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Most out-of-body evidence comes from hospitals, after the fact. This case came from a laboratory, with a target chosen in advance. It is the cleanest test of the idea that has ever reported a direct hit, and the argument about it has lasted more than fifty years.
A young woman who said she sometimes found herself at night floating near the ceiling, looking down at her body, was tested in Charles Tart's sleep laboratory. On the fourth night she reported an out-of-body experience and correctly gave a five-digit random number that had been placed out of her sight on a shelf above her bed. Tart put the odds of guessing it at 100,000 to 1.
The primary report is Charles T. Tart, "A Psychophysiological Study of Out-of-the-Body Experiences in a Selected Subject", Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 62 (1968), 3 to 27. Tart retold it in detail in "Six Studies of Out-of-Body Experiences", Journal of Near-Death Studies 17(2) (1998), 73 to 99.
Miss Z, as Tart called her, was about to leave the area, and spent four nights in his lab. He recorded her EEG, eye movements and skin resistance. Each night, after she was in bed and the recordings were running, he went to his office, opened a table of random numbers at random, copied five digits in figures about two inches high, carried the paper in an opaque folder, and slipped it onto a shelf where it would be visible only to someone whose eyes were about six and a half feet off the floor or higher.
On the first three nights she said she could not control her experiences well enough to see it. On the fourth, at 5.57 am, after seven minutes of ambiguous EEG activity, she called out over the intercom that the number was 25132. It was. She also said she "needed to go higher because the number was lying down", and it was lying flat, although she had expected it to be propped against the wall.
Tart also recorded something unusual in her brain waves during these episodes: a poorly developed stage 1 sleep pattern dominated by slowed alpha-like activity, with no rapid eye movements. He showed it to the sleep researcher William Dement, who agreed it was distinctive.
The target was chosen randomly, after the subject was in bed, by an experienced researcher. Five correct digits in order is not a near-miss that needs generous scoring. And it happened in a lab, not in a story told years later. Tart wrote that he had "always thought that some form of ESP was the best explanation of the results."
The weakness is the room, not the number. Critics pointed out that Miss Z was not under continuous observation: Tart watched the equipment from the next room and acknowledged that he sometimes dozed during the night. Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones (Anomalistic Psychology, 1989) argued that normal sensory means had not been ruled out, noting that light falling on the paper might be reflected in the surface of a clock on the wall above the shelf. Milbourne Christopher suggested a small mirror, and noted that she was not searched. James Alcock asked why she was not filmed. Martin Gardner proposed, sardonically, that she simply stood up in bed without detaching the electrodes and looked. Susan Blackmore argued that the EEG record showed interference consistent with movement, and Tart's own description of the seven minutes before the call is of ambiguous activity that sometimes looked like brief wakings.
Tart's answers deserve a hearing. With the magician and parapsychologist Arthur Hastings he later inspected the lab in the dark and found that the number could not be seen in the clock casing unless a bright flashlight was shone directly on it. The electrodes limited her movement. He also points out that his own original write-up was cautious: "Miss Z's reading of the target number cannot be considered as providing conclusive evidence for a parapsychological effect."
Even on Tart's terms, he knew the number, so believers in telepathy have their own alternative, which he concedes the design could not rule out. And the experiment was never repeated: Miss Z moved away and could not be traced.
A single hit by a single subject in a lab that was not built to exclude cheating or accident. The hit is real; the room is the problem. Tart's own description of its purpose is the fairest summary: to show that OBEs could be studied in the laboratory, not to settle what they are. Rating: Disputed.
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