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PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL, 64, NO.
3, MARCH 1976
A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer
over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective
and Recent Research
HAROLD E. PUTHOFF, member, ieee, and RUSSELL TARG, senior member, ieee
Abstract—For
more
than
100
years,
scientists have attempted
to
determine the truth or falsity of claims for the existence of a perceptual
channel whereby certain individuals are able to perceive and describe
remote data not presented to any known sense. This paper presents an
outline of the history of scientific inquiry into such so-called paranor-
mal perception and surveys the current state of the art in parapsycho-
logical research in the United States and abroad.
The nature of this
perceptual channel
is examined in a series of experiments earned out
in the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory of Stanford Research
Institute.
The perceptual modality most extensively investigated is the
ability
of both experienced subjects and inexperienced volunteers to
view, by
innate mental
processes, remote geographical or
technical
targets including buildings, roads, and laboratory apparatus.
The ac-
cumulated data indicate that the phenomenon
is not a sensitive func-
tion of distance, and Faraday cage shielding does not in any apparent
way degrade the quality and accuracy of perception. On the basis of
this research, some areas of physics are suggested from which a descrip-
tion or explanation of the phenomenon could be forthcoming.
I. Introduction
“TTT
IS THE PROVINCE of natural science to
investigate
I nature, impartially and without prejudice” [1], Nowhere
-11- in
scientific inquiry has this dictum met as great a chal-
lenge as in the area of so-called extrasensory perception (ESP),
the
detection
of remote
stimuli not mediated by the usual
sensory processes.
Such phenomena, although under scientific
consideration for over a century, have historically been fraught
with unreliability and controversy, and validation of the phe-
nomena by accepted scientific methodology has been slow in
coming.
Even
so,
a recent survey conducted by the
British
publication New Scientist revealed
that 67 percent of nearly
1500 responding readers (the majority of whom are working
scientists and
technologists) considered ESP to be an estab-
lished
fact
or
a
likely
possibility, and
percent held the
investigation of ESP to be a legitimate scientific undertaking
[ 2 ].
A review of the literature reveals that although experiments
by reputable researchers yielding
positive
results were begun
over a century ago
(e.g., Sir William Crookes’ study of D. D.
Home,
1 860’s)
[3], many consider
the study of these phe-
nomena
as only recently emerging from the realm of quasi-
science.
One
reason
for
this
is
that,
despite experimental
results, no satisfactory theoretical construct had been advanced
to
correlate
data or to
predict new experimental outcomes.
Consequently, the
area in question remained for a long time
in the recipe stage reminiscent of electrodynamics before the
Manuscript received July 25, 1975; revised November 7, 1975.
The
submission
of
this paper was encouraged
after review of an advance
proposal.
This work was supported by the Foundation for Parasensory
Investigation and the Parapsychology F'oundation, New York, NY; the
Institute
of Noetic
Sciences, Palo Alto, CA; and the National Aero-
nautics and Space Administration, under Contract NAS 7-100.
The authors are with the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory,
Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA 94025.
unification brought about by the work of Ampere, Faraday,
and Maxwell.
Since the early work, however, we have seen the
development
of
information
theory, quantum
theory, and
neurophysiological
research,
and
these
disciplines
provide
powerful conceptual tools that appear to bear directly on the
issue.
In
fact,
several
physicists (Section V) are now of the
opinion that these phenomena are not at
all inconsistent with
the framework of modern physics: the often-held view that
observations of this type are a priori incompatible with known
laws
is erroneous in that such a concept
is based on the naive
realism prevalent before the development of quantum theory.
In the emerging view, it
is accepted that research in this area
can be conducted so as to uncover not just a catalog of inter-
esting events, but rather patterns of cause-effect relationships
of the type that lend themselves to analysis and hypothesis
in
the
forms
with
which we
are
familiar
in
the
physical
sciences.
One hypothesis
is
that information transfer under
conditions
of
sensory
shielding
is
mediated
by
extremely
low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves,
a proposal that
does
not seem
to
be
ruled out by any obvious physical or
biological
facts.
Further,
the development
of information
theory
makes
it
possible
to
characterize and
quantify
the
performance
of
a
communications
channel
regardless
of
the underlying mechanism.
For
the
past
three
years, we
have had
a program
in the
Electronics
and
Bioengineering
Laboratory
of
the
Stan-
ford
Research
Institute
(SRI)
to
investigate those
facets of
human perception that appear to fall outside the range of well-
understood
perceptual/processing
capabilities.
Of particular
interest
is
a human information-accessing capability that we
call
“remote
viewing.”
This phenomenon
pertains
to
the
ability of certain individuals to access and describe, by means
of mental processes, information sources blocked from ordi-
nary perception, and generally accepted as secure against such
access.
In
particular,
the phenomenon we have investigated most
extensively
is the ability of a subject to view remote geograph-
ical locations up to
several thousand kilometers distant from
his physical location (given only a known person on whom to
target).
We have
carried out more than
fifty experiments
under controlled laboratory conditions with several individuals
whose remote
perceptual
abilities
have been developed
suf-
ficiently to allow them at times to describe correctly—often in
great detail—geographical or technical material such as build-
ings, roads, laboratory apparatus, and the like.
