Discovery Lab Answers

Science Unlimited Research Foundation (SURF) was a parapsychology research facility located in San Antonio, Texas. According to ESP-Nexus records, it was active during the mid-to-late 1980s and served as a research base for forensic auditing and experimental work on psi effects.

The foundation is best known in the parapsychology literature for hosting Rick E. Berger’s forensic critique work and his experiments on psi effects without real-time feedback during 1985–1989. Berger’s forensic audit research at SURF directly compared published summaries of psi studies against their raw source data, examining whether effect-size estimates in the literature remained consistent when traced back to primary documents — a methodological scrutiny that proved important for assessing the reliability of psi datasets.

The foundation was also one of six major parapsychology laboratories that Deborah L. Delanoy visited during her 1989 tour of US research sites, which surveyed the state of psi research infrastructure at the time.

For more detail on Berger’s work at SURF, see the Forensic critique of psi datasets and Psi effects without real-time feedback pages, or Rick E. Berger’s profile.