Jessica Utts

Jessica Utts is a statistician and professor at the University of California, Davis, who served as one of two independent assessors in the 1995 American Institutes for Research (AIR) evaluation of the STAR GATE remote viewing program commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency. Her positive assessment, published alongside Ray Hyman's skeptical counterpart assessment, concluded that the program's laboratory data showed genuine anomalous effects that could not be attributed to chance.¹

Academic Career

Utts earned her PhD in statistics from Penn State University in 1978 and joined the faculty of the University of California, Davis, where she rose to become chair of the Department of Statistics. She also served as president of the American Statistical Association in 2016. Her research interests included the statistical analysis of parapsychology data, an area she approached from the standpoint of determining whether the data met standard statistical criteria for a real effect.

Utts became involved in parapsychology research assessment through her statistical expertise. She had previously co-authored analyses of remote viewing and psi experimental databases and was not a programmatic skeptic; she applied standard statistical methodology to the question of whether the data showed effects beyond chance.¹

1995 AIR Evaluation

In June 1995 the CIA contracted the American Institutes for Research to review the DIA's Star Gate program, and AIR engaged Utts, then statistical editor of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and Ray Hyman as its two research reviewers, with Lincoln Moses of Stanford advising on statistics. The CIA supplied about 80 publications; the principal investigator, Edwin May, was asked to name the studies he thought strongest. Utts's report of September 1, 1995, concluded: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world." She placed the effect "in the range between what social scientists call a small and medium effect," explained that with five-choice rank-order judging "the effect size for a series of remote viewings is (3.0 - average rank)/2," cited the 1988 analysis of 154 SRI experiments and 26,000 trials with a p-value below 10^-20, tabulated May's ten SAIC experiments (Entropy II: 90 trials, effect size 0.550), and compared novice and experienced viewers at SRI (0.164 and 0.385) with the ganzfeld results at the Psychophysical Research Laboratories (0.17 and 0.35). "It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works," she wrote; "there is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof."²

Hyman Disagreement

Hyman's report of September 11 agreed that the SAIC experiments "were free of the methodological weaknesses that plagued the early SRI research" and that their effect sizes were "too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes," but answered no to whether they established anomalous cognition, whether flaws had been eliminated, and whether they matched other laboratories, "ten experiments, especially from one laboratory," being "far too few." Utts's reply cited the psychologist Sybo Schouten's estimate that all parapsychology funding since 1882 "is at best equivalent to the expenditures devoted to fewer than two months of research in conventional psychology in the United States," and the Physicians Health Study of aspirin: "had it been conducted on only 2,200 men with the same reduction in heart attacks, it would not have achieved statistical significance." AIR's own synthesis found that "the two reviewers agreed far more than they disagreed," and that the significant results rested on "the same remote viewers, the same judge, the same target set, and the same scoring procedures." The report of September 29 recommended against continuing the operational program. Both reviews were published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1996.³

On Nightline on November 28, 1995, she said: "I'm a statistician, and when I look at the data I have to say that there's something there," and "what it proves to me is that we don't quite understand either the nature of the mind or perhaps the nature of time and space." In a letter to Edwin May of December 19, 1995, which he published, she wrote that "I was explicitly asked by AIR staff NOT to mention the NRC report in my review! This is very troubling to me," since the NRC's "vote-counting" method "has been completely discredited," a point "substantiated by Stanford Statistics Professor Lincoln Moses" at the panel's July meeting; that "despite the claims Ray Hyman is making in the media, we were shown very little of the 'operational' remote-viewing work"; that after May sent her a memorandum she "was contacted by the AIR staff and told that I was NOT to contact any of those individuals"; and of Hyman, "I don't know how he can substantiate the claims he's making about remote viewing being useless for intelligence. He may be correct, but he has very little data on which to base that conclusion."⁴