Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 MEMO = al Wa (fi i\™* international Oe TO Mr, Manfred Gale (HQDA, DAMA-ZD) DATE 3 August 1979 FROM H. E, Puthoff LOCATION Bld, 44 SUBJECT. gRT/Gale Committee Meeting of 24-25 July CG We appreciated having an opportunity to discuss with you and members of your committee several aspects of our work during your recent visit to SRI. We welcome this kind of dialog and exchange of views with individuals of diverse backgrounds, who are willing to focus on issues of importance to us and our program, There were certain aspects of the meeting, however, which we felt were unsatisfactory, but for which we have specific remedial actions to propose, As you know from our agenda, we had intended to cover four major areas of interest: (1) an historical overview, including past applications to problems of interest to clients; (2) scientific questions with regard to RV protocols, judging, statistics, and so forth; (3) the goals and planned activities on present client programs; and (4) committee discussion with program remote viewers. Unfortunately, with the extended ad hoc discussions that took place during the opening presentation on historical material (Part 1) and the need to press on to a discussion of planned efforts on present client programs (Part 3), we all but skipped Part 2 on scientific questions (for example, none of the slides were shown), This seemed expedient at the time, given the apparent inappropriateness, in a group of such diverse interests, of getting involved in detailed discussions on specific technical issues (e.g., nuances as to protocol procedures, statistical evaluation techniques, etc.), This may have been "penny-wise and pound foolish," however, for all of us at SRI realized at one time or another in casual discussions with individual committee members during dinner breaks, etc., that there was a profound lack of understanding of some very basic issues, To cite some specific examples: (1) It was expressed that the RV target pool should be chosen and maintained by someone further removed from the experimentation than the principal investigators, and that access to the target pool should be limited. The above is in fact the procedure already in force. An independent target selection team generated the target pool and turned them over to the Project SSO who keeps them stored in a secure container. Targets are then withdrawn only under supervision of the SSO (who records their withdrawal) at the beginning of RV sessions. In Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 SRI 2903 2/78
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 Mr, Manfred Gale Page 2 3 August 1979 (2) (3) particular, the RV session interviewers (Targ and Puthoff) had never seen the target list until your committee asked that it be brought to the conference room, Concern was expressed that apparently successful RV results in our protocols might be due instead to a combination of remote viewer guesses of known Bay Area landmarks and/or artifactual sharpening of a subject's narrative by cues from the interviewer who is at least educated, if not directly knowledgeable as to the target possibilities, (We think that is was understood that the inter- viewer never knows the particular target.) The corollary to this concern is that although the RV function may exist, our protocols can't demonstrate it because of the above-stated circumstances, In fact, the statistical procedure we use takes into account at the outset the possibility that the target pool might be completely known to both remote viewer and interviewer--that it could be that RN EE eee ES A KL ST during the session; in short, that the RV series is to be treated as belonging to that class of studies in which the elements of the target pool are known a priori to both remote viewer and interviewer, as in studies involving numbers or cards as targets. (In fact, we would go this apparent criticism one step further and assert that it would be naive to assume that by any change in protocol one could in principle avoid the assumption that the remote viewer knows the target pool.) Thus, when there is a statistically significant result in our protocols, the cause must lie elsewhere than remote viewer guess or interviewer cueing, as these possibilities are handled at a fundamental level by a statistical procedure that assumes the worst, This fact must be understood by the committee members if they are to assess the SRI program results properly, It was repeatedly suggested that it would be better to dispense with the interviewer in an RV session so as to have a "cleaner" protocol, and that the use of an interviewer is somehow a methodological flaw. Such a suggestion indicates a complete failure to comprehend that success as obtained by use of the SRI RV protocols (as opposed to other procedures) is in large part due to an innovative design which incorporates a division of labor between remote viewer and interviewer designed to mirror the two primary modes of cerebral functioning; namely, the nonanalytic cognitive style (brain function) that pre- dominates in spatial pattern recognition and other holistic processing (and is hypothesized to predominate in psi functioning), and the Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 Mr. Manfred Gale Page 3 3 August 1979 analytical cognitive style that predominates in verbal and other analytical functioning. (Only very experienced remote