David Marks

David F. Marks, of the department of psychology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, began "an investigation in 1975, in association with Richard Kammann," of the remote-viewing experiments of Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute. Their letter to Nature, received July 2, 1977, accepted May 31, 1978, and printed on August 17, 1978: "Targ and Puthoff have described investigations of an extrasensory remote viewing ability which they claim may be widely distributed in the general population. We have carried out duplicate experiments, but our results do not verify their conclusions." Its conclusion, as they later quoted it: "Our investigation of the SRI remote viewing experiment with Pat Price forces the conclusion that the successful identification of target sites by judges is impossible unless multiple extraneous cues which were available in the original unedited transcripts are utilized. Investigators of remote viewing should take much more care to ensure that such cues are not available. Furthermore, the listing of targets given to judges should be randomized and not presented in the same sequence as that which occurred in the experiments."¹²

The Otago Experiments and the Cues

Five series of experiments at Otago, "with completely negative results," preceded the critique: "Our decision to break normal protocol and accompany the subject to the target at the end of each experiment was an attempt to gain a better understanding of why our subjects consistently reported successful remote viewing while judges consistently failed to make correct matches," a process the authors named "subjective validation." The SRI judge, Arthur Hastings, "agreed to let me see the Price transcripts" and, "in a letter dated 26 May 1977," told them "that, for the Price series of experiments, he had been given a typed list of targets in the same order as the table in Mind-Reach, i.e., in the correct order." Using "only the cues and the target list," a method they called "remote judging," judges in New Zealand matched the transcripts without visiting the sites: "If in the transcript the experimenter states 'Nothing like having three successes behind you' (Price, transcript 4), it would be irrational to place it earlier than fourth in the series." The book's remote-viewing chapters end: "it appears to us that the remote viewing effect is, at present, nothing more than a massive artifact of poor methodology and wishful thinking."²

Puthoff wrote to Marks on July 10, 1978: "With regard to your assumption that the judges knew the order of target visitation, that is incorrect. Neither the single judge (Hastings) nor the panel of five judges were given the order; they were kept blind"; and on August 25, 1980: "You are correct that, in the case of the Price series, the published list of the targets was in the order of target usage, and that, furthermore, when the target list was provided to the judge, it was inadvertently (through an error) given in the same order." In May 1979 Puthoff declined to release the transcripts, "since premature disclosure would prevent further blind analysis work... I do not think it will be in 1979, however, as our analysis contracts extend beyond that; thus, I doubt it will be in time for your book." Hastings "loaned me a complete set of nine transcripts from the Price series and showed me six of the nine Hammid transcripts," then "said he felt 'paranoid' about releasing this information and soon requested their return as they had become 'confidential.'" Of the Hammid transcripts: "I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that four of the six Hammid transcripts actually carried dates. Hastings told me one transcript even carried the name of the associated target"; twenty-four cues in six transcripts ("This is the 18th of September," "Russell Targ has gone to the remote site," "Our second experiment of the morning," "Hal has gone to a second target") let a remote judge in New Zealand reach "a sum of ranks of 8 giving a p value of 0.001," which "exceeded that obtained by Hastings." Hastings had received "three target lists" for the Hammid series, one randomized and two not. Marks's 1982 conclusion: "Well-controlled experiments never find the RV effect, while poorly controlled experiments nearly always do. Data suppression, flawed methodology, and lack of replication lead to the conclusion that remote viewing is a cognitive illusion, an artifact of human error and wishful thinking."³

The Replies

Puthoff and Targ's answer, "Information Transmission in Remote Viewing Experiments: II," dated January 1979 and "submitted for publication to Nature," survives in the CIA's files. It called the critique a "conjecture," reported that Charles Tart had the Price transcripts edited of "any additional phrases for which even the most remote post hoc cue argument could be made" and rejudged by a judge selected by a five-transcript test, with "seven of the nine" matched, and added: "We will have to await disclosure of the Marks-Kammann protocols to determine whether failure on their part can be traced to differences in procedure." Tart's accompanying note: "I would hypothesize that Marks and Kammann were unable to obtain significant results in their reanalysis of the subset of the Price series because their judges either lacked the necessary discriminative skills and/or were not sufficiently motivated to use them effectively." Marks replied in Nature in 1981 ("Sensory cues invalidate remote viewing experiments") and, with Christopher Scott, in 1986 ("Remote viewing exposed"). Ray Hyman's review for the 1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate cited the book's account of judges convinced by wrong matches: "This phenomenon of subjective validation is pervasive, compelling and powerful."⁴

Later Career

Marks was senior lecturer in psychology at Otago in 1982, one of five founding members of the New Zealand Skeptics in February 1986, who "used his knowledge" of remote viewing "to test the claim" of a New Zealand psychic, and left "for a professional chair in a new university in London"; he became professor of psychology at City University London, where he issued a second edition of the book in 2000 with three new chapters on remote viewing "including the 'psychic spying' attempted during Cold War days."⁵