"Wacky' science thrives at Stanford society
Members publish serious analyses not found elsewhere on UFOs and ESP
05/23/93
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

You're a scientist who studies psychic phenomena, UFOs,
reincarnation, extinct Martians, ESP or sea monsters,
but orthodox scientific journals won't publish your
research. "Too wacky," they scoff.
So who you gonna call? The Society for Scientific
Exploration!
"Fringe" science is the raison d'etre of the
Stanford-based society. It's small - about 400 members
worldwide - and its quarterly Journal of Scientific
Exploration looks like any other scientific journal:
peer-reviewed articles with footnotes, leaden prose and
logarithmic charts.
Its members believe that subjects such as UFOs and ESP
shouldn't be left to gullible amateurs but deserve to be
scrutinized via the scientific method - through
controlled experiments, analyzed with the latest
computerized and statistical techniques.
The journal may be the world's only scientific periodical
with the temerity to subtitle an article "A Laboratory
Replication of a Miracle."
In its seventh year, this handsome quarterly has become
the journal of last resort for scientists whose research
is far out - so far out, in some cases, that their orthodox
colleagues may scorn them as cranks, and their bosses may
deny them funds or lab space.
"I think we're just babes crawling on the floor of the
universe," says Stanford University materials
scientist William A. Tiller, who thinks his psychic
experiments may explain historical miracles - for
example, Jesus' transformation of water into wine.
Because of his effort to show how volunteers could
"psychically" control the motion of electrons in a
scientific instrument, Tiller's colleagues "would
prefer I was doing work at another institution," he
jokes. "If I hadn't been tenured when I was doing this
(research), I might not still be here."
Many journal articles are the veriest nonsense,
sometimes based on questionable statistics and data
collection, skeptics say.
"They tend to begin with a bias that things go bump in the
night," charges Paul Kurtz, head of the Committee for
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a
Buffalo, N.Y.-based group.
One of the world's best-known astrophysicists, Thomas
Gold of Cornell University, wrote an essay for the journal
a few years ago. But he says he didn't realize how much
emphasis the journal would put on topics such as UFOs and
reincarnation, and because of that "I WOULD NOT SUBMIT AN
ARTICLE TO THEM NOW. I don't believe in UFOs or
reincarnation."
You can turn to Science and Nature magazines to learn
mainstream scientific news - such as what's happening in
plate tectonics research, or what the Ulysses space probe
is learning as it speeds toward the sun. But if you're into
SPOOKS AND SPACE VISITORS, turn to the journal. Among
other subjects, it has had articles on:
"Sunken" prehistoric cities off the Bahamas.
Efforts to control the motion of microbes psychically,
by researchers at the University of Delaware, and to
predict computer simulations of coin-tossing, at
Princeton.
Correlations between geomagnetic storms and cancer.
The use of faith healing to regrow amputated limbs of
salamanders (the subject of a recent article by four
researchers in Orinda).
Photographic evidence from space probes of "a past
humanoid civilization . . . on Mars." The data include
"what appear to be large carved faces," researchers
write.
Unknown sea creatures. "Various lines of soft evidence
converge upon the tentative conclusion that an
unclassified sea-animal of significant size is living,
or at least recently lived, in the ocean waters of British
Columbia," reports Michael D. Swords of Western
Michigan University.
Critics question the journal's scientific standards.
"I think they're good people, but I don't think they're
necessarily always objective. . . . They're people who
really want to believe in something and find evidence for
it," says Kendrick Frazier, editor of the Committee for
Scientific Investigation's journal, Skeptical Inquirer.
"I don't necessarily believe everything I publish in the
journal either," responds Journal of Scientific
Exploration managing editor Bernhard Haisch, an
astrophysicist. "But I still think they deserve to be
discussed and looked at scientifically."
A major Society for Scientific Exploration figure is Ian
Stevenson of the University of Virginia. In the journal,
he has presented what he describes as evidence for
reincarnation and, more recently, the idea that "a
pregnant woman may be so frightened by the sight of some
deformity on another person that her baby will be affected
by a similar defect."
The supermarket tabloids make millions selling similar
stories, but fortune has eluded the journal. The editors
admit they're mystified by its failure to become more than
a "well-kept secret" with only several hundred
subscribers.
Last year Haisch told readers it faced "a
life-threatening budget deficit." It also lost a
measure of prestige when it was dropped by its
distinguished long-time publisher, Pergamon, which had
troubles of its own connected with the financial collapse
of its owner, the late Robert Maxwell.
The society's president, Peter Sturrock, became
interested in fringe science in the 1970s. Someone sent
him metallic fragments from an alleged flying saucer
crash in South America. He had the fragments chemically
analyzed and concluded they were highly purified
magnesium - interesting, but hardly evidence of alien
visitors.
His interest in UFOs apparently hasn't hurt his academic
career: He is director of Stanford's Center for Space
Science and Astrophysics, and recently won an award from
the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics
for his astronomical research.
Other society members take their lumps.
When Albuquerque, N.M., geophysicist John Derr and
another scientist suggested in a different journal that
alleged sightings of a glowing Virgin Mary were
electromagnetic "plasmas," some colleagues ridiculed
the idea. These luminous clouds of electrons and ions
might form when movement on earthquake faults strips
electrons from rocks, Derr suggested.
"The hard-core skeptics think their duty, as a hammer, is
to hit anything that's a nail," Derr complains. "Why be
a scientist if you're not going to investigate new and
interesting things?"