Remote viewing (RV) is a broad term for a variety of techniques or protocols employed to produce and control extra-sensory perception (ESP). These techniques originally were developed by researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) as part of a US-government-sponsored program that ran from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s. Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... Extra-sensory perception (ESP) is defined in parapsychology as the ability to aquire information by paranormal means. ... SRI International is one of the worlds largest contract research institutions. ...

The term "remote viewing" also has been used to refer to techniques derived from SRI's RV techniques, for example techniques used by commercial operators offering "remote viewing" services or training.

In remote viewing, a viewer attempts to gather information via ESP on a remote target. The target is usually an object, a place, or a person, and many remote viewers believe that the target may be situated anywhere in space or time. The viewer often has no a priori knowledge of the target's identity.

Ideally, the data generated by the remote viewer is combined with data provided by other viewers and is evaluated by a separate analyst. (Targ and Puthoff 1977, Puthoff 1996, Schnabel 1997.)

The term "remote viewing" was coined in the early 1970s by the SRI program's principal researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, mainly to distinguish the protocols they were investigating from older ESP protocols.^[1] (Targ & Puthoff 1977, Puthoff 1996, Schnabel 1997) Russell Targ is an American physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser. ... Harold E. Puthoff, PhD, is an American physicist. ...

As with other forms of extra-sensory perception, the validity of remote viewing is disputed by critics. Extra-sensory perception (ESP) is defined in parapsychology as the ability to aquire information by paranormal means. ...

History

Background

From the World War II era the US government occasionally funded ESP research. But as of the early 1970s it had no significant program in this area. At the same time, the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were giving high priority to ESP research, and to psi research generally. U.S. intelligence officials therefore became receptive to the idea of having their own, competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997)

Early SRI experiments

A low-key psi experiment conducted in 1972 by an SRI laser physicist, Hal Puthoff, led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The immediate result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project whose goal was to find some way of using psi operationally. (Schnabel 1997, Puthoff 1996)

Government sponsorship

The initial grant was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," the CIA preferred to transfer official sponsorship of the RV program to the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI psychics. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's psychic subjects. (Schnabel 1997)

The program had three parts. First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S. (Schnabel 1997)

In the second part of the program, SRI managed a stable of "natural-born" psychics and made them available to a variety of tasking agencies. This aspect of the program was not much more sophisticated or remarkable than the (apparently routine) use of psychics by law enforcement agencies. But it did allegedly generate some spectacular results, including the description of a mysterious construction at a Soviet nuclear research facility, the description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine, and the location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa (which former President Carter later referred to in speeches). By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics. (Schnabel 1997)

The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find ways to make ESP -- now called "remote viewing" -- more accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the psychics seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be sensationally "on" one day and inexplicably "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, psychics were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that would reveal when they were on- or off-target.

At SRI, Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff also developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)

In part because the program managers believed that anyone could learn accurate remote-viewing, the loss (through death and retirement) of the "naturals" was never replenished. Within the program, this was controversial. Some of the "naturals" believed that their talents were superior to those of the trainees.

The trainees (see Smith 2005, Schnabel 1997) generally believed that the research program had succeeded not only in training them acceptably but in finding ways to make remote viewing an intelligence-collection tool as reliable as other standard methods (for example, human-source intelligence, which is not always reliable).

The question of whether the tasking agencies agreed with this assessment is a difficult one to answer. One of the authors of an official 1995 report, authorized by the CIA and intended to justify the killing of the program, claimed that "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community."^[2]. But such claims beg the question of why the program lasted twenty three years.

Some agencies and offices sent taskings to the program routinely but, fearing the "giggle factor," were loath to document their involvement. Only a few intelligence officials, including the Army generals Edmund Thompson and Albert Stubblebine, and senior DIA official Jack Vorona, were willing to champion it openly. Others, such as generals Harry Soyster and William Odom, and Admiral Sam Koslov, allegedly wished to kill the project regardless of its results. The struggle between "true unbelievers" and "true believers" provided much of the program's actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong. As General Thompson later told author Jim Schnabel, "I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn't believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn't done your homework." Some of the more voluble skeptics in the intelligence program were reportedly prevented from seeing its more impressive data, among other reasons so that the skittish tasking agencies would not be identified and suffer from controversy. (Schnabel 1997)

A former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005) has provided a detailed example of remote viewing's alleged utility. In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and, in effect, prove its uselessness. According to Smith's account, Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.

However, by this time Vorona, Stubblebine and Thompson had all retired, and the program's support essentially depended on a key group of Senators, especially Democrat Robert Byrd, who chaired the Appropriations Committee. One of Byrd's top aides, Richard D'Amato, was the boyfriend of a female remote viewer, and evidently on the order of the supportive Senators kept the program alive with earmarks to appropriations bills. After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, and Byrd could no longer exert the same level of control over appropriations, the remote viewing program was effectively doomed. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be "evaluated" there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated. (Schnabel 1997) The CIA Seal The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an American intelligence agency, responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and reporting such information to the various branches of the U.S. Government. ...

