Remote viewing

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Remote Viewing (RV) refers to the attempt to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.[1][2][3] The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.[4]

Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a 20 million dollar research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community.[5]

As with other forms of extra-sensory perception, no claims of remote viewing have been accepted by the scientific community.[6] Critics who reexamined one of the early experiments said that clues inadvertently revealed by researchers explained how remote viewers can obtain information on remote viewing locations. Some of the experiments meant to detect remote viewing have had negative results when these cues were eliminated.[7] Scientists dispute the evidence for remote viewing. For example Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman say that further conclusive experiments would be necessary for acceptance, while others, such as science writer Martin Gardner describe the topic as pseudoscience.[8][9]

History

From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research. When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997)

Early Stanford Research Institute experiments

In 1972 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) laser physicist Hal Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project. (Schnabel 1997, Puthoff 1996, Kress 1977/1999, Smith 2005) As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature (Targ & Puthoff, 1974), in Proceedings of the IEEE (Puthoff & Targ, 1976), and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Puthoff, et al, 1981).

The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort.

Sponsorship was picked up by the Air Force, led by analyst Dale E. Graff of the Foreign Technology Division. In 1979, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators, was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer, Gen. Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Atwater 2001)

The program had three parts (Mumford, et al, 1995). First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S. (Schnabel 1997) Though the SRI program was classified SECRET until 1995, there are now more than 950,000 pages devoted to "remote viewing" on Google.

In the second part of the program, SRI managed its own stable of "natural" psychics both for research purposes and to make them available for tasking by a variety of US intelligence agencies. The most famous results from these years were Pat Price's description of a big crane at a Soviet nuclear research facility (Kress 1977/199, Targ 1996), a description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine by a team of three viewers including Joseph McMoneagle,(Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002) and Rosemary Smith's [10]location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa (which former President Carter later referred to in speeches). By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)

The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find out if ESP – now called "remote viewing" – could be made accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the group seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be "on" one day and "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, individuals were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that might reveal when they were "on- or off-target".

At SRI, Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff also developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002)

Decline and termination

A struggle between unbelievers and "true believers" in the sponsor organizations provided much of the program's actual drama.[citation needed] Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005), Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.

After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Mumford, et al 1995)

AIR evaluation of remote viewing

In 1995, the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research, a perennial intelligence-industry contractor, to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the remote-viewing program, the Stargate Project. Most of the program's results were not seen by the evaluators, with the report focusing on the most recent experiments, and only from government-sponsored research.[11] One of the reviewers was Ray Hyman, a long-time critic of psi research while another was Jessica Utts who, as a supporter of psi, was chosen to put forward the pro-psi argument. Utts maintained that there had been a statistically significant positive effect,[12] with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance.[13] Ray Hyman argued that Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, "especially precognition, is premature and that present findings have yet to be independently replicated".[14]Based upon both of their collected findings, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls. The CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project in 1995.[5] Time magazine stated in 1995 three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon be shut down.[5]

According to the official AIR report there was insufficient evidence of the utility of the intelligence data produced. David Goslin, of the American Institute for Research said, "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community."[5]

PEAR's Remote Perception program

Following Utts' emphasis on replication and Hyman's challenge on interlaboratory consistency in the American Institutes for Research report, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab conducted several hundred trials to see if they could replicate the SAIC and SRI experiments. They create an analytical judgment methodology to replace the human judging process that was criticized in past experiments. The results of the experiments were consistent with the SRI experiments.[15]

Distant viewing and Stephan Schwartz

Parallel with the work at SRI, Stephan A. Schwartz, who had just left government as Special Assistant to the US Chief of Naval Operations, developed almost the same protocol which he called Distant Viewing.[16] To study this, he began a research laboratory known as Mobius. A central question in the seminal IEEE paper (Puthoff & Targ, 1976) was whether RV was electromagnetic in nature, or something else. Schwartz had begun to consider how this might be studied in 1973, after reading the work of Soviet Academician Leonid Vasiliev, the tutor for Russian psychic Nina Kulagina,[17]. This work had eliminated all of the EM spectrum except for very low frequency ranges, known as ELF.

Testing in the ELF range required a submarine, because the only shield for ELF is hundreds of feet of seawater. In 1976, Schwartz was offered access to a small research submersible capable of going to the depths required by University of Southern California Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies. In 1977, just as the experiment was about to go to sea, he invited SRI to assist him in carrying out his study. The Project, known as Deep Quest, and carried out with logistical support from the USC Institute. It took place in the waters off Santa Catalina Island. Two Remote Viewings, one by Hella Hammid,[18] one by Ingo Swann described where target individuals were hiding in California. Both sessions were conducted while the submarine was at depth, and both were somewhat successful. Respectively the two targets were a tree and a shopping mall. Swann commented his site "could be City Hall." [19]

