This is a particularly rich issue of the JSE. And a hefty one. Its size is due primarily to two quite lengthy essays, one by Bryan Williams and one by Michael Sudduth. Of course, all of this issue’s articles and reviews are worth reading; that’s why we’re publishing them. But these two huge essays merit a few extra comments. Bryan Williams has given us something that I and various SSE members have hoped for over the years, a detailed review of a specific line of anomalistic research—the kind of article that would be useful to both veterans and newcomers to edge science. I’ve often tried to recruit such an opus from SSE colleagues at our conferences, hoping my considerable charm would dazzle them into accepting the opportunity. I’ve even been assured on several occasions that the solicited reviews would be forthcoming. But only Bryan, so far, has delivered the goods, a splendid essay surveying research on PK with random number generators. Not surprisingly, this review took Bryan a long time to write, and I want to thank him, not only for the result, but for his tenacity. Michael Sudduth’s essay is a forensic tour de force (as befits an admirer of the TV detective show Columbo)—an unprecedently detailed critique of the James Leininger case of ostensible reincarnation. That case is both complicated and messy, and it illustrates a general problem with CORT investigations that I’ve dubbed the Problem of Investigative Intricacy.

Keith Augustine’s critical evaluation of the essay contest sponsored by the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies (BICS) is an interesting but problematic review. It mixes reasonable and detailed criticisms of the contest and many of the winning essays with a disappointing reliance on some of the most trite and superficial criticisms of parapsychological research. Ironically, Augustine criticizes the winning essays for using straw-man arguments and cherry-picked evidence even though many of his own arguments commit these same errors.

Several of my recent Editorials have dealt with terminological/conceptual errors and confusions that have been all too prevalent among psi researchers. In this Editorial, I want to consider a related issue often raised about parapsychological concepts and explanation. Probably we’ve all heard the complaint that parapsychology’s core concepts have only been defined negatively, with respect to our present level of ignorance—for example, taking “telepathy” to be “the causal influence of one mind on another independently of the known senses.” Perhaps some of you have even expressed that complaint yourselves. Of course, the assumption underlying those complaints is that this definitional strategy is a problem. However, it seems like a perfectly reasonable procedure to me, and I can easily accept the possibility that we might eventually learn enough about phenomena so defined that we can later construct better, detailed, and more informative analytical definitions. But at least as far as psi research is concerned, I consider it presumptuous—at our present (and considerable) level of ignorance—to proceed any other way. We hardly have the barest hint, based on all the available data, as to what psi is doing in the world (i.e., both inside and outside the lab). In fact, formal, experimental evidence has been particularly unilluminating. It has barely succeeded, if it’s succeeded at all, in convincing parapsychological fence-sitters that there are any genuine paranormal phenomena to study (I’ve explored some reasons for this in Braude, 1997). And it certainly hasn’t shed light on how pervasive, extensive, and refined psi effects might be, or whether effects of radically different magnitudes would be the result of substantially different processes. At best, typical quantitative research examines only straitjacketed expressions of phenomena that non-laboratory evidence suggests occur more impressively (if not flamboyantly) “in the wild.” So it strikes me as appropriately modest and circumspect to define “PK” (for example) as “the effect of an organism on a region r of the physical world without any known sort of physical interaction between the organism's body and r.” (For additional specific parapsychological definitions, see Braude, 2002).

In my writings on the evidence for postmortem survival. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I consider much of the literature on the subject to be very shabby, usually because the authors are empirically myopic or inferentially-challenged. That is, writers on survival notoriously ignore or treat very superficially relevant areas of research having their own extensive literatures (e.g., on dissociation, savantism, prodigies, gifted under-achievers, and language mastery), and too often they seem unable to formulate valid arguments. In Braude, 2003 I explored these deficiencies in great detail. Here, I’d like simply to comment on a particular class of confusions and a recent eruption of nonsequiturs.

