Reddit reviews Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't

Hey, this sounds like an interesting proposition. I would highly recommend a book called Fringe-ology by Steve Volk. It's by a pretty well established journalist (published in Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, lots of others-- not some TV ghost hunter or anything like that). He goes out and uses ordinary journalistic methods to present and discuss paranormal events; not to find answers, but to show that there are things going on that science can't yet explain. He also discusses paranormal research and discusses how professional paranormal researchers are often extremely strict about controlling and duplicating their experiments because of the high level of ridicule, stigma, and scrutiny that comes with their field.

I remember in one chapter Volk writes about some of the telepathy/ESP experiments carried out by the US during the cold war (what that movie 'Men Who Stare at Goats' was loosely based on). Basically a lot of studies found results that showed people would be able to get telepathic questions 'right,' a good deal higher than they would if they were were just guessing answers at random. Apparently it wasn't nearly reliable enough for the military however, and the whole 'psy-ops' project was scrapped. I think that would be an interesting place to start doing research though.


*edit with more info:

Here is wikipedia's rundown on Project Stargate, with several anecdotal 'claimed successes' with ESP.


Some of the findings were analyzed by a statistician and University of CA professor named Jessica Utts. I'm having some trouble digging her paper up but she basically concluded that the statistics pointed to something going on beyond random chance.