According to Webster's Dictionary, in law prima facie evidence is evidence having such a degree
of probability that it must prevail unless the contrary be proved
. There are a few examples of applied,
non-laboratory remote viewings provided to the review team that would seem to meet that criterion for evidence. These
are examples in which the sponsor or another government client asked for a single remote viewing of a site, known to
the requestor in real time or in the future, and the viewer provided details far beyond what could be taken as a
reasonable guess. Two such examples are given by May (1995) in which it appears that the results were so striking that
they far exceed the phenomenon as observed in the laboratory. Using a post hoc analysis, Dr. May concluded that in one
of the cases the remote viewer was able to describe a microwave generator with 80 percent accuracy, and that of what
he said almost 70 percent of it was reliable. Laboratory remote viewings rarely show that level of correspondence.
Notice that standard statistical methods cannot be used in these cases because there is no standard for probabilistic comparison. But evidence gained from applied remote viewing cannot be dismissed as inconsequential just because we cannot assign specific probabilities to the results. It is most important to ascertain whether or not the information was achievable in other standard ways. In Section 3 an example is given in which a remote viewer allegedly gave codewords from a secret facility that he should not have even known existed. Suppose the sponsors could be absolutely certain that the viewer could not have known about those codewords through normal means. Then even if we can't assign an exact probability to the fact that he guessed them correctly, we can agree that it would be very small. That would seem to constitute prima facie evidence unless an alternative explanation could be found. Similarly, the viewer who described the microwave generator allegedly knew only that the target was a technical site in the United States. Yet, he drew and described the microwave generator, including its function, its approximate size, how it was housed and that it had "a beam divergence angle of 30 degrees" (May, 1995, p. 15).
Anecdotal reports of psychic functioning suffer from a similar problem in terms of their usefulness as proof. They have the additional difficulty that the "response" isn't even well- defined in advance, unlike in applied remote viewing where the viewer provides a fixed set of information on request. For instance, if a few people each night happen to dream of plane crashes, then some will obviously do so on the night before a major plane crash. Those individuals may interpret the coincidental timing as meaningful. This is undoubtedly the reason many people think the reality of psychic functioning is a matter of belief rather than science, since they are more familiar with the provocative anecdotes than with the laboratory evidence.