The CIA hired the American Institutes for Research, a perennial intelligence-industry contractor, to perform a retrospective evaluation of the "results" generated by the remote-viewing program. One of the reviewers was Ray Hyman, a long-time opponent of psi research. For reasons noted above, most of the program's results (which probably had never been gathered in one place anyway) were not seen by the evaluators. Even so, the review team's statistician, Jessica Utts, concluded that there had been a statistically significant positive effect, with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance.^[3] As expected Ray Hyman argued for a null result and the program was officially terminated. ^[3].^[2] It is worthwhile to note, that it is still not known how the CIA selected these experiments for the evaluation. This article needs cleanup. ... Ray Hyman (b. ... Generally, a null result is a result which is null (nothing): that is, the absence of an observable result. ...

Criticism

According to Dr. David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.^[4][5] David Marks is a psychologist and professor at City University in London, U.K.. He is founding editor of the Journal of Health Psychology. ... SRI International is one of the worlds largest contract research institutions. ...

Dr. Marks also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments were influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly. ^[6] The Forer effect (also called personal validation fallacy or the Barnum effect after P. T. Barnum) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a...

Others have said that the remote viewing sessions often produce information which is vague, and much of which is erroneous.^[3] For example, the 1995 report for the American Institute for Research "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications" by Mumford, Rose and Goslin, contains a section of anonymous reports describing how remote viewing was tentatively used in a number of operational situations. The three reports conclude that the data was too vague to be of any use, and in the report that offers the most positive results the writer notes that the viewers "had some knowledge of the target organizations and their operations but not the background of the particular tasking at hand."^[3] Year 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full 1995 Gregorian calendar). ...

Response to Criticism

SRI researchers responded to Marks' first criticism by noting that it could hardly have accounted for the very high positive hit rates.^{[citation needed]} Moreover, the "outbound remote viewing" protocol criticized by Marks was used only in an early phase of the program. Later experiments were not vulnerable to such criticism. (See the discussions in Targ & Puthoff 1977, Puthoff 1996, and Schnabel 1997.)

Marks's second criticism refers to the subjective perception of a connection between unrelated events. It is relevant in considering whether a personal experience is truly "psychic." But it is not relevant to parapsychological experimentation.

Popular Culture

• In the movie Suspect Zero detectives must track a killer who has the Remote Viewing ability. A major theme of the film is remote viewing, and the DVD's extra features include interviews with people who worked with the US military and intelligence agencies as part of those programs.
• In the second season of The Dead Zone, episode 16 (The Hunt) involves the protagonist, John Smith, being recruited by a covert government remote viewing team. He enables the team to provide real-time intelligence information to U.S. special forces engaging with terrorists in Afghanistan.
• In the TV Series John Doe (2002-2003) remote viewing also played a key role as John struggled to learn his identity.
• Remote Viewing is a common topic on the late-night radio talk show Coast to Coast AM.
• In the video games Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy and Second Sight, the main characters have remote viewing as one of their abilities.
• In the science fiction novel Three Days to Never by Tim Powers one character is a psychic spy, but also blind, using her Remote Viewing to see normally through the eyes of others. The underground US military Remote Viewing spy training facility in the desert which honed her RV capabilities as a child is loosely based on an actual CIA program which existed until the 1980s.
• In the TV series Numb3rs, season two episode "Mind Games" features John Glover as a remote viewer who assists Eppes' FBI team with a case.
• In the animated TV series Delta State, one of the four protagonists has the power of remote viewing.
• In the book Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz, a genetically modified remote viewer is able to possess control of a persons body at any location, usually indoors.
• Remote viewing is a major theme of the 2006-2007 Deadman series by Bruce Jones.

Promotional poster for Suspect Zero Suspect Zero is a 2004 thriller, directed by E. Elias Merhige. ... This article contains a trivia section. ... Coast to Coast AM is a late-night syndicated radio talk show in the United States which deals with a variety of topics, but most frequently ones that relate either to the paranormal, or to alleged conspiracies. ... Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy is a game developed by Midway Games. ... Second Sight is a video game developed by Free Radical Design and published by Codemasters for GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. ... Three Days to Never is a 2006 fantasy novel by Tim Powers. ... Tim Powers at the Israeli ICon 2005 SF&F Convention Timothy Thomas Powers (born February 29, 1952) is an American science fiction and fantasy author. ... Numb3rs (Numbers; officially NUMB3RS) is an American television show produced by brothers Ridley Scott and Tony Scott. ... For others with the same name, see: John Glover (disambiguation). ... The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a federal criminal investigative, intelligence agency, and the primary investigative arm of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). ... All the main characters (except the man on the left) Delta State is a Canadian animated television series, based on a comic book by Douglas Gayeton, featuring four amnesiac roommates with the ability to enter the Delta State, an ethereal realm. ... Sole Survivor (1970) (TV movie) A B-25 Mitchell bomber is discovered in the Libyan desert and an United States Air Force investigation team is called in to examine it. ... Dean Ray Koontz (born July 9, 1945 in Everett, Pennsylvania), also known under a number of pseudonyms, including Leigh Nichols, is an American writer. ... Deadman is a fictional character, a superhero appearing in DC Comics. ... Bruce Jones (born 24 January 1953, Collyhurst, Manchester) is a British actor best known for his role as cab driver Les Battersby in Coronation Street. ...

