Open Questions

Open The Global Consciousness Project

Why It Is Open The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.

What Would Settle It An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.

Expertise Needed Statistics; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in The Global Consciousness Project, Roger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project).

Open Sudarium of Oviedo

Why It Is Open Radiocarbon testing of the cloth returned an approximate seventh century date, but the testing laboratory itself cautioned that oil contamination absorbed by the cloth could distort the result, so the date obtained has never been treated as reliable.

What Would Settle It A repeat radiocarbon dating using a sample cleaned of contaminant oils, of the kind used elsewhere to correct for similar contamination in aged relics.

Expertise Needed Archaeometry, radiocarbon dating

Question posed in The Oviedo Cloth, Mark Guscin.

Open Radiocarbon Dating of the Sudarium of Oviedo

Why It Is Open The published assay came with the laboratory's own caveat that oils absorbed over centuries of veneration could distort the measured age, and that caveat was never tested. No scholar holds a position on what a clean measurement would show, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement: the work was started, it reached no conclusion, and nobody resumed it.

What Would Settle It A repeat assay on material cleaned by a published decontamination protocol, run blind across more than one laboratory, with the sampling location on the cloth recorded. Independent characterisation of the absorbed organic contaminants would show how large a shift they are capable of producing, which is the part the original caveat left unquantified.

Expertise Needed Radiocarbon dating and archaeometry, with textile conservation science for the decontamination protocol.

Question posed in The Oviedo Cloth, Mark Guscin.

Open Telepathy

Why It Is Open The original series reported dream content correlating with a sender's target image above chance, but no other laboratory reproduced the effect, and the series itself was never repeated at a comparable scale. Irvin Child argued in 1985 that the result was dismissed rather than evaluated, which is a claim about how the field responded rather than a claim that anyone has since run the missing replication.

What Would Settle It A preregistered, multi-night sleep laboratory replication with automated target selection, blind judging of dream transcripts against a randomized image pool, and a sample size and analysis plan fixed in advance.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; experimental psychology; meta-analytic methodology

Question posed in Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception, Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan.

Open The Maimonides Dream Telepathy Studies

Why It Is Open The original series ran on early electroencephalography and ended when the laboratory's funding did. Attempts elsewhere were smaller and did not reproduce the effect. This atlas could not establish whether any well-powered modern attempt exists, and the literature it consulted names none.

What Would Settle It A systematic search of sleep-research and parapsychology journals from 1975 onward for free-response dream studies using polysomnography and blind judging, and a count of their sample sizes.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; systematic review

Question posed in Psychology and Anomalous Observations: The Question of ESP in Dreams, Irvin L. Child.

Open Zi Wei Dou Shu

Why It Is Open The system is traditionally ascribed to the Daoist adept Chen Tuan, c. 871-989, but the attribution cannot be verified against any surviving text from his lifetime, and the earliest manuscripts describing the method postdate him by centuries.

What Would Settle It A textual historical study tracing the earliest surviving Zi Wei Dou Shu manuscripts and comparing their content and terminology against securely dated Chen Tuan texts.

Expertise Needed Sinology; history of Chinese astrology; textual criticism

Question posed in Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the Stars, Ho Peng Yoke.

Open Order of Nine Angles

Why It Is Open The identification most often made in print, with David Myatt, is denied by Myatt himself, and no independent documentary or forensic evidence establishes who wrote under the name. The order's early history is documented mainly through its own publications.

What Would Settle It A stylometric comparison of the earliest Anton Long texts against Myatt's other pseudonymous and signed writing, or documentary evidence such as publisher correspondence or internal order papers naming the author, would settle it.

Expertise Needed Textual and stylometric analysis; history of new religious movements

Question posed in Satanism: A Social History, Massimo Introvigne.

Open Iboga

Why It Is Open Reported since 1962 and repeated many times in unregulated clinics, but the evidence base is weak. Rigorous trials have been slow, partly because the compound is controlled in many jurisdictions and partly because a treatment given once does not fit the commercial model that funds drug development. Meanwhile ibogaine is cardiotoxic, prolongs the QT interval, and deaths have occurred where screening was absent.

