Protocol stipulated that an independent panel of judges was to determine how close each percipient's description or drawing was to the actual target.
Reports that the Soviet Union had successfully used technological devices to augment such psychic communication[4] moved the Central Intelligence Agency in the USA to attempt to keep pace with their Cold War rivals.
[5] Puthoff and Targ went on to explore the effect devices such as the Faraday cage and magnetometer would have on the accuracy of the images received by their percipients.
[13] Uri Geller began work with SRI in the early 1970s and was the primary focus of Puthoff and Targ's 1974 article in the journal Nature.
This article described numerous remote viewing trials undertaken by Geller and the extraordinary results they had gotten during the six weeks he spent at the laboratories.
[18] Geller would go on to worldwide fame for performing acts such as spoon bending, and aportations for both television and live audiences,[19] at times offering Puthoff and Targ's evaluation as substantiation of his abilities.
[21] Although it had been rejected multiple times by other journals, the editor of Nature accepted the paper simply as an example of the type of work currently being done in the field of parapsychology.
These objections included references to the lack of substantive evidence, problematic data collection, weak statistical calculations and relationships, and many others.
Charles Rebert, an expert on electroencephalography (EEG), and Leon Otis, a psychologist, held much more strictly to rigid scientific methods during the tests with which they were associated.
Rebert and Otis went so far as to document their objections to what they termed as "fraudulent and slipshod" work and to demand that any experiments they had been involved in be stricken from the paper before publication.
[24][25] Despite the editorial disclaimers published in the same issue as Puthoff and Targ's paper, their most famous test subject, Uri Geller, continues to tout the publication of these experiments in the respected journal as evidence of his claims of psychic powers.
Subsequently, flaws and mistakes in Jahn's reasoning were exposed by Ray Hyman in a critical appraisal published several years later in the same journal.
[35] A lengthy exchange ensued, with the external researchers finally concluding that the failure of Puthoff and Targ to address their concerns meant that the claim of remote viewing "can no longer be regarded as falling within the scientific domain".
[36][37] Procedural problems and researcher conflicts of interest in the psychokinesis experiments were noted by science writer Martin Gardner in a detailed analysis of the NASA final report.
[38] Also, sloppy procedures in the conduct of the EEG study were reported by a visiting observer during another series of exchanges in the scientific literature.
Randi also contacted the builder of the magnetometer used in the Swann experiments and established that the phenomena claimed as psychokinetic were no more than the normal fluctuations of the machine.
After reviewing the literature generated by researchers at SRI and conducting his own replication study, Hyman summed up his findings as, "The bottom line here is that there is no scientifically convincing case for remote viewing.