ASSAP held a Psychic Challenge at the Fortean Times Unconvention 2008. Below are the results for those who took part. Wendy Milner describes what happened.

Thank you for taking part in ASSAP's Psychic Challenge at the UnConvention 2008. We didn't want you to take it too seriously as the conditions were not right for proper testing, but we hope you enjoyed it as an introduction to the world of psi-testing.

Your total test scores are in the table below, next to your initials. Where initials are duplicated, the second letters of your name are used.

The average score was 7.31. A score of between 0 and 14 is pretty much one of chance. Above this is indicative of a good psi-hit ratio, but participants would have to score consistently high points over a series of tests for it to be an indicator of significant psychic ability. An interesting point to note was that those who scored highly were mostly aware of their psychic ability beforehand. This is commonly known as the Sheep-Goat Effect, which you can learn more about here.

The results

Key

The answers

Nobody was able to match the image supplied by Lionel Fanthorpe (pic 2 below). Interestingly though, lots of the same type of image kept appearing:

• 9 trees
• 9 animals (mostly cats, but no frogs)
• 6 churches
• 5 houses
• 5 boats

These are all common projections, which amounted to 50% of the drawings - the sort of drawings one would doodle randomly, apart from churches, which given the occupation of our subject, is not surprising either. People who seemed to have more drawing ability gave a more detailed drawing. Of course, although we didn't know at the time, because the test was double blind, Lionel had not drawn the image himself. This effectively meant that his own image was entirely random and not a common projection.

Of the other drawings, there were many symbolic icons which would be consistent with people who had an interest in the paranormal or science fiction.

Find out more about being psychic here. More on psychic testing here.

Pic 1

Pic 2