It was 1996 when Linda Rosa's daughter Emily was preparing her fourth-grade science fair entry. She was working on an exhibit with M&Ms that would illustrate the probability of picking out a certain color when one reached blindly into a bowl and plucked one. While she was working out the details, she noticed her mom watching a video on Therapeutic Touch. She said, "I wonder if they can really do that?" Suddenly her science fair project took a different form. After discussing several different possibilities with her mom, Emily decided that instead of having volunteers reach in and grab an M&M, she would invite Therapeutic Touch "healers" to reach through her screen and see whether they could detect which of their hands Emily was holding her hand over. She designed and constructed the screen herself, tested it out on a few school buddies, and then made further modifications to ensure the screen would insulate her from her subjects. She was ready.
James Randi, the famous magician and skeptic, has a standing offer of over $1 million dollars to anyone who can prove they can accurately detect an energy field. Despite publicly offering the challenge to Dolores Krieger and the other 100,000 people who claim to have this ability, Randi has only had one person make the attempt -- and she failed. Unlike Randi, however,
Emily was able to recruit 21 experienced TT practitioners for her experiment. The TTP's were allowed to "feel" Emily's hands prior to the test, and choose which one they felt the strongest energy radiating from. With the TTP seated behind the screen, Emily then placed her hand over one of the TTP's hands. After 20 trials, these experienced TTP's, some of whom had even published articles on TT, could only sense Emily's hand correctly 44% of the time. By chance alone, they should have guessed correctly 50% of the time [1]. Clearly, except in their own mind, they were not sensing an energy field.