Reality shopping; a consumer's guide to new age hokum

Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986 by Alan M. MacRobert

Almost everyone with a paranormal theory to tout, I have discovered, is unwilling to scrutinize the phenomenon. Whatever the claim, chances are he won't examine it closely even when he gets an excellent chance to do so. I get the impression that, deep down, paranormal claimants are afraid they'll see there's nothing there. Because science, the art of looking carefully to determine the truth, is precisely what they're afraid of, they'll reject its ability to assess their claim, perhaps with a snide reference to the inadequacy of "linear, left-brain, Western science."

Somebody else Is On the Moon contains a fine example of this fear of scrutiny. All of Leonard's moon constructions are at the very limit of photo resolution. When he had a chance to get better photos and to see the same terrain more clearly, he didn't.

On the other hand, you might expect John Taylor, a physicist the New Scientist called one of the top 20 scientists in the world, to be suspicious of psychics who attempted to avoid his close scrutiny. Yet his 1975 book Superminds enthusiastically described his experiments with "Geller children," kids who could bend forks and spoons "psychokinetically," just like uri Geller. The trouble was, they could only do it when no one was looking. Taylor even gave this aversion to scientific scrutiny a name: the "shyness effect." He accomodatingly designed "sealed" tubes with the objects to be bent placed inside, and sent them home with the children. When they returned bent the next day, still sealed in the tubes, he considered this proof of psychic abilities.

Taylor refused to see the magician, the Amazing Randi, who felt he could explain the shyness effect in more prosaic terms; cheating. Perhaps Taylor himself had become afraid of close scrutiny. Randi called on him anyway, disguised as a reporter, and found Taylor particularly easy to fool. In his book The Truth About Uri Geller, Randi describes having no trouble at all opening and closing the crudely sealed tubes in Taylor's presence, even managing to bend an aluminum bar while Taylor was momentarily distracted, scratch on it "Bent by Randi," and replace it among Taylor's collection undetected!

The final blow to Taylor's shyness effect occurred when an alternative team of scientists decided to replicate Taylor's findings. Six of his metal-bending prodigies were tested in a room with one observer, who noticed no cheating even though "psychokinetic" metal-bending occurred repeatedly. But a hidden camera recorded the truth about the shyness effect, as reported by the investigators in the September 4, 1975, issue of the scientific journal Nature: "A put the rod under her foot and tried to bend it; B, E, and F used two hands to bend the spoon . . . while D tried to hide his hands under a table to bend the spoon." Today, Taylor has retracted many of his 1975 claims.

When my father was investigating mediums, they often claimed that the spirits would stay away if there was a skeptic in the room. So if an investigator frisked the medium for gadgets, the spirits would fail to materialize. This is a very convenient explanation for why paranormal phenomena disappear when someone looks closely, and it is invoked in many ways by New Age theorists. The Amazing Randi is strongly disliked by the modern parapsychological community, and quite unwelcome at psychic demonstrations because of this "skeptics effect." A simpler explanation for why something isn't there when you look carefully is that it isn't there at all. Beware of anyone who says you mustn't look closely.