As observed in the laboratory, the basic phenomenon appears
to cover a range of subjective experiences variously referred to
‘Our
initial work
in
this area was reported
in Nature
[41, and
re-
printed in th e IEEE Commun. Soc. Newsletter, vol. 13, Jan. 1975
Copyright © 1976 by The Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A. Annals No.
603PR004
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, MARCH 1976
Fig.
1.
Airport in San Andres, Colombia, used as remote-viewing target, along with sketch produced by subject
in California.
in the literature as autoscopy (in the medical literature); exteri-
orization
or
disassociation
(psychological
literature);
simple
clairvoyance, traveling clairvoyance, or out-of-body experience
(parapsychological literature); or astral projection (occult liter-
ature).
We
choose
the term “remote viewing” as a neutral
descriptive term
free from
prior associations and bias as to
mechanisms.
The development at SRI of a successful experimental pro-
cedure to elicit this capability has evolved to the point where
persons
such
as
visiting government
scientists and
contract
monitors, with no previous exposure to such concepts, have
learned to perform well; and subjects who have trained over a
one-year, period have performed excellently under a variety of
experimental conditions.
Our accumulated data thus indicate
that both
specially
selected
and- unselecled
persons
can
he
aiiiJlSUid
in
developing
remote
perceptual
abilities
up
to
a
level of useful information transfer.
In experiments of this type, we have three principal findings.
First, we have established that
it
is possible to obtain signifi-
cant amounts of accurate descriptive information about remote
locations.
Second, an
increase
in
the
distance from a few
meters up to 4000 km separating the subject from the scene
to be
perceived
does not
in any apparent way degrade the
quality or accuracy of perception.
Finally, the use of Faraday
cage electrical shielding does not prevent high-quality descrip-
tions from being obtained.
To
build
a
coherent
theory
for
the
explanation
of these
phenomena,
it
is necessary to have
a
clear understanding of
what constitutes the phenomena.
In this paper, we first briefly
summarize previous efforts in this field in Section II. We then
present
in Sections
III and IV the results of a series of more
than
fifty experiments with nine subjects
carried out
in our
own laboratory, which represent a sufficiently stable data base
to permit testing of various hypotheses concerning the func-
tioning of
this
channel.
Finally,
in
Section V, we indicate
those areas of physics and information theory that appear to
be
relevant
to
an
understanding
of
certain
aspects of the
phenomena.
First, however, we present an illustrative example generated
in an
early
pilot experiment.
As will be clear from our later
discussion,
this
is not
a
“best-ever” example, but
rather
a
typical sample of the level of proficiency that can be reached
and that we have come to expect in our research.
Three
subjects
participated
in
a
long-distance experiment
focusing on
a
series of targets in Costa Rica.
These subjects
said they had never been to Costa Rica.
In this experiment,
one of the experimenters (Dr. Puthoff ) spent ten days traveling
through Costa Rica on a combination business/pleasure trip.
This information was
all that was known to the subjects about
the traveler’s itinerary.
The experiment called for Dr. Puthoff
to keep a detailed record of his location and activities, includ-
ing photographs
of each of seven target days
at 1330 PDT.
A total of twelve daily descriptions were collected before the
traveler’s
return:
six responses from one
subject,
five from
another, and one from a third.
The third subject who submitted the single response supplied
a drawing for a day in the middle of the series. (The subject’s
response, together with the photographs taken at the site, are
shown
in
Fig.
1).
Although
Costa
Rica
is
a
mountainous
country, the subject unexpectedly perceived the traveler at a
beach and ocean setting. With some misgiving, he described an
airport on a sandy beach and an airstrip with the ocean at the
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PUTHOFF AND TARG: PERCEPTUAL CHANNEL FOR INFORMATION TRANSFER
end (correct).
An airport building also was drawn, and shown
to have a large rectangular overhang (correct).
The
traveler
had taken an unplanned one-day side trip to an offshore island
and at the time of the experiment had just disembarked from a
plane
at
a
small
island
airport
as
described by
the subject
4000 km away.
The
sole discrepancy was that the subject’s
drawing showed a Quonset-hut type of building in place of the
rectangular structure.
The above description was chosen as an example to illustrate
a major
point
observed
a number
of times throughout the
program to be described.
Contrary to what may be expected,
a subject’s description does not necessarily portray what may
reasonably be expected
to be correct (an educated or “safe”
guess),
but
often
runs
counter
even
to
the
subject’s own
expectations.
We wish to stress again that a result such as the above is not
unusual.
The remaining submissions
in
this experiment pro-
vided further examples of excellent correspondences between
target and response.
(A target period of poolside relaxation
was identified; a drive through a tropical forest at the base of
a truncated volcano was described as a drive through a jungle
below a large bare table mountain; a hotel-room target descrip-
tion, including such
details as rug
color, was correct; and so
on.)
So as to determine whether such matches were simply
fortuitous—that
is, could reasonably be expected on the basis
of chance alone—Dr. Puthoff was asked after he had returned
to
blind match
the
twelve
descriptions
to
his
seven
target
locations.
On the basis of this conservative evaluation proce-
dure, which
vastly underestimates the
statistical significance
of the individual descriptions,
five correct matches were ob-
tained.
This number of matches
is significant at p = 0.02 by
exact binomial calculation.2
The observation of such unexpectedly high-quality descrip-
tions
early
in our program led to a
large-scale study of the
phenomenon at SRI under secure double-blind conditions (i.e.,
target unknown
to experimenters
as
well as
subjects), with
independent random target selection and blind judging.
