Discovery Lab Answers

John G. Kruth is a parapsychology researcher and Executive Director of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, whose work spans experimental psi research, poltergeist investigation, applied remote viewing, and editorial leadership in the field. His ESP-Nexus profile is at John G. Kruth.

Experiments

Kruth’s most substantive experimental contribution in the retrieved sources is a pilot study in associative remote viewing (ARV) applied to financial prediction ^[5]. Three viewers made weekly predictions about whether a stock index would rise or fall, with their sessions judged by a blinded judge and investments made on the basis of those judgments. The study incorporated two additional protocols: a second blinded judge (Protocol 2) to test whether judge identity affects outcomes, and a mock “control” investment instrument (Protocol 3) to test whether the specific target being invested in matters ^[5].

Beyond this ARV study, Kruth has investigated poltergeist phenomena and electronic anomalies, including a documented case involving a young boy whose environment showed 31 distinct apparent electrical disturbances or technology malfunctions, referred to the Rhine Research Center by a medical doctor ^[2]. He has also reviewed archival documentation from the Rhine’s own history, including previously undisclosed records related to J. B. Rhine and the Duke Parapsychology Lab.

His book reviews ^[1][6] engage critically with published case investigations — including a Polish poltergeist case and a possession/poltergeist case linked to The Exorcist — functioning as evaluative assessments of the investigative and evidentiary standards in those reports.

Methodology

The ARV stock-prediction study ^[5] used a blinded, dual-judge, multi-protocol design:

• Three remote viewers submitted sessions weekly; a primary judge (J1) evaluated sessions without knowledge of which target had been assigned, selecting the image that best matched the viewer’s description.
• A second judge (J2) and a second coordinator (C2, who was also the principal investigator) were added under Protocol 2 — blinded to all other participants — to test the hypothesis that judge identity influences outcomes.
• A second investment instrument was tracked under Protocol 3, unknown to all participants except the PI, with no actual investments made on it, serving as a control comparison.
• The design explicitly pre-specified two hypotheses: H1 (judge identity matters) and H2 (investment instrument identity matters), and separate protocols were constructed to evaluate each.

A notable methodological self-reflection in the paper is Kruth’s own notation of a potential experimenter effect in Protocol 2, where the PI served as coordinator — acknowledged in the methodology section itself ^[5].

For poltergeist investigation, Kruth’s approach involves direct field response (visiting affected families), structured documentation of anomalous events, medical screening of focal individuals, and cross-referencing with archival records from prior Rhine investigations ^[2].

Data

The no structured evidence block was provided for this question, so the statistics below come directly from the retrieved primary source ^[5] and must be read as figures from that paper’s own reporting.

ARV study — key quantitative results ^[5]:

Several features of this dataset are worth flagging honestly:

• The below-chance result for J2 (effect size = –1.498) is as prominent a finding as any positive result — the study does not show uniform psi-consistent scoring across judges.
• The two judges’ sharply divergent results are the headline finding for H1: judge identity appears to matter, but the direction of that effect is that one judge scored at chance or worse while the other did not.
• The cited prior results (Lantz et al.; the individual investor) are drawn from earlier independent work summarized in the paper’s introduction, not from Kruth’s own pilot series, and are presented as context rather than as outcomes of this study.
• This was explicitly a pilot study; Kruth characterizes it as such, and the sample is small enough that the results are framed as exploratory rather than confirmatory.

The poltergeist cases described in ^[2] and reviewed in ^[1] and ^[6] are case reports and critical reviews, not controlled experiments, and no quantitative outcome measures are reported for them in the retrieved sources.

Skeptical critiques

The retrieved sources do not include published criticism directed specifically at Kruth’s own experimental work. His ARV paper ^[5] does, however, contain an internally documented methodological concern worth noting: Kruth himself flags a potential experimenter psi effect arising from the PI’s dual role as coordinator and researcher in Protocol 2, acknowledging that the PI’s own possible psi abilities could have influenced the results. This is a caveat the author raises, not an external critic — but it points to a recognized open question in ARV methodology more broadly.

The paper also cites Harary (1992) — a published critique of psi-based commodity futures forecasting — in its reference list ^[5], indicating that the skeptical literature on financial ARV applications was known to and engaged with by the author, though the retrieved excerpts do not show how Kruth responds to Harary’s specific arguments at length.

No named external critic of Kruth’s poltergeist work or editorial output appears in the sources retrieved for this question.