SSE’s September Babies are in Good Company

●    September 29, 1895: Joseph Banks Rhine was born. J.B. Rhine launched experimental parapsychology as we know it, setting up the Zener card ESP tests at Duke University in 1930 and laying down what researchers still call the "Rhinean assumptions" — that psi is an unconscious ability nearly everyone possesses.

Nearly a century later, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, longtime parapsychologist James E. Kennedy — who cut his teeth at Rhine's own lab — asks why those assumptions have never produced a reliable, repeatable application of psi, despite millions in funding and decades of tantalizing early results. His answer: the "psi-trickster," a force that makes psi real but stubbornly resistant to control. Read the full essay here.

●    September 19, 1961: The Hill Abduction. On the night of September 19–20, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home through rural New Hampshire when a strange craft appeared to follow their car — and two hours of missing time later, they arrived home shaken, with no memory of the drive. Their story, later drawn out under hypnosis by psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, became the first widely publicized "alien abduction" case in American history.

In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, researcher Don Donderi revisits the Hill case alongside two later New England abductions, applying a framework borrowed from British WWII intelligence analysis to argue that consistent, corroborated details across multiple witnesses are "touchstones" — evidence that shouldn't be dismissed outright. Read the full essay here.

Over the past year, artificial intelligence (AI) and the prospect of machine consciousness have become much harder to treat as distant or speculative questions. AI is already changing the way that we work, communicate, create, and even make decisions. At the same time, we’re beginning to ask a much more difficult question: As these systems become increasingly capable, what, if anything, should we understand about them as forms of intelligence—and perhaps as forms of “mind”?

These questions are especially relevant for SSE. Our community’s interests have always extended beyond established scientific boundaries to include fundamental questions about consciousness, human experience, and phenomena that do not fit neatly within conventional categories. AI now raises a new set of questions at some of those same boundaries. What constitutes intelligence? What does agency mean when a system can act with considerable autonomy? Could a machine ever have subjective experience? And how would we even know?

We shouldn’t pretend that we have answers to these questions yet. Whether machines can be conscious or sentient remains an open scientific and philosophical problem. But that uncertainty is precisely why careful inquiry is needed right now. The ethical and intellectual questions surrounding AI are developing much faster than academia’s ability to settle them.

I hope that SSE members will approach this emerging area with the same combination of curiosity and critical thinking that has characterized our organization since its inception in 1982. We need neither alarmism nor uncritical enthusiasm. What’s needed instead is a willingness to examine the evidence, challenge our assumptions, and remain humble and open to possibilities without losing sight of scientific standards—the same spirit of open-minded, rigorous inquiry that lies at the heart of SSE and its peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration.

This is an important new frontier for the study of consciousness and anomalous phenomena. Several researchers familiar to SSE—such as Adam Curry, Julia Mossbridge, Damon Abraham, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Benjamin Boyle—have already started to harness AI-based approaches in their published work. No doubt many other researchers across various frontier-science topics have likewise been exploring and experimenting. I look forward to seeing how our SSE members engage with these developments—and to the conversations, questions, and perhaps unexpected insights that will follow.

We’re certainly living in interesting times!

Warmly,

James Houran, Ph.D.

Interim-President, SSE
Editor-in-Chief, JSE

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SSE Member Brian Laythe Talks Ghosts on “The Why Files” Podcast

SSE Member Brian Laythe (and former Managing Editor, Journal of Scientific Exploration) recently appeared on the popular “The Why Files” podcast to discuss the psychology and parapsychology of ghosts, hauntings, and poltergeists, with particular attention to the “Haunted People Syndrome (HP-S)” framework. His conversation arrives at a moment when the concept is gaining traction not only in popular culture but also in conventional academic settings.

“The Why Files” has become one of the most influential science‑and‑mystery programs on YouTube, with a global audience that routinely reaches millions of viewers. The show’s format—clear explanations, careful sourcing, and a willingness to tackle controversial topics without sensationalism—has made it a rare venue where complex research can reach a broad public without being flattened or distorted. For researchers working in areas that straddle psychology, anomalous experience, and public fascination, this kind of platform matters, as it shapes how large audiences understand the field and where they look for credible information.

Laythe’s appearance offered viewers a grounded, research‑based account of why certain individuals report recurring ghostly phenomena and how those experiences fit within broader psychological patterns. It also introduced Haunted People Syndrome to an audience far larger than any specialist journal could reach, helping to situate SSE‑related work within ongoing public and academic conversations. 