What Would Settle It Adequately powered controlled trials with cardiac monitoring. The question is included here rather than left to medicine because the answer bears on the plant: demand from outside Gabon is already driving overharvesting of wild stands of a slow growing species that a religion depends on.

Expertise Needed Pharmacology, addiction medicine, cardiology, conservation biology

Question posed in Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa, James W. Fernandez.

Open Ayahuasca Vine

Why It Is Open Two unrelated plants, out of the tens of thousands in the Amazon, must be combined for either to have any effect, and nothing about the appearance, taste or separate action of either suggests the other. Explanations range from very long systematic experimentation to the answer the traditions give, which is that the plants communicated it. The record is oral and the practice is old.

What Would Settle It Probably nothing can settle it. What would help is comparative work on how many other plant pairings are known in Amazonian practice, since a tradition with many such combinations implies a method, while a single one implies an accident or a transmission.

Expertise Needed Ethnobotany, Amazonian anthropology, ethnopharmacology

Question posed in Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, Luis Eduardo Luna.

Open Ergot

Why It Is Open Proposed by Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck in 1978. It would explain how an experience initiates consistently described as overwhelming could be produced reliably for thousands of people on a schedule. But no ancient source describes anything of the kind, the water extraction needed to separate soluble from toxic alkaloids is delicate, and the argument reasons backwards from the reported effect to a cause that would account for it.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis of vessels securely associated with the Eleusinian rite, or a text that describes the preparation. Absent either, the question may be permanently undecidable, since the Mysteries were kept for roughly two thousand years and the secret held.

Expertise Needed Classics, ancient history, archaeochemistry, mycology

Question posed in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck.

Open Nazca

Why It Is Open The Nazca (about 100 BCE to 800 CE) left no writing system, so no text records their own speech. The Quechua and Aymara families dominant on the Peruvian south coast today arrived through Inca imperial expansion in the fifteenth century and Spanish colonial administration afterward, six hundred years or more after Nazca civilization had already ended, so their modern presence cannot be read backward onto the Nazca population. Scholarship on Andean historical linguistics treats a Quechuan or Aymaran tie for the pre-Inca south coast cultures as speculative, resting on colonial-era impressions of multilingualism that may equally reflect internal variation within those two families elsewhere in the Andes.

What Would Settle It A securely dated Nazca-period inscription would settle it outright, but none has been found and the culture is understood to have had no writing system at all. Short of that, a documented layer of loanwords or toponyms in a later, attested language that can be traced specifically and exclusively to the pre-Inca Rio Grande de Nasca drainage, rather than to the wider post-Inca Quechua-speaking Andes, would be evidence a historical linguist could evaluate.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, archaeology

Question posed in The Languages of the Andes, Willem F. H. Adelaar with Pieter C. Muysken.

Open The Pearce-Pratt Distance Series

Why It Is Open C. E. M. Hansel examined the buildings in the 1960s and argued that a route existed by which the subject, unobserved in the library, could have reached a position from which the cards were visible. Rhine and Pratt disputed the sightlines, the timing, and whether such an absence would have gone unnoticed. Neither side conceded, and the buildings have since been altered, so the question can no longer be settled by inspection.

What Would Settle It Original architectural plans of the Social Sciences building and the campus library as they stood in 1933 and 1934, together with any contemporaneous record of Pearce's whereabouts during the sessions.

Expertise Needed History of science; architectural history; archival research at Duke University

Question posed in ESP: A Scientific Evaluation, C. E. M. Hansel.

Open Ark of the Covenant

Why It Is Open The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church restricts access to a single guardian monk and has never permitted independent examination of the chapel contents, so the claim rests on church tradition alone.

What Would Settle It An examination conducted by the church itself, or release of any documentary or photographic record it holds, since outside access is not permitted.

Expertise Needed Biblical archaeology, Ethiopian studies

Question posed in Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, Aksum (Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church).

Open Hyssop

Why It Is Open The Hebrew ezov is rendered hyssop by long translation convention, but Hyssopus officinalis is not native to the southern Levant and does not match the plant's described uses. Origanum syriacum, Syrian oregano, fits the ecology and the ritual use better and is the leading candidate, but the identification rests on inference rather than on any ancient description precise enough to settle it.

What Would Settle It A botanical description in an ancient source specific enough to exclude the alternatives, or archaeobotanical remains from a ritual context that can be identified to species.

