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Immense Claims. As parapsychology gains new respectability, so do its terms gain wide currency: "psi" for any psychic phenomenon; "clairvoyance" for the awareness of events and objects that lie outside the perimeters of the five senses; "out-of-body" experience for seeming to journey to a place that may be miles from the body; "psychokinesis" for the mental ability to influence physical objects; "precognition" for the foreknowledge of events, from the fall of dice to the prediction of political assassinations; and the wide-ranging term ESP for extrasensory perception.
For all its articulate spokesmen and scientific terminology, however, the new world of psi still has a serious credibility problem. One reason is that like any growth industry or pop phenomenon, it has attracted a fair share of hustlers. Indeed, the psychic-phenomena boom may contain more charlatans and conjurers, more naïfs and gullibles than can be found on the stage and in the audience of ten Ringling Brothers circuses. The situation is not helped at all by the "proofs" that fail to satisfy traditional canons of scientific investigations. Despite the published discoveries, despite the indefatigable explorations of the psychic researchers, no one has yet been able to document experiments sufficiently to convince the infidel. For many, doubt grows larger with each extravagant claim.
To Science and Mathematics Analyst Martin Gardner (Relativity for the Million, Ambidextrous Universe), announcements of psychic phenomena belong not to the march of science but to the pageant of publicity. "Uri Geller, The Secret Life of Plants, telepathy, ESP, the incomplete conclusions of Koestler —all seem part of a new uncritical enthusiasm for pseudo science," says Gardner. "The claims are immense, the proof nonexistent. The researchers, almost without exception, are emotionally committed to finding phenomena. And few are aware of the controls necessary in a field in which deception, conscious or unconscious, is all too familiar."
Daniel Cohen, former managing editor of Science Digest and author of the debunking volume Myths of the Space Age, remains unpersuaded by what he sees through the Koestlerian keyhole. "After decades of research and experiments," Cohen observes, "the parapsychologists are not one step closer to acceptable scientific proof of psychic phenomena. Examining the slipshod work of the modern researchers, one begins to wonder if any proof exists."
The criticism that psychics find hardest to counter comes not from scientists but from conjurers. Theoretically, magicians have no place in serious science. But they are entertainers whose business it is to deceive; thus they feel that they are better qualified to spot chicanery than scientists, who can be woefully naive about the gimmicks and techniques that charlatans may use for mystical effects. James Randi, who appears on television as "the Amazing Randi," duplicates many of Uri Geller's achievements with a combination of sleight of hand, misdirected attention and patented paraphernalia, then calls them feats of clay.