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2.
Viewers
Viewers were recruited by advertising a seminar on remote viewing and the promise of
audience participation in four RV trials.
Screening was conducted with two government groups,
two separate groups at SRI International, and a group from the Society for Scientific Exploration
(SSE).
One government group of volunteers was small and we therefore had the ability to use
independent trials in this setting.
However, the other settings involved larger groups, typically 25
to over 100, with
all members participating in the same trial simultaneously.
3.
Session Protocol
Viewers and experimenters were kept blind to both target category and the specific
target used for each trial. To do this, several hundred target packets were assembled prior to the
first screening.
Each contained four target names and was locked in a department safe.
To
prepare a single packet, a research assistant randomly chose one target from each of the four
categories and randomly permuted the order of the choices. A slip of paper printed with a target
name was placed
into
a
sealed, opaque envelope and numbered
to
indicate
the
order of
presentation. A packet was formed by sealing the four smaller envelopes into a larger unmarked
envelope. The packets were shuffled and, just prior to a screening session, an assistant selected
one of the packets for use during that session.
A mass screening session began with an introduction to RV presented by the project
director.
In addition to a historical review of RV research at SRI International, the presentation
included examples of good and not so good RV attempts.
Instructions on how to proceed with
an RV trial were then given. One RV trial consisted of a period of several minutes for viewers to
record their impressions of target material and a minute or so for the presentation of the target
film as feedback.
Four trials were conducted during each mass screening session.
Prior to each trial, the participants were asked to relax, take a few deep breaths, and
try to focus on the task at hand.
While the viewers were relaxing, an assistant, stationed in
another room some distance from the screening auditorium, opened the packet envelope and
selected the small envelope labeled No.
1.
The assistant had video copies of the sixteen targets
and video equipment with which to view the targets.
The
assistant’s task was to attempt to
“send” the target material (mentally) to the viewers. The first trial began when the experimenter
sent a signal to the sender (via one telephone ring or similar means) indicating that the audience
was ready to begin. The assistant then opened the small envelope selected for that session, found
the
first target, and began to view
it on a television monitor.
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As the sender continually and repeatedly viewed the target, the screening participants
wrote and/or drew their perceptions on specially prepared forms that provided an original and a
carbon copy.
At the end of several minutes, the original responses were collected and sealed m
an envelope while the viewers retained the copies for comparison with the feedback.
After all
responses were sealed for safekeeping, a phone call to the sender revealed the target and, with a
second copy of the target pool on video disks, the audience was allowed to view the target film
clip as feedback.
Trials 2,
3, and 4 proceeded in the same manner.
4.
Analysis
Quantitative
scoring
presents
several
problems when
testing
groups
of
viewers.
Because
all
viewers
have
seen
the same
four
targets,
a
single
judge
cannot produce
an
independent rank ordering for each viewer.
Therefore, since the goal was to find natural talent
for additional testing, a more qualitative assessment was done by the analysis
staff to find any
viewers who had produced striking matches to discrete target elements.
Another difficulty with having multiple viewers for the same target material
is what is
called stacking in the parapsychological literature.
This refers to the
fact that human viewers
have common response biases, and if the targets selected happen to correspond to these biases,
then the perceived strength of the match can be inflated.
For example,
if
it happens that most
people have a tendency to mention water in their
first remote viewing trial, and the
first target
happens to contain a
significant amount of water while the remaining targets do not, then a
fortuitous match can occur just because of this response bias.
If a different set of targets
is
selected
for each viewer,
this problem does not occur.
Since there was no way address this
problem and
still screen large groups of people together,
a qualitative assessment for the
first
stage of screening was necessary.
Two independent analysts made the qualitative assessments of the responses from the first
level of screening.
These assessments formed the basis for deciding which persons to invite for
the second-stage screening.
The qualitative judging was based on a seven-point rating scale
shown in Table 2.
Analysts were instructed to start at the top of the scale and find the largest
rating that describes the match between a response and
its intended target.
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Table 2
QUALITATIVE RATING SCALE.
7 = Excellent correspondence, including good analytical detail
(e.g., naming
the site), and with essentially no incorrect information.
6 = Good correspondence with good analytical information
(e.g., naming
the function), and relatively
little incorrect information.
5 = Good correspondence with unambiguous unique matchable elements
but with some incorrect information.
4 = Good correspondence with several matchable elements intermixed with
incorrect information.
3 = Mixture of correct and incorrect elements, but enough of the former
to indicate viewer has made contact with the
site.
2 = Some correct elements, but not sufficient to suggest results beyond
chance expectation.
1 = Little correspondence.
0 = No correspondence.
C.
Second-Stage Screening Protocol
1.
Viewers
The goal of second-stage screening was to select exceptional individuals who could
eventually participate
in applications-oriented
research.
Individuals who showed
qualitative
evidence of RV ability in the mass screening described above, either by producing an average
qualitative rating above three or producing a qualitative rating of six or seven on one trial were
invited to participate in the second round of screening in an RV laboratory.
2.
Targets
Targets for second-stage screening were the same as for first-stage screening.
3.
Session Protocol
Since
most
applications
do
not
provide
a
sending
individual,
the
sender
was
eliminated in the second-stage screening.
As before,
targets were randomly preselected and
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their associated target numbers were sealed in opaque envelopes and stored in the department
safe.
Before each trial, the RV monitor for that trial selected an envelope. A laboratory RV
session began with the monitor and viewer seated at opposite ends of a table in an RV laboratory.
When the viewer indicated
a readiness to begin, the monitor gave a previously agreed-upon
stimulus word
(i.e., “target”), and the viewer put down target impressions in the form of pictures
and/or written words.
The
session ended when a viewer had exhausted his/her impressions.
After copying the response, the monitor and viewer moved to the locked feedback room where
target material was
stored,
The monitor then opened the envelope
to
ascertain the
target
number, activated a TV screen and displayed the target filmclip as feedback for the RV session
(the viewer, of course, was not allowed to add anything to the response).
4.
Analysis
Quantitative analysis presents no problem
if each viewer
is tested individually as was the
case
in
the
second-stage
of
screening.
Each RV
response was
ranked
using
the
visual
correspondence method by an independent
analyst who was
otherwise uninvolved
with the
experiment.
In this procedure the target and
its three companions from the designated category
were presented in random order. The analyst rank-ordered the targets in order of decreasing
similarity to the response
(i.e., a rank of
1 means that the target best matches the response, and
a rank of 4 means the worst match)
. The output from each trial was the rank number the judge
assigned to the
correct target.
The sum of ranks over the total number of trials was used to
calculate p-values and effect sizes
(r)
for each of the second-stage participants.
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