The
results, presented
in Sections
III and IV, provide strong evi-
dence
for
the
robustness
of
this phenomenon
whereby
a
human perceptual modality of extreme sensitivity can detect
complex remote stimuli.
II. Background
Although we are approaching the study of these phenomena
as physicists, it is not yet possible to separate ourselves entirely
from the language of the nineteenth century when the labora-
tory study of the paranormal was begun.
Consequently, we
continue to use terms such as “paranormal,” “telepathy,” and
the
like.
However, we intend only to indicate a process of
information
transfer under
conditions generally accepted
as
secure against such transfer and with no prejudice or occult
assumptions
as to the mechanisms involved.
As in any other
scientific pursuit, the purpose is to collect the observables that
result from experiments and to try to determine the functional
relationships between these observables and the laws of physics
as they are currently understood.
’The
probability of a
correct daily match by chance for any given
transcript
is p = -j.
Therefore, the probability of at least five correct
matches by chance out of twelve tries can be calculated from
331
Organized research into so-called psychic functioning began
roughly in the time of
J.
J. Thomson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and
Sir William Crookes,
all of whom took part in the founding of
the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882 in England.
Crookes, for example,
carried out his principal investigations
with D. D. Home, a Scotsman who grew up in America and
returned to England in 1855
[3]
.
According to the notebooks
and
published
reports
of Crookes, Home had demonstrated
the ability to cause objects to move without touching them.
We should, note in passing that, Home, unlike most subjects,
worked only in the
light and spoke out in the strongest pos-
sible terms against the darkened seance rooms popular at the
time [5]
.
Sir William Crookes was a pioneer in the study of electrical
discharge in gases and in the development of vacuum tubes,
some types of which
still bear his name. Although everything
Crookes said about electron beams and plasmas was accepted,
nothing he said about the achievements of D. D. Home ever
achieved
that
status.
Many of his colleagues, who had not
observed the experiments with Home, stated publicly that they
thought Crookes had been deceived, to which Crookes angrily
responded:
Will not my critics give me credit for some amount of common
sense? Do they, not imagine that the obvious precautions, which
occur
to them
as soon as they
sit down to pick holes in my
experiments, have occurred to me also in the course of my pro-
longed and patient investigation?
The answer to this, as to all
other objections
is, prove
it to be an error, by showing where
the
error
lies, or
if a trick, by showing how the trick
is per-
formed.
Try the experiment fully and fairly.
If then fraud be
found, expose
it;
if
it be a truth, proclaim
it.
This
is the only
scientific procedure, and
it
is that
I propose steadily to pursue
[3].
In
the
United
States,
scientific interest
in the paranormal
was centered
in the
universities.
In
1912, John Coover [6]
was established in the endowed Chair of Psychical Research at
Stanford University.
In the 1920’s, Harvard University set up
research programs with George Estabrooks and L. T. Troland
[7],
[8].
It was in
this framework
that,
in
1930, William
McDougall invited
Dr.
J. B. Rhine and Dr. Louisa Rhine to
join the Psychology Department at Duke University [9]
.
For
more than 30 years, significant work was carried out at Rhine’s
Duke
University
Laboratory.
To examine the existence of
paranormal
perception, he
used
the now-famous ESP cards
containing
a boldly
printed
picture of a
star,
cross, square,
circle, or wavy lines.
Subjects were asked to name the order
of these cards in
a freshly shuffled deck of twenty-five such
cards.
To
test for telepathy, an experimenter would look at
the cards one at a time, and a subject suitably separated from
the sender would attempt to determine which card was being
viewed.
Dr.
J.
B. Rhine
together with Dr.
J. G. Pratt
carried out
thousands of experiments of this type under widely varying
conditions
[ 10]
.
The statistical results from these experiments
indicated that some individuals did indeed possess a paranor-
mal perceptual
ability
in
that
it was
possible
to obtain an
arbitrarily high degree of improbability by continued testing
of a gifted subject.
The work of Rhine has been challenged on many grounds,
however, including accusations of improper handling of statis-
tics, error, and fraud. With regard to the statistics, the general
consensus of statisticians today
is that
if fault
is to be found
in Rhine’s work,
it would have to be on other than statistical
grounds
[11].
With regard to the accusations of fraud, the
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most
celebrated
case
of
criticism of
Rhine’s work,
that of
G.
R.
Price
[12], ended
years
after
it began when the
accusation of fraud was retracted by
its author
in an article
entitled “Apology to Rhine and Soal,” published in the same
journal in which
it was first put forward [13].
It should also
be
noted
that
parapsychological
researchers
themselves
re-
cently
exposed
fraud
in
their own
laboratory when
they
encountered
it [14]
.
At the end of the 1940’s, Prof. S. G. Soal, an English mathe-
matician working with the SPR, had carried out hundreds of
card guessing experiments involving tens of thousands of calls
[15].
Many of these experiments were
carried out over ex-
tended
distances.
One of the most notable experiments was
conducted
with
Mrs.
Gloria
Stewart between London and
Antwerp.
This experiment gave results whose probability of
occurring by chance were less than 10
-8
.
