by Tom Valentine
Carol Ann Liaros of Buffalo, New York is a psychic; she is also bright, blond, attractive and filled with a strong sense of duty. She is the founder and director of "Project Blind Awareness," which teaches the blind to utilize their intuition to overcome their sight handicap. She was profiled for her excellence in Volume 1, Number 8 of the Exchange, March 1977.
For most of the last year she has been carrying on a running battle with a group of self-styled academicians who call themselves: "The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims for the Paranormal." The committee is headed by Dr. Paul Kurtz, also of Buffalo, New York. He is a professor of Philosophy and the former editor of the Humanist magazine.
The committee formed itself a few years ago and announced to the world, or anyone that would listen, that they reserved the right to pass judgement on all claims for the paranormal and were anyone to make claims without their express approval that claimant was a bad person... in so many words of course.
The latter paragraph was slanted journalism - obviously I do no look upon the "committee" with much favor; forgive the partiality - I'll try to be more objective.
Because there are a lot of unsubstantiated claims for the paranormal being aided by all manner of character, sincere and otherwise, it seems necessary that some body be appointed to screen the claims and act as sort of "underwriter's laboratory," for them.
The very first thing the committee did, as I recall, was adopt a resolution that astrology was hogwash - pure, unadulterated hogwash no less. They circulated a petition asking scientists to condemn the practice of astrology on the grounds that it couldn't possibly be scientific - which is as unscientific a campaign as anyone can think of.
The interpretations of astrologers are very like the interpretations of psychologists (including Humanists) insofar as they are based on observation and estimation. Actually, astrology has as much statistical data in support of its claim as does psychology -it merely lacks academic clout. As for science; there are known physical facts that show the positions of planets in relation to each other and earth can effect physical properties - so why not human behavior?
Anyway this article, which is a hodgepodge of editorial comment and reporting, is not defend astrology; I'm not impressed with very many astrologers (there are few that can blow one's mind though!) This article is about the Committee and the Lady... a worthy subject for an operetta or three act play.
Here is a letter from Paul Kurtz to Carol Ann Liaros dated March 6, 1978:
"Dear Ms. Liaros:
"I am sorry that we had so much difficulty in reaching each other.
"As already indicated, we are most pleased that you have agreed to have our Committee test you. We would like it to cover two areas: (1) psychometry, and (2) precognition. We can, of course, add other areas as well.
"Also, as I indicated at the meeting at the State University of New York at Buffalo, we will have a special test committee here on March 16th. Hence we hope that you can meet with us for a preliminary test. It will be conducted at the Department of Psychology (interim campus), Ridge Lea Road, Amherst, in cooperation with Professors Irving Biederman, Edward Katkin, and James Pomerantz (of that Department), Martin Gardner, and others are coming up from New York, ABC TV News (nationwide) will be filming our efforts. Hence, we very much hope that you can meet with us. If there is a problem, we can meet late on the 15th or early on the 17th.
"I understand full well your desire to have another/other parapsychologists present: We are thinking of Sally Drucker (formerly with the Maimonides Dream Lab), Ed Powell, or Clarence Dye, or someone else locally. (Unless you can recommend someone else nearby?)
"Thus, (1) we wish to conduct the test under rigorous scientific protocol, (2) we will include parapsychologists in consultation with you locally, (3) we are prepared for extensive testing.
"Since there is some urgency in knowing whether we can meet you on a preliminary basis on March 15,16 (preferable), or 17, I would appreciate your calling me. I seem to get only a recording when I call you.
"We are looking forward to your response."
Sincerely,
Paul Kurtz"
Carol Ann responded as follows:
"Dear Mr. Kurtz:
"As I indicated in my last letter to you, I shall not be able to participate in the special test committee's activities as I will be out of town from March 15th - 20th.
"Since then, I have conferred with several leading parapsychologists and they reaffirm the suggestions of using the test ‘A Precognition Method for Testing Sensitives' would be the idea one for scientific experiment to replicate. As you will see, it is a comprehensive test and one that would involve the ‘extensive testing' your committee is interested in doing.
"The
Procedure is as follows:
1. To find a group of people who are willing to ask 3 questions about an event
to occur in their future, to which they do not or cannot know the answers themselves.
(As the original test was done with three groups of people at different times
totaling 94 people asking a total of 282 people, we can duplicate these numbers
too).