Expertise Needed Botany and Biblical Hebrew philology together. Neither field settles it alone, which is why it has stayed open.

Question posed in Identification of Biblical Hyssop and Origin of the Traditional Use of Oregano-Group Herbs in the Mediterranean Region, Alexander Fleisher and Zhenia Fleisher, Volume 42, pages 232 to 241.

Open Onycha

Why It Is Open The Hebrew shecheleth of Exodus 30:34 is rendered onycha, fingernail, in the Septuagint. The leading identification is the operculum of a marine gastropod, which fits the sense, a nail-like hard plate, and the ancient aromatics trade. Benzoin, labdanum and rockrose are proposed plant alternatives but fit neither the sense nor the trade as well. A non-kosher animal product in the sacred incense is a live halakhic difficulty, which is the main reason the operculum identification is resisted by some commentators rather than for philological reasons. No reconstruction of the ketoret can be made without settling this, and it has not been settled.

What Would Settle It A residue analysis of an incense deposit from a securely dated Second Temple period altar or vessel, compared chemically against operculum keratin and against the candidate plant resins, would settle which substance was actually burned.

Expertise Needed Archaeochemistry, biblical studies

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Axion Estin

Why It Is Open Athonite monastic tradition credits the text to a tenth century revelation to a monk at Karyes, but that account is devotional legend, not a documented event, and no independent manuscript or historical source establishes the hymns actual date or author.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript witness to the text earlier than, or independent of, the Athonite legend, or a specialist study of Byzantine Marian hymnography that traces the hymns transmission history on textual rather than legendary grounds.

Expertise Needed Byzantine liturgical history; hymnography

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open Iboga

Why It Is Open Reported since 1962 and repeated many times in unregulated clinics, but the evidence base is weak. Rigorous trials have been slow, partly because the compound is controlled in many jurisdictions and partly because a treatment given once does not fit the commercial model that funds drug development. Meanwhile ibogaine is cardiotoxic, prolongs the QT interval, and deaths have occurred where screening was absent.

What Would Settle It Adequately powered controlled trials with cardiac monitoring. The question is included here rather than left to medicine because the answer bears on the plant: demand from outside Gabon is already driving overharvesting of wild stands of a slow growing species that a religion depends on.

Expertise Needed Pharmacology, addiction medicine, cardiology, conservation biology

Question posed in Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa, James W. Fernandez.

Open Birch (Beth)

Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.

What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.

Expertise Needed Celtic studies, medieval Irish philology

Question posed in A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus.

Open Ergot

Why It Is Open Proposed by Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck in 1978. It would explain how an experience initiates consistently described as overwhelming could be produced reliably for thousands of people on a schedule. But no ancient source describes anything of the kind, the water extraction needed to separate soluble from toxic alkaloids is delicate, and the argument reasons backwards from the reported effect to a cause that would account for it.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis of vessels securely associated with the Eleusinian rite, or a text that describes the preparation. Absent either, the question may be permanently undecidable, since the Mysteries were kept for roughly two thousand years and the secret held.

Expertise Needed Classics, ancient history, archaeochemistry, mycology

Question posed in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck.

Open The Persinger God Helmet Experiments

Why It Is Open The founding series reported the effect and a double-blind replication at Uppsala in 2005 did not, finding that measured suggestibility predicted the reported experience while exposure to the field did not. Persinger held that the Swedish exposure protocol differed materially from his own. Neither side withdrew, no further trial has been run under a protocol both would accept, and the God helmet continues to be cited in popular accounts of the neuroscience of religion as though the matter were settled in one direction or the other.

What Would Settle It A pre-registered, multi-site, double-blind trial using the field parameters and exposure durations of the original series, with suggestibility measured and entered as a covariate rather than offered as a rival explanation after the fact, and with the analysis plan fixed before data collection.

Expertise Needed Experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, working with the psychology of religion

Question posed in Sensed Presence and Mystical Experiences Are Predicted by Suggestibility, Not by the Application of Transcranial Weak Complex Magnetic Fields, Pehr Granqvist, Mats Fredrikson, Patrik Unge, Andrea Hagenfeldt, Sven Valind, Dan Larhammar and Marcus Larsson.