The Paranormal: Claims, History, Research and What the Evidence Shows

"Paranormal" is the umbrella word for events and abilities that are said to lie outside what science can explain. Ghosts, telepathy, precognition, psychic healing, haunted houses, mediums who speak with the dead, cryptids such as Bigfoot, and visitors from other worlds are the usual examples. The word turns up everywhere, from Halloween TV specials and ghost-hunting podcasts to university psychology departments that study why people believe these things.

This article does two jobs. First, it explains what paranormal claims actually say, where they came from, and why so many people find them convincing. Second, it lays out what more than a century of investigation has found. The short version: belief is widespread and sincere, personal experiences that feel paranormal are common and real as experiences, but no paranormal ability or entity has produced evidence that holds up under controlled, independently replicated testing. The longer version is more interesting, because the history of testing these claims has taught science a great deal about perception, memory, statistics and how easily careful people fool themselves.

What the word means

Reference works agree on the core idea. A paranormal event is a purported phenomenon described in popular culture, folklore or other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence is said to lie beyond the reach of normal scientific understanding. The Wikipedia article on the subject lists extrasensory perception (including telepathy) and the pursuits of ghost hunting, cryptozoology and ufology as the best-known examples.

The prefix para- means "beside" or "beyond," so the word literally means "beyond the normal." It is a fairly young word. According to the Wikipedia summary of its etymology, "paranormal" was first used in 1905, at a time when researchers described observed events that they assumed must follow physical laws not yet discovered. That framing matters. Early users of the word were not necessarily claiming the supernatural. Many of them thought they were looking at undiscovered natural forces, the way electromagnetism had once seemed mysterious.

Paranormal, supernatural and pseudoscience

These three terms overlap but are not identical.

Psychologist Terence Hines, author of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, treats the paranormal as a subset of pseudoscience. His list of paranormal claims includes extrasensory perception, telekinesis, ghosts, poltergeists, life after death, reincarnation, faith healing and human auras, which are typically explained by appeal to vague "psychic forces" or "human energy fields." What unites them, in Hines's analysis and in the mainstream scientific view, is that the claims rest on anecdote, testimony and suspicion rather than on empirical evidence that can be reproduced.

Not everyone who uses the word agrees with that characterisation. Parapsychologists, the small group of researchers who study these claims experimentally, would say their field is an attempt to apply scientific method to anomalous experiences. That is a fair description of their intent. Whether the results justify the claims is a separate question, covered later.

The main families of paranormal claims

Paranormal claims are not one belief but a loose cluster. It helps to sort them by what they say is happening.

The Wikipedia article describes three of these in more detail.

Ghosts. Traditionally a ghost is the spirit or soul of a dead person, a belief closely tied to animism, the very old idea that people, animals and even places have souls. Some versions extend the idea to dead animals. Ghost hunting is the practice of investigating places reported to be haunted.

UFOs. Ufology split early into two camps. One treated sightings as unexplained events worth serious study. The other blended the idea of extraterrestrial visits with occult and quasi-religious beliefs drawn from Theosophy and spiritualism. Critics note that UFO claims lack repeatable tests and have been repeatedly affected by hoaxes. (Many unidentified sightings are simply unidentified; "unidentified" does not mean "alien.")

Cryptids. Cryptozoology is described as a pseudoscience and subculture that searches for unknown, legendary or extinct animals whose existence is disputed or unsubstantiated.

A short history

Spirits, séances and the birth of spiritualism

Belief in ghosts, prophecy and communication with the dead is ancient and found across cultures, but the modern paranormal largely starts in the nineteenth century, when such claims began to be presented as observable, testable events.

A key moment came in 1848 in Hydesville, New York. Two young sisters, Margaretta ("Maggie") and Catherine ("Kate") Fox, reported mysterious rapping sounds that seemed to answer questions, and they presented these as messages from a spirit. Their older sister Leah became their manager, and the girls became famous mediums. Their first paid public demonstration was in Rochester in 1849. The Fox sisters are widely credited with helping launch Spiritualism, a religious and social movement built on the idea that the living can talk with the dead.

