Remote viewing

Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using subjective means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind".
Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.Search for the Soul by Milbourne Christopher, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979 The term was coined in the 1970s by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute, to distinguish it from clairvoyance.
Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the US government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995 after it failed to produce any useful intelligence information.
==History==
===Early background===
The study of psychic phenomena by major scientists started in the mid-nineteenth century. Early researchers included Michael Faraday, Alfred Russel Wallace, Rufus Mason, and William Crookes. Their work predominantly involved carrying out focused experimental tests on specific individuals who were thought to be psychically gifted. Reports of apparently successful tests were met with much skepticism from the scientific community.
In the 1930s J. B. Rhine expanded the study of paranormal performance into larger populations, by using standard experimental protocols with unselected human subjects. But, as with the earlier studies, Rhine was reluctant to publicize this work too early because of the fear of criticism from mainstream scientists.Hyman R, "Parapsychological Research: A Tutorial Review and Critical Appraisal", Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol 74 No 6, pp 823–849, June 1986.
This continuing skepticism, with its consequences for peer review and research funding, ensured that paranormal studies remained a fringe area of scientific exploration. However, by the 1960s, the prevailing counterculture attitudes muted some of the prior hostility. The emergence of New Age thinking and the popularity of the Human Potential Movement provoked a mini-renaissance that renewed public interest in consciousness studies and psychic phenomena and helped to make financial support more available for research into such topics.Wade N, "Psychical Research: the Incredible in Search of Credibility", Science, 181, July 13, 1973, pp 138–143.
In the early 1970s Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ joined the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).SRI International is now an independent research institute, unconnected with Stanford University. In addition to their mainstream scientific research work on quantum mechanics and laser physics, they initiated several studies of the paranormal. These were initially supported with funding from the Parapsychology Foundation, and the newly-formed Institute of Noetic Sciences.
One of the early experiments, lauded by proponents as having improved the methodology of remote viewing testing and as raising future experimental standards, was criticized as leaking information to the participants by inadvertently leaving clues.* Obtained from listing of research papers on Wiseman's website Some later experiments had negative results when these clues were eliminated.Randi & Clarke, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural "Remote viewing" definition "The data of Puthoff and Targ were reexamined by the other researchers, and it was found that their students were able to solve the locations without use of any psychic powers, using only the clues that had inadvertently been included in the Puthoff and Targ transcripts."
===US government-funded research===
From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research. When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research, it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997)
In 1972 Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann at SRI, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project. (Schnabel 1997, Puthoff 1996,Puthoff, 1996. Journal of Scientijc Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 63-76 Kress 1977/1999, Smith 2005) As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature,Nature 251, 602-607 (18 October 1974) in Proceedings of the IEEE (Puthoff & Targ, 1976),Puthoff & Targ, 1976. A perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent research, Proceedings of the IEEE, March 1976, Volume: 64 Issue:3, page(s): 329 - 354 and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Puthoff, et al., 1981).
The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials, including John N. McMahon (then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director) became strong supporters of the program.
In the mid 1970s sponsorship by the CIA was terminated and picked up by the Air Force. In 1979 the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer General Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Atwater 2001)
In 1984 remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle was awarded a legion of merit for determining "150 essential elements of information...producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source".Edwin C. May, "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program", Journal of Parapsychology. 60. 3-23. March 1996. Also in published as Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 89-107, 1996
Unfortunately, the viewers' advice in the "Stargate project" was always so unclear and non-detailed that it has never been used in any intelligence operation. Despite this, SRI scientists and remote viewers have claimed that a number of "natural" psychics were crucial in a number of intelligence operations. The most famous claimed results from these years were the description of "a big crane" at a Soviet nuclear research facility by Pat Price (Kress 1977/1999, Targ 1996) and Joseph McMoneagle, a description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine by a team of three viewers which included McMoneagle,(Smith 2005, McMoneagle 2002) and Rosemary Smith's location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa.Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate, America's Psychic Espionage Program by Paul H. Smith, Tom Doherty, 2005, p.100 By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics, (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005) but the collaboration never resulted in useful intelligence information.
===Decline and termination===
In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster appointed Army Colonel William Johnson to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. Funding dissipated in late 1994 and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995.
In 1995 the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the Stargate Project. Reviewers included Ray Hyman and Jessica Utts. Utts maintained that there had been a statistically significant positive effect,An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning Julia Utts with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance. Hyman argued that Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, "is premature, to say the least." Hyman said the findings had yet to be replicated independently, and that more investigation would be necessary to "legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning." Based upon both of their studies, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project in 1995.Time magazine, 11 December 1995, p.45, The Vision Thing by Douglas Waller, Washington Time magazine stated in 1995 that three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon be shut down.
