Remote Viewing

Remote Viewing is a controversial mental faculty or technique in which an individual is said to be able to acquire information about a distant or unseen target using extrasensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with the mind." The term was coined by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI to describe a new, more scientific and sober approach to clairvoyance, distinguishing it from older, more sensationalized terms like ESP or psychic perception. It was the central focus of the Stargate Project, a U.S. government-sponsored program investigating psychic phenomena for military and intelligence applications.¹

Practitioners of remote viewing, known as remote viewers, are trained to enter a state of deep relaxation and focus their attention on a specific target, which can be a person, place, or object. The viewer then reports the images, feelings, thoughts, and other sensory impressions that come to them, a process that requires the suspension of analytical judgment. The key to the technique is to avoid what is known as "analytical overlay" (AO), the brain's natural tendency to interpret and categorize incoming data based on past experience. A successful remote viewer must act as a pure conduit for information, free of preconceived notions.²

Methodologies and Techniques

Remote viewing encompasses various methodologies and techniques:

• Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV): Developed by Ingo Swann, this method involves using geographical coordinates to precisely and economically direct a psychic's perception to a target without revealing its identity. This was a breakthrough in making remote viewing operationally viable.¹

• Outbound Remote Viewing: In this method, an "outbound" experimenter visits a target site while the psychic, back at the laboratory, attempts to visualize the experimenter's surroundings. This allows for richer feedback, as the psychic can later visit the site themselves.¹

• Extended Remote Viewing (ERV): This refers to deeper altered-state methods of psychic spying, often favored by the unit at Fort Meade.¹

• Associative Remote Viewing (ARV): A technique used for precognition, where objects or geographic locations are used as surrogates for numbers or other abstract data that are difficult to remote-view directly. For example, a teddy bear might represent a specific number in a lottery, and the remote viewer would describe the teddy bear to predict the number.¹

SRI's written protocol of November 1978, by Puthoff and Targ, and its revision of August 1979, by Puthoff, Targ and Edwin May, both in the CIA's files, set out the local-target procedure: a pool of more than fifty Bay Area sites chosen "by an experimenter who will not interact with the subject after that," a target drawn by "a Texas Instruments SR-51 hand calculator," a fifteen-minute viewing in "an isolated windowless room of the Radio Physics Laboratory" while an outbound person stood at the site, an "inbound experimenter" whose task was "to make it 'safe' for the subject to experience remote viewing" ("no hypnosis, strobe lights, or sensory-deprivation procedures are ever used"), feedback at the site "for each experiment to ensure success," and judging by "an SRI research analyst not otherwise associated with the series," who ranked each transcript against each site in a 6x6 matrix scored by "a direct-count-of-permutations method" that, the authors wrote, applied "even in the limiting case in which the target pool is completely known a priori to all involved."⁹⁰²

The Nature Exchange

Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff's paper in Nature of October 18, 1974, concluded that "a channel exists whereby information about a remote location can be obtained by means of an as yet unidentified perceptual modality." In 1978 David Marks and Richard Kammann reported in the same journal that they could not replicate the results and that the transcripts of Pat Price's nine trials contained cues, such as "second place of the day," from which judges could order them; Targ, Puthoff, and Charles Tart replied in January 1979 that a judge given transcripts edited of such cues matched seven of nine, and that the critique "did not address the quality of the remote-viewing descriptions in the transcripts per se, but was instead limited to criticism of a particular judging procedure." The Army's Materiel Systems Analysis Activity, replicating the SRI protocol in twenty sessions of its own in 1978 and 1979, "did not result in statistical significance."³

Characteristics and Limitations

Remote viewing, like any human faculty, has limitations. Numbers and letters are generally difficult to remote-view accurately. Visually dramatic targets with fixed and long-established locations are usually easier to perceive. The longer a target has existed at a given site, the easier it is to remote-view. Conversely, the more a target moves, the more it blurs in the remote viewer's perception. Remote viewers often find it difficult to describe a target's surroundings in enough detail to pinpoint its exact location, and reading signs or specific alphanumeric data is challenging.¹

Aftereffects and Challenges

Intense remote viewing sessions can have aftereffects similar to those of hallucinogenic drugs, including heightened sensory perception and a feeling of a "natural high." However, prolonged and monotonous tasking can lead to mental fatigue, emotional fragility, and burnout. The controversial nature of remote viewing also led to the "giggle factor" within intelligence communities, where skepticism and fear of ridicule often hindered its acceptance and utilization.¹

Connection to UAP and Consciousness

The study of remote viewing has led to speculation about its connection to the UAP phenomenon and the nature of consciousness itself. Some researchers, like Garry Nolan, have discovered a correlation between individuals with a high aptitude for remote viewing and a hyperdeveloped area of the brain known as the caudate-putamen. This has led to the theory that this part of the brain may act as an "antenna," allowing certain individuals to perceive information that is normally filtered out by the conscious mind.²

Furthermore, the apparent precognitive abilities of UAP, such as the Tic Tac seeming to know the future location of the F/A-18 pilots, have led some to speculate that the operators of these craft may possess highly evolved psychic abilities, or that consciousness itself may be a fundamental component of their propulsion systems. The idea that remote viewing may be a vestigial human ability, a form of pre-linguistic communication, has also been proposed.²

David Marks and Richard Kammann's Nature letter of August 17, 1978, reported that duplicate experiments at the University of Otago "do not verify their conclusions" and attributed the Price matches to cues in the transcripts; Puthoff, Targ and Charles Tart's reply, drafted in January 1979 and printed in 1980, reported a rejudging of edited transcripts; Marks returned to the argument in Nature in 1981 and, with Christopher Scott, in 1986, and in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1982: "Well-controlled experiments never find the RV effect, while poorly controlled experiments nearly always do." A separate evaluation of 1979 by Harry and Arlene Snyder of Blacksburg, Virginia, held by the CIA, reached similar conclusions on methodology without citing Marks and Kammann.⁹⁰¹