The story has a revealing ending. In 1888 Margaretta publicly confessed that the raps had been a hoax, produced by cracking her toe and knee joints, and she demonstrated the technique. In November 1889 she retracted the confession, saying she had been pressured by money troubles and by opponents of Spiritualism. The movement kept growing regardless. Both younger sisters died in poverty. The pattern, a dramatic claim, a confession, a retraction and a movement that carries on largely unaffected, is one that recurs throughout the history of the paranormal.

The Society for Psychical Research (1882)

The first organised attempt to investigate these claims scientifically came in Britain. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was formally constituted on 20 February 1882, after a conference in January of that year held at the London headquarters of the British National Association of Spiritualists. The idea came out of conversations in autumn 1881 between journalist Edmund Rogers and physicist William F. Barrett. Its founding committee included Stainton Moses, Charles Massey, Edmund Gurney, Hensleigh Wedgwood and Frederic W. H. Myers. Its first president was the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who served from 1882 to 1884.

The SPR attracted serious figures. Its presidents have included the physicist Balfour Stewart, the future prime minister Arthur Balfour, the American psychologist William James, the chemist William Crookes, the physicist Oliver Lodge, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, and the philosopher C. D. Broad. Its current president, since 2025, is the psychologist Caroline Watt.

Early SPR work produced landmark publications:

• ***Phantasms of the Living (1886)*, a two-volume study by Gurney, Myers and Frank Podmore of telepathy and apparitions. Mainstream science received it poorly.
• The Census of Hallucinations (1894), which sampled about 17,000 people. Of these, 1,684 reported having experienced an apparition-type hallucination. This was one of the first large surveys of unusual experiences, and it showed how common such experiences are in ordinary people.
• Investigations of fraud. In 1884 the SPR sent Richard Hodgson to India to investigate the Theosophist leader Helena Blavatsky, and he concluded that her claimed phenomena were fraudulent. (A 1985 reexamination by Vernon Harrison argued that the fraud charge had not been proven, showing that even debunking can be disputed.) The SPR also exposed fraudulent mediums and spirit photographers, including work on the medium William Eglinton.

The SPR still exists. It publishes the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (quarterly since 1884, peer-reviewed), occasional Proceedings (first published in 1882), a magazine and an online Psi Encyclopedia.

Challenges and the magician's eye

Stage magicians played an outsized role in the history of paranormal investigation, because they understood deception in a way scientists often did not. In 1922 Scientific American offered two prizes of $2,500 each, one for an authentic spirit photograph and one for a visible psychic manifestation. Harry Houdini sat on the judging committee. No medium won.

Charles Fort and the anomaly collectors

A different tradition came from Charles Fort (1874–1932), a writer who collected reports of strange events from newspapers and scientific journals. He reportedly compiled up to 40,000 notes and wrote seven books, four of which survive. Fort's approach was anecdotal, not experimental. He enjoyed needling scientists for ignoring inconvenient reports, and his name lives on in the word "Fortean," used for odd phenomena of all kinds.

J. B. Rhine and laboratory parapsychology

The paranormal entered the laboratory in a systematic way with Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980). Rhine earned a PhD in botany from the University of Chicago in 1925 and moved to Duke University in 1927 to work with the psychologist William McDougall. At Duke he helped found a parapsychology laboratory and the Journal of Parapsychology, and later the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, the forerunner of today's Rhine Research Center. He also helped establish the Parapsychological Association.

Rhine popularised card-guessing and dice-rolling tests. Volunteers such as Hubert Pearce and Adam Linzmayer tried to identify the symbols on "Zener cards" hidden from view. His 1934 book Extra-Sensory Perception was widely read and helped put the term ESP into general use. In the late 1930s he turned to psychokinesis, testing whether people could influence how dice fell.

