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transcripts and Elmar's descriptions of his hiding places were sent to Dr. Hans Bender, a German researcher who arranged the judging for the experiment. Five judges looked at the material. Their job was to go to each of the ten target sites, read Gruber's comments about what he had been doing at the site, and while there, to decide which of Marilyn's ten transcripts was the best match for that site, which was the second best, etc. It turned out that of Marilyn's ten transcripts, six were matched correctly (first place) to the target that Elmar was visiting on the day the transcript was created. The likelihood of that happening by chance is less than 6 in 10,000. |
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This experiment received a great deal of examination by the critical scientific community. It was suggested that because Marilyn and Elmar were friends, they may have been similarly affected by world events, even though they did not communicate during the experiment. It was proposed that Elmar's comments about each place he visited might contain words or ideas, based on world events or the weather, for instance, which might have contaminated Marilyn's transcripts. As a result of this far-fetched but not totally invalid criticism, the entire judging process was repeated, omitting Elmar's comments about what he had done at each site. The overall significance of the experiment was calculated, and the likelihood of it happening by chance was less than I in 1,000 still remarkable for an experiment with only ten trials. |
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This experiment, along with most of the others in this chapter, made it into K. Ramakrishna Rao's 1984 book, The Basic Experiments in Parapsychology, which I consider to be in the ESP Hall of Fame.
23 Since our first publication of the remote-viewing protocol, in Nature, in 1974, there have been at least twenty-three successful replications of the work, and this is one of them.24 Taken together, the data from the ganzfeld and remote-viewing experiments have contributed giant steps toward substantiating the claims for clairvoyance that have been reported throughout history. |
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By now you may wonder, what is a reasonable person to believe about his or her own psychic abilities? We have offered a glimpse into the experimental evidence for mind-to-mind and mind-to-universe connections. As a physicist, I find it impossible to write about these experiments without |
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