Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 TABLE 7 Distribution of Rankings Assigned to Subject Drawings Associated with Each Target Location Rank of Associated Subject Drawings Drill press Xerox machine Video terminal Chart recorder Random number generator Machine shop Typewriter Total sum of ranks (p=0.036) 58 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 When the subjects tried to make sense out of these fragmentary impressions, they often resorted to metaphors or constructed an image with a kind of perceptual inference, From a feeling of the target as an "august" and "solemn" building, a subject ($4) said it might be a library: it was a church, A pedestrian overpass above a freeway was described as a conduit (S84). A rapid transit station, elevated above the countryside, was associated with an observatory ($2). These responses seem to be the result of attempts to process partial information: similarly, this occurs in other parapsychological experiments, These observations are compatible with the hypotheses that information received in a putative remote viewing mode is processed piecemeal in pattern form (consistent with a low bit rate process, but not necessarily requiring it); and the errors arise in the processes of attempted integration of the data into larger patterns directed toward verbal labeling, When the subjects augmented the verbal transcripts with drawings or sketches, these often expressed the target elements more accurately than the verbal descriptions, Thus, the drawings tended to correspond with the targets more clearly and precisely than the words of the transcript, The descriptions given by the subjects sometimes went beyond what the remote experimenter experienced, at least consciously. For example, one subject (S4) described and drew a belt drive at the top of a drill press that was invisible even to the remote experimenter who was operating the machine; another subject (S1) described a number of items 65 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 behind shrubbery and thus not visible to members of the demarcation team at the site. Curiously, objects in motion at the remote site were rarely mentioned in the transcript. For example, trains crossing the railroad trestle target were not described, though the remote experimenter stood very close to them, Also in a few cases, the subject descriptions were inaccurate regarding size of structures. A 20-foot courtyard separating two build- ings was described as 200 feet wide, and a small shed was expanded to a barn-like structure. Blind Judging of Transcripts--The judging procedure entailed examining the transcripts for a given experimental series and attempting to match the transcripts with the correct targets on the basis of their correspondences, The transcripts varied from coherent and accurate descriptions to mixtures of correspondences and noncorrespondences, Since the judge did not know a priori which elements of the descriptions were correct or incorrect, the task was complicated, and transcripts often seemed plausibly to match more than one target, A confounding factor in these studies is that some target locations have similarities that seem alike at some level of perception, For example, a radio telescope at the top of a hill, the observation deck of a tower, and a jetty on the edge of a bay all match a transcript description of "looking out over a long distance," A lake, a fountain, and a creek may all result in an image 66 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 of water for the subject. Therefore, in several cases even correct images may not help in the conservative differential matching procedure used, According to the judge, the most successful procedure was a careful element by element comparison that tested each transcript against every target and used the transcript descriptions and drawings as argu- ments for or against assigning the transcript to a particular target. In most cases, this resulted in either a clear conclusion or at least a ranking of probable matches; these matches were subjected to the statis- tical analyses presented in this paper. 2, Summary In summary, we do not yet have an understanding of the nature of the information-bearing signal that a subject perceives during remote view- ing. The subjects commonly report that they perceive the signal visually as though they were looking at the object or place from a position in its immediate neighborhood, Furthermore, the subjects' perceptual viewpoint has mobility in that they can shift their point of view so as to describe elements of a scene that would not be visible to an observer merely standing at ground level and describing what he sees, (In particular, a subject often correctly describes elements not visible to the target demarcation team). Finally, motion is seldom reported; in fact moving objects often are unseen even when nearby static objects are correctly identified. 