The work did not survive scrutiny well. Other laboratories failed to replicate Rhine's results, and critics pointed to weak controls, poor record-keeping and the possibility of sensory cues. The writer Martin Gardner accused Rhine of keeping quiet about failed experiments and about cheating by assistants. A 1938 review in the American Journal of Sociology by Harold Gulliksen, titled "Extra-Sensory Perception: What Is It?", is one of many contemporary critiques.

Still, Rhine's era set the template for the field. The Parapsychological Association formed in 1957 and was affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1969, a sign that parapsychologists were at least being treated as a group doing research, even if their conclusions were widely doubted.

The ganzfeld experiments

From the 1970s, the most important experimental paradigm in parapsychology was the ganzfeld ("whole field") test. A "receiver" sits in mild sensory deprivation, with halved ping-pong balls over the eyes, red light and steady static noise in headphones. A "sender" in another room looks at a randomly chosen target, such as a picture or short video clip, and tries to transmit it mentally. Afterwards the receiver is shown several options, usually four, and picks the one that best matches their impressions. With four choices, pure chance gives a 25% success rate.

Charles Honorton began these tests in the early 1970s, and the first full published experiment appeared in 1974. In 1982 Honorton carried out a meta-analysis of 42 studies and claimed evidence of psi. The psychologist Ray Hyman identified methodological flaws in those studies, and Honorton later agreed that they could not, on their own, support his claim. In 1986 the two published a joint communiqué that identified problems and set out stricter standards, including computer-controlled testing, and they agreed that replication was needed.

The "autoganzfeld" studies that followed, using computer control, reported a 32% hit rate against the 25% chance level. Critics questioned the randomisation and found possible routes for sensory leakage, meaning ways the receiver or the experimenter could pick up ordinary cues about the target. Richard Wiseman's reanalysis tied the positive results to trials in which leakage was possible.

The meta-analyses then went back and forth. Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman's 1999 meta-analysis found no effect beyond chance. Later meta-analyses by Storm and Ertel (2001), Bem and colleagues (2001), and Storm and colleagues (2010) reported significant results, but critics disputed which studies were included and how they were weighted. The ganzfeld history also includes a controversy over Carl Sargent's laboratory in Cambridge, where in 1979 the psychologist Susan Blackmore observed procedural irregularities; she later wrote that Sargent had almost certainly cheated in one trial.

The lasting lesson is not "the ganzfeld proved telepathy" or "the ganzfeld was a fraud." It is that small statistical deviations from chance are extremely vulnerable to tiny procedural flaws, selective reporting and analytic choices. Critics also point to what is sometimes called the "psi assumption": treating any deviation from chance as evidence of telepathy, when it might equally reflect a flaw in the setup.

Remote viewing and the Stargate Project

Governments took an interest too. Remote viewing research began in 1972 at SRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute), led by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. The CIA had funded an earlier program called SCANATE from 1970. The U.S. Army set up a secret psychic-intelligence unit at Fort Meade, Maryland, which went through a series of code names: Gondola Wish (a 1977 evaluation program), Grill Flame (the 1978 operational program), INSCOM "Center Lane" (1983), Sun Streak (funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1985) and finally Stargate.

In 1995 the defence appropriations bill moved oversight to the CIA, which commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to review the program. The review panel centred on the statistician Jessica Utts and the psychologist Ray Hyman. They disagreed. Utts argued that the laboratory results were evidence of psychic functioning. Hyman argued that the findings had not been independently replicated and that the apparent matches were what reasonable guessing plus subjective validation would produce. On the practical question, the review was clear. It concluded that "continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted," and found that no remote-viewing report had ever provided actionable intelligence. The CIA cancelled and declassified the roughly $20 million program.

PEAR at Princeton

From 1979 to February 2007, Princeton University hosted the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, founded by Robert G. Jahn, then the university's Dean of Engineering. PEAR tested whether human intention could nudge the output of random number generators and other machines. The effects it reported were tiny, roughly 0.1% to 1%. Critics noted that one participant, likely a staff member, took part in 15% of the trials and accounted for half the total effect. Two German organisations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, and PEAR failed to reproduce its own. The lab had a strained relationship with the university, where some faculty considered it an embarrassment, and when it closed it was folded into a private organisation, the International Consciousness Research Laboratories.

