Letter to the Editor

Abstract

To the Editor, I read with great interest the article "Understanding the factors at play in the sender-receiver dynamic during telepathy ganzfeld: A meta-analysis" (Pooley et al., 2023) in the latest issue of the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition in which the authors disregarded Parra´s ganzfeld studies, remarking that: "serious fraudulent actions and widespread plagiarism conducted by Alejandro Parra […] we deemed it best to remove all the Parra studies from the dataset (a total of 5 data points). I am in agreement to discard studies containing plagiarism, however these ganzfeld studies are not affected by plagiarism or experimental fraud. All ganzfeld studies were performed under supervision with me as co-author. I understand Parra was involved, but it is unfair to involve other people who worked on those studies as well, such as Juan Carlos Argibay (a statistical advisor) and me.´The results were evaluated by Juan Carlos Argibay (a statistical advisor) in a double masked fashion, which was standard protocol. I understand the "weight" of plagiarism would tend one to suspect experimental fraud, but it was absolutely impossible. Plagiarism refers to unacknowledged paragraphs in some articles, but they did not affect the validity of the experimental results. Lance Storm (2021a,b) never retracted our articles in AJP nor did Malcolm Schofield, editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (they both cited a list of articles plagiarized; but had faith in the experimental results). In fact, Storm, who analyzed specifically plagiarism, opined that although one of our studies had a large effect size as (>.30), another had a a very small