With' the publication
of Modern Experiments
in
Telepathy by Soal and Bateman
(both of whom were statisticians), it appeared that card guess-
ing experiments produced significant results, on the average. 3
The most severe
criticism of all this work, a criticism diffi-
cult to defend against in principle,
is that leveled by the well-
known
British parapsychological
critic C. E. M. Hansel [17],
who began
his examination of the ESP hypothesis with the
stated assumption, “In view of the a priori arguments against
it we know
in advance that telepathy,
etc., cannot occur.”
Therefore,
based
on
the
“a
priori
unlikelihood”
of
ESP,
Hansel’s examination of the literature centered primarily on
the
possibility
of
fraud,
by
subjects
or
investigators.
He
reviewed
in
depth
four
experiments which he
regarded
as
providing the best evidence of ESP: the Pearce-Pratt distance
series
[18]; the Pratt-Woodruff [19]
series, both conducted
at Duke; and Soal’s work with Mrs. Stewart and Basil Shackle-
ton [15], as well as a more recent series by Soal and Bowden
[20]
.
Hansel showed, in each case, how fraud could have been
committed (by the experimenters
in the Pratt-Woodruff and
Soal-Bateman
series,
or by
the
subjects in the Pearce-Pratt
and Soal-Bowden experiments).
He gave no direct evidence
that fraud was committed in these experiments, but said, “If
the result could have arisen through a trick, the experiment
must be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or
not it is finally decided that such a trick was in fact used” [17,
p.
1 8 ]
.
As
discussed by Honorton in
a review of the
field
[21]
, Hansel’s conclusion
after 241 pages of careful scrutiny
therefore was that these experiments were not “fraud-proof”
and therefore in principle could not serve as conclusive proof
of ESP.
Even among the supporters of ESP research and
its results,
there remained the consistent problem that many successful
subjects eventually lost their ability and their scores gradually
drifted toward chance
results.
This decline effect in no way
erased their previous astronomical success; but
it was a disap-
pointment since
if paranormal perception
is a natural ability,
one would like to see subjects improving with practice rather
than getting worse.
One of the first successful attempts to overcome the decline
effect was in Czechoslovakia in the work of Dr. Milan Ryzl, a
chemist with the Institute of Biology of the Czechoslovakian
Academy
of
Science and
also
an amateur hypnotist
[22],
Through
the
use
of hypnosis, together with feedback and
’Recently, some of the early Soal experiments have been criticized
[16].
However,
his long-distance experiments cited here were judged
in a double-blind fashion of the type that escaped the criticism of the
early experiments.
reinforcement, he developed several outstanding subjects, one
of whom,
Pavel
Stepanek,
has worked with experimenters
around the world for more than 10 years.
Ryzl’s pioneering work came as an answer to the questions
raised by
the
1956 CIBA
Foundation conference on extra-
sensory perception.
The CIBA Chemical Company has annual
meetings on
topics
of
biological and chemical
interest, and
that
same
year
they assembled
several prominent
parapsy-
chologists to have
a state-of-the-art conference on ESP [23],
The conference concluded that
little progress would be made
in
parapsychology
research
until
a
repeatable
experiment
could be found; namely, an experiment that different experi-
menters could repeat
at
will and that would
reliably yield a
statistically significant result.
Ryzl had by 1962 accomplished that goal.
His primary con-
tribution was a decision to interact with the subject as a per-
son, to try to build up his confidence and ability.
His protocol
depended on “working with” rather than “running” his sub-
jects.
Ryzl’s star subject, Pavel Stepanek, has produced highly
significant results with many contemporary researchers [24]-
[29],
In these experiments, he was able to tell with 60-percent
reliability
whether
a
hidden
card
was
green
side
or
white
side
up,
yielding
statistics
of
a
million
to one with only a
thousand trials.
As significant as such results are statistically, the information
channel
is imperfect, containing noise along with the
signal.
When considering how best to use such a channel, one
is led
to the communication theory concept of the introduction of
redundancy
as
a means of coding
a message to combat the
effects of a noisy channel [30], A prototype experiment by
Ryzl using such techniques has proved to be successful. Ryzl
had
an
assistant
select randomly
five groups of three
digits
each.
These
1 5 digits were then encoded into binary form and
translated into a sequence of green and white cards in sealed
envelopes.
By means
of repeated
calling and
an elaborate
majority vote protocol, Ryzl was able
after 19 350
calls by
Stepanek (averaging 9 s per
call) to correctly identify
all
numbers,
a
result
significant
at p = 10 -15
The
hit rate for
individual calls was 61.9 percent,
1 1 978 hits, and 7372 misses
[31],
Note Added in Proof:
It has been brought to our attention
that a similar procedure was recently used to transmit without
error
the word
“peace”
in
International Morse Code
(J.
C.
Carpenter,
“Toward
the
effective
utilization
of
enhanced
weak-signal ESP effects,” presented at the Annual Meeting of
the American
Association
for
the Advancement of Science,
New York, NY, Jan. 27, 1975).
The
characteristics
of such
a
channel
can be specified in
accordance with the precepts of communication theory.
The
bit rate associated with the information channel is calculated
from [30]
R = H{x) - Hy (x)
(1)
where H(x) is the uncertainty of the source message containing
symbols with a priori probability p,-
:
#(*)"- X
Pi log2 Pi
(2)
1*1
and Hy (x)
is the conditional entropy based on the a posteriori
probabilities that a received signal was actually transmitted:
Hy (x) = -
p(i,j) log2 Pi(j).
