Shit. There was a great thread on this stuff in the Laboratory, but it apparently predates the latest board crash.
The skinny, as I recall, was that some people were able, after training, to get pretty detailed glimpses of specific structures, draw accurate base layouts or diagrams of things like missile launch platforms. It seemed like the information was always visual and the kind of thing that could be transmitted in less than a second.
Lemme look for some links....
Here, London Times article from 1995.
quote:The team's first high-profile problem was the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, when militants seized the American embassy in Tehran and held 63 diplomats prisoner. Almost immediately the American government began planning to rescue the hostages, but intelligence was thin and the exact locatino of all the Americans was impossible to learn through conventional methods.
"They would take a picture of a hostage, put it in a double envelope and give it to me," said McMoneagle. "Then I would concentrate and sketch the room where that person was being held, or maybe just the contents of the room. My rate was and is about one in four. I would consider it effective that I could describe the location where three of the hostages had been taken."
Ultimately, that information proved of little value as an attempt to rescue the hostages turned into tragedy when the transport aircraft crashed at a site codenamed Desert One, south of Tehran.
However, there were some startling successes. One psychic described an airfield with a gantry and crane at a set of coordinates that placed it at the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk. A spy satellite photograph the following day showed the exact crane and gantry structure described by the psychic.
The psychics, also described as "remote viewers," were used to try to locate Colonel Gadaffi before the 1986 airstrike on Tripoli by American aircraft. Although the bombing failed to kill Gadaffi, a psychic did apparently locate him.
There were high-profile failures, too. The psychics had suggested that an American general seized by Red Brigades terrorists in Italy in 1981 was held on a yacht on Lake Como. Police searched every boat and found nothing. Another sighting reported him hidden in Austria. That, too, was a false trail. The general was eventually released after police received a tip-off.
So, it's not 100%, but then again, neither are high-altitude photographs. (Hitler used to paint barn roofs and country roads over airfields to fool reconnaissance planes.)
If you'd like something more specific & scientific, here's an article from the University of California, Davis Division of Statistics.
quote:Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.
snip
Government-sponsored research in psychic functioning dates back to the early 1970s when a program was initiated at what was then the Stanford Research Institute, now called SRI International. That program was in existence until 1989. The following year, government sponsorship moved to a program at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) under the direction of Dr. Edwin May, who had been employed in the SRI program since the mid 1970s and had been Project Director from 1986 until the close of the program.
snip Few human capabilities are perfectly replicable on demand. For example, even the best hitters in the major baseball leagues cannot hit on demand. Nor can we predict when someone will hit or when they will score a home run. In fact, we cannot even predict whether or not a home run will occur in a particular game. That does not mean that home runs don't exist.
Scientific evidence in the statistical realm is based on replication of the same average performance or relationship over the long run. We would not expect a fair coin to result in five heads and five tails over each set of ten tosses, but we can expect the proportion of heads and tails to settle down to about one half over a very long series of tosses. Similarly, a good baseball hitter will not hit the ball exactly the same proportion of times in each game but should be relatively consistent over the long run.
The same should be true of psychic functioning. Even if there truly is an effect, it may never be replicable on demand in the short run even if we understand how it works. However, over the long run in well-controlled laboratory experiments we should see a consistent level of functioning, above that expected by chance. The anticipated level of functioning may vary based on the individual players and the conditions, just as it does in baseball, but given players of similar ability tested under similar conditions the results should be replicable over the long run. In this report we will show that replicability in that sense has been achieved.
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