Jessica Utts, a prominent statistician who has long studied whether there’s a scientific basis for such phenomena as extrasensory perception (ESP) and telepathy, has joined the faculty of UC Irvine’s Bren School of Information and Computer Science.

Utts was recruited from UC Davis, where she has been doing statistics research in parapsychology, transportation, air quality and education. She’s also taught a variety of courses, including “Testing Psychic Claims.”

Utts (homepage) is especially well known in her field for helping to evaluate the Stargate Project, a once-classified effort to see if there are ways to use psychic phenonena in intelligence gathering.  The project, co-funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, featured secret experiments conducted by the Stanford Research Institute and, at a later date, by the Science Applications International Corporation, both in Menlo Park.

Much of the research focused on “remote viewing,” a type of ESP in which a person tries to describe a place or object that’s either hidden or located far away. Scientists also experimened with “remote staring,” the alleged ability of one person to change the physiology of another by staring at them from a distance.

In an e-mail, Utts said, “I definitely think there is a place for parapsychology in intelligence gathering, but it’s somewhat limited by two things. First, although remote viewing and similar abilities work well enough that we can reject chance guessing as the explanation, the results are usually not completely correct.

“Occasionally, the remote viewer produces a stirking match to a target, but there is no way to know when that has happened until we know the target. Even experienced remote viewers don’t know when they have done well and when they haven’t until they see the target. (I think in this way it differs from something like hitting a baseball, where the batter doesn’t do a perfect job every time, but is likely to know right away when he or she has.)

“So I think remote viewing can be useful, but it’s not going to work every time, and it’s not going to give 100 percent accurate results. When all other methods have failed, or in combination with other intelligence, I think it can be useful.”

Utts has written an overview on the subject called, “From Psychic Claims to Science: Testing Psychic Phenomena with Statistics.” Click here to read it.

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