(3)
«',/=
i
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F AND TARG: perceptual channel for information transfer
333
For Stepanek’s run, with
p,- = j, Pj(j) = 0.619, and an average
time of 9 s per choice, we have a source uncertainty H(x ) =
bit and a calculated bit rate
R » 0.041 bit /symbol
or
R/T^ 0.0046 bit/s.
(Since the 15-digit number (49.8 bits) actually was transmitted
at the rate of 2.9 X
-4
bit/s, an increase
in
bit
rate by a
factor of about 20 could be expected on the basis of a coding
scheme more optimum than that used in the experiments.
See,
for example, Appendix A.)
Dr. Charles Tart
at the University of California has written
extensively on the so-called decline effect.
He considers that
having subjects attempt to guess cards, or perform any other
repetitious task
for which they receive no feedback, follows
the
classical technique for deconditioning any response.
He
thus
considers
card guessing
“a technique for extinguishing
psychic functioning in the laboratory” [32]
.
Tart’s injunctions
of the mid-sixties were being heeded
at
Maimonides Hospital, Brooklyn, NY, by a team of researchers
that
included
Dr.
Montague
Ullman, who was
director
of
research
for the
hospital;
Dr.
Stanley Krippner; and,
later,
Charles Honorton.
These three worked together for several
years on experiments on the occurrence of telepathy in dreams.
In the course of a half-dozen experimental series, they found
in
their week-long
sessions
a number of
subjects who had
dreams
that
consistently were highly descriptive of pictorial
material that a remote sender was looking at throughout the
night.
This work
is described in detail in the experimenters’
book Dream
Telepathy
[33].
Honorton
is continuing work
of this free-response type in which the subject has no precon-
ceived idea as to What the target may be.
In
his more recent work with subjects in the waking state,
Honorton
is providing homogeneous stimulation to the subject
who
is to describe color slides viewed by another person in a
remote room.
In
this new work, the subject listens to white
noise
via
earphones and
views an homogeneous visual
field
imposed through the use of Ping-Pong ball halves to cover the
subject’s
eyes
in
conjunction with diffuse ambient illumina-
tion.
In this so-called Ganzfeld setting, subjects are again able,
now
in the waking
state, to
give
correct and
often
highly
accurate
descriptions
of
the
material being viewed by
the
sender [34],
In Honorton’s work and elsewhere,
it apparently has been
the
step away from the repetitive forced-choice experiment
that has opened the way for a wide variety of ordinary people
to demonstrate significant functioning in the laboratory, with-
out being bored into a decline effect.
This
survey would
be incomplete
if we
did
not
indicate
certain aspects of the current
state of research in the USSR.
It
is
clear from translated documents and other sources
[35]
that many laboratories in the USSR are engaged in paranormal
research.
Since the
1930’s, in the laboratory of L. Vasiliev (Leningrad
Institute for Brain Research), there has been an interest in the
use of telepathy as a method of influencing the behavior of a
person at a distance.
In Vasiliev’s book Experiments in Mental
Suggestion, he makes
it very clear that the bulk of his labora-
tory’s experiments were aimed
at long-distance communica-
tion
combined
with
a
form
of
behavior
modification;
for
example, putting people
at
a distance to sleep through hyp-
nosis [36]
.
Similar behavior modification types of experiments have been
carried out
in recent times by
I. M. Kogan, Chairman of the
Bioinformation
Section
of the Moscow Board of the Popov
Society.
He
is a
Soviet engineer who, until 1969, published
extensively on the theory of telepathic communication [37]-
[40]
.
He was concerned with three principal kinds of experi-
ments:
mental
suggestion without
hypnosis over
short
dis-
tances, in which the percipient attempts to identify an object;
mental awakening over short distances,
in which a subject
is
awakened from a hypnotic sleep at the “beamed” suggestion
from the hypnotist; and long-range (intercity) telepathic com-
munication.
Kogan’s main
interest has been to quantify the
channel capacity of the paranormal channel. He finds that the
bit
rate decreases from 0.1
bit/s
for laboratory experiments
to 0.005 bit/s for his 1000-km intercity experiments.
In the USSR, serious consideration is given to the hypothesis
that telepathy
is mediated by extremely low-frequency (ELF)
electromagnetic
propagation.
(The
pros
and
cons of
this
hypothesis
are
discussed
in
Section V of
this
paper.)
In
general, the
entire
field of paranormal research in the USSR
is part of a larger one concerned with the interaction between
electromagnetic
fields and
living organisms [41],
[42].
At
the
First
International
Congress
on
Parapsychology
and
Psychotronics in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1973, for example,
Kholodov spoke
at
length about the
susceptibility of living
systems to extremely low-level ac and dc fields. He described
conditioning effects on the behavior of fish resulting from the
application of
10 to 100 juW of RF to their tank [43],
The
USSR take these data seriously
in that the Soviet safety re-
quirements
for
steady-state
microwave
exposure
set
limits
at 10 /uW/cm
, whereas the United States has set a steady-state
limit of 10 mW/cm2
[44],
Kholodov spoke
also about the
nonthermal effects of microwaves on animals’ central nervous
systems.
His experiments were very carefully carried out and
are characteristic of a new dimension in paranormal research.
The increasing importance of this area in Soviet research was
indicated recently when the Soviet Psychological Association
issued an unprecedented position paper calling on the Soviet
Academy of
Sciences to
step up
efforts
in
this area
[45].