Selected remote viewing study participants

• Ingo Swann, one of the founding participants
• Pat Price, early participant
• Paul Smith, credited with authoring/editing the original CRV training manual
• Russell Targ, cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s
• Joseph McMoneagle, early participant
• Ed Dames, formerly associated with PSI TECH, Inc.
• Courtney Brown, founder of the Farsight Institute
• David Morehouse, participant during the Stargate program
• Lyn Buchanan
• David Marks, critic of remote viewing, after finding sensory cues in the original transcripts generated by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s
• Gerald O'Donnell, Founder and President of the Academy of Remote Viewing and Remote Influencing Reality and Thought

Ingo Swann is an artist who helped develop the procedure of remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute for the Central Intelligence Agency, and has become well known as a remote viewer himself. ... Under a program first called Project SCANATE (scanning by coordinate), researchers at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, studied the remote-viewing talents of Ingo Swann and Pat Price, among others. ... Russell Targ is an American physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser. ... Joseph McMoneagle (Born January 10, 1946, Miami, Florida) is known for his involvement in the development of Remote Viewing by U.S. Army Intelligence and the Stanford Research Institute. ... Major Edward A. Dames is a retired U.S. Army and CIA intelligence officer, known primarily for making predictions of imminent doom. ... For other persons named Courtney Brown, see Courtney Brown (disambiguation). ... Dr. David Morehouse was a U.S. Army Major, and a third generation military man. ... Lyn Buchanan was a Sergeant brought into the Fort Meade remote viewing unit run by General Stubblebine. ... David Marks is a psychologist and professor at City University in London, U.K.. He is founding editor of the Journal of Health Psychology. ...

Books

• Richard Broughton, Parapsychology: The Controversial Science. Rider and Company, 1991.
• Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities Delacorte Press, 1977, ISBN 0440056888 (currently published by Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 2005)
• David Marks, Ph.D., "The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd edn.)" Prometheus Books, 2000. ISBN 1-57392-798-8
• Courtney Brown, Ph.D., Remote Viewing : The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception. Farsight Press, 2005. ISBN 0-9766762-1-4
• David Morehouse, Psychic Warrior, St. Martin's, 1996, ISBN 0-312-96413-7
• Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997 , ISBN 0-440-22306-7
• Paul H. Smith, Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate -- America's Psychic Espionage Program, Forge, 2005, ISBN 0-312-87515-0
• Paolini, Christopher Eragon & Eldest Knopf publishing, 1989 ISBN 0-432-2191-5
• Buchanan, Lyn, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets Of Remote Viewing As Told By A "Psychic Spy" For The U.S. Military, ISBN 0-7434-6268-8
• F. Holmes Atwater, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance, Hampton Roads 2001, ISBN 1-57174-247-6
• McMoneagle, Joseph, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy, Hampton Roads 2002, ISBN 1-57174-225-5
• Targ, Russell and Hurtak, J.J.The End of Suffering2006, Hampton Roads.

Russell Targ is an American physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser. ... Harold E. Puthoff, PhD, is an American physicist. ...

Papers

• Hal Puthoff, "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute", 1996
• Utts and Josephson, The Paranormal: The Evidence and Its Implications for Consciousness, 1996 [1]

References

1. ^ http://parapsych.org/glossary_l_r.html#r Parapsychological Association website, Glossary of Key Words Frequently Used in Parapsychology, Retrieved January 8, 2006
2. ^ ^{a b} Time magazine, 11 Dec 1995, p.45, The Vision Thing by Douglas Waller, Washington
3. ^ ^{a b c d} http://psiland.free.fr/dossiers/parapsy/psi_defense/remote.pdf "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications" by Mumford, Rose and Goslin
4. ^ Marks, D.F. & Kammann, R. (1978). "Information transmission in remote viewing experiments", Nature, 274:680-81.
5. ^ http://www.nap.edu/books/POD276/html/647.html "A comprehensive review of major empirical studies in parapsychology involving random event generators or remote viewing" by Alcock, J.
6. ^ Marks, D.F. (2000). The Psychology of the Psychic. Amherst, New York:Prometheus Books.

Stargate FOIA (freedom of information act) remote viewing documents and other remote viewing files and history can be found at remoteviewed.com

External links

• History of Remote Viewing and its Connection to the OT-Levels of Scientology
• STAR GATE Controlled Remote Viewing
• Interview with noted remote viewer and researcher, Stephan A. Schwartz
• http://www.remoteviewed.com FOIA Stargate papers, remote viewing results, history and much more
• Remote Viewing? Remote Chance. A Skeptical look at Remote Viewing by Karen Stollznow
• Remote Viewing What is Remote Viewing Parts 1, 2 & 3 by Kevin Pirolo