Bem's "Feeling the Future" and the replication crisis

The most consequential parapsychology paper of the twenty-first century appeared in a mainstream journal. In March 2011 the Cornell social psychologist Daryl Bem published "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the field's leading journals. It reported nine experiments that appeared to show precognition, for example that people's memory for words was improved by practice that happened after the test.

The reaction reshaped psychology. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French repeated one of the experiments, "Retroactive Facilitation of Recall," and found no evidence of precognition; their attempt was published in PLoS ONE in 2012, but only after several journals declined it because it was a replication. Also in 2012, the same journal that published Bem printed "Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi," which reported seven experiments with no evidence of precognition. Statistical critics, including Gregory Francis and Ulrich Schimmack, argued that Bem's rate of significant results (nine of ten studies) was implausibly high, suggesting publication bias or flexible analysis. The psychologist Stuart Vyse described one of Bem's own comments about his methods as "remarkably close to an outright admission of p-hacking," while crediting Bem with prompting stricter research standards. A large pre-registered replication published in 2023 found no evidence for precognition.

Bem and colleagues published a meta-analysis of 90 experiments in 2016 that they said supported the effect. Supporters cite it; critics note that meta-analyses inherit the flaws of the studies they pool.

The irony is that Bem's work did a great deal for science, though not in the way he intended. If standard methods could "prove" something as implausible as people reacting to stimuli before they appear, then standard methods were too loose. The episode is widely cited as one of the sparks for psychology's "replication crisis" and the reforms that followed: pre-registering hypotheses, sharing data and publishing replications.

Television and the participant-observer era

Alongside laboratory work, a separate tradition grew up around ghost hunting. Ghost hunters try to gather data by immersing themselves in a reportedly haunted location, often at night, with cameras, audio recorders and electromagnetic field meters. Television shows such as Ghost Hunters made the approach hugely popular, and one website cited in the Wikipedia article lists more than 300 ghost-hunting groups in the United States and United Kingdom.

Critics of this "participant-observer" approach point to threats to objectivity, unsystematic data collection, subjective measurement and observer effects. In plain terms, people who go looking for a ghost in a dark, creaky building, primed by stories and equipped with gadgets that beep at ordinary electrical fluctuations, will reliably find things that feel like evidence.

Meanwhile, academic paranormal research in the United States declined sharply after a peak in the 1970s. By the 2000s, the Wikipedia article notes, no experimental result in the field had gained wide scientific acceptance.

How many people believe?

Belief in at least some paranormal claims is a majority position in many countries, though belief in any single claim usually is not.

Gallup 2005

Gallup's June 2005 survey of 1,002 U.S. adults (fieldwork June 6–8, margin of error ±3 points) found that 73% believed in at least one of ten paranormal items, down slightly from 76% in 2001. About 57% believed in two or more, 32% in four or more, 22% in five or more, and only 1% in all ten.

Gallup also asked about psychic or spiritual healing ("the power of the human mind to heal the body"), which 55% believed in, and devil possession, at 42%, but treated these separately from the core ten because respondents may have understood them in religious or non-literal ways. The 2005 survey found no statistically significant differences by age, gender, education, race or region.

Gallup 2025

Gallup returned to the topic twenty years later. Its survey of 1,003 U.S. adults (May 1–18, 2025; margin of error ±4 points) found Americans broadly skeptical, with no phenomenon believed by a majority. Psychic or spiritual healing was the most widely held belief at 48%, followed by ghosts at 39%. Roughly one in five respondents said they were unsure about each item. At least half said they did not believe in clairvoyance (50%), reincarnation (50%), astrology (55%) or witches (60%).

Compared with 2001, most beliefs were statistically similar, but belief in psychic or spiritual healing and in clairvoyance each fell 6 points, and belief in telepathy fell 7 points.

