I
Annrm/d For Release 2000/08/08
: CIA-RDP96-00789R002200430001-0
Final Report-Objective B, Task
December 1988
Covering the Period
1 October 1987 to 30 September 1988
MASS
SCREENING
FOR
PSYCHOENERGETIC
TALENT
USING A REMOTE VIEWING TASK
By:
NEVIN D. LANTZ
EDWIN C. MAY
Prepared for:
Peter J. McNelis, DSW
CONTRACTING OFFICER’S TECHNICAL REPRESENTATIVE
SRI Project 1291
Approved by:
MURRAY J. BARON, Director
Geoscience and Engineering Center
333 Ravenswood Ave.
• Menlo Park, CA 94025
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ABSTRACT
A
screening
effort was mounted during FY
1988
to discover individuals who showed
natural remote viewing (RV) ability as measured by a laboratory RV task. Out of 196 individuals
who participated in the selection process, three persons showed evidence for some skill at the
task during further testing.
ii
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I INTRODUCTION
A.
Overview
Traditionally,
psychoenergetic
experimenters
at
SRI
International have
relied on
the
remote viewing (RV) of a relatively small number of talented persons in laboratory experiments.
But, as the number and nature of experiments and/or applications increases, the necessity for
discovering additional talented individuals becomes acute.
In FY 1984, in anticipation of more
process-oriented experiments, the psychoenergetics project at SRI International began efforts to
increase the
size
of the psychoenergetic
talent group
for
future experimental work.
Three
directions were pursued;
(1)
attempts to train selected individuals,
(2) mass screening using
psychological
correlates
of
psychic
functioning,
and
(3)
mass
screening
using
a
carefully
developed remote viewing task.
This report details the third effort conducted during FY 1988.*
B.
Objective
Although it has not been documented to what extent psychoenergetic abilities exist in the
general
population,
certain
individuals do have
a
capacity
for
picking up
information
not
available by known sensory processes.
Some of these persons may have had spontaneous
experiences that led them to be more or less aware of an extrasensory potential while others with
ESP potential have not had such experiences. The goal of the FY 1988 mass screening effort was
to find individuals with talent for RV, the ability to give vivid verbal and pictorial descriptions of
designated sites and scenes in the absence of sensory contact.
To accomplish
this, we developed a two-stage process
for screening large numbers of
people.
The goal was to screen several hundred individuals at the first stage and to invite 10 to
20 of the most promising individuals to participate in four to eight additional laboratory trials in
anticipation of finding five to ten individuals who would show robust RV performance.
* This report constitutes the deliverable for Objective B, Task
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Approved For Release 2000/08/08
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II METHOD OF APPROACH
A.
General Description
A two-stage screening process was deployed to find good remote viewers.
The first stage
included a lecture presentation summarizing RV research conducted at SRI International over
the past 15 years.
This presentation was designed to attract interested audiences of 50 or more
persons.
Following the lecture, the audience was asked to volunteer its participation in four RV
trials with targets randomly selected from a previously constructed target pool.
Based on a
qualitative assessment of the RV data collected at the first stage, the second stage consisted of a
formal test with selected individuals using independent trials in our RV laboratory.
B.
Mass Screening Protocol
1.
Targets
A special set of sixteen targets was constructed for the screening procedure.
The
target pool contained both dynamic
(targets with motion) and static
(still photographs) targets.
Dynamic targets consisted of action film clips edited from popular movies while the static targets
were a series of thematically related still photographs shown in succession for five seconds each.
The targets ranged in length from approximately 60 to 100 seconds and were stored for ease of
retrieval on two video disks.
The sixteen targets were divided into four categories with four targets in each one.
Categories included: Military, scientific/industrial, natural/non-technical, and projects.
Targets
in the first three categories were film clips of the dynamic variety, while each target in the fourth
category showed a project title
(e.g.. Project Blue Book) interspersed with images related to the
purpose of the project (e.g., UFOs). Four categories were chosen to allow for the possibility that
some types of targets might be easier to view than others.
No attempt was made to maintain
target
orthogonality
across
categories,
but
considerable
effort
was
expended
to
maintain
within-category orthogonality.
Two factors were considered in choosing the targets. Within each category the targets
were chosen because they were thematic,
interesting, and possessed geometric elements that
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: CIA-RDP96-00789R002200430001-0