The Center for Inquiry Investigations Group (CFIIG) currently administers the world’s largest active paranormal challenge at $250,000 (the James Randi Education Foundation $1 Million Challenge has been dormant for years). Many dozens of people apply for this prize every year. This requires quite a bit of work on the part of the CFIIG’s first responder team, which fields the initial inquiries and guides the challenger toward being tested. Here is a summary of our testing work in 2020.
From January 1 to December 31, 2020, we received seventy-five formal challenge submissions and many other phone calls and inquiries. We believe the COVID-19 epidemic slowed our usual traffic a bit. However, 2021 will be a totally different story. Since an article on the Challenge appeared on Medium’s OneZero on February 24, we’ve gotten over 100 new applications.
Applicants are often not very clear about what exactly they can do or what the claim entails, so categorizing the claims is sometimes difficult. With that caveat, the claims fell roughly into these categories: clairvoyance (five applicants); energy (five applicants); entities/spirits/ghosts (six applicants); psychic/medium (five applicants); telekinesis (eight applicants); telepathy (sixteen applicants); numerology (three applicants); miracles (three applicants); unclear (twelve applicants); various (twelve applicants).
Several claims, including those that involved possible physical harm to either the challenger or others, were rejected immediately due to CFIIG policies. For instance, the German challenger who claimed to be able to (mentally) deflect a bullet shot directly at someone was told she must find a less deadly means to demonstrate her powers. The challenger who claimed to be able to stop another person’s heart did not strike fear into us but was denied under the same “do no harm” policy. We also denied the challenger who wanted to be paid just to be tested.
Other challengers, particularly those claiming to be “psychic mediums,” apparently did not understand that telling us they had contacted dead people did not qualify as proof of ability. Others claimed to have correctly made very general predictions of events that were not tied to specific times or places. For example, one person claimed that an earthquake would happen sometime during 2020 at some place on the East Coast of the United States. There was an earthquake in New Jersey, and though the event was somewhat unusual, the challenger’s prediction was not specific, and so not impressive in any way.
Others did not understand that their (apparent) hallucinations, personal experiences, or pareidolia were not objective evidence of what they claimed. Similarly, videos that showed “orbs” don’t mean that there was a ghost in the room. Dust on a camera lens, reflections from objects, etc., can produce similar effects. Though we are often interested to see what leads people to believe they are having a paranormal experience, we do not accept photo or video evidence as proof toward our quarter-million-dollar prize.
By the end of the year, seventy-two claims had been assigned to CFIIG investigators/first responders; of those, negotiations on four led to demonstrations. All are described at https://cfiig.org/investigations/. These included one claim of telepathy, one of the ability to determine if a person was alive or dead by viewing a photograph, and one of teleportation and telekinesis.
One claim on that page did not actually lead to a demonstration but is nevertheless instructive in showing how people can misinterpret what they experience. The challenger claimed to be able to cause a top to spin in a manner that standard physical theory suggests is impossible. After much discussion and work among ourselves, we found two physicists who looked at the challenger’s videos. The physicists determined that what he was claiming was perfectly explainable by Newtonian mechanics. The challenger, unfortunately, refused to accept this and probably still believes that we somehow cheated him out of the prize.
So what happened to the claims that weren’t immediately rejected or that led to failed demonstrations? In most cases, the challenger did not respond to the first email from a first responder within a reasonable amount of time, which led to the challenge being closed. In others, our standard suggestion for the challenger to perform a self-test was also met with silence—or maybe led to failure. These applications were also closed. It should be noted that it is rare for challengers to actually conduct a self-test and conclude that their abilities are not real. We’re usually happy to test them in person.