They
recommended
that
the
newly
formed
Psychological
Institute
within
the
Soviet Academy
of
Sciences
and
the
Psychological Institute of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences
review the area and consider the creation of a new laboratory
within one
of the
institutes
to
study persons with unusual
abilities. They also recommended a comprehensive evaluation
of experiments and theory by the Academy of Sciences’ Insti-
tute of Biophysics and Institute for the Problems of Informa-
tion Transmission.
The
Soviet
research,
along
with
other
behavioristically
oriented work,
suggests
that
in
addition
to obtaining overt
responses such as verbalizations or key presses from a subject,
it should be possible to obtain objective evidence of informa-
tion
transfer by direct measurement of physiological parame-
ters
of
a
subject.
Kamiya,
Lindsley,
Pribram,
Silverman,
Walter, and others brought together to discuss physiological
methods
to
detect ESP
functioning, have
suggested
that
a
whole range of electroencephalogram (EEG) responses such as
evoked potentials (EP’s), spontaneous EEG, and the contingent
negative variation (CNV) might be sensitive indicators of the
detection
of remote
stimuli not mediated by usual sensory
processes [46].
Early
experimentation
of
this
type
was
carried
out
by
Douglas Dean
at the Newark College of Engineering.
In his
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search for physiological correlates of information transfer, he
used
the plethysmograph
to measure changes
in
the blood
volume in a finger, a sensitive indicator of autonomic nervous
system functioning
[47].
A plethysmographic measurement
was made on the
finger of a subject during telepathy experi-
ments.
A sender looked
at randomly selected target cards
consisting of names known to the subject, together with names
unknown to him (selected at random from a telephone book).
The names of the known people were contributed by the sub-
ject and were to be of emotional significance to him.
Dean
found
significant
changes
in
the
chart
recording
of
finger
blood volume when the remote sender was looking
at those
names known to the subject
as compared with those names
randomly chosen.
Three
other experiments
using the physiological approach
have now been published. The first work by Tart [48]
, a later
work by
Lloyd
[49], and most
recently
the work by
the
authors [4]
all follow a similar procedure.
Basically, a subject
is closeted
in an
electrically shielded room while
his EEG
is
recorded.
Meanwhile, in another laboratory, a second person
is stimulated from time to time, and the time of that stimulus
is marked on the magnetic-tape recording of the subject’s EEG.
The subject does not know when the remote stimulus periods
are as compared with the nonstimulus periods.
With regard to choice of stimulus for our own experimenta-
tion, we noted that in previous work others had attempted,
without
success, to detect evoked potential changes in a sub-
ject’s EEG in response to a single stroboscopic flash stimulus
observed by
another
subject
[50]
.
In a discussion of that
experiment, Kamiya suggested that because of the unknown
temporal characteristics of the information channel,
it might
be more appropriate to use repetitive bursts of light to increase
the probability of detecting information transfer [51].
There-
fore, in our study we chose to use a stroboscopic flash train of
10-s duration as the remote stimulus.
In the design of the study, we assumed that the application
of the remote
stimulus would
result
in responses similar to
those
obtained under conditions of direct stimulation.
For
example,
when
an
individual
is
stimulated
with
a
low-
frequency (< 30 Hz)
flashing
light, the EEG typically shows
a
decrease
in
the
amplitude
of
the
resting rhythm and
a
driving of the brain waves at the frequency of the flashes [52]
.
We
hypothesized
that
if we
stimulated
one
subject
in
this
manner (a putative sender), the EEG of another subject in a
remote room
with no
flash present
(a receiver) might show
changes
in
alpha
(9-1 1 Hz)
activity
and
possibly an EEG
driving similar to that of the sender, or other coupling to the
sender’s EEG
[53].
The
receiver was
seated
in
a
visually
opaque,
acoustically and
electrically shielded, double-walled
steel room about
7 m from the sender.
The
details of the
experiment,
consisting
of seven runs of thirty-six
10-s
trials
each (twelve periods each for 0-Hz, 6-Hz, and 16-Hz stimuli,
randomly intermixed), are presented in
[4],
This experiment
proved to be successful. The receiver’s alpha activity (9-1 1 Hz)
showed a significant reduction in average power (-24 percent,
p < 0.04) and peak power (-28
percent, p < 0.03)
during
16-Hz
flash
stimuli
as
compared
with
periods
of
no-flash
stimulus.
[A similar response was observed
for 6-Hz stimuli
(-12 percent in average power, -21
percent in peak power),
but
the
latter
result
did
not
reach
statistical
significance.]
Fig. 2 shows an overlay of three averaged EEG spectra from
one
of the
subject’s 36
trial
runs, displaying differences in
alpha activity during the three stimulus conditions.
Extensive
control
procedures
were
undertaken
to determine
if
these
Fig. 2.
Occipital EEG frequency spectra, 0-20 Hz, of one subject (H.H.)
acting as receiver showing amplitude changes in the 9-1 1-Hz band as a
function of strobe frequency.
Three cases:
0-,
6-, and 16-Hz flashes
(twelve trial averages).
results
were
produced
by system
artifacts, electromagnetic
pickup (EMI), or subtle cueing; the results were negative [4]
.