For those who want to go deeper: the JSE article on HP-S that underpins Laythe's framework lays out the research in full, and JSE's own guidance on communicating frontier-science topics to the media offers a useful companion piece on getting research like this in front of audiences the right way.

SSE Elections are Open!

Help shape the future of the Society for Scientific Exploration! All Full and Emeritus SSE members in good standing are eligible to vote in this year's Council election. Review the candidate statements and cast your ballot to help select the Council members who will guide SSE's policies and priorities. Voting closes September 20 at 11:59 pm ET. 

SSE’s Fall Webinar— “How to Build a Time Machine (Time Travel and Temporal Paradoxes)” 

Join presenter Daniel Sheehan,  Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of San Diego, at 11 am Central Time on October 13th for a mind-bending journey into the realities and possibilities of time travel!  

Why attend:

●    Unpack the scientific foundations of time and why they are far stranger than intuition suggests. 
●    Investigate real-world anomalies that suggest temporal flexibility.
●    Hear how scientists grapple with the possibility of traveling through time. 

Dr. Daniel P. Sheehan is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of San Diego, where he taught from 1989 to 2024. He earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Santa Clara University in 1981 (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and his doctorate in Physics from the University of California, Irvine, in 1987, with thesis work in experimental plasma physics. His research interests include negative ion plasmas, planetary formation, the Casimir effect, the physics of time, the phenomenon of consciousness, and the foundations of thermodynamics, specifically the limits to the second law. He is currently working with a team to build an informational time machine. 

Zoom registration is now open! 

Help Choose Our Next Explorer Book Club Selection

What is on your bookshelf or sitting in your ever-growing to-be-read pile?

The Explorer Book Club is planning our next read, and we want to hear from you. We're seeking books that challenge assumptions, explore the unexplained, revisit scientific mysteries, or venture into those fascinating places where conventional understanding gets a little uncertain. 

Have a book you think fellow explorers would love? Head over to our Substack and share your recommendation!

Upcoming MAVERICK Talks: Interactive Virtual Chats about Bold Ideas 

MAVERICK = Monthly Adventures Via Exploration, Revealing Inquiry, Curiosity, and Knowledge. Help us shape the future of scientific exploration—one bold idea at a time!
SSE’s monthly virtual forum where members can share works-in-progress, spark fresh inquiry, and receive thoughtful feedback from fellow explorers. Whether you're refining a method, testing a hypothesis, or navigating a controversial topic, this is your space to engage, reflect, and grow.

When & Where: Second Sunday of each month (unless a quarterly webinar is scheduled), 1-hour Zoom sessions at: 5 PM ET | 4 PM CT | 3 PM MT | 2 PM PT 

Upcoming talks: 

●    September 13, 2026 (Christopher Sciacciatano)
●    October 11, 2026 (Everton de Oliveira Maraldi, PhD, Incoming Editor-in-Chief of JSE)
●    November 8, 2026 (Sky Nelson-Isaacs)
●    December 13, 2026 (Liza Horan)
●    January 10, 2027 (Albert So)

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Theo Fischer, Founder and Principal of PSI Core, is an independent researcher, Controlled Remote Viewing practitioner and trainer. After entering the field in 2019 through the declassified record of the U.S. STAR GATE program, he received formal remote-viewing training from former members of the program. His publications include the first volume of From Star Gate to Today — Controlled Remote Viewing After Three Decades (Eckhaus Verlag), which he co-edited and which was reviewed in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik / Journal of Anomalistics, and "Reunited: A Case Study on Remote Viewing" in the IRVA's Aperture. In 2024 he conceived and led the first German-language panel ever held at an IRVA conference, at the association's 25th anniversary meeting. Speaking engagements include keynotes at both editions of the Untersberg Remote Viewing event in Austria. His current research focuses on measurement methodology, provenance, scoring, and the evidential limits of apparent target correspondence in complex free-response data. He writes the newsletter Beyond Perception.

Please talk about your career journey and what led you to your current work? Since childhood, I have been fascinated by astronomy, physics, and unconventional fields of research. There were Mickey Mouse books too, and curiosity did not always win — but often enough. One that stayed with me was the Einstein–Born correspondence, first published in German in 1969 as Briefwechsel 1916–1955 and translated into English two years later as The Born-Einstein Letters: nearly four decades of correspondence between two physicists who famously disagreed over some of the deepest questions raised by quantum mechanics. The physics was beyond me. The disagreement was not. 

