Project Alpha - Peter Phillips' Experiments

Peter Phillips' Experiments

In 1979, James S. McDonnell, board chairman of McDonnell Douglas and believer in the paranormal, awarded a USD $500,000 grant to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, for the establishment of the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research. He intended the money to be used for serious study of psychic phenomena in a controlled setting. The lab was led by physicist Peter Phillips, who decided to focus on spoon bending by children, also known as "psychokinetic metal bending", or PKMB.

Before the testing had started, James Randi had written to the lab with a list of 11 "caveats" they should be wary of, and his suggestions on how to avoid them. These included a rigid adherence to the protocol of the test, so that the subjects would not be allowed to change it in the midst of the run. This had been the modus operandi of Uri Geller while being tested at Stanford Research Institute; whenever something did not work, he simply did something else instead. The researchers then reported this as a success, when in fact the original test had failed. Other suggestions included having only one object of study at any time, permanently marking the object or objects used so they could not be switched, and having as few people in the room as possible to avoid distractions. Randi also offered his services to watch the experiments as a control, noting that a conjurer would be an excellent person to look for fakery. Phillips did not take Randi up on the offer because of the skeptic's reputation of being "a showman rather than an unprejudiced critic" and his perceived hostility towards psychic claimants. In his letters, Randi even told the researchers that the subjects were fake, but the researchers did not check out their backgrounds.

Throughout the early phases of the project, many people claiming to have psychic powers presented themselves to the lab. The vast majority quickly proved to have no such ability, or, just as commonly, used sleight of hand to make their "abilities" work. Many of these were convinced what they were doing was "real". However, after a short while it became apparent that two young men, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, were much more successful, and the lab started to focus their energies on them. In fact, the two young men were "plants", friends of Randi whom he had met some time before as part of his magician's trade. Part of Randi's instructions to these men was to tell the truth if they were ever asked if they were faking the results; they were never asked this question directly. The researchers assumed that the participants would have no qualms about lying in their answer to a straightforward question if they were also lying about their abilities.