As part of the experimental protocol, the subject was asked
to indicate a conscious assessment for each trial (via telegraph
key)
as to the nature of the stimulus; analysis showed these
guesses to be at chance.
Thus arousal as evidenced by signifi-
cant alpha blocking occurred only at the noncognitive level of
physiological response.
Hence the experiment provided direct
physiological (EEG) evidence of perception of remote stimuli
even in the absence of overt cognitive response.
Whereas in our experiments we used a remote light flash as a
stimulus,
Tart
[48]
in
his work used an electrical shock to
himself as sender, and Lloyd
[49]
simply told the sender to
think
of
a
red
triangle each time
a
red warning
light was
illuminated
within
his
view.
Lloyd
observed
a
consistent
evoked potential
in
his subjects; whereas in our experiments
and
in Tart’s, a reduction in amplitude and a desynchroniza-
tion of alpha was observed—an arousal response.
(If a subject
is
resting
in
an
alpha-dominant
condition
and
he
is then
stimulated, for example in any direct manner, one will observe
a desynchronization and decrease in alpha power.)
We con-
sider that these combined results are evidence for the existence
of noncognitive awareness of remote happenings and that they
have a profound implication for paranormal research.
III. SRI Investigations of Remote Viewing
Experimentation
in
remote
viewing
began
during
studies
carried out to investigate the
abilities of a New York artist,
Ingo Swann, when he expressed the opinion that the insights
gained during experiments at SRI had strengthened his ability
(verified in other research before he joined the SRI program)
to view remote
locations
[54].
To
test Mr. Swann’s
asser-
tion, a pilot study was set up in which a series of targets from
around the globe were supplied by SRI personnel to the ex-
perimenters on
a
double-blind
basis.
Mr. Swann’s apparent
ability
to
describe
correctly
details
of
buildings,
roads,
bridges, and
the
like
indicated
that
it may
be possible
for
a subject by means of mental imagery to access and describe
randomly
chosen
geographical
sites
located
several
miles
from
the subject’s position and demarcated by some appro-
priate
means.
Therefore, we
set up
a research program
to
test
the remote-viewing hypothesis under
rigidly
controlled
scientific conditions.
In carrying out
this program, we concentrated on what we
considered to be our principal responsibility—to resolve under
unambiguous conditions the basic issue of whether or not this
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335
class of paranormal perception phenomenon
exists.
At
all
times, we and others responsible for the overall program took
measures to prevent sensory leakage and subliminal cueing and
to
prevent deception, whether
intentional or unintentional.
To ensure
evaluations independent of belief structures of both
experimenters and judges,
all experiments were
carried out
under a protocol, described below, in which target selection at
the beginning of experiments and blind judging of results at
the end
of experiments were handled independently of the
researchers engaged in carrying out the experiments.
Six subjects, designated SI through S6, were chosen for the
study.
Three were considered as gifted or experienced subjects
(SI
through S3), and three were considered
as learners (S4
through
S6).
The a
priori dichotomy between
gifted and
learners
was
based
on
the
experienced group having been
successful
in
other
studies
conducted
before
this program
and
the
learners group
being inexperienced
with
regard
to
paranormal experimentation.
The
study
consisted of a
series of double-blind
tests with
local targets in the San Francisco Bay Area so that several in-
dependent judges could visit the sites to establish documenta-
tion.
The protocol was to closet the subject with an experi-
menter
at SRI and
at an agreed-on time to obtain from the
subject
a
description
of
an
undisclosed
remote
site
being
visited by a target team.
In each of the experiments, one of
the
six
program
subjects
served
as remote-viewing
subject,
and SRI experimenters served as a target demarcation team at
the
remote
location
chosen
in
a
double-blind
protocol
as
follows.
In
each
experiment,
SRI management randomly
chose
a
target location from a
list of targets within a 30-min driving
time from SRI; the target location selected was kept blind to
subject and experimenters.
The target pool consisted of more
than 100
target locations chosen from
a target-rich environ-
ment.
(Before the experimental series began, the Director of
the Information Science and Engineering Division, not other-
wise associated with the experiment, established the set of lo-
cations as the target pool which remained known only to him.
The target locations were printed on cards sealed in envelopes
and kept in the SRI Division office safe.
They were available
only with the personal assistance of the Division Director who
issued
a
single random-number selected
target card that con-
stituted the traveling orders for that experiment.)
In detail: To begin the experiment, the subject was closeted
with an experimenter at SRI to wait 30 min before beginning
a narrative description of the remote location. A second ex-
perimenter then obtained from the Division Director a target
location from a set of traveling orders previously prepared and
randomized by the Director and kept under his control.
The
target demarcation team, consisting of two to four SRI experi-
menters, then proceeded by automobile directly to the target
without any communication with the subject or experimenter
remaining behind.
The experimenter remaining with the sub-
ject at SRI was kept ignorant of both the particular target and
the
target pool
so
as
to
eliminate the possibility of cueing
(overt or subliminal) and to allow him freedom in questioning
the subject to clarify his descriptions.
The demarcation team
remained
at
the
target
site
for an agreed-on 15-min period
following the 30 min allotted for travel.4
During the observa-
4 The
first subject (SI) was allowed 30 min for his descriptions, but
it was found that he fatigued and had
little comment after the first
S
min.