"Examples of questions asked in the original test: On Oct. 19th one of the participants asked on paper ‘Will my union vote to strike when they meet on Oct. 24th? ‘Example 2: ‘Will my husband buy me the car of my choice?'
"Participants are allowed to ask questions about anything in any area of their life they choose, as long as the event has not happened yet, as we are testing for precognitive abilities.
"The participant places their name at the top of the sheet of paper, with their questions listed below it. They must ask it in such a way so that it can be answered with a ‘yes' or ‘no' reply from me to eliminate any subjective interpretation from anyone. Then when the future event occurs it will give me an incorrect or correct score with each question.
"The papers are then given to me, and before I leave the premises, I must answer all the questions on all the sheets from all the participants.
"To guard against the possibility of the question lending itself to the answer, and also to make sure I am not simply doing telepathy, a safeguard was established: On another sheet of paper, with their names at the top, the participants write out their own anticipated answers to the questions. In other words the way they feel the event will turn out. At the end of the test (after all events have occurred my answers are compared with theirs to see if I simply read their minds or if the question lent itself to the answer and anyone would have answered it in the same way). Of course, I never see their sheets until the end.
"In the original test, rarely did my answers agree with the participants showing that it was indeed not telepathy, then as the events transpired and the event was checked against the anticipated answers of the participant himself, whom you would think would know his future better than I, it became obvious people are not good at predicting their own future. Then when my answer was compared to the way the event turned out, this is where we received the statistics of millions to one against a chance result the three different times we repeated the test.
"Out directions to participants included asking them to keep their questions to an event they could conceivably occur in the next three months, so the experiment would not go on for years waiting for a conclusion.
"We could draw upon classes taught at SUPAB other than those taught by members of your committee or recruited from other neutral sources.
"The
standard Chi-Square Test was done to get the statistics with the four numbers
drawn from:
My ‘yes' answers Actual occurrence - yes
My ‘no' answers Actual occurrence - no
"After consulting with several parapsychologists, it would appear from the criteria set up for classifying a parapsychologist a member of the Parapsychologist Association and scientist who has had a paper accepted for publication, that the only one who might qualify that you suggested is Sally Drucker.
"One of the other areas we will have to explore is the choosing of the unbiased scientists to run this experiment. My understanding the day of the panel discussion was that Dr. Michael Farrell had offered his staff and lab as a neutral ground with scientists who do not have extreme bias' in either direction. Your committee's criticism of biased experimenters is also well heeded from our viewpoint too. And we feel this is an absolute necessity to insure unbiased results.
"Dr. Douglas Dean has placed himself at our disposal by phone or in person to help set up in exact duplicate the experiment I have just outlined, as it was he who published the results of this experiment in a scientific journal.
"I
shall be looking forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Carol Ann Liaros"
More letters and more tentative dates for "testing" were bandied about until finally the idea was abandoned since neither party could reconcile a time with the other. Naturally the committee accused Carol Ann of dodging, which was not the least bit true. A local anti-psychic, Dr. Irving Biederman a professor of parapsychology, became the protagonist for the committee in place of Kurtz about mid-summer.
Douglas Dean is certainly qualified as a parapsychologist but the committee apparently wasn't impressed - they insisted that Carol Ann read "cards" shuffled by a "neutral" person. Carol Ann consistently explained that - "I don't do that; I don't read cards, there is not value in reading cards." She insisted on the precognitive testing as outlined in her letter.
Dr. Biederman hooked up with a columnist for the Buffalo Courier Express, Mike Healy, and the newspaperman gleefully plunged his poison pen into psychic phenomena and especially Carol Ann Liaros who was sponsoring her annual "Psychic Expo" at the Niagara Falls Conventions Center (one of the biggest psychic events in the nation each year with proceeds going to help Project Bind Awareness.)
With a headline reading: Psychic stuff: Hocus-Pocus Hides under a Cloak of Truth, Healy wrote the following column:
"A baby is conceived outside the womb and born healthy. A wonder.
"Scientists isolate and photograph a single human gene out of the tiniest components of life. An incredibly great achievement.
"An astronomer finds a moon circling Pluto, the planet farthest from the sun. Amazing.
"Truly Amazing. And equally amazing is that in a culture sophisticated enough to do all that, events like the upcoming ‘ESP/Psychic Fair' still exist.
