Ray Hyman

Ray Hyman is an American psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, and one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement. He co-founded CSICOP (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) in 1976. His article on cold reading, the techniques by which fortune tellers appear to know things about strangers, is often reprinted, and the Hick-Hyman law in psychology carries his name.

Hyman studied Uri Geller and parapsychology experiments such as the Ganzfeld studies, arguing that their results had not been independently replicated.

In 1995 the American Institutes for Research asked him and the statistician Jessica Utts to evaluate the government's remote viewing research, later known as Stargate. Hyman agreed that the recent laboratory experiments were free of the more obvious flaws, but argued that Utts's conclusion that psychic functioning had been shown was premature, because the effects had not been independently replicated and other explanations had not been ruled out. The program was ended that year.