Confessions of a Star Psychic

Keith "Blue" Harary was a hot young psychic, sought after by treasure hunters, stockbrokers and spies. Then he began to question his own extraordinary abilities.

By Keith Harary, published on November 01, 2004 - last reviewed on August 26, 2009

Mathematician John Allen Paulos has memorably stated that the most amazing coincidence of all would be the complete absence of coincidence. Any sequence of events rich enough in details always leads to some coincidence, asserts Paulos, author of Innumeracy and Its Consequences: "If you look at a sequence of correspondences and ask what is the probability of that occurring by chance, the answer is always minuscule," he says. "The right question is, what is the probability of anything that will seem meaningful? It's very high. There are many ways for all kinds of correspondences to occur in daily life."

Parapsychologists try to accommodate the math of coincidence in experimental design, of course, and statistical significance entails multiple trials of the same controlled experiments, not just evaluation of anecdotes or one-time events. Pooling results from multiple trials of one free-response technique, the "ganzfeld" (a sensory isolation technique thought to enable freer flow of images), parapsychologists reported meeting the bar for statistical significance of psi, overall. But when psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. redid that work by adding in more recent data, he found the opposite. Some parapsychologists suggested that had he waited to include even more recently published experiments, the outcome would have supported their findings.

"What if I waited longer?" asks Wiseman. "A positive result? But what if I waited longer after that? A negative result? At what point do you stop?"

Parapsychology must move beyond the debate over its inconsistent data for progress to be made. One sphere of interest may be the realm of pattern recognition, including the processing of information sometimes too subtle to announce itself to the conscious mind.

In my Valentine's Day experience, there were probably subtle clues to my wife's ovarian cancer. It may have been something I learned from previous situations in which she wasn't feeling well, suggests Paul Lewicki, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Tulsa—some differences in her speech or appearance that were too complex to consciously process. "The human mind can't interpret beyond two or three variables on a conscious level," says Lewicki, "but the unconscious can."

There is so much we still don't know. Consider how phenomena at the frontiers of physics can look similar to the paranormal. In a process Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," two fundamental particles that have interacted become "entangled" and immediately correlate their actions no matter how far they are separated; in this strange effect of physics, the information passing between them isn't even limited by the speed of light. It seems reminiscent of the kind of information transfer parapsychologists attribute to ESP. Whether this or any other quirk of physics is related to paranormal claims remains unknown. In the end, we may discover that experiences we think of as "psychic" exist, but their foundation may turn out to be grounded in the natural world and the human brain.

Perfect Telepathy

During the course of my extraordinary journey through the labyrinth of parapsychology I played the part of both psychic and researcher. In the beginning I was excited to explore the boundaries of the mind. But as I developed the skills of the clinician and scientist through graduate work toward my Ph.D., I came to understand the fallacy of the otherworldly designation, "psychic." In the face of something so inexplicable and potentially powerful, almost all of us, even scientists, can sometimes make the wrong assumptions or get confused.

It was in 1987 that I attended a meeting at Esalen, the birthplace of the human potential movement, with a handful of players in the paranormal limelight. I sat on pillows and gazed over the bluffs of the Pacific as my doctoral advisor spoke out: As the elite corps of thinkers in parapsychology, "what would we do if we had a formula for perfect telepathy," he asked. Everyone in the room could handle the responsibility, he felt, but was the rest of humanity ready to take it on?

Each person in the circle weighed in on the issue. From my former partner in the silver study to the researcher who later led the hunt for the ghost galleon, the consensus was virtually unanimous. Those present could make the leap in evolution, but given their reservations about humanity at large, they'd better keep it to themselves.

I was the only dissenting voice. "Even if I accepted the premise that we're the elite," I said, "I don't think anyone here is qualified to handle 'perfect telepathy,' much less withhold it from the world."

"Oh, you just want to be psychic," the galleon hunter responded, seemingly for everyone.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. "All I want is to know what's going on," I said. "Philosophizing about what we would do if we had all the answers isn't as important as the questions themselves." It was a point I would press home directly more than two years later, when I rejected an effort to credit me with helping to find a sunken ship.