The AIR report concluded that no usable intelligence data was produced in the program. David Goslin, of the American Institute for Research said, "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community."
===UK government research===
In 2001–2002 the UK Government performed a study on 18 untrained subjects. The experimenters recorded the E field and H field around each viewer to see if the cerebral activity of successful viewings caused higher-than-usual fields to be emitted from the brain. However, the experimenters did not find any evidence that the viewers had accessed the targets in the data collection phase, the project was abandoned, and the data was never analyzed since no RV activity had happened. Some "narrow-band" E-fields were detected during the viewings, but they were attributed to external causes. The experiment was disclosed in 2007 after a UK Freedom of Information request.
===PEAR's Remote Perception program===
Following Utts' emphasis on replication and Hyman's challenge on interlaboratory consistency in the AIR report, the Princeton E.A.R. Lab conducted several hundred trials to see if they could replicate the SAIC and SRI experiments. They created an analytical judgment methodology to replace the human judging process that was criticized in past experiments, and they released a report in 1996. They felt the results of the experiments were consistent with the SRI experiments.
In 2007 the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab laboratory was closed, in part due to lack of funding.
==Scientific studies and claims==
Scientific studies have been conducted; some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results but they had invalidating flaws, and none of the newer experiments had positive results when under properly controlled conditions. The scientific community rejects remote viewing due to the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain remote viewing, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results.* Obtained from listing of research papers on Wiseman's website It is also considered a pseudoscience.
According to psychologist David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.Marks, D.F. & Kammann, R. (1978). "Information transmission in remote viewing experiments", Nature, 274:680–81."A comprehensive review of major empirical studies in parapsychology involving random event generators or remote viewing" by Alcock, J.
Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly.Marks, D.F. (2000). The Psychology of the Psychic. Amherst, New York:Prometheus Books.
Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable."The Psychology of the Psychic" by David Marks and Richard Kamman, Prometheus Books. Amherst, New York, 2000, 2nd edition. * note: 1st edition, 1980, does not contain all of this information* Book review of 2nd edition: Flim Flam by James Randi, Prometheus books, New York, 1987, 9th printing
The information from the Stargate Project remote viewing sessions was vague and included a lot of irrelevant and erroneous data, it was never useful in any intelligence operation, and project managers changed the reports so they would fit background cues."An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications" by Mumford, Rose and Goslin "remote viewings have never provided an adequate basis for ‘actionable’ intelligence operations-that is, information sufficiently valuable or compelling so that action was taken as a result (...) a large amount of irrelevant, erroneous information is provided and little agreement is observed among viewers' reports. (...) remote viewers and project managers reported that remote viewing reports were changed to make them consistent with know background cues (...) Also, it raises some doubts about some well-publicized cases of dramatic hits, which, if taken at face value, could not easily be attributed to background cues. In at least some of these cases, there is reason to suspect, based on both subsequent investigations and the viewers' statement that reports had been "changed" by previous program managers, that substantially more background information was available than one might at first assume."
According to James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.Remote viewing at the Randi Educational Foundation
Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for outlandish claims that will revolutionize the world, and thus he remains unconvinced:
Wiseman also pointed at several problems with one of the early experiments at SAIC, like information leakage. However, he indicated the importance of its process-oriented approach and of its refining of remote viewing methodology, which meant that researchers replicating their work could avoid these problems. Wiseman later insisted there were multiple opportunities for participants on that experiment to be influenced by inadvertent cues and that these cues can influence the results when they appear.
Psychologist Ray Hyman says that, even if the results were reproduced under specified conditions, they would still not be a conclusive demonstration of the existence of psychic functioning. He blames this on the reliance on a negative outcome—the claims on ESP are based on the results of experiments not being explained by normal means. He says that the experiments lack a positive theory that guides as to what to control on them and what to ignore, and that "Parapsychologists have not come close to (having a positive theory) as yet"."Because even if Utts and her colleagues are correct and we were to find that we could reproduce the findings under specified conditions, this would still be a far cry from concluding that psychic functioning has been demonstrated. This is because the current claim is based entirely upon a negative outcome – the sole basis for arguing for ESP is that extra-chance results can be obtained that apparently cannot be explained by normal means. But an infinite variety of normal possibilities exist and it is not clear than one can control for all of them in a single experiment. You need a positive theory to guide you as to what needs to be controlled, and what can be ignored. Parapsychologists have not come close to this as yet." – Ray Hyman, The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1996 Ray Hyman also says that the amount and quality of the experiments on RV are way too low to convince the scientific community to "abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles", due to its findings still not having been replicated successfully under careful scrutiny."What seems clear is that the scientific community is not going to abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles on the basis of a handful of experiments whose findings have yet to be shown to be replicable and lawful." – Ray Hyman, The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1996
Science writer Martin Gardner and others describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience. Gardner says that founding researcher Harold Puthoff was an active Scientologist prior to his work at Stanford University, and that this influenced his research at SRI. In 1970, the Church of Scientology published a notarized letter that had been written by Puthoff while he was conducting research on remote viewing at Stanford. The letter read, in part: "Although critics viewing the system Scientology from the outside may form the impression that Scientology is just another of many quasi-educational quasi-religious 'schemes,' it is in fact a highly sophistical and highly technological system more characteristic of modern corporate planning and applied technology." Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim in the book Occult Chemistry that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.
