put perception under unusual conditions well that fits a lot of things underwater and submarines up and out of space and stuff like that but a lot of the people doing oddball ESP experiments and other stuff will use that to cover up what they're doing so there, and this John Alexander at when I was on the committee on techniques for enhancing human performance which was basically the Army Research Institute put up this money to have the National Academy of Sciences look into borderline techniques such as neuro-linguistic programming meditation, sleep learning and parapsychology many vendors are selling techniques to various branches of the military based on these things, so we were asked to look at, see if there's any one of these things that have any possibility of being good, that the government was currently then using including using these recordings subliminal persuasion and so on and most of the people even in the agencies where this was going on didn't know what was going on, you know this John Alexander, Colonel Alexander was running a military ordinance research at Fort Mead I think it was and he was sponsoring the research of Cleve Baxter, Baxter was the guy in the 1960s was the first guy to attach electrodes to a phylo dendron plant and show that it responded psychically to people, to brine shrimp being burned in another room or something like that and that started talking to plants movements and stuff like that Baxter's still around, he's still doing research like that and John Alexander Colonel Alexander when he was running the ordinance laboratory was funding his work, how did he get away with that? This is guns he's supposed to be dealing with right? He got away with it because he said he told us ourselves, our committee, he said look, if I spend anything over $10,000 I've got to document everything but if I spend anything up to $10,000 I don't have to say anything about it so he was giving this guy $10,000 a day you know, each one is a separate contract so he didn't have to report it So no real clear road map on how to diminish the government's support itself for pseudoscience Well what it amounts to is the government is just a microcosm of the rest of society, it's the same thing some thoughts don't know what the other part's doing and people, their roads are all around and it may be good or bad because there are whole areas in the CIA and the defense department, people go off and do their own thing and the rest of the people don't know even the head of the CIA doesn't know about it it's just amazing it's just such a big bureaucracy but also all these little pockets of people doing some strange things and I'd like to believe that they still are a minority but I'm not so sure but when I was there our committee was formed in 1985 then retired head of INSCOM Army Intelligence Albert Stubblebein III who Tammy over here confirms me she knew Stubblebein, they were good friends obviously right? but she knew Stubblebein he's the brother of Lee Marvin he looks like him too so Lee Marvin's name must have been Stubblebein II before he changed to Marvin so I think we have time for one more question anyone? right over here you spend a lot of time in academia and I understand that getting grant money is very, very difficult how is it that even with really nothing to show for it over many, many years that there are still departments of parapsychology there's still money being awarded to research in parapsychology parapsychology gets practically no funding government funding by the way a big deal was made out of the fact that the 20 year research in Stargate on remote viewing got 7 million dollars that's a pittance of the military budget but actually the only reason that number of 7 million dollars comes around is because they got it from me I was trying to find out how much was being spent only in one laboratory in California on the research they were doing being supported by the first the CIA but then it was a national defense intelligence agency I'm sorry what happened was the CIA had for the first five years or so of the remote viewing they had been supporting it but then decided it was going nowhere so they dropped it but then the defense intelligence agency took it over and they were supporting it so for 20 years this program was going on and no one knew how much money was being spent on it but I just tried to find out on one laboratory how much they had gotten and he told me over five years they got 7 million dollars of funding that one lab so I haven't mentioned that and that became the word all over now because once you say something like that that becomes it and so unfortunately it was the inadvertent so when he had me on he said how can the government waste 7 million dollars of money you know 7 million dollars of pittance right in terms of the people who were incensed about this kept emphasizing that the 7 million dollars wasted and the people on the other side who didn't want to interview me they interviewed instead Jessica Utz she was the other part of the team and she's the parapsychologist part of the team if they wanted a program where they want to emphasize look the government is doing this wonderful stuff it's like remote viewing how open we got a great government they would interview her if they want to emphasize the negative they would interview me but during that interview they always brought up the 7 million dollars how government wasted 7 million dollars if you have precious tax dollars Ray last question and it's really kind of a follow-up on that and then we'll finish up after 50 years of looking into this stuff do you think the questions are still worth asking is the research still worth doing so even if it's not government funded is it still worth looking into all this stuff for my part I don't know but you know if people want to do it I say okay if they're going to do it I hope they do it in the best way possible thank you very much for the conversation Ray Haiman thank you for listening to this episode of for good reason for updates throughout the week find me on twitter and on facebook to get involved with an online conversation about this interview with forgoodreason.org Views expressed on for good reason aren't necessarily the views of the James Randy educational foundation questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at forgoodreason.org for good reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri for good reasons music is composed for us by MA award nominated Gary Stockdale Christina Stevens contributed to today's show I'm your host DJ Growthy