Hella Hammid

Hella Hammid (July 15, 1921 - May 1, 1992) was a German-American professional photographer based in Los Angeles who became one of the SRI's most extensively tested remote viewing subjects during the CIA-funded research program directed by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ from the early 1970s onward. Unlike Ingo Swann and Pat Price, who brought backgrounds claiming psychic ability, Hammid entered the SRI program as an ordinary person whose experimental results proved unexpectedly consistent, making her an important test case for the hypothesis that anomalous perception was not limited to self-identified psychics.¹

SRI Remote Viewing Experiments

Puthoff and Targ began working with Hammid after establishing the initial remote viewing protocol with Swann. Her participation addressed a key question about the SRI research: whether the remote viewing phenomenon was specific to individuals with claimed psychic abilities or whether it could be demonstrated in ordinary subjects with no prior psychic claims.

Hammid was a subject in the formal SRI remote viewing experiments described in Puthoff and Targ's 1976 paper in Proceedings of the IEEE, which presented results from a series of experiments conducted under controlled conditions with independent judges evaluating the correspondence between subjects' descriptions and target locations. Her results contributed to the statistical case for anomalous information transfer that the SRI team presented to CIA and Defense Department sponsors as evidence of a genuine, reproducible phenomenon.

The SRI protocol for Hammid and other subjects involved an outbound experimenter who traveled to a randomly selected location within thirty minutes' driving distance. The subject remained at SRI with Puthoff or Targ and attempted to describe the target location through spontaneous description and drawing. Independent judges matched the descriptions to the target locations blind, without knowing which description came from which trial.¹

Project Deep Quest

Hammid participated in Project Deep Quest in the summer of 1977, a unique experiment testing whether remote viewing could be performed under extreme environmental conditions. The experiment, conducted in the Pacific Ocean near Catalina Island, used the deep-sea research submersible Taurus I.

In one part of the experiment, Hammid worked with Ingo Swann to attempt to identify the locations of previously unidentified seafloor shipwrecks, using maps and dowsing-style intuitive technique. Both subjects independently marked a single location; when the Taurus I investigated, the submersible found an uncharted wreck.

In the Air Force's classified component of the experiment, Hammid was sealed inside the Taurus I submersible at 500 feet depth, 375 miles from a land-based target she had not been told about. She was given a set of six sealed envelopes and asked to identify which contained a photograph corresponding to a location on land where Puthoff and Dale Graff were serving as a beacon. Her selection matched the correct target.¹

CIA Handler Relationship

Hammid's work was part of the SRI research program funded through the CIA beginning in 1972. The CIA's liaison to the SRI program, Kit Green of the CIA's Life Sciences Division, oversaw the program in its early years and would have been aware of Hammid's results as they were reported to the agency. Her participation alongside Pat Price and Ingo Swann in the early SRI experiments was cited in the classified reports that Green and his successors used to justify continued CIA funding for the program.

Hammid was not herself a CIA employee or contractor; she was a civilian research subject who participated in experiments conducted under institutional protocols at SRI.¹