Gallup sorted respondents into two clusters. About 34% were "open," believing in at least three phenomena (five on average). About 66% were "skeptical," believing in about one on average; the main exception was psychic or spiritual healing, which a third of skeptics accepted. The demographic differences in the open group were notable:

The religious-attendance finding surprises some people. Regular churchgoers were the most skeptical group (78% skeptical among weekly or near-weekly attenders, against 57% among those who never attend). One plausible reading is that organised religion offers its own framework for the supernatural and discourages competing ones such as astrology or mediumship.

Other surveys

• Pew Research Center, in a 2009 survey, found that 18% of U.S. adults said they had seen or been in the presence of a ghost, and 29% said they had felt in touch with someone who had died.
• The U.S. National Science Foundation reported in 2001 that 9% of Americans thought astrology was "very scientific" and 31% "sort of scientific," and that about 60% agreed with some form of ESP.
• A 1996 Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans believed the government was covering up information about UFOs. A 2002 Roper poll for the Sci Fi channel found 56% thought UFOs were real craft and 48% thought aliens had visited Earth.
• Chapman University's 2017 survey found the most common paranormal belief was in ancient advanced civilisations such as Atlantis (55%), followed by haunted places (52%) and ancient alien visits (35%).
• A 2006 online survey by Monash University in Australia, with more than 2,000 respondents, found about 70% reported an unexplained, life-changing event, about 70% reported sensing an absent person or animal, about 80% reported a premonition and almost 50% recalled a past life. Online self-selected surveys tend to attract people interested in the subject, so these numbers say more about experiences among respondents than about the general population.

The wording of a question changes the answer a great deal. Asking whether someone "believes in ghosts" gives a different number from asking whether they have ever "felt the presence" of someone who has died. That is one reason the figures vary so much from survey to survey.

A worked example: reading a poll margin

Hypothetical illustration. Suppose a poll of about 1,000 adults reports that 39% believe in ghosts, with a margin of error of ±4 points at 95% confidence. That means the true population figure is likely somewhere between 35% and 43%. If an earlier poll had found 32%, the gap of 7 points is larger than either poll's margin alone, but comparisons between two polls carry their own, larger uncertainty, and changes in question wording or survey method can shift results by several points. This is why careful pollsters, Gallup included, describe some changes as "statistically similar" even when the raw numbers differ.

Why paranormal experiences feel so real

The scientific consensus does not say that people who report paranormal experiences are lying or foolish. It says the experiences are real, but their causes are ordinary. The study of these causes is called anomalistic psychology. The psychologist David Marks, a prominent researcher in this area, lists factors such as magical thinking, mental imagery, subjective validation, coincidence, hidden causes and fraud.

Perception: seeing patterns that are not there

Human brains are pattern-detectors built to err on the side of seeing too much rather than too little. Pareidolia is the tendency to see a meaningful image, especially a face, in a vague stimulus: a face in a cloud, the Man in the Moon, or the "Face on Mars," which later photographs showed to be an ordinary rock formation. It is a specific kind of apophenia, the broader tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. A 2009 brain-imaging study found that face-like objects trigger early activity in the fusiform face area much as real faces do, and face pareidolia has been demonstrated even in rhesus macaques.

Auditory pareidolia matters for ghost hunting. "Electronic voice phenomena" (EVP), the claim that spirits leave voices on audio recordings, was popularised by Konstantīns Raudive's 1971 book; the Wikipedia article on pareidolia describes EVP as an example of hearing words in random noise.

The cognitive scientist Justin Barrett proposed that the brain has an "agency detection" system that can overreact, perceiving a person or presence where there is only a noise or a shadow. A 2013 study by Michiel van Elk, titled "Paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection than skeptics," supports the idea that people differ in how readily this system fires.

From an evolutionary point of view, the logic is simple. A person who mistakes a rustle in the grass for a predator loses little. A person who mistakes a predator for a rustle in the grass may not survive. Brains that over-detect agents are the ones that left descendants.