In adulthood, that same curiosity took me to Southeast Asia, where I lived for nine years. Living there showed me how much weight an explanation carries simply because of where you happen to have grown up — including my own. 

In 2021, I spent forty hours in a training room in Utah with Paul H. Smith and William G. Ray, working through twelve monitored sessions as part of my Controlled Remote Viewing training. Both were personally trained in CRV by Ingo Swann in 1984 under the U.S. Army's training contract with SRI International, and served in the Fort Meade unit under CENTER LANE and later SUN STREAK — the projects consolidated in 1991 under the name STAR GATE. I had already been studying and practicing remote viewing for about two years by then, but that experience brought me much deeper into the discipline and into the practical question of what happens when a person has to describe something they cannot knowingly identify. 

Over the following years, I kept going. I trained in several approaches, completed hundreds of sessions, became an independent trainer, and became increasingly involved in the remote-viewing community. Like most practitioners, I was fascinated by the striking moments: an unusual description, a spatial relationship, or a sketch that seemed to make unexpected sense when the target was finally revealed. 

But repetition changed what I paid attention to. 

The impressive moments were still there, but so were the ambiguous descriptions, incorrect interpretations, unverifiable material, and statements that could be read several different ways after feedback. Gradually, the question that interested me most changed from “Was this a remarkable session?” to something much less glamorous: “What exactly are we counting?” 

That question became especially concrete while I was doing a large coding analysis of a 24-trial remote-viewing dataset in MAXQDA. I was working through thousands of individual codings across language, spatial information, sensory descriptions, sketches, and other free-response material. One sketch could be broken into five features or twenty-five, depending on how finely I chose to code it. If each feature then counted as a separate unit of evidence, the same drawing could carry five times the weight — not because the underlying observation had changed, but because I had represented it in more pieces. And those pieces were not necessarily independent: several coded features might describe closely related aspects of the same underlying structure. 

That was not just a coding detail. It meant that my own decisions about granularity could influence the evidential weight assigned to the material. Analytical resolution and evidential weight are easy to confuse, but they are not the same thing. 

That problem eventually led to my current work on measurement methodology. The principle I began working from is deliberately simple: complex material should be analisable at high resolution, but breaking it into smaller pieces should not automatically give it more evidential weight. Those smaller components still belong to the larger observation from which they were derived. 

Remote viewing turned out to be an unusually demanding environment in which to work on this problem. A single session may contain words, sketches, sensory impressions, spatial relationships, models, uncertainty, and later interpretation. The reference material may itself be incomplete. That combination forces you to think very carefully about provenance, denominators, representation, human judgment, and what can legitimately be concluded from the resulting measurement. 

Today, I describe my work primarily as independent research into measurement methodology, evidence architecture, provenance, and the reproducible evaluation of complex free-response data. Remote viewing remains my first demanding test domain, but the methodological questions extend well beyond it. 

The approach is now defined clearly enough to be tested prospectively, but I am careful not to confuse specification with validation. The next step is to test it on unseen material, with independent evaluation, robustness checks, and ultimately independent replication. 

My path therefore moved in a direction I did not initially expect: from wanting to become better at remote viewing to becoming increasingly interested in how we know what the evidence actually says. I remain fascinated by anomalous cognition, but today I am equally interested in methods that can tell us when an extraordinary interpretation is not justified.

What do you find most rewarding about your research in frontier science? What I find most rewarding is the moment when careful analysis changes my own interpretation of what I thought I had seen. 

One blinded trial made that especially clear to me. I was asked to describe a location that I had no information about in advance. As the trial unfolded, I became increasingly convinced that what I was describing might be something like the Great Wall of China. After the trial, however, the location I had been asked to describe was revealed to be the Eden Project in Cornwall, with its large interconnected geodesic biomes. 

When I later examined my notes more systematically, the most interesting part was not that my overall interpretation had been wrong, but that several underlying descriptive elements — multiple rounded structures, segmentation, relationships to slopes, translucency, and a visitor-related function — were still present in the record. 

That experience helped me understand why reducing a complex session to “hit” or “miss” can throw away much of the information we actually want to study. A final interpretation can be wrong while parts of the underlying descriptive or spatial structure remain interesting. Conversely, material that appears impressive after feedback may not be sufficiently specific to distinguish one target from alternatives. 