The experiment also tested a protocol Schwartz had devised involving five multiple viewers.[20] Four were given charts of the Pacific ocean and were asked to locate an unknown wreck on the seafloor. They chose as their location a 10 mile square area near Santa Catalina.[21] The sunken vessel was determined by the Bureau of Land Management Marine Sites Board to be previously unknown. A documentary was shot as the events took place of the entire project was made.[Schwartz, 1977, 2007][citation needed] But the riches which Schwartz and his investors have sought in their many undersea expeditions have never been found.[22] The ship Schwartz's team found on the Bahamas Banks was carrying molasses, not the treasure that was their goal.[23]

Schwartz also claims he was involved in the discovery and the first modern mapping of the Eastern Harbor of Alexandria and the discovery of numerous shipwrecks as well as Mark Anthony's palace in Alexandria, the Ptolemaic Palace Complex of Cleopatra, and the remains of the Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Much of this was discounted by two on-site Egyptian scholars whom Schwartz had listed as research associates, Dr. Shehetta Adam, head of Egypt's Department of Antiquities and Dr. Mostafa El Abbadi.[24]

Criticism

Remote viewing
ClaimsCertain people have the paranormal ability to use their minds to see hidden, distant locations using the psychic powers of extra-sensory perception.
Related scientific disciplinesPhysics, Biology, Psychology
Year proposed1974
Original proponentsRussell Targ and Harold Puthoff
Subsequent proponentsIngo Swann, Russell Targ, Joseph McMoneagle, and Courtney Brown
(Overview of pseudoscientific concepts)

According to psychologist David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.[25][26]

Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly.[27] Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable.[28][29][30]

Others have said that the information from remote viewing sessions can be vague and include a lot of erroneous data.[13] A 1995 report for the American Institute for Research contains a section of anonymous reports describing how remote viewing was tentatively used in a number of operational situations. The three reports conclude that the data was too vague to be of any use, and in the report that offers the most positive results the writer notes that the viewers "had some knowledge of the target organizations and their operations but not the background of the particular tasking at hand."[13]

According to James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.[31]

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for paranormal claims and thus he remains unconvinced:[32]

I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do. ... Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence.

— Richard Wiseman, Daily Mail, January 28 2008, pp 28-29

Science writer Martin Gardner, and others, describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience. Gardner says that founding researcher Harold Puthoff was an active Scientologist prior to his work at Stanford University, and that this influenced his research at SRI. In 1970, the Church of Scientology published a notarized letter that had been written by Puthoff while he was conducting research on remote viewing at Stanford. The letter read, in part: "Although critics viewing the system [Scientology] from the outside may form the impression that Scientology is just another of many quasi-educational quasi-religious 'schemes,' it is in fact a highly sophistical and highly technological system more characteristic of modern corporate planning and applied technology."[8] Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.[8]

Selected RV study participants

  • Ingo Swann, one of the founders of remote viewing
  • Pat Price, one of the early remote viewers
  • Paul Smith, credited with authoring/editing what is known today as the “CRV Manual”. The CRV manual was never intended to be a "training manual" per se, nor a replacement for proper training by a qualified instructor. Its purpose was simply to serve as a guide and a reference for the terminology to obtain government funding. Smith has published articles on remote viewing in UFO Magazine, and about dowsing and remote viewing in The American Dowser, the quarterly journal of the American Society of Dowsers. His book Reading the Enemy's Mind was the book bonus feature for the March 2006 Reader's Digest.[33]
  • Russell Targ, cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s
  • Joseph McMoneagle, one of the early remote viewers.[34] See: Stargate Project
  • Ed Dames, formerly associated with PSI TECH, Inc.
  • Courtney Brown, founder of the Farsight Institute
  • David Morehouse, remote viewer during Stargate program
  • Lyn Buchanan
  • David Marks, the critic of remote viewing, after finding sensory cues and editing in the original transcripts generated by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s
  • Gerald O'Donnell, Founder and President of the Academy of Remote Viewing and Remote Influencing Reality and Thought

Notes

  • David Marks, Ph.D., "The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd edn.)" Prometheus Books, 2000. ISBN 1-57392-798-8
  • Courtney Brown, Ph.D., Remote Viewing : The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception. Farsight Press, 2005. ISBN 0-9766762-1-4
  • David Morehouse, Psychic Warrior, St. Martin's, 1996, ISBN 0-312-96413-7
  • Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997 , ISBN 0-440-22306-7
  • Paul H. Smith, Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate -- America's Psychic Espionage Program, Forge, 2005, ISBN 0-312-87515-0
  • Ronson, Jon, The Men who Stare at Goats, Picador, 2004, ISBN 0-330-37547-4, written to accompany the TV series The Crazy Rulers of the World [3]The military budget cuts after Vietnam and how it all began.
  • Paolini, Christopher Eragon & Eldest Knopf publishing, 1989 ISBN 0-432-2191-5
  • Buchanan, Lyn, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets Of Remote Viewing As Told By A "Psychic Spy" For The U.S. Military, ISBN 0-7434-6268-8
  • F. Holmes Atwater, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance, Hampton Roads 2001, ISBN 1-57174-247-6
  • McMoneagle, Joseph, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy, Hampton Roads 2002, ISBN 1-57174-225-5

