Printable Version, Best Evidence

April 2001

Best Evidence
A Book by Michael Schmicker

by Dick Allgire

Michael Schmicker became interested in the paranormal while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. “The Thai people believe in an unseen world,” he explains, “and some of that rubbed off on me.” His degree in philosophy also gave him an open-minded view of reality. “My philosophy training tells me that the definition of “reality” is very hard to pin down, and that science alone cannot describe it accurately or completely.

Schmicker’s new book, “Best Evidence” is billed as “an Investigative Reporter’s Three-Year Quest to Uncover the Best Scientific Evidence for ESP, Psychokinesis, Mental Healing, Ghosts and Poltergeists, Dowsing, Mediums, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation and Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear.”

Remote viewing is also mentioned in his book, although it doesn’t go into the field as much as remote viewers might want. (Perhaps RV could be the subject of his next book?) But this book is loaded with references to scientific studies, surprising poll results, and anecdotes that show the paranormal is far more accepted than many realize.

Schmicker is primarily a business and technology writer. He is the former editor of Hawaii Business Magazine, and is currently the Vice President of Pacific Marine, a company that designs exotic hull forms from the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research.

In Schmicker’s opinion, “98 percent of what we believe is paranormal is probably not -- but that last 2 percent (based on my research, and in my opinion) is truly paranormal, and there's excellent, quality scientific evidence out there to allow intelligent, rational people to reach that conclusion.” And he adds, “There’s no need to apologize for that last 2 percent.”

Some remote viewers resent being lumped in with ghosts, mediums, and channeling, and Schmicker agrees that remote viewing is out in front in terms of scientific proof obtained under controlled conditions.

“Where RV gets a leg up,” he explains, “is in having tightly-controlled lab experiments to point back to. It's definitely more scientific if your standard for scientific evidence requires laboratory experiments and excludes field investigations. Ghosts and poltergeists and many other paranormal phenomena have to be studied primarily in the field.”

“RV has to face it's own problems,” he continues. “Too many people are claiming success without being able to offer any scientific evidence for it. My conclusion after researching RV is that excellent, quality scientific evidence exists for its reality. I think Puthoff and Targ's early SRI research with Pat Price and Ingo Swann is stunning and extremely defendable.”

On the other hand Schmicker says, “I also suspect the claims of many RV practitioners. There needs to be more controlled testing and independently verified claims. If you look carefully at the course ESP research has taken from Dr. Rhine's experiments in the early 1930s up to today's Ganzfield debate, you realize that skeptics played a valuable role in attacking wishful thinking, sloppy controls and poor experiment design. We all have to be more careful in our claims if we want others to take us seriously. That said, I personally have no doubt that the best RV experiments are solid proof for the reality of the phenomenon.”

Schmicker attended the RV Conference 2000 in Mesquite, Nevada last year. His impression of conference? “I felt there was the normal mix of dedicated, serious RV experts and practitioners and the usual large contingent of "New Age" hangers-on. I found some of the presentations of little scientific value, others of great value. I thought Jessica Utts defense of RV and Stargate to be excellent.”

So what can remote viewers do to make the case for RV?

“You already have [made the case] to any open-minded person,” says Schmicker. “You will never be able to legitimize it to debunkers because no amount of evidence, however good, will ever convince them. In the book, I quote Jessica Utts’ comment from the CIA-funded AIR report. The American Institutes for Research final report concluded that the laboratory ESP (RV) experiments were statistically significant. For her part, program reviewer Dr. Jessica Utts agreed. Their success was not due to chance, methodological flaws in the experiments, or fraud. From here on, she recommended, researchers should focus on how the phenomenon worked, not on proving whether it existed "since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data."

“That said,” he continues, “I think you [members of the remote viewing community] have a PR problem, like the whole paranormal field has. Anybody can claim anything, and true RV experts are lumped in with the wannabees in the media and public's mind. One way out is to make sure your experiments are written up in papers that can pass muster in at least the refereed journals of sympathetic organizations -- the Society for Scientific Exploration, the Parapsychological Association, etc. They're open to looking at any evidence you can produce.

Another way to “prove” remote viewing is to apply it in real world situations. Show success in the field; find missing children, solve crimes."

Best Evidence is full of fascinating stories of investigations into all manner of paranormal activity. Schmicker told us about one of the good examples he recounts of a field investigation of an Italian medium.

In 1908, the Society for Psychical Research sent a "Fraud Squad" to debunk Italian medium Palladino once and for all. The team consisted of three skeptics, two of whom were magicians (one of them a professional). The group had a sterling track record of exposing fraudulent mediums.

One of them had spent thirty years attending seances, and had investigated almost every medium in Britain. They set up stringent professional controls to eliminate any possible means of fraud during the sittings. They accompanied Palladino everywhere; strip-searched her before sessions; arranged the placement of people and furniture and lighting, and locked doors and windows in the specially prepared room to keep out accomplices; tied her hands and feet; and did everything they could think of to ensure against trickery and fraud.

Despite these precautions, Palladino was able to completely levitate tables multiple times, materialize objects like hands and heads, and produce various loud sounds, bangs and raps. As one of the debunkers declared after the fifth of eleven sessions, the mental gymnastics involved in trying to avoid concluding such "absurd" phenomena were real produced a kind of "intellectual fatigue."

In the end, the SPR fraud squad capitulated completely. One former debunker summed up the opinion of the group with the following: "Taking into consideration the manner of the control, I find it impossible to believe that she could have been able to practice trickery constantly during the man-hours that the seances lasted and remain undetected.”

The book looks to be a good read for anyone interested in the paranormal. As for Michael Schmicker, he claims he has never had any personal paranormal experiences.

“I'm extremely left-brained.” he states. But he’s a believer. “Every time I tell someone about the book I wrote, they inevitably tell me a story about what happened to them, or their mother, or their friend. The universality of these phenomena - - to me - - is reason enough to believe they possibly exist and to study them.”

For information on ordering the book, contact: www.amazon.com.