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parapsychological Association, Inc.
P.O. Box 12236
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
Contact: Dr. Dean Radin, Princeton University, 609-987-2930
— PRESS RELEASE —
NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL SUPPRESSES EVIDENCE IN
ASSESSMENT OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — The President of the Parapsychological Association, Dr. Dean
I.
Radin, has released a report responding to the National Research Council’s (NRC) recent assessment of
parapsychology, commissioned by the US Army.
The NRC Committee concluded that there was “no
scientific
justification from research conducted over a
period
of 130 years
for the
existence
of
parapsychological phenomena.”
The
Parapsychological Association, an
affiliate of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, states in
its report that the NRC conclusion was biased
through blatant suppression of evidence, including an attempt to delete favorable passages in a paper
commissioned by the NRC itself.
Specifically, the Parapsychological Association's report reveals that
(1) The two principal evaluators of parapsychology for the NRC Committee have had a long-
standing, public committment against parapsychology, while scientists with more favorable opinions were
excluded from the Committee.
This is in direct violation of the NRC’s stated policy of assigning members
to committees “with regard to appropriate balance.”
(2) The NRC report systematically omits findings favorable to parapsychology but quotes liberally
from two background papers that support the Committee’s position. More disturbing,
it has been learned
that the Chairman of the NRC Committee actually called one of the authors of a background paper that was
favorable to parapsychology and asked him to withdraw his positive conclusions.
(More)
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(3)
In spite of the Committee’s prejudice against parapsychology, and in spite of
its attempt to
suppress favorable expert opinion, the report
is self-contradictory.
The Committee concluded that there
was no evidence for parapsychological phenomena, yet bv
its own admission
it could offer no plausible
alternatives to much of the research
it surveyed.
Moreover, the Committee recommended that the Army,
which paid a half a million dollars for the report, should continue to “monitor” parapsychological research
being conducted at laboratories in the United States and in the Soviet Union.
The Parapsychological Association’s
report, co-authored by
Dr. John Palmer,
Institute for
Parapsychology, Durham, NC, Charles Honorton, Psychophysical Research Laboratories, Princeton, NJ,
and Dr. Jessica Utts, University of California,
Davis, CA, also listed classes of psi effects repeatedly
demonstrated in laboratory studies, and included several examples of applications of psi phenomena of
potential interest to national security.
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Note: The press kit includes (a) this press release, (b) a letter to Dr. Frank Press (President of the National
Academy of Sciences) and (c) the Parapsychological Association's response to the NRC report. The
Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association will be held August
17-20, 1988, at Le Nouvel
Hotel, Montreal, Canada.
Among the scheduled events is a panel discussion on the NRC report by the
authors of the Parapsychological Association report.
For more information about the Parapsychological Association convention, contact Mrs. Laura Knipe at
212-247-7847 or Patrice Keane at 212-799-5050.
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“The gist of this type of criticism is that test tubes should be clean when doing careful and important
scientific research. To the extent that the test tubes were dirty, it is suggested that the experiment was
not carried out according to acceptable scientific standards.
Consequently, the results remain suspect
even though the critic cannot demonstrate that the dirt in the test tubes was sufficient to have produced
the outcome...” (p. 199-200).
In other words, the Committee could think of no scientific explanation for the selected studies that
they reviewed.
Parapsychologists often refer to these unexplained anomalies as psi phenomena.
Considering the NRC Committee’s bias against the phenomena studied, their admission of finding
no plausible alternatives must be taken as a compelling endorsement of the existence of anomalous
effects.
In conclusion, we believe that the NRC’s findings about parapsychological phenomena are wrong
— anomalous effects that cannot be explained by prevailing scientific models continue to be
demonstrated, repeatedly,, in laboratory studies.
Sincerely,
Dean I. Radin, Ph.D.
President, Parapsychological Association, Inc.
Department of Psychology, Green Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
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