viewers appear to have the ability to handle both cognitive styles simultaneously.) The removal of the burden of analytical functioning (by the interviewer) during exercise of the RV faculty appears to be an important ingredient for success, A change in this aspect of the methodology may give the appearance of a cleaner protocol (it is not), but it may also yield the lower level results characteristic of classical academic (as opposed to operational) studies. Our client programs, on the other hand, force us to develop techniques that yield results, and it cannot be stressed enough that we have developed the appropriate statistical procedures to handle such possibilities as remote viewer guessing and interviewer cueing or sharpening, To the degree that the committee's overall evaluation of the SRI program will touch on technical issues such as these, we would suggest that it is incumbent on the committee members to obtain a more thorough grounding in the technical details than was possible in the few hours available during the July meeting at SRI. We would doubt, for example, that anyone would be in a position to critique our present RV statistical procedures fairly and justly (not that there wasn't the potential because of the expertise represented) simply because we did not have an opportunity to present them, and, being a new approach in our program (Scott's direct-count-of-permutations method), we have not discussed them at any length in publications available to the committee, Since the approach (a) is specifically designed to handle narrative material of the remote viewing type, (b) takes into account the possibility of potential remote viewer/interviewer guessing and/or knowledge of the target pool, and (c) has been thoroughly investigated, used, and documented in the academic parapsychology community as the most conservative reference statistic to fall back on, one cannot assess remarks such as (1) - (3) above without at least an intuitive understanding of the assumptions and implications of this approach. Beyond this, there were other items that to our mind need clearing up, such as confusion of our work with other labs' work and statements, and little awareness that we have done considerable experimentation with simpler paranormal functions than remote viewing (e.g., computer-automated number-perception tasks, binary card tasks) to establish certain parameters of the more complicated functioning, (Such scientific legwork we did not present to the committee, as it seemed beyond the scope of interest expressed at the time,) Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 Mr. Manfred Gale Page 4 3 August 1979 To remedy the shortcomings inherent in the brief orientation meeting of 24-25 July, to ensure that we do justice to the multitudinous concerns of the committee, and to ensure that the SRI program obtains a fair hearing from the committee, we propose that: (1) all committee members receive from your office a copy of this memo and the attached protocols to gain a better understanding of our procedures; (2) further discussions be held in smaller groups between SRI personnel and those members of the committee who are especially concerned with specific issues (e.g., protocol procedures and statistical approaches with Drs, Synder and Tang). We are available for such interactions at Menlo Park, Washington, or elsewhere, and would appreciate the opportunity to resolve these issues at the earliest convenience, Out of such interactions we could also expect as a bonus to define with greater clarity those scientific issues that need to be pursued in more detail should fundamentally-oriented research programs be set up in the future, as they must. Since we are mitually tasked by our sponsor to provide the best technical assessment possible of a field fraught with complex and subtle issues, we believe that additional actions such as we have proposed are necessary if we are to fulfill our mutual goals and responsibilities, Enclosed are copies of the memo and protocols for all the committee members, which we would appreciate your distributing. Also enclosed for use at your discretion are additional copies for Maj. Gen. E, R. Thompson, Dr. Ruth Davis, and the Hon, Walter Laberge. We remain at your disposal as to arrangements should you decide to follow up on the further interactions we have proposed, Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
ra | Internattions cad [_ Approvgd For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 August 1979 STANDARD REMOTE VIEWING (RV) PROCEDURES: LOCAL SITES Prepared by: H, E, Puthoff, Ph.D. R, Targ E. C, May, Ph.D, 333 Ravenswood Ave. « Menlo Park, California 94025 nionaved For Release 2000/08/4Gr'QNA-RDPIY600:787 R600'F00060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 STANDARD REMOTE VIEWING (RV) PROCEDURES (LOCAL SITES) Our present standard remote-viewing (RV) procedures are similar to those in our Proc. IEEE paper, "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent "1 The elements of the protocol, each of which is addressed Research, below, consist of (1) basic procedural design; (2) remote viewer/interviewer roles; (3) target pool selection; (4) target storage and access; (5) remote viewer orientation; (6) interviewer behavior; (7) target person behavior; (8) post-experiment feedback; (9) evaluation procedure, Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 I BASIC PROCEDURAL DESIGN At the