New Flap Over Uri

The title of the report printed in Nature magazine seemed innocuous enough: "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding." But to the world of parapsychology, publication of the paper, the first claimed proof of extrasensory powers to have appeared in that prestigious scientific journal for many years, was nothing short of a sensation. Parapsychologists and others who believe in the existence of such psychic phenomena as telepathy, psychokinesis and precognition were jubilant; in their view, Nature had bestowed upon them the recognition and respectability that the scientific establishment has so long withheld. Some skeptics were dismayed; they felt the mere publication of the report in Nature would lend legitimacy to many of the hotly disputed tenets of parapsychology.

Submitted by Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, the Nature article emphasized experiments at the Stanford Research Institute involving the controversial Israeli psychic and nightclub magician Uri Geller (TIME, March 14, 1973). Among other things, the report claimed that Geller correctly called the roll of a die inside a steel box eight out of ten times; on the other two rolls he declined to pick a number. The odds against his performing that feat by chance, Targ and Puthoff calculated, were about a million to one. Geller was also reported to have sketched remarkably accurate versions of drawings picked at random by researchers hidden in another room. Those claims, printed in Nature, did seem to make a case for extrasensory perception.

Lengthy Exposé. What was generally overlooked—or purposely ignored —in the reaction to Nature's publication, was the unprecedented almost apologetic editorial that accompanied the Stanford Research Institute report. In the editorial, Nature's editors not only criticized the SRI paper but also pointedly called attention to the same week's issue of another respected British magazine, New Scientist, which carried a lengthy exposé that undermined both Geller and the SRI report.

Nature said that the original SRI paper was "weak in design and presentation," that its details were "disconcertingly vague," that some methods used were "naive," and that the experimenters showed "a lack of skill." Nonetheless, after sending the paper back to SRI for modifications, the magazine finally decided to publish it. Why? It had been submitted by "two qualified scientists" with the backing of a major research institute; the subject was "worthy" of investigation; the paper would allow other researchers "to gauge the quality of the Stanford research and assess how much it is contributing to parapsychology."