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Remote viewing

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Remote viewing (RV) is a form of clairvoyance by which a viewer is said to use his or her clairvoyant abilities to "view", i.e. gather information on a target consisting of an object, place, person, etc, which is hidden from physical view of the viewer and typically separated from the viewer in space by some distance, and sometimes separated in time (future or past) as well.

Remote viewing is distinguished from other forms of clairvoyance in that it follows a specific experimental protocol (or some variant of it). The salient aspect common to these protocols is that the viewer is blind to the target in the sense that he is given no (or negligible) information regarding the target being viewed.

Most of the remote viewing literature was developed as a part of US-sponsored research projects, the aim being to develop a reliable "spying system". The ability to remotely view military installations and documents would be invaluable. The official project ended in 1995 after over 20 years of effort, with little to show for the efforts.

History

For some time in the 20th century the CIA monitored science programs in the USSR, particularly those related to intelligence and military applications. When they learned that the USSR had serious programs pursuing the development and application of psi abilities, they decided to fund research to evaluate the potential threat from this direction.

As a result, in the early 1970s the US government contracted with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to investigate these questions. Dr. Hal Puthoff reviewed the information made available to him regarding projects behind the iron curtain, and wrote that there seemed to be sufficient evidence to warrant scientific investigation into psi abilities. The CIA and US Army funded the effort as Project Stargate.

Around that time, on the east coast of the US, Ingo Swann had attained some note as the subject of a series of experiments designed and conducted by Dr. Karlis Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research. These had produced positive, reasonably repeatable results in precursors to the remote viewing protocols. In 1972, Swann was put into contact with Puthoff by Cleve Backster (prominent in the field of modern polygraph testing), and they arranged a meeting at SRI. As a result of their meeting, Puthoff hired Swann to work on the program.

Very early on they believed that they had sufficiently convincing evidence of psi phenomenon. The continued funding of the program therefore was not so much concerned with establishing the existence of psi phenomenon as with characterizing it and determining to what extent psi abilities could be controlled or reduced to practice, i.e. whether psi abilities could be developed or trained in individuals and used to gather information remotely on a practical basis.

However little of this information was allowed to be seen in public, as one would expect given the nature of the research in question and it's security-related background. It appears that the CIA became disenchanted with the SRI research soon after it started, but the DIA and Defense Department took over funding. A number of hints of the project's existance did become public in the 1980s however, when Joe McMoneagle claimed in public to have been employed as a "psychic spy" for some sixteen years before leaving the Army. During this time he claims to have been used to discover the location of the US embassy employees being held in Iran, while a number of other such viewers were used to locate Moammar Gadhafi and various lost military items.

After nearly two decades of activity the program moved from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in 1992. They ran the program until 1994, but apparently called for their own review of the work. In 1995 the justification for further government funding of the program was put under review by a small panel appointed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). Conflicting reports were issued by Drs. Jessica Utts (who believed) and Ray Hyman (who didn't), and the decision was made to stop funding the program. Dr. Utts has, before and since the publication of the report, published numerous articles on similar subjects in journals such as the Journal of Parapsychology and the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

Over time the program had a series of names (or perhaps sub-projects which had specific names) of which the most recent and perhaps most well-known was STAR GATE. Since the government-funding of the program was ended in 1995 there has been an increase in publicly available RV services and training offered by several of the principals who were involved over time in the program (as well as by others).

Description

Under the remote viewing family of protocols, the viewer is blind to the target, i.e. is not explicitly told what the target is; rather it is specified in one of several ways. One common method is that the target is described either in writing or by a photograph or by some set of coordinates (e.g. latitude & longitude), the latter of which may be encrypted.

The description is then placed in a double-set of opaque envelopes which may be shown to the viewer or its location described to the viewer, but which the viewer is not allowed to touch or open during the viewing session. The viewer then writes down whatever information he can gather about the target, typically including drawings and gestalt impressions as well as visual details (and sometimes auditory or kinesthetic details as well). The viewing session is often administered or facilitated by a second person called the monitor.

The output of the viewing session is evaluated by a third person, the analyst or evaluator, who matches or ranks the output against a pool consisting of the actual target with some number of decoy or dummy targets. In research scenarios (experiments) the monitor and analyst are also blind to the target along with the viewer until the evaluation is complete. The viewer is typically given information about the target after the evaluation is complete, especially during training sessions.

In the opinion of most of its proponents, remote viewing is a skill that typically improves with training, and certain variations of the protocol are used during training.