Various skeptic organizations have conducted experiments for remote viewing and other alleged paranormal abilities, with no positive results under properly controlled conditions.
==Recent research==
In 2002, Michael Persinger, Cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Laurentian University, published a study into remote viewing suggest positive results. He studied the remote viewing accuracy of remote viewer Ingo Swann, as measured by a group of ratings of congruence (between Swann's drawings and the locale being 'viewed') by 40 experimentally blind participants during stimulation with complex magnetic fields using a circumcerebral (around the head) eight-channel system. In 2010, Persinger (et al.) published a report of his work with the psychic Sean Harribance, reporting that blind-rated accuracies in his psychic insights correlated with specific Quantitative Electroencephalography profiles; specifically, congruence between activity over the left temporal lobe of those being 'read' by Mr. Harribance and his right temporal lobe. "The results indicate even exceptional skills previously attributed to aberrant sources are variations of normal cerebral dynamics associated with intuition and may involve small but discrete changes in proximal energy."
==Selected RV study participants==
* Ingo Swann, one of the prominent research participants of remote viewing. He wrote a book about his experience:
:*Kiss the Earth Good-bye: Adventures and Discoveries in the Nonmaterial, Recounted by the Man who has Astounded Physicists and Parapsychologists Throughout the World by Ingo Swann, Hawthorne Books, 1975
* Pat Price, one of the early remote viewers
* Russell Targ, cofounder of the investigation at Stanford Research Institute into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s
* Joseph McMoneagle, one of the early remote viewers.Mind Trek: Exploring Consciousness, Time, and Space Through Remote Viewing by Joseph McMoneagle, Hampton Roads, Publishing Co., Inc., 1997 See: Stargate Project
* Courtney Brown, founder of the Farsight Institute
*David Marks, the critic of remote viewing, after finding sensory cues and editing in the original transcripts generated by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s
==References==
;Footnotes
;Bibliography
*Edward A. Dames, Tell Me What You See: Remote Viewing Cases from the World's Premier Psychic Spy. Wiley, 2010. ISBN 09780470581773
*David Marks, Ph.D., "The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd edn.)" Prometheus Books, 2000. ISBN 1-57392-798-8
*Courtney Brown, Ph.D., Remote Viewing : The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception. Farsight Press, 2005. ISBN 0-9766762-1-4
*David Morehouse, Psychic Warrior, St. Martin's, 1996, ISBN 0-312-96413-7
*Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997 , ISBN 0-440-22306-7
*Paul H. Smith, Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate—America's Psychic Espionage Program, Forge, 2005, ISBN 0-312-87515-0
* Ronson, Jon, The Men who Stare at Goats, Picador, 2004, ISBN 0-330-37547-4, written to accompany the TV series The Crazy Rulers of the World The military budget cuts after Vietnam and how it all began.
*Buchanan, Lyn, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets Of Remote Viewing As Told By A "Psychic Spy" For The U.S. Military, ISBN 0-7434-6268-8
*F. Holmes Atwater, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance, Hampton Roads 2001, ISBN 1-57174-247-6
*McMoneagle, Joseph, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy, Hampton Roads 2002, ISBN 1-57174-225-5
*Targ, Russell & Puthoff, Harold, Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding, Nature 251, 602-607 (18 October 1974) Letter0
==External links==
* "Seeing is Believing", Fortean Times visits the Monroe Institute, a remote viewing laboratory
* "Scientific Remote Viewing", article at CSICOP
* "Remote Viewing", entry on Skeptics Dictionary.
* "Remote viewing" Study for U.K. Ministry of Defence 2001–2002, obtained through Freedom of Information Act
* "Visual History Map" A complete visual map of remote viewing History and its participants
* The Truth About Remote Viewing: The psychic technique of remote viewing is consistent with simple, well known magic tricks., Skeptoid
* Remote Viewing Institute
* The Arlington Institute Presents Dr. Harold (Hal) Puthoff
* RENSE.COM: Remote Viewer Dick Allgire Foresaw Boston Bombing of 2013 - PDF
== Source ==
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Category:New Age practices
Category:Psychics
Category:Parapsychology
 
Category:Pseudoscience