At 1606:22, Clipper 759 informed the tower that it was ready for takeoff. At 1606:24, the local controller cleared the flight for takeoff, and at 1606:30, the first officer acknowledged the clearance. The acknowledgement was the last radio transmission received from Clipper 759. On July 8, 1982, Pan American World Airways Flight 759 (Clipper 759), a Boeing 727-235, N4737, was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from Miami, Florida, to Las Vegas, Nevada, with an en route stop at New Orleans, Louisiana. About 1607:57 central daylight time, Clipper 759, with 7 crewmembers, 1 nonrevenue passenger on the cockpit jumpseat, and 137 passengers on board, began its takeoff from runway 10 at the New Orleans International Airport, Kenner, Louisiana. At the time of flight 759’s takeoff, there were showers over the east end of the airport and to the east end of the airport along the airplane’s intended takeoff path. The winds at the time were gusty, variable, and swirling. Clipper 759 lifted off the runway, climbed to an altitude of between 95 feet to about 150 feet above the ground, and then began to descend. At 1608:57, the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) activated and “Whoop whoop pull up whoop. . . .” was recorded. The airplane struck a line of trees about 2,376 feet beyond the departure end of runway 10 at an altitude of about 50 feet above the ground. The airplane continued on an eastward track for another 2,234 feet hitting trees and houses and then crashed into a residential area about 4,100 feet from the end of the runway. The airplane was destroyed during the impact, explosion, and subsequent ground fire. One hundred forty-five persons on board the airplane and eight persons on the ground were killed in the crash. Six houses were destroyed; five houses were damaged substantially.1,2 Moreover, nine people on the ground suffered severe injuries. The aircraft hit the ground with a considerable left bank angle, firstly hitting an oak tree with the left wing, cutting the power and the telephone lines mounted on poles, then destroying the houses of the Schultz family, the neighboring house, and a few others, and eventually cartwheeled and broke into pieces. Kerosene spilled from the ruptured tanks and ignited although there was a thunderstorm with heavy rain; three members of the Schultz family staying in their house were badly burned, one of them died in hospital. Among those killed on the ground—actually the first victim along the swathe of destruction caused by the crashing/impacting aircraft—was Jennifer Schultz, then eleven years of age, who was in the carport (perhaps was talking on the telephone, sitting on a swing there as she used to do) when disaster struck. On March 11th, 2008, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a girl, Rylann, was born to the O’Bannion family. Rylann appeared to be developing earlier than usual, but she showed some curious habits, e.g., for some time she kept sleepwalking. She started complaining that her hair touching her back hurt her back; she drew dramatic fits about putting on shirts. The clothing, she would complain, hurt her back, neck, and shoulders—it felt like her skin was burning. Referring to a photograph she mentioned time and again, she had been “bigger” than on that picture, a statement that didn’t make sense to her mother at that point in time. Eventually, at the age of three years and five months, again touching the topic of having been “bigger” before, she said: “Mommy, I died. I was in our backyard. It was raining. I was alone but I wasn’t scared. Then the rain shocked me. It was raining a lot. There was a loud noise, then the rain shocked me. I floated up to the sky then.” As the O’Bannion family subscribed to the Catholic faith, reincarnation was not a subject to consider. Over time, Rylann added new bits of memory; at the age of five she started talking about what happened to her “in heaven” after her death (meeting God and Jesus, and ‘Grandy Sally’ whom she never had met in reality), and that “you can choose to come back if you died before you were supposed to.” Once, out of the blue, she said “I remember the name of Jennifer.”

This issue of the JSE includes a retraction of a paper by Alejandro Parra that we published in 2017. As far as I can determine, it’s the journal’s first official retraction of a published paper. The reason for this action is the author’s extensive plagiarism, both in that paper and in other published work (including a recent book whose publisher has since recalled all copies). It’s a sad state of affairs, of course—and perhaps the first of its kind in this particular and admittedly minor scientific domain. But it reminds me that six years ago, in Volume 29(2), we published a paper on retractions in science, and in that issue I seized the opportunity to editorialize further on the subject. I recycle that Editorial below. But before that, I must note that careful examination has found no additional evidence of plagiarism in the one other research article (in 2018) and the one book review we’ve published by Parra. I must also mention that, henceforth, the JSE will run routine plagiarism tests on papers accepted for publication. I thought this was a chore I’d left behind when I retired from teaching. However, I don’t want the JSE to emulate the person who said “I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m certain I can repeat them exactly.” EDITORIAL FROM JSE VOLUME 29(2), 189–192

Michael Nahm’s report in this issue of the JSE deftly presents many of the scholarly offenses perpetrated by Alejandro Parra. Some of those not mentioned had to do with Parra’s submissions to the JSE, and I feel it’s important to add those to the record. JSE published a retraction notice earlier this year (Volume 35, Issue 1) and provided examples of Parra’s plagiarism. Moreover, the Journal rejected another paper in which we found substantial plagiarism. But Parra’s boldest effort was his submission, under his own name, of a paper by an Argentinian author, Anna Conforte—in fact, a paper Parra published in his own newsletter. But Parra never indicated that the paper was written by someone else. Several people independently and carefully compared the English submission to the original Spanish. All agreed that Parra apparently simply auto-translated the paper to clumsy English and presented it as his own work.