Sleep paralysis: the classic "visitor in the bedroom"

Many of the most vivid ghost, demon and alien-abduction experiences match a well-understood sleep phenomenon. In sleep paralysis, a person wakes (or begins to fall asleep) while the body is still in the muscle-paralysed state of dreaming sleep. They are aware but cannot move, and dream imagery can spill into waking perception.

Estimates of how many people experience it at least once range from 8% to 50%, and about 5% have regular episodes. One review of 35 studies estimated lifetime rates of about 8% in the general population, 28% among students and 32% among psychiatric patients. Episodes usually last from a few seconds to a few minutes.

The hallucinations are strikingly consistent: a sense that someone or something is in the room (the "intruder"), pressure on the chest as if something is sitting there (the "incubus"), difficulty breathing, floating sensations, and buzzing, humming or voices. Cultures across the world have names for it, more than 100 by one count: the "Old Hag" in Newfoundland, kanashibari ("metal binding") in Japan, the jinn-related al-Jathoom in parts of the Arab world, and the Cambodian expression "the ghost pushes you down." Researchers have proposed sleep paralysis as an explanation for many reports of ghosts, demons, night hags and "shadow people," and as a contributor to alien-abduction stories in the United States.

How common "ghost" experiences are

The psychologist Richard Wiseman, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, notes that roughly 15% of people report having encountered a ghost, but only about 1% report seeing a full apparition. The rest describe sensations: a sudden chill, a feeling of being watched, an odd smell, a sense of presence. Wiseman attributes most of these to the brain's own activity, often triggered by the environment and by expectation.

Researchers have tested environmental explanations. The neuroscientist Michael Persinger proposed that weak magnetic fields could produce ghostly experiences, and built a helmet (popularly called the "God helmet") to test the idea. When Pehr Granqvist's team repeated the work with proper double-blind controls, they found that the effects came from suggestion, not the magnetic fields. People who were told something might happen often reported that something did.

Memory and subjective validation

Memory is reconstructive. Each time a story is retold, it can drift towards a better story. A dream about a relative followed by news of that relative's illness is remembered; the thousands of dreams followed by nothing are forgotten. This is the core of how premonitions come to feel compelling.

Subjective validation is the tendency to find personal meaning in vague or general statements. It is the engine of psychic readings. A reader who says "I'm sensing someone whose name begins with J, or has a J sound" will, in a room of any size, find someone for whom that is true. The person who responds then supplies more information, often without realising it, and later remembers the reading as more specific than it was. This technique, whether used deliberately or not, is called cold reading.

Coincidence and the law of large numbers

Rare events happen all the time when there are enough opportunities. Hypothetical worked example: suppose a person has a vivid "premonition" about some acquaintance with a one-in-ten-thousand chance of coming true on a given day. If 100 million adults each have one such thought a day, about 100,000,000 × 1/10,000 = 10,000 people would experience a "true premonition" every single day by chance alone. Each of them would have a remarkable story, and none of them would be evidence of precognition.

Personality, cognition and circumstance

Studies have linked paranormal belief and experience to several traits: fantasy proneness, dissociation, absorption (a tendency to become deeply immersed in experiences), and certain cognitive biases and reasoning errors. Some research associates belief with trauma in childhood and with a feeling of lacking control over one's life. Some studies link it with lower education and social status, though findings conflict; one 2006 study by Farha and Steward found belief rose with education level for some items. Women score higher on many measures of belief, while men report more belief in UFOs. Some neuroscientific work associates belief with higher dopamine activity, which may increase the tendency to find patterns.

None of this means that believers are irrational in general. Many intelligent, well-educated people hold paranormal beliefs, and skeptics are subject to the same biases in other areas. The point is that the mind has known, measurable habits that produce paranormal-feeling experiences without anything paranormal happening.

The skeptical movement

Organised skepticism arose partly in response to the paranormal boom of the 1970s. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) was founded in 1976. It is now called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and publishes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer.