67 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 A comparison of the results of remote viewing (a so-called free-response task) with results of forced-choice tasks, such as the selec~ tion of one of four choices generated by a random number generator [58], reveals the following findings. From a statistical viewpoint, a subject is more likely to describe, with sufficient accuracy to permit blind matching, a remote site chosen at random than he is to select correctly one of four random numbers. Our experience with these phenomena leads us to consider that this difference in task performance may stem from fundamental signal- to-noise considerations. Two principal sources of noise in the system apparently are inemory and imagination, both of which can give rise to mental pictures of greater clarity than the target to be perceived. In the random number task, a subject can create a perfect mental picture of each of the four possible outputs in his own imagination and then attempt to obtain the correct answer by a mental matching operation. The same is true for card guessing experiments. On the other hand, the subject in remote viewing is apparently more likely to approach the task with a blank mind as he attempts to perceive pictorial information from remote locations about which he may have no stored mental data. Finally, we observe that most of the correct information that subjects relate to us is of a nonanalytic nature pertaining to shape, form, color, and material rather than to function or name. Inconsultation with Dr. Robert Ornstein of the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, San Francisco, and with Dr. Ralph Kiernan of the Department of Neurology, 68 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, California, we have formed the tentative hypothesis that paranormal functioning may involve special- ization characteristic of the brain's right hemisphere. This possibility is derived from a variety of evidence from clinical and neurosurgical sources which indicate that the two hemispheres of the human brain are specialized for different cognitive functions. The left hemisphere is predominantly active in verbal and other analytical functioning and the right hemisphere predominates in spatial and other holistic processing [59], [60]. Further research is necessary to elucidate the relationship between right hemispheric function and paranormal abilities. Nonetheless, we can say at this point that the remote viewing results of the group of sub- jects at SRI have characteristics in common with more familiar performances that require right hemispheric function. The similarities include the highly schematicized drawings of objects in a room or of remote scenes. Verbal identification of these drawings is often highly inaccurate and the draw- ings themselves are frequently left-right reversed relative to the target configuration. Further, written material generally is not cognized. These characteristics have been seen in left brain-injured patients and in callosal-sectioned patients. As a result of the above considerations, we have learned to urge our subjects simply to describe what they see as opposed to what they think they are looking at. We have learned that their unanalyzed perceptions are almost always a better guide to the true target than their interpretations of the perceived data. 69 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 IV CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING TIME If the authors may be forgiven a personal note, we wish to express that this section deals with observations that we have been reluctant to publish because of their striking apparent incompatibility with existing concepts. The motivating factor for presenting the data at this time is the ethical consideration that theorists endeavoring to develop models for paranormal functioning should be apprised of all the observable data if their efforts to arrive at a comprehensive and correct description are to be successful. During the course of the experimentation in remote viewing (Section IIL), subjects occasionally volunteered the information that they had been thinking about their forthcoming participation in a remote viewing experiment and had an image come to them as to what the target location was to be. On these occasions, the information was given only to the experimenter remaining at SRI with the subject and was unknown to the outbound experimenter until completion of the experiment. Two of these contributions were among the most accurate descriptions turned in during those experiments. Since the target location had not yet been selected when the subject communicated his perceptions about the target, we found the data difficult to contend with. We offer these spontaneous occurrences not as proof of precognitive perception, but rather as the motivation that led us to do further work in this field. On the basis of this firsthand evidence, together with 71 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6
Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 the copious literature describing years of precognition experiments carried out in various other laboratories, we decided to determine whether a subject could perform a perceptual task that required both spatial and temporal remote viewing. It is well-known and recently has been widely discussed that nothing in the fundamental laws of physics forbids the apparent transmission of information from the future to the present (discussed further in Sec- tion V). Furthermore, there is a general dictum that "in physical law, everything that is not forbidden, is required [61]."" With this in mind, we set out to conduct very well-controlled experiments to determine whether we could deliberately design and execute experiments for the sole purpose of observing precognition under Laboratory conditions. The experimental protocol was identical to that followed in previous remote viewing experiments with but one exception. The exception was that the subject was required to describe the remote location during a 15-minute period beginning 20 minutes before the target was selected and 35. minutes before the outbound experimenter was to arrive at the target location. In detail, as shown in Table 9, each day at ten o'clock one of the experimenters would leave SRI with a stack of ten sealed envelopes from a larger pool and randomized daily, containing traveling instructions that had been prepared, but that were unknown to the two experimenters remaining with the subject. The subject for this experiment was 72 Approved For Release 2002/05/17 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6