Solar-periodic full moon effect in the Fourmilab RetroPsychoKinesis Project experiment data: an exploratory study

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2005 by Eckhard Etzold

The lore about the moon's effect on the animal and human behavior has existed for centuries. The full moon seems to be connected with a higher accident rate. The notions of "full moon madness," "lunacy," and "lunatic" imply a relationship of altered states of consciousness with lunar influences. The tales of werewolves and moon magic bring the moon into connection with anomalous phenomena. In the Holy Bible, people pray to the Lord that the moon shall not "smite you by night" (Ps. 121:6, Revised Standard Version). The full moon is also associated with important spiritual events: Passover and Easter are always at Saturday and Sunday after the full moon of the vernal equinox. The time of a solar and lunar eclipse is considered to be a time of extreme spiritual importance and of successful prayer: "The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and manifest day. And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." (Acts 2:20-21; Joel 2:31-32) Is this only superstitious belief or does the lore about the effects of the moon have a grain of truth? Does the moon affect the results of our thinking, wishing, and praying?

In the 1960s, Andrija Puharich observed during telepathy experiments an increase in the strength of effects at the time of full moon and new moon (Puharich, 1973). In the 1970s, Stanley Krippner and colleagues noticed increased psi abilities at the time of full moon. They wrote:

   The data of 80 night time sessions involving ESP in dreams
   suggest a significant relationship with the lunar cycle. It
   is hoped that other investigators will inspect their data to
   see whether similar patterns emerge or, better yet, design
   experiments to probe this association more thoroughly.
   (Krippner, Becker, Cavallo, & Washburn, 1972, p. 18)

In the 1990s Radin and Rebman mentioned that psychokinesis effects also arise in everyday life and they sought to test such effects particularly in the casino: "Thus, if one accepts that precognition and psychokinesis are widely distributed human abilities, then, in principle, they may also be present in the casino" (Radin & Rebman, 1998, p. 193). In 1998, they claimed, based on analyses of data from Las Vegas casinos, that the payout rate (the quotient of income and payout rate) varies over a period of time and is correlated with some environmental variables. They found that the peak effect occurred within 1 day of the full moon. They supposed that "some environmental factors may be related to predictable variations in psi performance" (p. 193). One of these environmental factors is the influence of the geomagnetic field: Scores in free response anomalous cognition experiments are negatively correlated with geomagnetic fluctuations (Spottiswoode, 1990). Another one is the tidal effect, the moon's gravitational influence on the earth.

Casino data are hard to get. But for those who are interested in examining the anomalies claimed by Radin and Rebman there is another possibility. Because they reduce the anomalies observed in the casino payout rates to psychokinesis and/or precognition (Radin, 1997, p. 175), this opens the opportunity for the direct use of psychokinesis (PK) or retropsychokinesis data for testing the findings of the Radin and Rebman study. For this test the only public PK database in the World Wide Web was used and analyzed: the quite extensive database of the Fourmilab RetroPsychoKinesis Project.

A first attempt of the author to replicate the findings of Radin and Rebman with the Fourmilab retroPK data seemed to confirm a positive, significant effect in the full moon interval (Etzold, 2000). In the summer of 2000 the situation changed rapidly. A significant and strong negative effect in the full moon interval canceled the entire accumulated positive deviation. The replication with the new data failed (Etzold, 2002a). The reason for the unsuccessful replication will be considered in this study.

Many serious studies on lunar effects in human behavior and experience have failed to find any significant effects (Bordlein, 2002; Culver, Rotton, & Kelly, 1988; Guiard, 2002; Wunder & Schardtmuller, 2002). Is Radin's and Rebman's study now the great exception? All of the aforementioned studies showed defects that make it difficult to test the claim of a lunar effect. Krippner and his colleagues analyzed the data of 80 nighttime sessions, 2.7 lunar cycles if these sessions were executed day by day. This is a very small time interval to make a general statement about a lunar effect. A defect of the Radin and Rebman study might be the fact that it represents only one pilot study without any consistent replication. The large error bars in Figure 4 of the Radin and Rebman study (1998, p. 204) more likely indicate a nonsignificant deviation (Boller, 2002). In another publication, Radin demonstrates a replication with new data from lottery payout rates. However, this replication shows the lowest payout rate exactly at the time of the full moon, which Radin explained with increased geomagnetic field values at this time (Radin, 1997, p. 187). In contrast to that, other studies associate high PK effects such as poltergeists or retarding the hemolysis of red blood cells with high geomagnetic field activity (Braud & Dennis, 1989; Gearhart & Persinger, 1986; Palmer, Baumann, & Simmonds, 2005). The hypotheses here are based on Radin and Rebman's observation that low geomagnetic field activity is associated with high positive retroPK effects whereas high geomagnetic field activity might be associated with high negative retroPK effects.