Skeptics usually lean on Occam's razor: when two explanations fit the evidence, prefer the one that requires fewer new assumptions. If a medium seems to know private details, the explanation "she researched the sitter or used cold reading" requires no new physics; "she is speaking with the dead" requires a great deal.

The magician James Randi became the movement's most famous figure. He showed that stage magicians could duplicate the spoon-bending of Uri Geller, and founded the James Randi Educational Foundation, which offered a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal ability under agreed test conditions. The prize was never claimed. The Independent Investigations Group, founded in 2000, offers $100,000 for a paranormal claim that passes scientifically controlled tests; according to the Wikipedia article, no claimant has passed even the first, easier stage. Combined prizes on offer worldwide for proof of the paranormal have been reported to exceed $2.4 million.

Critics of the skeptics argue that prize challenges prove little, since a genuine but weak effect might not show up in a single test, and that some skeptics dismiss data without examining it. That is a fair point about method. It is also true that proponents have had well over a century, many laboratories and millions of dollars of public and private funding, and the effects have shrunk as methods have tightened, which is the opposite of what happens with real phenomena.

What the evidence shows

Here is a fair summary of where things stand.

Paranormal experiences are common and real as experiences. Large numbers of people, in every culture studied, report sensing presences, seeing apparitions, having premonitions or feeling contact with the dead. The 1894 Census of Hallucinations and modern surveys agree on this.

No paranormal ability has been demonstrated reliably. After more than 140 years of organised investigation, from the SPR to Rhine's Duke lab, the ganzfeld, PEAR, government remote-viewing programs and Bem's experiments, no paranormal effect has been independently replicated to the satisfaction of the wider scientific community. Effects that appear in early, loosely controlled studies tend to shrink or vanish as controls improve. The 1995 review of the U.S. government's remote-viewing program found it had never produced actionable intelligence.

The ordinary explanations are well supported. Pareidolia, agency detection, sleep paralysis, suggestion, memory distortion, coincidence, cold reading and outright fraud have all been demonstrated experimentally and explain the main features of most reported experiences.

The claims also conflict with well-tested physics. Telepathy over any distance, precognition of future events and minds moving matter would require forces or channels that have not shown up in any physical measurement, despite physics being able to detect extraordinarily weak signals. This does not make such things logically impossible, but it sets a high bar of evidence, which the data have not cleared.

The research has had real scientific value. Testing paranormal claims led directly to better methods: blinding, randomisation, pre-registration, attention to sensory leakage and stricter statistics. Bem's 2011 paper, in particular, became a teaching example of how flexible analysis can produce false positives in any field.

Common misconceptions

"If something can't be explained, it must be paranormal." An unexplained event is just unexplained. Many "mysteries" turn out to have ordinary causes once more information is available, and a lack of explanation is not evidence for any particular alternative.

"Science refuses to study the paranormal." Science has studied it extensively, in some of the world's best universities, for over a century. The problem is not lack of study but lack of results that survive replication.

"Electromagnetic field meters detect ghosts." EMF meters detect electromagnetic fields, which come from wiring, appliances and phones. There is no established link between such fields and spirits. Persinger's magnetic-field work, the main scientific attempt to connect fields with ghostly experiences, did not hold up under double-blind conditions.

"Skeptics say everyone who has an experience is lying." Mainstream researchers generally take reports at face value as sincere accounts of experiences. The disagreement is about what caused them.

"Polls show most people believe, so it must be true." Popularity is not evidence. Belief rates have also moved with culture and media; Gallup found belief in ghosts and haunted houses higher in 2001 than in 1990, and belief in several items has declined since.

"Debunking one case proves nothing." True: one exposed fraud does not disprove every claim. But the consistent pattern across many decades, in which better controls lead to smaller effects, is meaningful evidence.

The paranormal in culture

Whatever its scientific status, the paranormal is a major cultural force. Ghost stories, haunted-house attractions, horror films, psychic hotlines, tarot and astrology apps, true-crime-style ghost-hunting series and UFO documentaries are a large entertainment industry. Many people engage with these things playfully, much as they enjoy a horror film, without firm belief. Others find meaning, comfort or community in them, especially beliefs about contact with the dead, which can feel bound up with grief.

