Look at the pages of newspapers allocated for advertising - they are chock-full of ads about clairvoyants, witches (certainly in the 7th generation), fortunetellers, soothsayers, about removing corruption, love spells (and from a photograph), etc.
Extrasensory perception - receiving information outside the senses, influencing physical phenomena without muscle effort, etc. - has become a highly profitable business, making money out of nothing.
Parapsychology (from the Greek "para" - near, near) is the study of extrasensory perception of information, as well as the impact of a person on physical phenomena outside the body without muscular effort ("power of thought"). At one time, people who publicly displayed their psychic abilities or were caught in them were declared sorcerers and burned at the stake, "in order to cleanse their souls from filth with fire."
The study of the phenomena of parapsychology in scientific terms began at the end of the 19th century, but it did not lead to final conclusions about their nature, mechanisms and very existence. As they say in science, the results were mixed and unstable. Some successful experiments, as a rule, could not be repeated. But these studies contributed to the knowledge of new psychological patterns, the explanation of hypnosis, phenomenal memory, mathematical superpowers, sub-sensory perception, etc.
Unfortunately, lovers of all kinds of mysticism and secrets rushed into parapsychology, and in a huge number, which led to massive rigging, hoaxes and deception. With regret, I have to state that they were joined by some scientists, whose official sphere of activity, as a rule, is far from human superpowers - physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, etc. (they pay little, but I want to eat!). These people give their parapsychological research some science.
The only pity is that they are based on unproven and unconfirmed postulates such as a unified field, astral space, etc. Modern parapsychology (aka psychotronics, bioinformation, biointroscopy, etc.) distinguishes the following forms of hypersensitivity: telepathy - the transmission of thoughts at a distance, mental communication between the transmitting and receiving subjects, moreover, the transmitter is a psychic, and the receiver is an ordinary person; clairvoyance - obtaining information about the events of the outside world, not based on the work of the known sense organs and on mental judgments; foresight (prophecy) - prediction of future events; dowsing - finding with the help of auxiliary objects underground waters, ores, voids, etc.; paradiagnostics - medical diagnosis without contact with the patient.
I deliberately omit here obviously supernatural phenomena - communication with the Lord and His relatives, with the other world, with the ghosts and spirits of the dead, etc. as objectively not provable by definition. Soviet scientists also put their hand to the study of phenomena related to parapsychology.
Famous scientists A. N. Leontyev, B. F. Lomov, V. P. Zinchenko and A. R. Luria published an article "Parapsychology: fiction or reality", immediately translated into 6 foreign languages. The conclusion of the article sounded something like this: "so far we have no grounds for a final judgment." In fact, both in the USSR and abroad, a lot of strictly classified research was carried out, the results of which are characterized in approximately the same way as in the article by A. N. Leontiev et al.
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Now it is difficult to talk about the availability of reliable scientific works that objectively prove the existence of parapsychological phenomena (however, adherents of parapsychology say that these works are classified). But there are no reliable studies that completely refute any parapsychological phenomena, since some of them, they say, have been confirmed.
Everyone knows the fulfilled predictions of Wolf Messing (as you know, you can't argue against the fact!). Apparently, to study each parapsychological phenomenon (well, if anyone wants to do it), you need to develop an appropriate methodology.
But for this you need to have a more or less plausible hypothesis explaining the phenomenon under study. But so far no one has done this. Serious scientists avoid doing this (so as not to fall under the blow of fundamentalist criticism; and who will give money now?), And graduate students are hardly capable of formulating such a hypothesis (as you know, topics for graduate students are given just by serious scientists - their scientific advisors).
So we will wait until, and at the same time we will try to avoid contact with charlatans posing as parapsychologists, as well as with all other charlatans, including from science.