[Thatcherite]

And test it we have, at Stanford and Cambridge. The results were fairly conclusive that the effect is real and unexplainable by current physical theories. But you won't hear it from a "scientist"...except me.

Professional magicians have suggested the alternative explanation which is that scientists (even at Stanford and Cambridge) aren't very good at spotting the tricks used by hucksters who claim to be able to do stuff like bending spoons and make a good income out of fooling the public.

[Flightdeck]

Yes, you are correct that several frauds make a living off tricking the public and even scientifically trained observers. But there have been other laboratory test regimens that have taken that factor out completely and relied on statistics. It's hard to do that for spoon bending, of course, but for something like mentally controlling the (mechanical) roll of a die, studies have been performed at Duke, Stanford, Cambridge, and Princeton which have all showed the chances of the abnormal results obtained were on the order of trillions to one. These are starting to leak into the mainstream journals.