Given Playfair's mendacity regarding the CSICOP/CSMMH test on Natasha Demkina, I'm not about to accept anything he writes at face value, and certainly not a column plugging his own book.
Claims Playfair:
We have had the statistical evidence for some time, and we now have the visible evidence, produced by an easily repeatable experiment.
There's a problem with his claim of the "experiment" being replicated, though, namely this:
It was not the first time that an ostensibly telepathic signal had been recorded at the moment it was received. In 1997, the same polygraph expert supevised [sic] an experiment held in front of a live audience for a programme in Carlton TV's Paranormal World of Paul McKenna series shown on 24th June.
Italics mine.
Now, as ImaginalDisc has already rightly pointed out, polygraphs are of highly dubious validity to begin with, and here we have
the same guy operating the machine in both instances where the desired result was achieved. When scientists speak of replicability, they mean that
someone else was also able to perform the experiment with the same result, not that one guy did his schtick twice.
I can't tel whether we're dealing with active fraud or self-delusion here, but I'm highly skeptical that there's anything to it, at least based on this column. Interestingly, my mother is one of identical twins, and despite years of close observation, I've never known my mother or my aunt to exhibit this kind of behavior. They've certainly never incurred spontaneous bone fractures.
