Abstract

Tested a new placement psychokinesis (PK) machine which uses 1,200 small steel balls in 3 experiments. The balls, when released down an incline, rolled into 16 pairs of chutes, which were alternately colored green and red. Scoring was done by a majority-vote technique (i.e., when the majority of balls in a chute-pair fell into the target side, a single hit was recorded). Significant results were obtained with 2 testing methods: in the "straight PK" method, the target color was the same for all 16 chute-pairs. In the "blind PK" method the target colors varied across chutes. 2 internal effects were observed in preliminary studies: a "vertical" division showed that scoring rates were higher in chute-pairs which contained fewer numbers of balls; a "horizontal" division showed higher scoring in the 8 inner than in the 8 outer chute-pairs. Results of the vertical division were confirmed in the 3 experiments, but no significant differences were found when the horizontal division was made. Analyses were made of 3 individual series where the actual numbers of balls in the chutes were counted (rather than the majority votes). In accordance with expectation, the majority-vote technique was a more sensitive measure of PK effects than the actual ball count.