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

David Marks wrote in 1982 that of the six transcripts of her series shown to him by the SRI judge Arthur Hastings, "four of the six Hammid transcripts actually carried dates" and "one transcript even carried the name of the associated target"; he listed twenty-four cues ("This is the 18th of September," "Russell Targ has gone to the remote site," "Hal has gone to a second target," "Hella has made a drawing of Hal's first location") from which a judge in New Zealand, using no descriptive material, matched the transcripts better than Hastings had, and reported that Hastings had received three target lists, one randomized and two not. Targ and Puthoff's own account of her had been that she was "a friend: 'I (R.T.) had known Hella for more than a dozen years.'"⁹⁰¹

The 1974 Record

SRI's first progress report of March 1974 records "a preliminary remote viewing pilot experiment" with "a subject (H.H.) previously screened by the EEG correlates experiment": "The target chosen at random was a small red clapboard schoolhouse structure with a bell steeple on top in a miniature golf course. The subject's response was that she saw a red clapboard structure with a steeple that seemed to be artificial as in a movie set." An outside reviewer noted that of six subjects in the EEG work, "one of the six subjects, HH, showed a consistent alpha blocking effort. Therefore, this subject was studied further and most of the data recorded is based on HH's performance." A CIA officer who observed her in 1974 wrote: "Hella is very alert and outgoing; although not insightful. She is very concerned with her performance. Her aim seems to be pleasing the experimenters rather than proving anything to herself." "She does very badly on absolute size estimates. She does very well on indicating lighting conditions, including the presence of steady or pulsing lights. She does not often describe colors, but is very accurate when she does." "There can be no question that Hella can repeatably, although not reliably, produce information not available through normal means." Set to describe an electric typewriter on which the officer had typed for ten minutes, she missed, while Russell Targ, who had been questioning her throughout, "gave a nearly perfect account of the target." Called in by a police lieutenant named Konar, who "had exhausted all available leads" in the murder of a young woman in the Stanford chapel, she "gave details of the crime location, described the victim and her assailant, indicated the exact location of the fatal wound, alluded to the ritualistic tone of the crime, and traced the victim's movements before the crime as well as the relocation of the body afterwards," the only known error being earrings; Konar wrote SRI a letter and followed her leads; but "none of the data that Hella generated, that has been verified, was unknown to Lt. Konar at the time of this experiment. Therefore, it is possible that Hella received all of her information from the Lt., by some unknown means." The same officer warned that if funding lapsed Puthoff and Targ "will publish everything they have generated," including "their association with unreliable subjects." A cassette of September 19, 1974, is catalogued "Tape 'N' Text Editor and Drill Press, Beacon Russell Targ, Viewer Hella Hammid."²

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