References

  1. ^ Leonard Zusne, Warren H. Jones (1989). Anomalistic psychology: a study of magical thinking. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. p. 167. ISBN 0805805087. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  2. ^ Search for the Soul by Milbourne Christopher, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979
  3. ^ Kiss the Earth Good-bye: Adventures and Discoveries in the Nonmaterial, Recounted by the Man who has Astounded Physicists and Parapsychologists Throughout the World by Ingo Swann, Hawthorne Books, 1975
  4. ^ http://parapsych.org/glossary_l_r.html#r Parapsychological Association website, Glossary of Key Words Frequently Used in Parapsychology, Retrieved January 8 2006
  5. ^ a b c d Time magazine, 11 December 1995, p.45, The Vision Thing by Douglas Waller, Washington
  6. ^ http://www.csicop.org/sb/9606/remote_viewing.html
  7. ^ Randi & Clarke, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural "Remote viewing" definition "The data of Puthoff and Targ were reexamined by the other researchers, and it was found that their students were able to solve the locations without use of any psychic powers, using only the clues that had inadvertently been included in the Puthoff and Targ transcripts."
  8. ^ a b c Gardner, Martin, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience ISBN 0393322386
  9. ^ http://www.csicop.org/si/9603/claims.html The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality By Ray Hyman in the Skeptical Inquirer magazine : March/April 1996
  10. ^ Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate, America's Psychic Espionage Program by Paul H. Smith, Tom Doherty, 2005, p.100
  11. ^ May, E.C., “The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary”, The Journal of Parapsychology. 60, pp 3-23, March 1996
  12. ^ Utts homepage
  13. ^ a b c "An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications" by Mumford, Rose and Goslin
  14. ^ [1] Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena by Ray Hyman.
  15. ^ "Precognitive Remote Perception: Replication of Remote Viewing" (PDF). Journal of Scientific Exploration. 10 (1). Society for Scientific Exploration: 109–110. 1996. Retrieved 2008-06-02. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  16. ^ Stephan A. Schwartz
  17. ^ http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:srDADU4mSi8J:www.uri-geller.com/potm27.htm+leonid+vasiliev+pk&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
  18. ^ http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/rvandlayers.html Ingo Swann describes Hella Hammid's RV abilities and the RV process
  19. ^ The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities by Russell Trag and Keith Harary, Villard Books, 1984, pages 40 & 50
  20. ^ "Both the research and applications fail to statically support a reality that multiple viewers increase the amount or the degree of accuracy about a specific target." The Ultimate Time Machine by Joseph McMoneagle, Hampton Roads Publishing Co.,Inc.,1998, p.30
  21. ^ Psychic Powers: Mysteries of the Unknown edited by Henry Anatole Greenwald, Consultants: Stephan A. Schwartz, Marcello Truzzi, and James G. Matlock, archivist of the ASPR library, Time-Life Books, 1987, p.124
  22. ^ The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime by Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi, Ph.D., The Mysterious Press, 1991, pp 76 & 77
  23. ^ Parapsychology: The Controversial Science by Richard S. Broughton, Ph.D., Ballantine books, 1991, p.338
  24. ^ The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime by Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi, Ph.D., The Mysterious Press, 1991, p.77
  25. ^ Marks, D.F. & Kammann, R. (1978). "Information transmission in remote viewing experiments", Nature, 274:680-81.
  26. ^ http://www.nap.edu/books/POD276/html/647.html "A comprehensive review of major empirical studies in parapsychology involving random event generators or remote viewing" by Alcock, J.
  27. ^ Marks, D.F. (2000). The Psychology of the Psychic. Amherst, New York:Prometheus Books.
  28. ^ The Psychology of the Psychic by David Marks and Richard Kamman, Prometheus Books. Amherst, New York, 2000, 2nd edition. 1st edition, 1980, does not contain all of this information
  29. ^ [2] Book review of 2nd edition by James Alcock
  30. ^ Flim Flam by James Randi, Prometheus books, New York, 1987, 9th printing
  31. ^ Remote viewing at the Randi Educational Foundation
  32. ^ Penman, Danny (January 28 2008). "Could there be proof to the theory that we're ALL psychic?" (html). Daily Mail UK newspaper. pp. pp. 28-29. Retrieved 2008-01-29. {{cite web}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Check date values in: |year= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  33. ^ Learn Dowsing From Expert Paul Smith
  34. ^ Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time, and Space Through Remote Viewing by Joseph McMoneagle, Hampton Roads, Publishing Co., Inc., 1997

External links

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