Joseph Banks Rhine

[scarygirl67]

I agree that the testing itself is interesting. Rhine may not have been the best judge of character which is why I think he was able to be fooled by some..however I also think he was a brilliant man who had honest intentions. I still believe personally that psychic ability is something that happens randomly, which may make it difficult to test.

[UglyNRude]

I agree testing under controlled circumstances need to be done. The problem is finding one without another agenda. Example if the institution receives money yearly by showing progress then its in their best interest to show progress. I also think they need to remove as much of the human factor as possible. This way influence is removed, the leaking information.

Look at the Project Alpha claims. It was a $500,000 grant to Washington University to perform testing. But claims James Randi got a couple of people placed in that used trickery and deception to fool the testers. Project Alpha
But if you search this you will find pages pro and con on the results. So what can we believe? What accuracy is ok? I see so many of these claimed psychics make shotgun predictions. Make a lot of scattered predictions and hope to hit or come close to hitting. They do things like I see a volcano eruption in Hawaii, then claim they got it. But if we study the volcano's in Hawaii there are 5 active with one of the most active in the world. So this was a garbage prediction. Look at claims so many psychics post about their accuracy. That is because they are the ones making the claims and a high percentage of them are grasping for straws.

Now what is a real psychic? Someone that guesses one thing in ten years with thousands of wrong guesses? Or someone who makes one prediction and hits it?

I think both skeptics and believers want to see testing done that can't be argued with the results. Will it ever happen?

[scarygirl67]

I completely agree, that as long as anyone involved in the testing has some kind of agenda other than the absolute truth, there are going to be questions from one side or the other. I also agree about the hits and misses. What good is it if you are doing nothing but throwing out guesses and one out of a thousand is right? I was a lot more impressed when my mom's friend made the prediction about something as silly as a flower girl dress that I wore..because it was exact and there was no way she could have known it. But again..this was someone who I knew personally (which may affect my perception) and it is someone who always insisted that there was no rhyme or reason to the things that would 'come' to her..they just did.

If anything..the testing has called out some frauds, such as the medium 'Margery' once called out by Houdini and confirmed by Rhine. But do you know..even with those two very respected names calling her out..people still believed her. I want to believe in the paranormal and psychic ability and I have seen some personal evidence in my own experiences that tells me it's possible. But I would like to think that my objectivity would rule out when something is exposed as fake.