A long-standing concern (or at least a belief) about ESP, held by both skeptics and believers in the paranormal, is that if telepathy really occurs, then it might pose a threat to mental privacy. And it’s easy enough to see what motivates that view. Presumably we like to think that we enjoy privileged access to our own mental states. But if others could come to know telepathically what we’re thinking or feeling, then (among other disquieting prospects) that would mean that our sins of the heart and most embarrassing or repulsive fleeting thoughts would potentially be available for public inspection. But how well-founded is that belief or concern? To get a grip on the issues, we should begin by considering the valuable distinction (perhaps first mentioned by C.D. Broad--Broad, 1953, 1962) between telepathic (or clairvoyant) cognition and telepathic (or clairvoyant) interaction. As you would expect, every instance of the former would be an instance of the latter, but the converse doesn’t hold—that is, ESP interaction may occur without ESP cognition. To see why this matters, we must take a closer look. If telepathic cognition occurs at all, it would presumably be a form of non-sensorial knowledge about another individual’s state of mind. More specifically, it would be a state of affairs in which so-called “percipient” A comes to know something about a telepathic interaction A has with another individual B. And what kind of things might A telepathically come to know? Well, presumably, in its most robust (and most intrusively intimidating) form, A would learn what’s going on in B’s mind—that is, that B is having certain thoughts, perceptions, or emotions. But it would still be an instance of telepathic cognition—admittedly, less intimidating or threatening to one’s mental privacy—if A learned merely that B was the telepathic cause of A’s current thought or experience—that is, that B was directly influencing or interfering with A’s stream of consciousness, whether or not A’s resulting thoughts or experiences were those of B or known by A to be those of B.

In my previous Editorial, I took a short detour from the main topic (telepathy and mental privacy) to comment briefly on one of the deeper flaws in the trendy, but seriously misguided, practice of replacing the terms “ESP” and “PK” with (respectively) “anomalous cognition” and “anomalous perturbation.” As I’ve discussed in great detail elsewhere (Braude, 2020), there’s actually quite a lot that’s wrong with this terminological folly. And it’s hardly the only time psi researchers have botched efforts to explicate or replace some of the field’s key concepts. The terminological error that I discussed in my earlier Editorial was the failure to accommodate the valuable distinction between ESP-cognition and ESP-interaction. And in that Editorial, I also noted that another, and increasingly trendy, practice likewise commits this error. It’s the strategy of abandoning the venerable arsenal of psi-terms and replacing them with a single expression—either “nonlocal awareness” or “nonlocal consciousness.” (The underlying rationale for this is usually that the traditional vocabulary is likely to be professionally toxic.) I’m thinking about these matters again because recent events have conspired to remind me of still another, but less trendy and prevalent, approach to parapsychological terminology that also deserves a few words of disapproval.

I’ve been both fascinated and distressed by the arguments raging over how best to respond to the covid-19 pandemic. In particular, I’ve been struck by the way people claim scientific authority for their confident assurances of what needs to be done. And I’m especially intrigued by the scorn they often lavish on those who hold differing views on what science is telling us. The heat generated by the resulting debates is strikingly similar to the heat generated by debates over the science connected with human-caused climate change. And in both cases, the disputants too often presuppose indefensibly naïve views about scientific authority and certitude, apparently unaware that even the allegedly most obvious logical truths lack the certainty attributed to scientific authority in these debates. As a rule, I dislike re-circulating my Editorials, but I think it’s time to resurrect one (modestly tweaked) from a few years ago, addressing precisely this issue (Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 379–386, 2017). …………………………………… “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” --Oscar Wilde I’ve often noticed how debates within the SSE community sometimes parallel debates in the political arena, perhaps especially with respect to the passion they elicit and the intolerance and condescension sometimes lavished on members of the “opposition.” Occasionally, of course, the debates in the SSE are nearly indistinguishable from those in the political arena—say, over the evidence for human-caused climate change. But what I find most striking is how the passion, intolerance, etc.—perhaps most often displayed by those defending whatever the “received” view happens to be—betrays either a surprising ignorance or else a seemingly convenient lapse of memory, one that probably wouldn’t appear in less emotionally-charged contexts. What impassioned partisans tend to ignore or forget concerns (a) the tentative nature of both scientific pronouncements and knowledge claims generally (including matters ostensibly much more secure than those under debate), as well as (b) the extensive network of assumptions on which every knowledge claim rests. So I’d like to offer what I hope will be a perspective-enhancer, concerning how even our allegedly most secure and fundamental pieces of a priori knowledge are themselves open to reasonable debate. A widespread, but naïve, view of logic is that no rational person could doubt its elementary laws. But that bit of popular “wisdom” is demonstrably false. And if that’s the case, then so much the worse for the degree of certitude we can expect in more controversial arenas. Let me illustrate with a few examples.[1] [1] I’m indebted to Aune, 1970 for much of what follows.

