Edwin May

Edwin C. May is a particle physicist who served as principal investigator of the U.S. government's remote viewing research program from 1985, succeeding Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute, and who moved the program to SAIC in 1991 when SRI withdrew from the contract. He directed the program through its final phase until the CIA's 1995 termination and commissioned the American Institutes for Research evaluation that recommended the program's end. Of the government program's principal investigators, May was the most scientifically rigorous in design and the most cautious about operational claims, treating the research as an ongoing scientific investigation rather than an established intelligence capability.

Background and SRI Entry

May completed a Ph.D. in nuclear and particle physics from the University of Pittsburgh and had a background in experimental physics research before joining the SRI remote viewing program in 1976. He worked initially as a research scientist under Puthoff and Russell Targ, contributing to experimental design and data analysis while the program was in its most active CIA-funded phase. His experimental physics background gave him a different methodological orientation than Puthoff, who had trained as an electrical engineer and was more willing to accept operational application of early-phase research results.

Principal Investigator (1985-1995)

When Puthoff left SRI in 1985, May assumed the principal investigator role for the government research contract. He shifted the program's emphasis toward rigorous experimental methodology, imposing tighter statistical standards and more controlled experimental protocols than had been standard under the SRI program's earlier phases.

In 1991, SRI withdrew from the remote viewing research contract. May negotiated the transfer of the contract to SAIC, relocating the research to the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory within SAIC's structure. Under his direction, the SAIC phase was conducted with careful attention to experimental controls and protocol documentation, reflecting May's view that the field's credibility depended on methodological rigor rather than operational demonstrations.

AIR Evaluation and Termination

When the CIA, which had taken over program management from DIA in 1991, commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the STAR GATE program in 1995, May's experimental database from the SAIC phase provided the primary data for Jessica Utts's positive assessment. Utts, a University of California Davis statistician, concluded that May's experimental results met the statistical standard for establishing an anomalous effect. Ray Hyman, the skeptical evaluator, acknowledged the statistical results but argued that methodological weaknesses precluded firm conclusions.

The AIR report recommended termination. May disagreed with this recommendation but accepted that the decision had been made. He argued that the program was ended before the science had matured sufficiently to determine whether operational applications were feasible, and that the AIR evaluation's split findings indicated genuine uncertainty rather than a resolved negative conclusion.

Post-STARGATE Research

After the STAR GATE program's termination, May founded the Laboratories for Fundamental Research (LFR) in Palo Alto, California, a private research organization continuing anomalous cognition research. He published extensively in scientific journals on experimental parapsychology, focusing on statistical analysis of remote viewing data and theoretical frameworks for understanding what physical mechanism might account for the observed effects. He proposed "decision augmentation theory" (DAT) as a framework for interpreting the statistical patterns in remote viewing data without requiring conventional psychic transmission.

May continued to serve as a consultant on anomalous cognition research for academic and government-adjacent projects after STAR GATE's termination, representing continuity between the government-funded program and the subsequent private research that drew on the government program's methodological legacy.