Jessica Utts

Jessica Utts is a statistician and professor at the University of California, Davis, who served as one of two independent assessors in the 1995 American Institutes for Research (AIR) evaluation of the STAR GATE remote viewing program commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency. Her positive assessment, published alongside Ray Hyman's skeptical counterpart assessment, concluded that the program's laboratory data showed genuine anomalous effects that could not be attributed to chance.¹

Academic Career

Utts earned her PhD in statistics from Penn State University in 1978 and joined the faculty of the University of California, Davis, where she rose to become chair of the Department of Statistics. She also served as president of the American Statistical Association in 2016. Her research interests included the statistical analysis of parapsychology data, an area she approached from the standpoint of determining whether the data met standard statistical criteria for a real effect.

Utts became involved in parapsychology research assessment through her statistical expertise. She had previously co-authored analyses of remote viewing and psi experimental databases and was not a programmatic skeptic; she applied standard statistical methodology to the question of whether the data showed effects beyond chance.¹

1995 AIR Evaluation

When the CIA commissioned the AIR to evaluate STAR GATE, AIR project director Edwin May provided Utts and Hyman with the program's experimental database - the accumulated laboratory remote viewing sessions from the program's SRI and SAIC phases, including the work of Edwin May's Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at SAIC.

Utts concluded in her assessment that the data showed "a genuine anomalous transfer of information" with an effect size large enough to be meaningful and replicable across independent laboratories. She calculated that the probability of obtaining the observed results by chance was less than one in a billion. She argued that the program's laboratory effect was real and that further scientific investigation was warranted, while acknowledging that the mechanism was unknown and the operational application was a separate question from the laboratory finding.

Her assessment explicitly compared the remote viewing effect size to other accepted but unexplained phenomena and argued that the scientific standard for accepting or rejecting the data should be the same as in any other field of inquiry.²

Hyman Disagreement

Ray Hyman's independent assessment reached opposite conclusions from the same data. Hyman acknowledged that the results could not be explained by chance, but argued that methodological issues - primarily potential experimenter effects, inadequate controls against sensory leakage, and inadequate blind conditions - provided alternative explanations that precluded accepting the data as evidence for remote viewing.

The AIR's final report, drawing on both assessments, found no demonstrated practical intelligence utility and recommended termination. Utts disputed the operational conclusions, maintaining that the laboratory evidence was real and had been overshadowed by the question of whether operational military applications had been demonstrated.

Both assessments were subsequently published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1996, where they have served as reference papers for the psi debate.²

Significance

Utts's 1995 AIR assessment is frequently cited in parapsychology literature as the most rigorous statistician's endorsement of a psi effect in a government-funded context. Critics, including Hyman, maintain that her analysis did not adequately account for methodological confounds; supporters cite her credentials and statistical methodology as making her conclusions difficult to dismiss on purely methodological grounds. The exchange between Utts and Hyman in the Journal of Scientific Exploration remains the most focused technical debate over the STAR GATE experimental data.²