The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research

The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research collects the psychologist Ray Hyman's critical examinations of parapsychology. Its central claim is that the evidence offered for psychic phenomena, when scrutinised by ordinary standards of experimental rigour, repeatedly fails to establish the effects it reports.

The method is methodological critique: Hyman analyses the design, statistics, and replication record of psychical-research experiments, identifying flaws, artefacts, and selective reporting that can account for apparently positive results without recourse to the paranormal. The "quarry" of genuine psi proves persistently elusive precisely because better controls dissolve it.

Written by a founding figure of organised scientific skepticism, the book represents the careful, internally critical pole of the debate over consciousness and anomalous cognition. It anchors the appraising, evidence-first tradition that tests rather than asserts the claims of the mind-power lineage.