The peculiar matter of decreasing psi

Looking back at parapsychology over my lifetime, in the late 60's and the whole of the 70's there was  a pretty popular idea that scientific proof of things such as ESP or other psi powers would be soon established, and likely understood as a part of nature that had just not been properly recognised before.  (And/or, a part of human evolutionary progress.)  Science fiction by Larry Niven, and to a degree, Arthur C Clarke, incorporated this theme, as did some TV shows.  And I doubt that non fiction books on the paranormal have ever sold as well as they did in the 1970's, and perhaps into the early 80's. 

In reality, though, the investigation of psi seemed to progress in haphazard fashion, with promising early experiments and studies fizzling out.   Ganzfeld experiments for ESP testing seemed to be finally be a potential repeatable demonstration of ESP, but there is now doubt about that.

Given the slipperiness of the evidence in the field, I have often wondered whether anyone had written science fiction in which alien or supernatural operatives actively interfered with parapsychology research in order to keep humans in the dark about the true nature of reality.  I suspect its already been done (you could say it's been done for UFO's with the Men in Black.)

But I didn't realise until this weekend when I read this essay "The Capricious, Actively Evasive, Unsustainable Nature of Psi"that in fact there had been a a lot of pondering within parapsychological circles over the last couple of decades about the mysterious way psi has often seemed to dissipate after early successes.

The .pdf article at the link, which appeared in the Journal of Parapsychology ten years ago (I found it via comments at Michael Prescott's blog) is a good read.   The author (James Kennedy, who I had not heard of before) did some work in parapsychology himself, and some autobiographical detail appears in this other paper.

He fully acknowledges that many people will go to the obvious explanation - that declining positive results are simply because of of improved experimental rigour - but notes (if briefly) that there are circumstances where this cannot really explain it.  This example seems odd:

Targ described another case:
[W]e did a series of trials some time ago where we had nine successes in a row forecasting silver futures changes, and then I triedto replicate that . . . and got eight out of nine hits. . . . I then sought for replication to take advantage of this mechanical psi machine we had created and I got eight out of nine failures. That has really stopped my personal psi investigation for a couple of years while I have tried to meditate on what the problem is here.  (Targ, Braud, Stanford, Schlitz, & Honorton, 1991, pp. 76–77)

Kennedy seems to be sympathetic to the view that something very personal goes on with psi, and it sounds as if believes in some type of external higher consciousness being involved.

While this may sound too "spiritual" for hard nosed skeptics to take him seriously, he nonetheless seems to write well on the topic, and to be an interesting character. There are links to many of his papers here.