With regards to the ai-box experiment; I defy the data. :-)
Your reason for the insistence on secrecy (that you have to resort to techniques that you consider unethical and therefore do not want to have committed to the record) rings hollow. The sense of mystery that you have now built up around this anecdote is itself unethical by scientific standards. With no evidence that you won other than the test subject’s statement we cannot know that you did not simply conspire with them to make such a statement. The history of pseudo-science is lousy with hoaxes.
In other words, if I were playing the game, I would say to the test subject:
“Look, we both know this is fake. I’ve just sent you $500 via paypal. If you say you let me out I’ll send you another $500.”
From a strictly Bayesian point of view that seems to me to be the overwhelmingly more probably explanation.
There’s a reason that secret experimental protocols are anathema to science.
That’s not quite true. The conclusion was that there actually is interference at the other end, but there are two interference patterns that cancel each other out and make it appear that there is no interference. You can apparently produce interference by bringing (classical) information back form one end of the experiment to the other, but you aren’t really creating it, you are just “filtering out” interference that was already there.