Critics argue that media coverage tends to promote paranormal claims while giving little airtime to skeptical explanations, and that some commercial operators, such as paid mediums or "psychic healers," can cause harm, particularly when vulnerable or grieving people pay large sums, or when someone delays medical treatment in favour of psychic or spiritual healing. Anyone dealing with a health problem should see a doctor rather than rely on paranormal or "energy" treatments.

Frequently asked questions

When was the word "paranormal" first used? According to the Wikipedia article's etymology note, in 1905, to describe phenomena presumed to follow physical laws not yet understood.

What is parapsychology? The experimental study of claimed psychic phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis. Its main professional body, the Parapsychological Association, was founded in 1957 and affiliated with the AAAS in 1969.

What is the ganzfeld experiment? A telepathy test in which a receiver in mild sensory deprivation tries to identify a target viewed by a sender, usually from four options, so that chance is 25%. Results have been disputed for decades; a 1999 meta-analysis by Milton and Wiseman found no effect beyond chance, while some later meta-analyses claimed small effects, and critics point to methodological problems.

Did the U.S. government really fund psychic spies? Yes. The Stargate Project and its predecessors ran from the 1970s until 1995. A review commissioned by the CIA concluded that remote viewing was not useful for intelligence, and the program was cancelled.

Has anyone ever won a paranormal challenge prize? No. Scientific American's 1922 prizes, James Randi's $1,000,000 challenge and the Independent Investigations Group's $100,000 prize all went unclaimed.

Why do so many people report seeing ghosts? Common causes include sleep paralysis, pareidolia, an over-active agency detection system, suggestion and expectation, memory distortion and environmental factors such as drafts or low-frequency noise. Richard Wiseman notes about 15% of people report a ghost encounter, though only around 1% report seeing a full figure.

Is belief in the paranormal rising or falling? In the United States, Gallup's 2025 survey found most beliefs similar to 2001, with modest declines in belief in psychic healing, clairvoyance and telepathy. About a third of Americans are broadly open to paranormal claims; about two thirds are broadly skeptical.

Are paranormal beliefs harmful? Often they are not; many people enjoy them as folklore or entertainment. Harm can arise when people pay large sums to frauds, are exploited while grieving, or substitute paranormal "healing" for medical care.

What would count as good evidence? A clearly defined effect, tested under blinded and randomised conditions with procedures fixed in advance, that independent laboratories, including skeptical ones, can reproduce consistently. That standard is the same one applied to any new medicine or physical discovery.

The bottom line

The paranormal sits where human experience meets human error. The experiences are widespread and often deeply moving. The claims behind them have been investigated more thoroughly than many people realise, by believers and skeptics alike, and the investigations have consistently pointed to the mind's own workings rather than to ghosts, psychic powers or spirit voices. The most lasting product of that long search has been a much clearer understanding of perception, memory and the statistics of discovery, which is valuable knowledge in its own right.

Sources

• Paranormal (Wikipedia)
• Gallup: Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal (2005)
• Gallup: Paranormal Phenomena Met With Skepticism (2025)
• Pew Research Center: 18% of Americans say they've seen a ghost
• Society for Psychical Research (Wikipedia)
• J. B. Rhine (Wikipedia)
• Ganzfeld experiment (Wikipedia)
• Stargate Project (Wikipedia))
• Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (Wikipedia)
• Feeling the Future (Wikipedia)
• Fox sisters (Wikipedia)
• Pareidolia (Wikipedia)
• Sleep paralysis (Wikipedia)
• Wiseman, "The Haunted Brain," Skeptical Inquirer
• Marks (1988), "The Psychology of Paranormal Beliefs"
• van Elk (2013), "Paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection than skeptics"
• Gulliksen (1938), "Extra-Sensory Perception: What Is It?"
• National Science Foundation: Belief in the Paranormal or Pseudoscience (archived)