Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance (from the French: voir clair, "clear seeing") is the claimed paranormal faculty of perceiving information about physical reality - objects, events, locations, or people - by extrasensory means that bypass the ordinary senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It is classified as one of the major categories of psi alongside Telepathy (mind-to-mind information transfer) and Precognition (perception of future events). The distinction between clairvoyance and telepathy is conceptually significant: clairvoyance involves direct perception of physical reality independent of any transmitting mind, while telepathy involves information passing between two minds.

In the context of the U.S. government's STAR GATE remote viewing programs at SRI, Langley, and Fort Meade, clairvoyance was the operative phenomenon being studied. The formal term used by researchers was "remote viewing" rather than clairvoyance, in part to avoid the paranormal connotations of the older term. However, the operational mechanism - a viewer gaining information about a distant location or target through means that could not be explained by conventional sensory access or logical inference - is functionally equivalent to what earlier researchers called clairvoyance.¹

Historical Research

The scientific investigation of clairvoyance began formally with the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882 and the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885. Early researchers including Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney attempted to establish systematic evidence for clairvoyance through card-guessing experiments and spontaneous case collection. In the early twentieth century, J.B. Rhine at Duke University developed the Zener card protocol for clairvoyance testing - a sender-free design in which subjects attempted to identify the order of a shuffled deck of five-symbol cards without any person knowing the card sequence, intended to isolate clairvoyance from telepathy.¹

SRI Remote Viewing Experiments

Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI conducted clairvoyance experiments from 1972 onward that they termed remote viewing, using a protocol in which a subject described a distant target location being visited by an outbound experimenter. Their experiments with subjects including Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Hella Hammid, and Uri Geller produced results they reported as statistically significant evidence for clairvoyant perception. The research was funded by the CIA through a liaison relationship managed by Kit Green and later by the Defense Intelligence Agency.¹

The Sugar Grove incident - in which Price and Swann were given geographic coordinates for a classified NSA signals intelligence facility and produced accurate descriptions of the installation's interior - was among the most operationally significant clairvoyance results obtained during the SRI program, because of the security implications of the accuracy.¹

Soviet and Chinese Research

The U.S. government's interest in clairvoyance was significantly driven by intelligence assessments of Soviet research in the field. Soviet parapsychology research, conducted under the euphemism "Psychoenergetics," was reported to include experiments on clairvoyance and related phenomena as potential intelligence and weapons applications. Hal Puthoff's 1982 classified report, "Psychoenergetics Research in the People's Republic of China," documented Chinese research into Extraordinary Human Body Function (EHBF) - a term used by Chinese researchers for clairvoyance and related abilities - confirming what DIA officials saw as a competitive foreign research program.²