In this issue we present commentaries on a remarkably simplistic critique of psi research published recently by Arthur Reber and James Alcock—hereafter, R&A (Reber & Alcock, 2019a, 2019b). I believe the rebuttals that follow, from Cardeña and others, effectively demolish R&A’s critique. But I also believe a few additional points are worth making. These highlight not only R&A’s ignorance of—indeed, refusal to consider—relevant data, but also their general conceptual naivete. And I’ll focus primarily on R&A’s assertion that alleged psi phenomena are impossible. Note, R&A aren’t merely making the likewise inadequate but at least superficially more sophisticated claim that psi phenomena are initially improbable relative to some well-supported background theory. But even if we were to concede that the phenomena (including small-scale ESP and PK) are initially improbable relative to an accepted background theory, we’re still not compelled to deny their reality. We need only show that the direct evidence in their favor overrides their initial and conditionalimprobability. That, I believe, is easy to do, but of course, R&A are fortified by their refusal to consider the data. Moreover (as some of the commentaries note), R&A greatly overestimate the level of support for what they take to be the background physical theory. In any case, the more relevant points for now are these. First, there are serious reasons for thinking that no well-supported broad scientific theory (e.g., quantum physics, or the general or special theories of relativity) precludes the existence of any specific mental phenomenon, normal or paranormal. Arguably (I think persuasively), those phenomena are simply outside the domain of physics. I’ll return to this point shortly. For that matter, the existence of ESP is compatible even with theories of perception in psychology. Of course, those theories are much more limited in scope than the grand theories of physics or (say) evolutionary theory. So even if theories of perception did prohibit the existence of ESP, the failure of that prediction would matter little to science as a whole. But in fact, those theories merely describe the operation of the familiar or known sense modalities. It’s simply not their business to legislate the full range of possible forms of information acquisition or organic interaction. So if evidence leads us to accept the existence of previously unacknowledged perceptual modalities, psychology would simply find its domain expanded.

I’ve recently found myself discussing apparitions with some SSE members and various other correspondents. And to my dismay I’ve discovered that many suppose, all too readily, that when apparitional cases require paranormal explanations, they should be viewed as instances of telepathic interaction. I addressed this topic quite some time ago (in Braude, 1997), arguing that the telepathic interpretation of apparitions is problematical—at least as an approach to apparitions generally. And back then I expected (admittedly, rather foolishly) that my trenchant and extended analysis would settle the matter decisively. So now that I’ve been humbled once again by this latest indication of my lack of influence, I’d like to revisit the topic briefly and review its essentials, in the hope that some might then adopt a more sophisticated and nuanced approach. Apparitional phenomena have intrigued me for a long time. One reason is that they reach into all corners of the human population. Even hard-nosed, otherwise outwardly skeptical academics have confided their apparitional experiences to me and acknowledged they were baffled and impressed by them. That august group even includes an ex father-in-law (an anatomist at Ohio State) and my dissertation advisor (a distinguished and suitably hard-nosed philosopher). From the earliest days of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the dominant view, at least within parapsychology, has been that if apparitions aren’t simply internally-generated (e.g., exhaustion- or drug- or illness-induced) hallucinations, they can then be explained by appealing to various sorts of telepathic interaction. And I suspect that’s still the prevailing view. So for example, according to this view we’d understand apparitions of the dead to result from telepathic interactions between a postmortem and an ante-mortem individual, and we’d explain apparitions of the living entirely in terms of ante-mortem telepathic interactions. Thus, a so-called “crisis apparition” would be understood as a kind of moment-of-death (or peril) telepathic reaching out from the agent to the percipient.

