Mystery Atlas
Paranormal Claims

Psychic Phenomena

Claims of telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, and mediumship — laboratory research like Project Stargate, replication problems, and the scientific consensus.

Psychic phenomena claims share a testable shape rare among this site's other subtopics: a formal, documented experiment or survey, rather than a single contested eyewitness account. This subtopic covers a declassified CIA research programme, an independent laboratory's worldwide sensor network, a Nobel-adjacent Victorian author's decades of advocacy, a controlled clinical drug study, and a multi-hospital clinical resuscitation study, five separate attempts to bring psychic and paranormal claims into a laboratory or a formal record, each with a documented, disputed outcome.

What Are Psychic Phenomena?

This subtopic covers claims of perception, communication, or shared consciousness beyond currently understood science, tested under conditions rigorous enough to leave a formal record: Project Stargate, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and US Army remote-viewing research programme that ran from 1972 to 1995; the Global Consciousness Project, an independent research effort testing whether shared human attention affects physical random number generators; Arthur Conan Doyle's decades of spiritualist advocacy and psychical research; and DMT entity encounters, the striking consistency with which users of the psychedelic compound report meeting similar non-human beings. Each case pairs a genuine, checkable body of evidence with an interpretive question that evidence alone has not settled.

Why Psychic Phenomena Matter

This subtopic matters because it shows, more clearly than almost anywhere else on this site, that "untestable" is not the same as "untested." Each case here was investigated under conditions careful enough to produce real, disputed data: the CIA commissioned two independent evaluators who reached opposite conclusions from identical Stargate results; the Global Consciousness Project's own founders and independent statisticians disagree over the same September 11 dataset; and Rick Strassman's clinical DMT study produced a documented, replicated pattern, that entity encounters recur with unusual consistency, without settling what produces it. These cases demonstrate how genuinely difficult it is to close the door on a paranormal claim even with rigorous, good-faith investigation, which is a more useful lesson than a tidy dismissal would be.

Key Concepts

  • Remote viewing — the claimed ability to perceive a distant or hidden target using only minimal cues; the specific claim Project Stargate spent 23 years testing under formal government-funded laboratory conditions.
  • Statistical anomaly vs experimental artefact — the recurring dispute in every formally tested case in this subtopic: whether an observed statistical effect reflects something genuinely unexplained or flaws in how the experiment was designed and analysed. It split the CIA's own Stargate evaluators and separately splits the Global Consciousness Project's supporters from its independent critics.
  • Spiritualism — the religious and social movement, at its height in the 1920s, holding that the dead can communicate with the living through mediums; Arthur Conan Doyle was its most prominent public champion.
  • Entity encounter — the specific, recurring experience DMT users report: an apparently autonomous, intelligent non-human presence, described with unusual consistency across large, unconnected samples, distinct from more generic hallucinatory visuals.
  • Selection bias in after-the-fact analysis — choosing which time window or statistical measure to report only after an event's outcome is already known, the specific methodological criticism levelled at the Global Consciousness Project's September 11 findings and comparable to concerns raised about some Stargate sessions.

Key People

  • Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ — the SRI International physicists who developed Project Stargate's "coordinate remote viewing" protocol from 1972, working with subject Ingo Swann.
  • Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman — the statistician and psychologist the CIA commissioned to evaluate Project Stargate's results in 1995; they reviewed identical data and reached opposing conclusions.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle — the Sherlock Holmes creator whose three decades of psychical-research interest deepened into full public spiritualist advocacy after devastating family losses during the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic.
  • Roger Nelson — the Princeton researcher who launched the Global Consciousness Project in 1998, extending the university's PEAR laboratory's research to a worldwide sensor network.
  • Rick Strassman — the psychiatrist who ran the first federally approved US clinical study of a psychedelic drug in over twenty years, documenting DMT entity encounters among 60 volunteers between 1990 and 1995.

Timeline of Events

  • 1893 — Arthur Conan Doyle joins the Society for Psychical Research.
  • 1916-1918 — Doyle publicly converts to spiritualism; his son Kingsley dies in October 1918, deepening his advocacy.
  • 1972 — Project Stargate's precursor remote-viewing research begins at SRI International under CIA funding.
  • 1990-1995 — Rick Strassman conducts the first federally approved US clinical DMT study, documenting entity-encounter reports among volunteers.
  • 1995 — the CIA declassifies Project Stargate alongside its own commissioned evaluation, then ends the programme's funding.
  • 1998 — Roger Nelson launches the Global Consciousness Project's worldwide random-number-generator network.
  • 2001 — the Global Consciousness Project's most cited claimed finding, a statistical anomaly around the September 11 attacks.
  • 2020 — a Journal of Psychopharmacology survey of more than 2,500 people documents the consistency of DMT entity-encounter reports.

Related Mysteries

This subtopic sits inside the wider paranormal claims hub alongside ghosts and hauntings and curses and omens, which apply comparable evidentiary standards to different kinds of claims. It connects to secret societies and covert operations through Project Stargate's CIA funding, one of the documented episodes behind why the CIA appears in so many conspiracy theories; to hoaxes and debunked claims through the Cottingley fairy photographs, which Conan Doyle championed as an extension of his spiritualist conviction; and to this site's scientific theories coverage through the demarcation problem, the recurring question of what separates a genuine scientific test from the appearance of one.

Common Questions

Has anything in this subtopic ever been scientifically confirmed? No psychic mechanism has been confirmed in any case covered here. What has been confirmed, in each case, is the surrounding documentary record: the CIA's declassified Stargate evaluation, the Global Consciousness Project's published (and independently re-analysed) datasets, and Strassman's clinical trial data are all real, checkable facts, none of which have been accepted by mainstream science as evidence of a paranormal mechanism.

Why do rigorous investigators keep disagreeing over the same evidence in this subtopic? Because these claims are unusually resistant to clean falsification: a positive statistical result can always be attributed to a methodological flaw a critic hasn't fully specified, and a null result can always be attributed to conditions not being right. Stargate's Utts-versus-Hyman split and the Global Consciousness Project's own founder-versus-independent-statistician split both show this pattern among genuinely rigorous investigators, not just between believers and professional debunkers.

Are DMT entity encounters connected to the government research covered elsewhere in this subtopic? No, they are historically and institutionally unconnected. Strassman's clinical study was conducted through the University of New Mexico with no link to the CIA or Project Stargate, and the two are grouped in this subtopic by category, testing claims about mind and perception beyond current science, rather than by any shared origin.

Is Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualism connected to the later, more scientific cases in this subtopic? Not historically; Doyle's conversion predates Project Stargate and the Global Consciousness Project by many decades and he had no documented link to either. He belongs here because his case is this site's clearest example of a rigorous, famous intellect embracing a psychic claim for reasons, grief and confirmation bias, that recur in less personal form across the subtopic's later, more formally tested cases.

Knowledge Base

Government and Institutional Research

Belief and Experience

Related Topics