The viewing time was therefore reduced to
1 S min for subjects
S2 through S6.
tion period, the remote-viewing subject was asked to describe
his impressions of the target
site into a tape recorder and to
make any drawings he thought appropriate. An informal com-
parison was then made when the demarcation team returned,
and the subject was taken to the site to provide feedback.
A.
Subject SI : Experienced
To begin the series, Pat Price, a former California police com-
missioner and
city
councilman,
participated
as
a subject
in
nine
experiments.
In
general,
Price’s
ability
to
describe
correctly buildings, docks, roads, gardens, and the like, includ-
ing
structural materials,
color, ambience, and activity— often
in
great
detail—indicated
the
functioning
of
a remqte
per-
ceptual
ability.
A Hoover Tower
target,
for example, was
recognized and named by name.
Nonetheless, in general, the
descriptions contained
inaccuracies
as
well
as
correct
state-
ments. A typical example is indicated by the subject’s drawing
shown
in
Fig.
in which he correctly described
a park-like
area
containing two pools of water: one rectangular, 60 by
ft
(actual dimensions 75 by 100
ft); the other circular,
diameter 120
ft (actual diameter 110 ft). He incorrectly indi-
cated
the
function, however,
as water filtration rather than
recreational swimming.
(We often observe essentially correct
descriptions of basic elements and patterns coupled with in-
complete or erroneous analysis of function.)
As can be seen
from
his
drawing, he
also included some elements, such as
the tanks shown in the upper right, that are not present at the
target site. We also note an apparent left-right reversal, often
observed in paranormal perception experiments.
To
obtain
a numerical evaluation
of the
accuracy of the
remote-viewing
experiment,
the
experimental
results
were
subjected to independent judging on a blind basis by an SRI
research
analyst not
otherwise
associated with the research.
The
subject’s
response
packets,
which
contained
the
nine
typed
unedited
transcripts
of
the
tape-recorded
narratives
along with any associated drawings, were unlabeled and pre-
sented in random order.
While standing
at each target loca-
tion, visited in turn, the judge was required to blind rank order
the nine packets on a scale
1 to 9 (best to worst match). The
statistic of interest is the sum of ranks assigned to the target-
associated
transcripts, lower values indicating better matches.
For nine
targets, the sum of ranks could range from nine to
eighty-one.
The probability
that
a given sum of ranks s or
less will occur by chance is given by [55]
where
s
is obtained sum of ranks, N is number of assignable
ranks, n
is number of occasions on which rankings were made,
and
l takes on values from zero to the least positive integer k
in
(i - n)/n.
(Table
I
is a table to enable easy application of
the above formula to those cases in whichN = n.) The sum in
this case, which included seven direct hits out of the nine, was
(see Table
II),
a
result
significant
at p = 2.9 X 1CT
by
exact calculation.
In Experiments 3, 4, and 6 through
9, the subject was se-
cured
in
a double-walled
copper-screen Faraday
cage.
The
Faraday
cage
provides
120-dB
attenuation
for
plane-wave
radio-frequency radiation over a range of 15 kHz to
1 GHz.
For magnetic
fields, the attenuation
is 68 dB at 15 kHz and
decreases to 3 dB at 60 Hz.
The results of rank order judging
(Table
II)
indicate
that
the use of Faraday
cage
electrical
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Fig. 3. Swimming pool complex as remote-viewing target,
(a) City map of target location,
(b) Drawing by Price (Si).
TABLE
I
Critical Values of Sums of Ranks for Preferential Matching
Number of
Assignable
Ranks
(N)
Probability
(one-tailed)
that
the
Indicated Sum of Ranks or Less Woulc
Occur by Chance
0.20
0.10
0.05
0.04
0.025
0.01
0.005
0.002
0,001
0.0005
io- 4
10~E
10- B
10'7
*47
Note: This table applies only to those special cases in which the number of occasions on which objects
are being ranked
(n )
is equal to the number of assignable ranks (TV).
Each entry represents the largest
number that is significant at the indicated p-level.
Source: R. L. Morris [55]
.
shielding does not prevent high-quality descriptions from being
obtained.
As
a backup judging procedure, a panel of five additional
SRI scientists not otherwise associated with the research were
asked simply
to blind match the unedited typed
transcripts
(with
associated
drawings) generated by
the remote viewer
against
the
nine
target locations which they independently
visited in turn.
The transcripts were unlabeled and presented
in random order.
A
correct match consisted of a transcript
of a given date being matched to the target of that date.
In-
stead of the expected number of
1 match each per judge, the
number of correct matches obtained by the five judges was 7,
6,
5,
3, and
3, respectively.
Thus, rather than the expected
total number of 5 correct matches from the judges, 24 such
matches were obtained.
B.
Subject S4: Learner
This experiment was designed to be a replication of our pre-
vious experiment with Price, the
first replication attempted.
The
subject
for
this experiment was Mrs. Hella Hammid, a
gifted
professional photographer.
She was
selected
for this
series on
the
basis of her
successful performance
as a per-
cipient in the EEG experiment described earlier.
Outside of
that interaction, she had no previous experience with apparent
paranormal functioning.
At
the' time we began working with Mrs. Hammid, she had
no, strong feelings about the likelihood of her ability to suc-
ceed
in
this
task.
This was in contrast to both Ingo Swann
who had come
to our laboratory fresh from a lengthy and
apparently successful series of experiments with Dr. Gertrude
Schmeidler at City College of New York [56] and Pat Price
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