Some variations on the remote viewing protocol have names or adjectives:

  • Outbounder Remote Viewing has a person (the outbounder) physically present at the target site acting as a "beacon" to identify the target site. This was one of the earliest protocols used in the SRI program.
  • Extended Remote Viewing (ERV) refers to the first protocol used in applications at Fort Meade.
  • Coordinate (or Controlled) Remote Viewing (CRV) in which target sites were originally described in terms of geographical coordinates, later generalized to any (non-descriptive) identiying code used to identify a target to the viewer. Originally suggested by Ingo Swann and developed at SRI.
  • Technical Remote Viewing (TRV), which is a trademarked term of one company's offered training, basically the same as CRV.
  • Associative Remote Viewing (ARV) is a variant which adds a level of indirection, specifically proxy targets are associated to events in order to answer binary (yes/no) questions. Often applied to predicting future events.

Applications

Remote viewing was originally developed under a US government-sponsored program, with an eye toward intelligence-gathering applications for the CIA and military clients. Some RV proponents state that they suspect that some US government agencies still make ongoing use of RV activities. RV proponents also claim that a number of foreign states engage in RV activities.

RV proponents also claim that RV has found applications outside the government. It has been applied to marine archeology (see links to reports below), though whether RV was of significance in those operations the reader should determine for himself. RV proponents also claim applications to criminal investigations, and commercial information gathering (not to say industrial espionage), but due to privacy concerns it is unlikely that details would be provided in these cases.

Criticism

Criticism of the remote viewing projects at SRI center on a number of specific complaints. Primary among these was the weakness of the protocols. In order to judge the accuracy of the viewer's descriptions, their hand-drawn images were compared to the target image by a single person. The viewer's images were typically very vague, making their evaluation highly subjective. A judge, faced with such an image in one hand and the target image in the other could find similarities in almost every case. A much better protocol would have used several judges, or even intermediaries who would write down descriptions of the images for comparison by another person. No such control was used, making the statistics questionable.

Another serious concern was experimenter effect. Puthoff and his associates were clearly "true believers" who often accepted very shaky evidence and promoted it as excellent research. Although the experimenters made many claims about the validity of their experimental controls, when examined by outside observers the consensus was that they were flawed, often terribly. When a subject was placed under tight control their abilities would disappear, only to return when the controls were relaxed. During the Stargate era, Puthoff and Targ became infamous for declaring Uri Geller to be psychic, only to later demonstrate an astonishing ability to ignore contrary data, and make some claims with no data at all.

When faced with these complaints, the researchers were always quick to adbandon their previous results. This is a major theme of Ray Hyman's critical report on the research.

If you were trying to demonstrate that a particular lake averaged 5 degrees, you would do a series of temperature measurements over time. If those results said 10, 11, 11, 10, 8, 11, 12, and then later 5, 4, 5, 7, 4 etc, the only possible conclusion is that the lake does not average 5 degrees. If you were to then publish a report claiming it was, you would be guilty of scientific fraud.

This was not the case in the remote viewing experiments. When faced with the fact that a particular test series was flawed, or simply returned the null result (ie, no remote viewing capability), the experimental run was discarded. Worse, the very definition of a success was based on a failure to explain the results in "some other way", if such an explaination was later offered, the entire run was discarded. This means that the experimental evidence is always, by definition, positive.

Within the parapsychology field, success rates for RV experiments, i.e. the strength of the scientific evidence for RV is apparently not viewed as being as strong as that for some other psi phenomena, such as the ganzfeld experiments. However it should be pointed out that the ganzfeld experiments are simply the latest "incontestible proof" in the wider field that has also discarded all previous examples of "incontestible proof". The ganzfeld series developed out of Rhine's forced-choice card experiments, which were likewise offered as incontestible proof, until other experimenters could not repeat the results. Then the results were discarded.

Perhaps the best critism is that RV is apparently not used by the intelligence community itself. Although proponents claim it is, they can offer no proof, and when pressed for it have always replied that such proof is impossible due to the top-secret nature of the efforts.

Names of Note

  • Lyn Buchanan, viewer.
  • Ed Dames, viewer.
  • Edwin May, program member since mid-1970s and STAR GATE program director from 1986 until the close of the program.
  • Joe McMoneagle, one of the early viewers.
  • Hal Puthoff, physicist and original program director.
  • Paul Smith, viewer credited with authoring/editing the original CRV training manual.
  • Ingo Swann, artist and primary subject (not to say "psychic") and co-developer with Puthoff & company of the original RV protocol(s).
  • Russel Targ, physicist and program member.

External Links

Regarding the AIR evaluations:

General links:

Of historical interest:

Papers on remote viewing applied to marine archeology: