APPARENT ASSOCIATION BETWEEN EFFECT SIZE IN FREE RESPONSE ANOMALOUS COGNITION EXPERIMENTS AND LOCAL SIDEREAL TIME

Nothing is known about the physical mechanism of anomalous cognition (AC), or ESP. Afirst step towards generating focused hypotheses would be the discovery of a physicalparameter which clearly modulated AC performance. In this paper, an associationbetween the local sidereal time (LST) at which a trial occurs and the resulting effect size isdescribed. In an existing database of 1,468 free response trials,theeffect size increased340%for trials within 1 hour of 13.5h LST (p= 0.001). A independent database of1,015similar trials was subsequentlyobtainedin which trials within 1 hour of 13.5h LSTshowed an effect size increase of450%(p= 0.05) providing confirmation of the effect.Possible artifacts due to the non-uniform distribution of trials in clock time and variationsof effect size with experiment are discussed and rejected as explanations. Assuming thatsome unknown systematic bias is not present in the data, it appears that AC performanceis strongly dependent upon the LST at which the trial occurs. This is evidence of a causalconnection between performance and theorientation of the receiver (i.e., a term forsubject or participant), the earth and the fixed stars