the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

DUBIOUS NOTIONS 121
According to a 1988 Washington Post account, a seer dressed in “fl owing
saffron- colored robes” arrived in Padua, Italy, and had a State Depart-
ment official take him to the apartment from which Dozier had been kid-
napped so he could get a “reading” of where Dozier was being held.
Eventually, Dozier was rescued without any paranormal assistance. In
1986, Time later reported, military psychics tried to pinpoint Libyan dictator
Muammar Gadhafi’s location before U.S. warplanes attacked the
country, but were unsuccessful. ABC News Nightline would later report
that the psychic spies were employed in about five hundred different intelligence
operations over the years, but that the clairvoyants came up with
useful information in less than a dozen instances.
The program gradually began to deteriorate, one participant later
complained to Newsweek, after the army began letting “any old kook” into
the psychic corps. One psychic quit the project after he became convinced
that there was a Martian colony hidden beneath the New Mexico desert.
And military brass irked the psychics by treating them at times as if they
were a Vegas magic act. One general, for example, reportedly tried to see
if he could get participants to bend spoons.
Meanwhile, the research part of the project continued until 1986.
Typically, a researcher would sit and look at a picture of, say, an Indian
temple, clipped from National Geographic, while at another location, a
psychic would try to visualize and describe the image. The psychic’s description
was then given to a third person acting as a judge, who was also
given the temple picture and four other photos of similar locales. If the
judge decided that the psychic’s description most closely resembled the
picture of the temple, the test was scored as a successful “hit.”
Scoring a hit, of course, didn’t necessarily prove that the remote
viewer’s powers were real. Psychologist Ray Hyman of the University of
Oregon, who later evaluated the research for the government, pointed out
in a 1996 article for the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that it had some obvious
flaws. Even if the subjects managed to score a higher proportion of
hits than the 20 percent that mere chance would dictate, the work didn’t