What is Remote viewing (RV)
Remote Viewing Is a broad term for a variety of techniques or protocols employed to produce and control extra-sensory perception (ESP). These techniques originally were developed by researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) as part of a US-government-sponsored program that ran from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s. Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... Extra-sensory perception (ESP) is defined in parapsychology as the ability to acquire information by paranormal means. ... SRI International is one of the worlds largest contract research institutions. ...
The term "remote viewing" also has been used to refer to techniques derived from SRI's RV techniques, for example techniques used by commercial operators offering "remote viewing" services or training.
In remote viewing, a viewer attempts to gather information via ESP on a remote target. The target is usually an object, a place, or a person, and many remote viewers believe that the target may be situated anywhere in space or time. The viewer often has no a prior knowledge of the target's identity.
From the World War II era the US government funded ESP research. But as of the early 1970s it had no significant program in this area. At the same time, the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were giving high priority to ESP research, and to psi research generally. U.S. intelligence officials therefore became receptive to the idea of having their own, competing psi research program. (Schnabel 1997)
A low-key psi experiment conducted in 1972 by an SRI laser physicist, Hal Puthoff, led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The immediate result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project whose goal was to find some way of using psi operationally. (Schnabel 1997, Puthoff 1996)
The initial grant was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," the CIA preferred to transfer official sponsorship of the RV program to the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI psychics. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's psychic subjects. (Schnabel 1997)The program had three parts. First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S. (Schnabel 1997)
In the second part of the program, SRI managed a stable of natural-born psychics and made them available to a variety of tasking agencies. This aspect of the program was not much more sophisticated or remarkable than the (apparently routine) use of psychics by law enforcement agencies. But it did allegedly generate some spectacular results, including the description of a mysterious construction at a Soviet nuclear research facility, the description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine, and the location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa (which former President Carter later referred to in speeches). By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics. (Schnabel 1997)
The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find ways to make ESP -- now called "remote viewing" -- more accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the psychics seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be sensationally "on" one day and inexplicably "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, psychics were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that would reveal when they were on- or off-target.
At SRI, Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff also developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005)
In part because the program managers believed that anyone could learn accurate remote-viewing, the loss (through death and retirement) of the "naturals" was never replenished. Within the program, this was controversial. Some of the "naturals" believed that their talents were superior to those of the trainees.
The trainees generally believed that the research program had succeeded not only in training them acceptably but in finding ways to make remote viewing an intelligence-collection tool as reliable as other standard methods (for example, human-source intelligence, which is not always reliable).
The question of whether the tasking agencies agreed with this assessment is a difficult one to answer. One of the authors of an official 1995 report, authorized by the CIA and intended to justify the killing of the program, claimed that "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community." But such claims beg the question of why the program lasted twenty three years.
Some agencies and offices sent taskings to the program routinely but, fearing the "giggle factor," were loath to document their involvement. Only a few intelligence officials, including the Army generals Edmund Thompson and Albert Stubblebine, and senior DIA official Jack Vorona, were willing to champion it openly. Others, such as generals Harry Soyster and William Odom, and Admiral Sam Koslov, allegedly wished to kill the project regardless of its results. The struggle between "true unbelievers" and "true believers" provided much of the program's actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong. As General Thompson later told author Jim Schnabel, "I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn't believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn't done your homework." Some of the more voluble skeptics in the intelligence program were reportedly prevented from seeing its more impressive data, among other reasons so that the skittish tasking agencies would not be identified and suffer from controversy.
A former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith (2005) has provided a detailed example of remote viewing's alleged utility. In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and, in effect, prove its uselessness. According to Smith's account, Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.
