Experiment One of the SAIC Remote Viewing Program: A Critical Re-evaluation - a reply to May

Abstract

In our original paper (Wiseman & Milton, 1999), we described a number of potential information leakage pathways in Experiment One of the SAIC remote viewing program. In this paper, we counter May’s assertion that the proposed leakage paths could not have accounted for the observed difference between performance in the static-target and dynamic target conditions and refute May’s claim that there is empirical evidence from the literature that indicates that our proposed information pathways cannot be effective. We also described in our earlier paper the repeated and marked difficulties encountered by May and the SAIC research team in producing a consistent account of a number of aspects of the experiment’s procedure, which resulted in a sequence of five different accounts of these procedures. These difficulties not only make an assessment of Experiment One extremely difficult but call into question whether the assessors commissioned to write a US government-sponsored report on the other studies in the SAIC program would have been given accurate information about their unrecorded details. In his response, May insists that the final account of Experiment One is the correct reconstruction but offers no evidence or argument to support this claim and does not address the problems that the situation raises for the government report.