I forget the details now but I did a story around 1970 on a scientific organization that had just been admitted, on a provisional basis, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS is a very prestigious organization with membership that includes the American Physoical Society, the American Chemical Society, and virtually every every scientic society from Athropology to Zoology. What made this a story was the new group was The American Paranormal Society. AAAS felt that it was time to bring in this organization and see that experiments were conducted with rigor. In return, the paranormal experimenters were able to use the significant cachet of at least conditional acceptance by AAAS.

I remember one activity they were conducting was a telepathy experiment in which they had a "transmitter" in Washington, DC and "receivers" in cities across the US and the world. The idea was to see if there was an element of time or distance in the transmission of images. They were even hoping to get NASA to cooperate.

The president of the society was very hopeful that as a member of the AAAS, they would get the respect they deserved and be able to raise the money for the experiments that would prove the efficacy of some methodology of paranormality.

I haven't heard anything from that society. There has been no announcement of their discoveries in the AAAS journal, Science, which would have been delighted to report on success.

I think it was the same group that tried to repeat a sleep experiment which was an out-of-body experience. People, during sleep, were reporting the ability to travel and see things going on in other places. They reported rising to the top of the room and seeing the scene below.

A rigorous experiment was set up in which things were placed out of sight of the sleeper in the room. They could only see the test objects from a point of view not reachable by standing, even on furniture. The result was that the "best" subjects had a 100% failure rate.

Not much support for the paranormal here.

Sourdough