Discovery Lab Answers

Debra Lynne Katz, PhD is a parapsychology researcher, remote viewing practitioner, and founder of the International School of Clairvoyance, profiled at Debra Lynne Katz. The structured evidence below covers two studies in the ESP-Nexus library. Because the library’s share of the published literature on her work has not been measured, what follows is a summary of what the library holds — not a settled account of the field.

Experiments

Katz’s work in the library spans several distinct lines:

Project Firefly (2018) was a naturalistic, longitudinal associative remote viewing (ARV) study in which participants made daily aggregate predictions over roughly fourteen months. The study tested whether ARV-style remote viewing could produce above-chance predictive accuracy in a real-world, uncontrolled setting.

Background context and photographic targets (2021) — co-authored with James D. Lane and Michelle Freed-Bulgatz — was a controlled laboratory experiment examining whether the background context of objects in photographic targets influenced remote viewing performance. It ran across multiple sessions and used repeated-measures analysis. The audit page is at Katz et al. (2021).

Remote viewing meta-analysis (2023) — co-authored with Patrizio Tressoldi — synthesized the remote viewing literature from 1974 through 2022, constituting the first comprehensive meta-analysis of that span. The audit page is at Tressoldi & Katz (2023).

Sensing accuracy survey (2026) — co-authored with Jenifer Prather and Jimmy Akin — examined experienced remote viewers’ awareness of their own accuracy and correctness during sessions, with implications for confidence judgments and reliability in remote viewing applications.

Experts’ remote viewing guidelines (2026) — co-authored with Jimmy Akin and Patrizio Tressoldi — used qualitative methods to consolidate expert consensus on best practices for conducting remote viewing research, covering areas such as viewer recruitment, session recording, target selection, and analyst qualifications.

Critical thinking and replication (2025) — co-authored with Jeffrey S. Reber, Jacob H. Tengelsen, and Peder Schillemat — analyzed how introductory psychology textbooks treat replication, using psi research (including work by Bem) as a case study in how replication status is or is not communicated to students.

She also served as president of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA) and co-founded the IRVA Research Unit in 2020 with Dale Graff.

Methodology

Project Firefly used a naturalistic ARV design: 62 participants made 177 daily aggregate predictions across a fourteen-month window (October 2014 – December 2015). The study was observational rather than tightly controlled, tracking accuracy in conditions closer to real-world application than a laboratory protocol.

Katz et al. (2021) used a controlled repeated-measures design. The key methodological feature was systematic manipulation of background context in photographic targets — comparing conditions where background context differed — across 360 sessions with 12 participants. A repeated-measures ANOVA (RM-ANOVA) was the primary inferential tool, with the sum-of-ranks as the pre-specified outcome for the H1 Phase II test.

The 2023 meta-analysis with Tressoldi applied systematic review methods to the 1974–2022 remote viewing literature, using a random-effects meta-analysis framework and examining moderators including type of participant, type of task, publication type, and interjudge agreement.

The 2026 expert guidelines paper with Akin and Tressoldi used thematic analysis (following Braun & Clarke, 2006) applied to structured expert input, synthesizing qualitative consensus rather than quantitative data. Katz contributed to conceptualizing guidelines on viewer experience, session recording, and methodological flexibility for experienced viewers.

Data

The two studies with structured quantitative outcomes in the library are not directly comparable — they use different metrics — so no pooled figure is appropriate.

The 2021 background-context experiment showed that background condition significantly affected remote viewing performance (p = .01), though the ESP-Nexus audit page notes that this effect ran in opposite directions depending on scoring method — a complication the headline statistic alone does not capture.

Project Firefly produced a hit rate of 0.48 and an effect size of −0.02 across 177 trials, a null result. Trades hit below the level that would be needed for the Kelly wagering strategy to be profitable.

These two outcomes point in different directions — one positive, one null — and the metrics are not poolable. The unsettled signal across these two studies is genuine and should not be smoothed over.

The 2023 meta-analysis with Tressoldi covers the broader remote viewing literature quantitatively, but its aggregate statistics are not reproduced in the structured evidence rows for this question; the audit page at Tressoldi & Katz (2023) carries those figures.

A publication-year trend chart is not rendered here because the two studies report different, non-comparable metrics — a chart of effect size against year would require at least four results on one standardized metric, which this set does not provide.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. The Tressoldi & Katz (2023) audit page notes that Katz is affiliated with the International Remote Viewing Association, an organization that promotes remote viewing, and flags this as a relevant consideration when evaluating the 2023 meta-analysis. This is a standard conflict-of-interest concern in meta-analytic research: when a co-author has an organizational stake in the phenomenon under review, the selection and weighting of studies may be influenced in ways that are not fully transparent.

What the experimental data show. The Project Firefly study — one of Katz’s own primary experiments — returned a null result (hit rate 0.48, ES −0.02) across 177 trials and 62 participants. That null is part of Katz’s own published record and is reported here alongside the positive result from Katz et al. (2021). The 2021 study’s positive background-context effect (p = .01) was qualified by the finding that direction differed by scoring method, which the authors themselves recorded.

Analysis. The conflict-of-interest flag is documentary rather than a finding of bias — it identifies a structural feature of the research team that readers should weigh, not a demonstrated error in the analysis. The null from Project Firefly and the scoring-method qualification in the 2021 study are both published findings, available in the record. Independent replication of the 2021 background-context effect by researchers outside the original team has not been documented in the sources retrieved for this question.