beginning of a trial, a remote viewer is closeted with an interviewer in an isolated windowless room of the Radio Physics Laboratory in the SRI complex to await an agreed-upon start time, At the same time a target person is sent, without communication with the remote viewer or interviewers remaining at SRI, to a target location somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area (~500 square km). The target is determined by random-number access to a target pool of sealed travelling orders previously prepared by an independent experimental team and kept locked in a secure safe. The target pool consists of more than 50 target locations chosen from a target-rich environment, During a predetermined viewing period of 15 minutes duration, the remote viewer is asked to render drawings and describe into a tape recorder his impressions of the target site being visited by the outbound target person. The interviewer with the remote viewer is kept ignorant of the target and is therefore free to question him to clarify his descriptions without fear of cueing (overt or subliminal) as to the particular target.” Since general knowledge of the San Francisco Bay Area target region on the part of the remote viewer and interviewer must be taken as a given, and since particular knowledge of the contents of the target pool is revealed as a series progresses, one must take into account the possi- bility that any particular description may be artifactually sharpened. (Such sharpening can in principle increase the apparent quality of the result only if there is functional remote viewing to begin with, It cannot in the absence of ESP produce an inflated result.) This sharpening possibility in the presence of an already functioning RV capability is handled in the statistical evaluation of the results by conservatively assuming at the outset that the series is to be treated as belonging to that class of studies in which the elements of the target pool are known a priori to both remote viewer and interviewer, as in studies involving numbers or cards as targets, 2 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 When the target person returns to SRI following the remote viewing period, the subject is then taken to the target site so that he may obtain direct feedback, Following a series of such trials over a several-day period, a formal blind judging procedure (described below) is used to evaluate the data and quantify the results, Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 II REMOTE VIEWER/INTERVIEWER ROLES An important methodological aspect of the SRI RV protocols revolves around the fact that the remote viewer/interviewer team constitutes a Single information gathering unit in which the remote viewer's role is designed to be that of perceiver/information source, and the interviewer's role is designed to be that of analytical control. This division of labor is designed to mirror the two primary modes of cerebral functioning; namely, the nonanalytic cognitive style (related to brain function) that predominates in spatial pattern recognition and other holistic processing (and is hypothesized to predominate in psi functioning), and the analytical cognitive style that predominates in verbal and other analytical functioning .*7~4 (Only very experienced remote viewers appear to have the ability to handle both cognitive styles simultaneously.) The interviewer role, removing as it does the burden of analytical functioning during exercise of the RV faculty, appears to be a key element in generating the level of success required in operational programs, and we attribute the success of the SRI RV protocols in large part to this innovative design which appears to provide an appropriate match to the required functioning. Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6
Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6 III) TARGET POOL SELECTION Target locations in the San Francisco Bay Area are selected by a team of two Radio Physics Laboratory personnel who are not involved as inter- viewers in the experiments (to prevent direct knowledge of the target pool by the interviewers), The locations are chosen to satisfy the following criteria: (1) Target sites must be within a half-hour drive of the SRI Menlo Park complex so that a uniform target access time exists for all experiments, (2) The target pool is constructed to contain several targets of various types--that is, several fountains, several churches, several boathouses, and so forth--specifically to circumvent analysis strategies of the type "there was a fountain yesterday, so it is unlikely that there is a fountain today." Furthermore, targets of different types are not chosen to be particularly distinct from each other, so that overlapping features exist. In this manner the content of a given target, determined by random entry into the target pool, is essentially independent of the contents of other targets ("open-deck" design). (3) The definition of what constitutes each target is established in advance of the entire RV series by written descriptions on a set of 3" X 5" target cards, (Ex: Four Seasons Restaurant, on El Camino Real, just north of San Antonio Road. Stand under the entry arch and feel the bricks,) These cards constitute the outbound team's instructions at the beginning of the trial, and the judge's target list during the evaluation phase, Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000100060001-6