In this issue we present commentaries on a remarkably simplistic critique of psi research published recently by Arthur Reber and James Alcock—hereafter, R&A (Reber & Alcock, 2019a, 2019b). I believe the rebuttals that follow, from Cardeña and others, effectively demolish R&A’s critique. But I also believe a few additional points are worth making. These highlight not only R&A’s ignorance of—indeed, refusal to consider—relevant data, but also their general conceptual naivete. And I’ll focus primarily on R&A’s assertion that alleged psi phenomena are impossible. Note, R&A aren’t merely making the likewise inadequate but at least superficially more sophisticated claim that psi phenomena are initially improbable relative to some well-supported background theory. But even if we were to concede that the phenomena (including small-scale ESP and PK) are initially improbable relative to an accepted background theory, we’re still not compelled to deny their reality. We need only show that the direct evidence in their favor overrides their initial and conditional improbability. That, I believe, is easy to do, but of course, R&A are fortified by their refusal to consider the data. Moreover (as some of the commentaries note), R&A greatly overestimate the level of support for what they take to be the background physical theory. In any case, the more relevant points for now are these. First, there are serious reasons for thinking that no well-supported broad scientific theory (e.g., quantum physics, or the general or special theories of relativity) precludes the existence of any specific mental phenomenon, normal or paranormal. Arguably (I think persuasively), those phenomena are simply outside the domain of physics. I’ll return to this point shortly. For that matter, the existence of ESP is compatible even with theories of perception in psychology. Of course, those theories are much more limited in scope than the grand theories of physics or (say) evolutionary theory. So even if theories of perception did prohibit the existence of ESP, the failure of that prediction would matter little to science as a whole. But in fact, those theories merely describe the operation of the familiar or known sense modalities. It’s simply not their business to legislate the full range of possible forms of information acquisition or organic interaction. So if evidence leads us to accept the existence of previously unacknowledged perceptual modalities, psychology would simply find its domain expanded.

Many take it for granted that evidence for precognition would be evidence for retrocausation—that is, counterclockwise causal chains in which future states of affairs cause earlier states of affairs. So for example, when a person has a veridical precognitive dream of a future plane crash, they would say that the dream was caused by the later event. However, there are alternative and reasonable ways of interpreting the evidence for precognition, even after we rule out explanations of the data in terms of nonparanormal processes. These alternative approaches still appeal to the operation of psi, but they appeal only to clockwise causal chains. Moreover, the alternative approaches seem to avoid some nagging problems with the retrocausal analysis. Let us begin by surveying our explanatory options.

This book accomplishes the nearly miraculous achievement of being both substantive and highly entertaining. According to Barrington, “JOTT,” derived from “Just One of Those Things,” stands for a kind of “spatial discontinuity”—namely, a motley class of events in which objects appear or disappear in mysterious ways. For example, some can be classified as “Walkabouts,” in which “an article disappears from the place where it was known to have been and is found in another place.” Similarly, in “Comebacks,” “a known article disappears from the place where it was known to have been and later is found back in the same place.” And in “Turn-ups,” “a known article from an uncertain location appears in a place where it is known not to have been before it was found there.” The other primary categories in Barrington’s taxonomy are Flyaway, Windfall, and Trade-in (the reader might be able to guess what these are). The central contention of this book is that JOTT phenomena merit the attention of psi researchers and theorists of the paranormal. I’ve often lamented that lab research in parapsychology is premature, because we have no decent idea what kind of organic function scientists are trying to investigate under inevitably straitjacketed laboratory conditions. Not only are we ignorant of psi's finer‑grained features, we don't even know what its natural history might be–for example, whether it has an evolutionary role or primary or overall purpose or function (although there=s no shortage of speculation on these matters). Of course, there=s no reason to think that psychic phenomena occur only for parapsychologists, much less only when those parapsychologists set out to look for them. After all, a major motivation for conducting formal studies is that we have evidence of psi occurring spontaneously in life. Moreover, there are good reasons for thinking that psi might be triggered unconsciously or subconsciously, in which case it might also occur surreptitiously. But since we=re a very long way from understanding the nature and function of everyday psi, we don't know whether psychic functioning is an ability (like musical ability) or whether it=s a brute endowment such as the capacity to see or to move one's limbs. Obviously, then, in the absence of this rudimentary knowledge, we have no idea whether (or to what extent) our experimental procedures are even appropriate to the phenomena. After all, many human capacities or endowments are situation-sensitive and can only be evaluated in real-life contexts.

I’ve often noted how discussions of the evidence suggesting postmortem survival fail to consider adequately alternative interpretations in terms of dissociative processes, and in particular the apparent ease with which dissociation either facilitates the operation of living-agent psi or unleashes otherwise latent creative capacities that might suggest survival to the unwary (see, e.g., Braude 2003). I suppose it should come as no surprise that a related phenomenon sometimes occurs as well—namely, that evidence suggesting dissociative processes might in fact be evidence for the operation of psi. An interesting recent paper by Hong Wang Fung in the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation illustrates the point (Fung 2018). Hung’s paper is titled “The Phenomenon of Pathological Dissociation in the Ancient Chinese Medicine Literature.” And I commend Hung for unearthing some interesting material. He summarizes six obscure, old cases described originally in terms antedating the development of present-day psychological concepts. One case in particular stood out for me. Hung reports it as follows.