[ FROM THE EDITOR
Two issues ago, we published without comment here an important special report with the provocative title “Why Parapsychological Claims Cannot Be True.” Scientists are generally loathe to make absolute statements, for good reason. But our article’s authors, Arthur S. Reber and James E. Alcock, both respected psychological scientists and longtime critical observers of parapsychology, stepped back from all the detailed and often arcane arguments about the data. Instead they presented a broader view based on fundamental principles of science. Their article was blunt. It was courageous. They said the entire field of parapsychology is bankrupt. Its claims violate causality, time’s arrow, thermodynamics, and the inverse square law. The claims cannot be true.
One thing we pride ourselves on with the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER is that we have always had a substantive Letters to the Editor section. Seminal debates about issues of concern to skeptics often play out there. Once again that is so. The article has stimulated several concerned yet thoughtful letters published in this issue. As expected, most of the letter writers, while expressing their own doubts about psi claims, question the authors’ use of cannot and impossible.