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Okay, so, back in the 1970s, when disco was king, Nixon was queen, and Elvis was their
inbred prince son, the dirty reds tricked the pure, hardworking Americans into thinking
the Russians were spending 60 million rubles a year on “psychotronic research”—and
while it turns out they were probably punking us, we nonetheless decided to show those communists
the brilliance of capitalism by spending $20 million of public money training psychics
to help the military.
This was the birth of the Stargate Project.
Now, this is just one chapter in the history of very real experiments into very not-real
psychic phenomenon: there’s the Ganzfield experiments, dream telepathy research dating
back to Freud, even experiments supposedly proving “precognition” by Daryl Bem as
recently as 2011.
But instead of talking about those multiple other interesting things, let’s talk about
one half as interesting thing: Stargate’s earliest, and most foundational, experiment—conducted
with CIA funding in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute by Doctor Harold Puthoff and not-a-doctor
Russell Targ.
The experiment went like this.
Step 1: Find a person.
Any person, actually.
Part of Targ and Puthoff’s theory is that anyone can express psychic ability.
But the person does have to be willing to do a bunch of experiments to see if they are,
in fact, psychic, so maybe do the recruiting at a renaissance fair or something.
Step 2: Come up with a list of twelve distinct locations.
Do not tell the maybe-psychic person about them.
Step 3: Put the maybe-psychic person in a room with an experimenter.
Step 4: Without telling either of the people in the room, have another experimenter choose
one of the twelve places and then drive there, along with one to three observers.
Step 5: Once at the site, have the observers walk around look at stuff, acting as “psychic
beacons,” whatever that means.
Step 6: Simultaneously, have the maybe-psychic person describe and draw pictures of what
the observers are seeing, despite not knowing where they are.
Record this.
Step 7: Take the maybe-psychic to the site so they can see how they did, but do not record
this.
Step 8: Repeat steps 1-7 nine times, with different locations, doing a few a day.
Step 9: Get an objective judge, take them to all nine of the locations, and give them
the nine unedited transcripts of the maybe-psychic person’s attempts at descriptions.
Step 10: Have the judge attempt to match up the transcripts to the locations.
Step 11: Analyze the data.
If the objective judge successfully matched the locations to the transcripts—which,
again, contained only the conversation between the maybe-psychic person and the experimenter,
both trapped in a room and not told where the observers were—then the maybe-psychic
person must have accurately read the psychic beacons of the observers, they can be upgraded
from a maybe-psychic person to a psychic-psychic person, and all of our understanding of the
world needs to be reconsidered.
Going in with one-in-nine odds if picking randomly, the six judges in Targ and Puthoff’s
experiment matched 24 of 45 right.
The odds of that happening randomly are less than one in a billion.
So, the study was published in esteemed scientific journal Nature, and in conclusion, psychics
are real.
End of video.
Thanks for watching.
Now let me tell you about our sponsor, Craig.
Craig is a guy I met on a street corner, and he sells powder that smells great—wait…
what’s that?...
Oh no.
It’s the Kiwis.
They found us.
And they’re here to ruin everything.
Specifically here to ruin everything are David F. Marks and Richard Kammann, two New Zealand
researchers who recreated Targ and Puthoff’s experiments as exactly as they could.
But when it came time for the judges to do the judging thing, it went terribly.
Despite the subjects being convinced they had experienced incredible psychic visions,
not a single judge correctly matched a single one of their descriptions to a location.
Which raised the question: “Whaaa?”
Well, while the answer is complicated, the answer is also pretty not-complicated: in
Marks and Kammann’s experiments, before they gave the transcripts to their judges,
they edited out certain non-psychic-y lines that might have provided unfair clues about
how to match them up.
The original experiments did… not that.
Take for example, this sentence that was left in an original experiment transcript: “I’ve
been trying to picture it in my mind and where you went yesterday on the nature walk.”
Now, this gives the judge two key pieces of information.
First, this transcript does not correspond to the nature walk location.
Second, this transcript does correspond to a place that was visited the day after the
nature walk.
The transcripts were full of information about things that happened on previous days—plus,
it turned out that while the order of the transcripts was randomized in the original
experiment, the list of locations was given to the judges in the order in which they were
visited.
That means if the judge could just order the transcripts chronologically, they could match
them.
Basically, the judging was less psychic evaluation, and more like one of those little logic puzzles
you did in middle school when your teacher had a hangover.
Marks and Kamman also found six, subtler types of cues that could help judges order chronologically.
First, subjects would typically express more confidence in their abilities over time.
Second, names of observers were mentioned, but observers changed across days of experimentation.
Thus, if only, say, three transcripts mention “Marty,” they’re probably all from the
same day—the day Marty was there.
Third, time of day was often mentioned.
Fourth, only some transcripts had drawings, and they tended to be grouped in later sessions.
Fifth, descriptions of how the site was selected became more sophisticated over time.
And sixth, transcripts generally got shorter over time.
Plus, in a blunder that ranks alongside “this wooden horse rocks, I bet there’s nothing
inside it,” it seems that some of the original transcripts given to judges may have listed
the date they were recorded.
To test their cueing hypothesis, David Marks was given a set of transcripts from the original
experiments, and a list of locations—but he was not permitted to visit them.
Despite not knowing what any of the places looked like, he matched all the transcripts
perfectly to the locations, based only on the cues—a feat then successfully repeated
by multiple other judges.
In the end, while the Targ-Puthoff experiments’ bogus findings may have led to 20 years of
useless CIA and military research into psychics, they did prove one useful thing: the importance
of good experimental design.
While the Targ-Puthoff and Marks-Kammann experiments had totally different findings, they did have
one surprising thing in common: in both cases, test subjects left completely convinced that
they were psychic.
And while I’d love to talk about the fascinating psychological phenomenon that explains why,
that would make this video too long, inviting punishment from our capricious czar, the YouTube
algorithm.
That’s why I took that and everything we cut for time and put it in an extended version
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