"The fair at the Niagara Falls Convention Center is billed by its sponsors as a ‘celebration of the new age.' But the new age seems to be made up of the oldest bumkum in the world: astrology, fortune telling and mind reading, ‘psychic healding' and even dowsing.
"It's like a throwback to the Middle Ages,' said Paul Kurtz who, among other things, is a professor of philosophy at the university of Buffalo and head of the ‘Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.'
"I've been to events like this, and there's every form of quackery lined up in stalls. And think of the poor people who get there and get advice from these people, advice based on wives tales' he said.
"Kurtz takes this whole business very seriously, for a number of reasons. He sees the current popularity of astrology and parapsychology as a return to unreason, and a retreat from rationality. For there is not a shred of good scientific evidence that ESP or psychic phenomena exist.
"Pyramids don't sharpen razor blades or do any of the marvelous things pyramidologists say they do. Kirlian photography is bogus. The future cannot be foretold with cards or aruras or vibrations or anything else. It is all nonsense.
"The Psychic Fair is really in the same domain as the old shows to sell snake oil,' said Dr. Irving Biederman, professor of Psychology at UB and director of the Cognitive Studies program there, and a Fellow on Kurtz's committee.
"Biederman challenged Carol Ann Liaros, one of the founders of the fair and its guiding light, to come to his laboratory and have her claims of being a ‘psychic sensitive' tested in an objective, scientific setting. That was over three years ago, and Liaros has not shown up. Her last appointment was a few weeks ago, but she did not show.
"It's a very common occurrence," he said of Miss Liaros' seeming reluctance to be tested. The laboratory in Durham (incorrectly associated with Duke University) has been testing supposed psychics for decades, and they don't have one person that they can hold up and say the abilities are there.
"Miss Liaros' lack of credible scientific verification of her powers is disturbing (she allegedly teaches ESP to blind people in ‘Project Blind Awareness' for one thing), but that lack is universal in the parapsychology field.
"People have a right to believe anything they want. They can believe the world is flat, for that is their right and privilege. What disturbs me is people who would claim evidence for the flatearth belief, or who would lie and distort findings to support their belief. I don't think it's fair that some people are persuaded of the veracity of psychic phenomena because they are given false or misleading evidence,' Biderman said.
"He is also disturbed by the ‘real potential for abuse' of these paranormal claims by self-proclaimed psychics.
"- People may stake critical decisions on the advice of a psychic, believing there's some veracity to these powers. And there are cases of people who went to psychic healers who had tumors that could have been operable if they had gotten to a doctor in time,' he said.
"There's no question that the fair is funny, in a way - weird powers, strange other-worldly occurrences, mystery, wonder. The TV stations will no doubt treat it lightly - and non-judgementally - and interview the strange people who claim to do strange things.
"But this stuff isn't entertainment. Magic is entertainment, and it's performed by self-professed tricksters. This psychic stuff, at its worst, is dangerous.
"Its a celebration not of a new age, but of an old, dark one.
"The fair runs from August 3 through 6, from noon to 11 p.m. every day. Don't go.
Mike Healy has every right to his opinions, and there certainly are a lot of deluded characters in the ranks of the "psychic" world, but it's a crying shame, a journalist who wields so much power with the printed word should shoot his column off without knowing what he's talking about. To take the word of a psychologist is like taking the word of an astrologer... Healy should get out in the world and take a long, hard, skeptical look. Underneath the sometimes sham there is so much we cannot explain that it is indeed humbling in nothing else.
Without study the Mike Healy's of the world know all the answers to the mysteries of life - who was it that said "ignorance is bliss?" It may be, but not in journalists and college professors.
There is a happy ending to the story. Most thinking people ignore the ignorance of the Healy's and Dr. Bidermans; and most thinking people have considered the "Committee" to be obstructionist fools. Carol Ann Liaros continues to help the blind to expand their lives through paranormal ability.
College students, happily, are listening carefully to both sides of the controversy in Buffalo and making up their own minds.
The tone of this article may not have shown it, but Tom Valentine is a skeptic - in fact among psychic circles in Chicago I have the reputation for being a "terrible non-believer." Let me share something Buddha said:
"Always begin in doubt. To begin in doubt leads to knowledge; to begin in belief leads to faith."
I begin in doubt when psychologists talk, too.