I do not want a measurement system that simply confirms what I already believe. I want one that can surprise me and correct me. For me, that is one of the most rewarding parts of frontier science: discovering that the interesting question is sometimes not whether an unusual experience was simply “right” or “wrong,” but what survived, what changed, and where interpretation began to take over. The other part I value is the people. This field attracts researchers from very different backgrounds, and the conversations tend to go somewhere I did not anticipate.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your career, and how have you overcome them? The largest one is straightforward: I have no academic career behind me. 

In my experience, working without an institutional affiliation makes access to research opportunities harder. Finding a route into a university as a guest researcher is particularly challenging without a degree, a supervisor, or a prior department to vouch for me. 

The less obvious part was learning how to put academic conventions into practice without the day-to-day guidance of a supervisor. 

I had to learn how a manuscript is assembled, how a paper is structured, how references and supplementary material are organized, and what a reviewer might look for first. Even details such as a journal’s line-spacing requirements were part of that learning process. These are the kinds of practical questions a supervisor or colleague can help with. I had to work through them largely on my own, often by getting something wrong first. 

But the encounter with scientific standards gave me something I did not anticipate. 

In Controlled Remote Viewing, there is a term for a very specific error: analytical overlay. It is the moment when the mind stops describing and starts concluding — when "a curved white surface" quietly becomes "a bathtub." The training is to notice that transition, mark it, and set it aside rather than build on it. It is a narrow path even in ordinary conversation. 

Scientific work asks for the same care in distinguishing observation from inference. What was observed, what was inferred, what remains open — each needs to be visible as a distinct thing. Encountering that standard has been one of the most valuable parts of this work for me, because it took a discipline I had been practicing in sessions and showed me what it looks like when it is applied rigorously to an entire body of evidence. 

What actually opened doors, step by step, was working in public. I write a newsletter, Beyond Perception, in which I examine the evidence behind claims in this field — including claims I would like to be true. I speak internationally, and I coordinated the first German-language panel at an IRVA conference, bringing together seven speakers on the history and future of remote viewing in Germany. None of that substitutes for an academic position. But over several years it produced a body of work that people can read, disagree with, and judge for themselves. 

That mattered more than I expected. Without an institutional affiliation, I have had to build credibility through the work itself. For me, that means making it possible for someone else to follow the reasoning, check the evidence, and see where a conclusion stops. That is why I care about keeping "not established" available as a legitimate outcome, rather than forcing every observation into a success-or-failure story. 

None of this has disappeared. I still work without an affiliation, and there are doors that stay closed. But the constraint pushed me toward the part of research I am now most interested in, and I am no longer sure I would have arrived there by the ordinary route.

What drew you to the Society for Scientific Exploration, and what do you hope to contribute to the community? What drew me to the Society for Scientific Exploration is its willingness to take difficult questions seriously without requiring a predetermined answer. 

My interest in a research community like the SSE grew through being asked to contribute to a study. I took part as one of several remote viewers in a research project run by Debra Lynne Katz and Daqing Piao, which is still in analysis. Contributing sessions to a study designed by people who were going to subject the results to formal evaluation changed how I thought about my own practice. It is one thing to review your sessions yourself. It is another to produce material that someone else will assess under conditions you do not control. 

That experience is a large part of why this community interests me. What I value is not simply that unusual topics get discussed here, but that they are expected to survive criticism, replication, and methodological argument. 

I joined recently, so most of what I can say about the Society is anticipation rather than experience. What I hope to contribute comes from the combination I have ended up with: years of practical remote-viewing work, and a more recent preoccupation with how free-response material can be evaluated at all. How do you define a denominator for a session that contains language, sketches, spatial relationships and interpretation at once? That question is unglamorous, and I think it sits underneath a great deal of the disagreement in this field.

What advice would you give to someone just starting in frontier science? Stay curious, but do not become attached to the result you hope to find. 

Frontier research attracts people because the questions are unusual, difficult, and often personal. That is exactly why the discipline matters. Keep the experience and the interpretation of it apart, and let uncertainty stand as an answer instead of resolving it too early. 

Do not be afraid to change your mind. Intellectual independence in this field is not about defending a position at all costs. It is about staying free enough to follow the evidence somewhere you did not want to go. 

And build methods that are capable of disappointing you. If your procedure can only confirm what you already believe, it is not protecting you from anything. 

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A Farewell Funny

My relationship with statistics is significant. Unfortunately, p > .05.