One of the most important hallmarks of science is replicability. A phenomenon with statistical variability, whether it is scoring home runs in baseball, curing a disease with chemotherapy or observing psychic functioning, should exhibit about the same level of success in the long run, over repeated experiments of a similar nature. The remote viewing experiments are no exception. Remember that such events should not replicate with any degree of precision in the short run because of statistical variability, just as we would not expect to always get five heads and five tails if we flip a coin ten times, or see the same batting averages in every game.
The analysis of SRI experiments conducted in 1988 singled out the laboratory remote viewing sessions performed by six "expert" remote viewers, numbers 002, 009, 131, 372, 414 and 504. These six individuals contributed 196 sessions. The resulting effect size was 0.385 (May et al, 1988, p. 13). The SRI analysis does not include information individually by viewer, nor does it include information about how many of the 196 sessions used static versus dynamic targets. One report provided to the review team (May, Lantz and Piantineda, 1994) included an additional experiment conducted after the 1988 review was performed, in which Viewer 009 participated with 40 sessions. The effect size for Viewer 009 for those sessions was .363. None of the other six SRI experts were participants.
The same subject identifying numbers were used at SAIC, so we can compare the performance for these individuals at SRI and SAIC. Of the six, three were specifically mentioned as participating in the SAIC remote viewing experiments. As can be seen in Table 2, viewers 009, 131 and 372 all participated in Experiment 1 and viewers 009 and 372 participated in Experiments 4, 9 and 10 as well.
The overall effect sizes for two of the three, viewers 009 and 372, were very close to the SRI effect size of 0.385 for these subjects, at .35 and .34, respectively, and the .35 effect size for Viewer 009 was very similar to his .363 effect size in the report by May, Lantz and Piantineda (1994). Therefore, we see a repeated and, more importantly, hopefully a repeatable level of functioning above chance for these individuals. An effect of this size should be reliable enough to be sustained in any properly conducted experiment with enough trials to obtain the long run statistical replicability required to rule out chance.
It is also important to notice that viewers 009 and 372 did well on the same experiments and poorly on the same experiments. In fact the correlation between their effect sizes across experiments is .901, which is very close to a perfect correlation of 1.0. This kind of consistency warrants investigation to determine whether it is the nature of the experiments, a statistical fluke or some methodological problems that led these two individuals to perform so closely to one another. If methodological problems are responsible, then they must be subtle indeed because the methodology was similar for many of the experiments, yet the results were not. For instance, procedures for the sessions with static and dynamic targets in Experiment 1 were almost identical to each other, yet the dynamic targets did not produce evidence of psychic functioning (p-value = .50) and the static targets did (p-value = .0073). Therefore, a methodological problem would have had to differentially effect results for the two types of targets, even though the assignment of target type was random across sessions.