The umbrella term for ESP, telekinesis, and precognition, studied for 140 years by scientists who keep finding just enough to keep going.
Documented
The research program is real and on the record
The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882 with philosophers and physicists among its founders. J.B. Rhine ran a parapsychology laboratory at Duke from the 1930s, publishing ESP card experiments in academic journals. The US government funded remote-viewing research, the Stargate program, for over two decades before its 1995 declassification. Ganzfeld telepathy meta-analyses have produced results above chance and decades of argument about why.
Assessment: Fully documented: the institutions, the publications, the declassified files. What is not established is psi itself. Replication attempts fail as often as they succeed, no mechanism exists, and the field's strongest results live at the edge of statistical detectability, exactly where methodological ghosts live too.
Interesting claims
Suppression, not failure, explains the exile
Jorjani's version, the strongest on this shelf: psi phenomena are not paranormal but supernormal, occluded by reductive models, and the boundary between science and the spectral was drawn for institutional convenience. On this reading, Stargate ended not because remote viewing failed but because it worked and became ungovernable. The skeptic societies, CSICOP and its heirs, function as border police, not referees.
Assessment: A genuinely interesting claim with a weak engine. Governments did fund the research, which undercuts pure suppression, and the declassified Stargate reviews concluded the intelligence value was never demonstrated. The honest verdict is stranger than either camp: 140 years of effort produced anomalies that refuse to die and refuse to grow. Whatever that is, it is not yet science.
Stories
The knowing that needs no laboratory
Twin telepathy, the mother who wakes before the phone rings, the dream before the disaster: after the Aberfan landslide of 1966, a psychiatrist collected dozens of premonitions and founded a bureau to log them. The folk tier of psi is the world's largest informal dataset.
Assessment: The Aberfan premonition bureau is documented, as is the conclusion: predictions logged after the fact convince everyone and prove nothing. The stories are real experiences; the question is what experiences are evidence of.
Sources and further reading
R.H. Thouless & B.P. Wiesner, The Psi Processes in Normal and Paranormal Psychology, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 48, 1942, coining psi
J.B. Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception, 1934
Worth asking
Rhine's card-guessers beat chance by margins statistics can measure. Ganzfeld experiments replicate at rates better than some famous physics results. Why does everyone act as if nothing was ever found?