Hi there.
I've been too busy to post for a few days, but I wanted to address some of the questions/statements made about some of my statements.
The one that seems to have caused the most controversy is my statement about having no verified proof of psychic abilities after over 100 years of legitimate scientific testing. People have brought up PEAR and Gary Schwartz's work as examples of proof of psychic phenomenon. Unfortunately, these tests were not conducted properly and/or their results have been misinterpreted as being better than they actually were.
Gary Schwartz's Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Schwartz does a pretty good job of detailing the problems and biases of his studies. Even former test subjects and colleagues do not agree with his research. The main issue with his research is his not filtering out the possibility of "subjective validation". This link: http://skepdic.com/subjectivevalidation.html provides a good overview of what subjective validation is and why it needs to be filtered out when examining psychics.
Next, The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) has been touted as providing proof of psychic/precognitive abilities, but the actual results do not appear to support that claim. Wikipedia provides a good overview of the organization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research and this link: http://skepdic.com/pear.html provides a good overview of the testing results and the problems with them. The biggest issue with the PEAR results seems to be in the way people interpret this: "In 1987, Dean Radin and Nelson did a meta-analysis of all RNG experiments done between 1959 and 1987 and found that they produced odds against chance beyond a trillion to one." Please keep in mind that chance would be 50%. Well, the actual percentage from the tests was, according to Dean Radin, "just under 51 percent." So, in one line of the analysis it sounds like a statistically significant result was reached, but another line of the analysis says that there was no statistical difference beyond chance.
As far as the "low hanging fruit" question goes, the IIG has not actively sought out cases to investigate as much as I would personally prefer. Most, not all, but the vast majority of the cases the IIG has investigated are ones that were brought to us by individuals asking for our help or from people applying for the $50,000 Paranormal Challenge or the JREF Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.
Finally, personally I, and many others in the IIG, would love to come across something that we couldn't explain. It would open the door on entirely new lines of research. BTW, it would probably be levels of research that the IIG itself would not be able to do. We would most likely need to hand it off to a university level type of research facility, but it would be great to have discovered it. You can either believe me when I say this, or not, but I would absolutely love to discover proof of a paranormal ability and change it to a normal, albeit rare, ability.
-Derek