Comments on Dr. Brenner's 'Facts, Coincidence, and the Psi Hypothesis'

Dr. Brenner has put me on the carpet for not having checked the facts concerning the frequency of appearance of the worm-eating warbler in New York's Central Park. As it happens, the precise data involved, as we shall see, are not too easy to get at. At all events, I was not quite as negligent in the matter as Dr. Brenner charges me with having been.

The episode described in my paper occurred in 1949 and was written up by me at the time almost exactly, save for the introductory and concluding remarks, as it was published. The particular circumstances responsible for the fact that, after some questioning of the patient, I relied on his knowledge and veracity for the details of my account are perhaps not too relevant here. However, before publication, after the lapse of several years, it did occur to me to check the data about the worm-eating warbler as given by my patient. Consulting the literature, I found that this was considered a rarely observed (and even more rarely heard) species, and that it was not even catalogued by name in several manuals describing birds commonly found in the north-eastern United States. I next wrote to the National Audubon Society in New York to request data on the actually recorded dates of appearance of the bird in Central Park. I was referred to an ornithologist of the American Museum of Natural History, but from this person I never received a reply to my inquiry. I finally placed my reliance on the description of the bird's habits given in Birds of America, T. Gilbert Pearson, Editor-in-Chief (Doubleday, 1936), a standard reference work in the field. 'The worm-eating warbler', it is there stated, 'is not so rare as it has been credited. … But the search for him has to be made in ravines and on dry forested hillsides where the undergrowth makes a convenient nesting site.' I did not gather from this that an individual was at all likely to come upon him during a casual stroll in Central Park, whose terrain hardly fits that give