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 custody of the program from the DIA in 1995 at the direction of Congress, contracted the American Institutes for Research in June 1995 to evaluate it (1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate), May, as principal investigator, was asked "to list those studies which he believes provide the strongest evidence" and every unique study since the 1988 National Research Council report. His memorandum of July 25, 1995, listed ten SAIC experiments, among them "Entropy II" (90 trials, effect size 0.550, p = 9.1 × 10^-8), "ERD AC Behavior" (70 trials, 0.303), "Remote observation" (48 trials, 0.361), and "AC with binary coding" (40 trials, −0.067). Jessica Utts took them, with the 1988 analysis of the SRI database, as establishing that "psychic functioning has been well established"; Ray Hyman agreed the effects were "too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes" but held that ten experiments from one laboratory could not establish a phenomenon. May told the panel that "approximately 20 percent of the information supplied by a viewer is accurate," and AIR noted that throughout the experiments "only one judge, apparently the Principal Investigator, was used in assessing matches." The report of September 29, 1995, recommended against continuing the operational program. May's commentary in the Journal of Parapsychology the next year described the review as the result of "a Congressionally Directed Activity" and gave the report's public release as November 28, 1995.¹

The CIA's chronology of the transfer records for February 28, 1995: "CIA met with DIA principal investigator at SAIC, Dr. Ed May. All-day technical exchange." An ORD memorandum for the record of April 20, 1995, its author redacted, states that "Ed May of SAIC called this morning and volunteered to send me unsolicited information he had obtained from a 'remote viewer' named 'Joe' relating to the Oklahoma City Bombing," that ORD had no means of "tasking or disseminating this type of information," that May asked for a law-enforcement contact and, told to send it to his former contracting officer's representative at DIA, "said they didn't get along"; given an FBI number that evening, "he asked if this would be a 'cold call' because he didn't want to sound like a 'lunatic,'" and "agreed reluctantly" to call. The Director of Research and Development's covering memorandum to the Counterterrorist Center the same day: "We attach no credibility to this information, and currently have no way to evaluate it. We have asked Dr. Ed May of SAIC to forward this information to you directly. Please direct any questions regarding how the information was acquired to Dr. May. He has been the primary contract investigator in this area, and we have not completed our evaluation of his past efforts."⁹⁰⁰

The 1996 Commentary

May "was asked by the CIA to provide administrative support, technical documents, and briefings on an as-needed basis for the review," under a small contract to SAIC, from which he resigned on November 28, 1995, the day the report was released. His commentary in the Journal of Parapsychology argued that "there is compelling evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun," by "limiting the research and operations data sets to exclude positive findings, by purposefully not interviewing historically significant participants, by ignoring previous extensive Department of Defense program reviews, and by using the questionable National Research Council's investigation of parapsychology as the starting point." He noted that AIR's president, David Goslin, had also overseen the NRC's 1988 report; that of the seventeen members of the SRI and SAIC oversight committees and review board "only one was contacted by the CIA"; that his memorandum of June 6, 1995, "the existence of anomalous mental phenomena cannot be statistically determined from the results of a single laboratory," was "ignored by fiat"; and that a Senate staff member told him the CIA's briefing to Congress gave eight bullet points to Hyman's conclusions and four to Utts's. He quoted Jessica Utts's letter of December 19, 1995: "I was explicitly asked by AIR staff NOT to mention the NRC report in my review!" and "we were shown very little of the 'operational' remote-viewing work"; and Robert Rosenthal on the NRC's 1988 request that he omit his ganzfeld section, "censorship did not occur." He quoted Joe McMoneagle's 1984 Legion of Merit citation, "more than 200 missions, addressing over 150 essential elements of information," reported "at the highest echelons," and traced a line from ARPA's George Lawrence and Hyman being refused access at SRI in 1974, through Lawrence's commissioning of the NRC study in 1985, to Goslin's AIR review. Of the program's last years: a 1993 attempt to move it to the CIA "found no willing recipient," the last DIA officer "had little knowledge of the program," and "the program was in shambles." "I am forced to conclude that either the AIR investigators were not competent to conduct a proper review of such a complex program, a view to which I do not subscribe, or they knew exactly what they were doing: They wanted to demonstrate that AC lacked usefulness for intelligence operations. They did so by construction rather than by careful analysis." On Nightline that November he said: "I think about 15% of our data, over 1500 separate remote viewing trials, are of such a quality that you might think they were sketched," and, after Robert Gates said the work was "better done on the outside": "I couldn't agree with Director Gates more."²

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.