Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 IV TARGET STORAGE AND ACCESS The target cards are numbered and placed in individual envelopes, Similarly numbered, by the target selection team; they are then turned over to the project Special Security Officer (SSO) who maintains them in a GSA-approved secure container. At the start of an RV session the interviewer, remote viewer, and target person rendevous in the laboratory and establish the trial start time (30 minutes hence), The target person then leaves the laboratory for the SSO station, generates a random number in the presence of the SSO by the use of the random-number function on a Texas Instruments Model SR-51 hand calculator, obtains the associated envelope (which is recorded by the SSO), and departs for the target site. 6 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 V REMOTE VIEWER ORIENTATION During the period that the target person is enroute to the target, the interviewer and remote viewer have a period to relax and discuss the protocols, The goal of the interviewer during this period is to make it "safe" for the remote viewer to experience remote viewing. For the initial orientation of a new remote viewer, this typically includes a discussion as to how remote viewing appears to be a natural rather than abnormal function, and that many people appear to have done it successfully. The remote viewer is told that memory and imagination constitute noise in the channel, and therefore the closer he can get to raw uninter- preted imagery, the better, He is encouraged to report raw perception rather than analysis, since the former tends to be correct while the latter is often wrong, Since remote viewing is a difficult task, apparently similar to the perception of subliminal stimuli ,° it takes the full attentive powers of the remote viewer, Therefore, the environment, procedures, etc., are designed to be as natural and comfortable as possible so as to minimize the diversion of attention to anything other than the task at hand. No hypnosis, strobe lights, or sensory-derivation procedures are used, since in our view such (novel) environmental factors would divert some of the subject's much-needed attention. Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 VI INTERVIEWER BEHAVIOR The interviewer arranges ahead of time to have pen and paper available for drawing, and a tape recorder, The room lighting is somewhat subdued to prevent after-image highlights, shadows on eyelids, etc, When the agreed-upon RV trial time arrives, the interviewer simply asks the remote viewer to "describe what impressions come to mind with regard to where the target person is." The interviewer does not pressure the remote viewer to verbalize continuously; if he were to, the remote viewer might tend to embroider descriptions to please the interviewer, a well-known syndrome in behavioral studies of this type. If the remote viewer tends toward being analytical ("I see Macy's") the interviewer gently leads him into description, not analysis. ("You don't have to tell me where it is, just describe what you see.") This is the most important and difficult task of the interviewer, but is apparently necessary for good results, especially with inexperienced remote viewers, It is also useful for the interviewer to "surprise" the remote viewer with new viewpoints. (''Go above the scene and look down--what do you see? If you look to the left, what do you see?") The remote viewer's viewpoint appears to shift rapidly with a question like this, and the data come through before the viewer's defenses activate to block it out. The shifting of viewpoint also obviates the problem of the remote viewer spending the entire session time giving meticulous detail on a relatively trivial item, such as a flower, which, even if correct, generally will be of little use in assessing the session, (Once a remote viewer feels he sees something, he tends to hang on to this perception rather than commit himself to a new viewpoint.) It is important to recognize again that with the division of 8 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 labor outlined in Section II it is the interviewer's (not the remote viewer's) responsibility to see that the necessary information to permit discrimination among the range of target possibilities is generated, the remote viewer's responsibility being confined to exercise of the RV faculty, The remote viewer is encouraged to sketch what he sees, even over his objections that he is not an artist, can't sketch, etc. He may do so throughout, or wait until the end of the session if intermittent drawing would distract his concentration, Since drawings tend to be more accurate than verbalizations, this is an extremely important factor for good results, Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 VII TARGET PERSON BEHAVIOR After obtaining a target card in the manner described in Section V, the target person proceeds to the target site indicated, He is asked to come upon the target location at the starting time so that his view of it is fresh at the beginning of the remote viewing period, He is to then simply pay attention to the environment as dictated by instructions on the target card. At the end of the agreed-upon target viewing time of 15 minutes the target person returns to the lab, 10 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 VIII POST-EXPERIMENT FEEDBACK When the target person returns, and after all the raw data has been turned over to the SSO, the interviewer, remote viewer, and target person proceed directly to the target site for feedback, This helps to develop the remote viewer's sense of which aspects of his mental imaging process are correct, which are incorrect, This appears to bring the RV trial to closure for the remote viewer, so that when he has a following session, his mind is no longer involved with wondering how he did on the previous one, Only a very experienced subject can function well time after time without feedback, so this is done for each trial to optimize the potential for success, 11 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 IX EVALUATION PROCEDURE In a sense, the most critical part of the remote-viewing procedure is the evaluation procedure. Any single experiment in remote viewing, even if perfect, could in principle be dismissed as possibly a coincidence, Further, any result less than pefect might be called into question as a generalized "grass is green, sky is blue" transcript that fits every target. Only blind differential discrimination of transcripts across a series of targets can provide a basis to discriminate between these dismissals and the RV interpretation, To obtain a numerical evaluation of the accuracy of a standard six- trial remote viewing series with a given remote viewer, the results are subjected to independent judging on a blind basis by an SRI research analyst not otherwise associated with the series, In preparation for judging, the remote viewer's tapes are transcribed. The resulting transcripts are then edited only to the extent of deleting information which might act as artifactual cues to a judge, such as references to other targets, or phrases which might indicate the temporal order of the transcripts. The transcripts (including associated drawings) and target cards, each arranged in their own random order different from the order of target usage, are then turned over to the judge. The judge is instructed to visit the target locations on the basis of the target card instructions, and to blind rank order, on a scale of 1-6 (best to worst match), each of the six transcripts against each of the six target sites, generating a 6 X 6 matrix as in the example shown in Table 1, 12 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 TYPICAL 6 X 6 JUDGING MATRIX Distribution of Judge's Rankings TRANSCRIPT LETTER TARGET patafelo| =| A precise measure of the statistical significance of the matrix of target/transcript relations is given by a direct-count-of-permutations method of great generality.® It is an exact calculation method requiring no approximations such as normality assumptions, Furthermore, the judging process that went into generating the matrix is not required to be inde- pendent transcript-to-transcript nor target-to-target. Finally, the statistical evaluation procedure is general enough that, in addition to being applicable to the blind rank order procedure in use at the present time, it can be applied to analyses in which numerical estimates of target/transcript correspondences are made on the basis of other rank-order or rating scales, This includes rating 1-7, zero to complete correspondence; arbitrary scale rating arrived at by some complex procedure involving many factors such as occurs in multiple-judge voting; cases in which, for a 13 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 given target, several transcripts are given the same rating, all transcripts are rated zero, a few transcripts are assigned rank order numbers and the rest are assigned the mean of the remaining rank order numbers, and so forth, The only requirement is that no artifactual information is provided as to the order of targets and transcripts. In particular, it can be shown that if targets are used with replacement or are non-orthogonal, interviewer, Thus the possibility of interviewer cueing or subject guessing based on a priori knowledge of the target pool is handled at a fundamental level by a statistical procedure that assumes the worst. The argument is as follows, In the absence of knowledge as to which transcript was generated in response to which target, one observes that in setting up the matrix there are n! possible ways to label the columns (transcripts), given any particular order of the rows (targets), and vice versa. Thus, there are n! possible matrices which could be constructed from the raw judging data, ali of them equally likely a priori in the absence of knowledge as to the order of targets and transcripts. Each has its associated sum on the diagonal corresponding to a possible alignment of targets and transcripts. The significance level for the experiment is then determined by counting the number of possible matrices that would yield a result (diagonal sum) equal to or better (i.e., lower sum of ranks in the rank- order case, higher sum of scores in the correspondence-rating case, etc.) than that obtained for the matrix corresponding to the key, and dividing by n! This ratio gives the probability of obtaining by chance a result equal to or better than that obtained in the actual judging process. For the 6 X 6 matrix used as an example (Table 1) we have, by direct computer count of the 6! matrices obtained by interchanging columns, -3 p = 2/6! = 2.8 %*%10°, 14 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 This statistical procedure, in use for more than two decades by many researchers, was specifically designed to handle narrative material of the remote viewing type, and it cannot be stressed enough that it is constructed sufficiently conservatively so as to apply even in the limiting case in which the target pool is completely known a priori to all involved, thus handling any possible contamination due to remote viewer guessing or interviewer cueing in protocols of the type used in the SRI RV procedure, 15 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6